You will meet heroic truth detectives, such as Florence Nightingale who started a revolution with a pie chart. Within these pages you will transform into a Truth Detective, and be able to hunt down the truth about the world around you. And in a world of rising living costs, climate change, fake news and dodgy data, it's hard to get your head round it all.īut don't panic.

The world is often full of bamboozling headlines and numbers that don't add up. > And that even the greatest detectives have been fooled by fake news and dancing fairies? > Or that a pooping cow can show you how to invest your pocket money? > Did you know that a toy spaceship can teach you about inflation? As a result, The Data Detective is a big-idea book about statistics and human behavior that is fresh, unexpected, and insightful.Available for purchase at:AmazonBarnes & NobleBooks A MillionBookshop.A must read for curious kids looking to make sense of a complicated world, from presenter of BBC Radio 4's 'More or Less', Tim Harford. In The Data Detective, he uses new research in science and psychology to set out ten strategies for using statistics to erase our biases and replace them with new ideas that use virtues like patience, curiosity, and good sense to better understand ourselves and the world. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics-we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us.” If we can toss aside our fears and learn to approach them clearly-understanding how our own preconceptions lead us astray-statistics can point to ways we can live better and work smarter.As “perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world” (New Statesman), Tim Harford is an expert at taking complicated ideas and untangling them for millions of readers.

That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. From “one of the great (greatest?) contemporary popular writers on economics” (Tyler Cowen) comes a smart, lively, and encouraging rethinking of how to use statistics.Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us.

The data detective by tim harford