Download or read book The Tyranny of Numbers written by Nick Eberstadt and published by American Enterprise Institute. This book was released on 1995 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the facts and figures that have led to government measures that have been unhelpful or injurious to their intended beneficiaries.
Download or read book The Tyranny of Numbers Why Counting Can t Make Us Happy written by David Boyle and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Never before have we attempted to measure as much as we do today. Why are we so obsessed with numbers? What can they really tell us?
Download or read book The Tyranny of Numbers written by David Boyle and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Too often we try to quantify what can't actually be measured. We count people, but not individuals. We count exam results rather than intelligence, benefit claimants instead of poverty. The government has set itself 10,000 new targets. Politicians pack their speeches with skewed statistics: crime rates are either rising or falling depending on who is doing the counting. We are in a world in which everything is designed only to be measured. If it can't be measured it can be ignored. The problem is what numbers don't tell you - they won't interpret, they won't inspire, and they won't tell you precisely what causes what. In this book, David Boyle examines our obsession with numbers. He reminds us of the danger of taking numbers so seriously at the expense of what is non-measurable, non-calculable: intuition, creativity, imagination, and happiness.
Download or read book Governing by Numbers written by Stephen J. Ball and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social science researchers have become increasing attentive to the role of numbers in contemporary life. Issues around big data, national test results, and output and performance statistics are now routinely reported and debated in the media. Numbers are a powerful resource for governments as a means to manage and ‘improve’ their populations, and we are increasingly represented, organized and driven by an economy of numbers, which inserts itself into more and more aspects of our lives. This book critically addresses some of the ways in which numbers are deployed in educational governance and practice, and some of the consequences of this deployment for what it means to be educated, to teach, and to learn. Recognising that numbers do not simply represent, but that they change things and have real effects, allows us to move beyond a system where difficult and important issues about what we want from education and from teachers are side-stepped in the push to ‘improve our numbers’. This collection offers a set of starting points from which we might speak back to numbers, drawing on research to explore how numbers change the way we think about ourselves and what we do. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education Policy.
Download or read book A Dictionary of African Politics written by Nicholas Cheeseman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With over 400 A-Z entries, this new dictionary provides clear and authoritative definitions of terms within the fast-growing field of African Politics. It includes coverage on elections, parties and judiciaries, but also popular protest, gender-relations, the politics of development, and Africa's international relations. Entries comprise of major events and figures within African Politics, including the East African Community and independance, as well as covering key terms of particular relevance to Africa such as neopatrimonialism, queue voting, and post-conflict power sharing. Written by a world-leading political scientist working on the area of African politics, this dictionary is an essential guide for both undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics, journalists, and researchers working on African politics alike.
Download or read book The Tyranny of Metrics written by Jerry Z. Muller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the obsession with quantifying human performance threatens business, medicine, education, government—and the quality of our lives Today, organizations of all kinds are ruled by the belief that the path to success is quantifying human performance, publicizing the results, and dividing up the rewards based on the numbers. But in our zeal to instill the evaluation process with scientific rigor, we've gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself—and this tyranny of metrics now threatens the quality of our organizations and lives. In this brief, accessible, and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage metrics are causing and shows how we can begin to fix the problem. Filled with examples from business, medicine, education, government, and other fields, the book explains why paying for measured performance doesn't work, why surgical scorecards may increase deaths, and much more. But Muller also shows that, when used as a complement to judgment based on personal experience, metrics can be beneficial, and he includes an invaluable checklist of when and how to use them. The result is an essential corrective to a harmful trend that increasingly affects us all.
Download or read book Quantifying Measurement written by Jeffrey H Williams and published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Measurements and experiments are made each and every day, in fields as disparate as particle physics, chemistry, economics and medicine, but have you ever wondered why it is that a particular experiment has been designed to be the way it is. Indeed, how do you design an experiment to measure something whose value is unknown, and what should your considerations be on deciding whether an experiment has yielded the sought after, or indeed any useful result? These are old questions, and they are the reason behind this volume. We will explore the origins of the methods of data analysis that are today routinely applied to all measurements, but which were unknown before the mid-19th Century. Anyone who is interested in the relationship between the precision and accuracy of measurements will find this volume useful. Whether you are a physicist, a chemist, a social scientist, or a student studying one of these subjects, you will discover that the basis of measurement is the struggle to identify the needle of useful data hidden in the haystack of obscuring background noise.
Download or read book Tyranny of the Textbook written by Beverlee Jobrack and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2012 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Tyranny of the Textbook, a retired educational director, gives a fascinating look behind-the-scenes of how K-12 textbooks are developed, written, adopted, and sold. Readers will come to understand why all the reform efforts have failed. Most importantly, the author clearly spells out how the system can change so that reforms and standards have a shot at finally being effective"--
Download or read book On Tyranny written by Timothy Snyder and published by Crown. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “bracing” (Vox) guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism, from “a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present” (The New York Times) “Timothy Snyder reasons with unparalleled clarity, throwing the past and future into sharp relief. He has written the rare kind of book that can be read in one sitting but will keep you coming back to help regain your bearings.”—Masha Gessen The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.
Download or read book The Tyranny of Merit written by Michael J. Sandel and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Times Literary Supplement’s Book of the Year 2020 A New Statesman's Best Book of 2020 A Bloomberg's Best Book of 2020 A Guardian Best Book About Ideas of 2020 The world-renowned philosopher and author of the bestselling Justice explores the central question of our time: What has become of the common good? These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favor of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the American credo that "you can make it if you try". The consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fueled populist protest and extreme polarization, and led to deep distrust of both government and our fellow citizens--leaving us morally unprepared to face the profound challenges of our time. World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success--more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility and solidarity, and more affirming of the dignity of work. The Tyranny of Merit points us toward a hopeful vision of a new politics of the common good.
Download or read book The Tyranny of Numbers written by Alwyn Young and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper documents the fundamental role played by factor accumulation in explaining the extraordinary postwar growth of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. Participation rates, educational levels and (with the exception of Hong Kong) investment rates have risen rapidly in all four economies. In addition, there have been large intersectoral reallocations of labour, with (again, excepting Hong Kong) non-agricultural and manufacturing employment growing one and a half to two times as fast as the aggregate working population. Thus, while the growth of output per capita in these economies has averaged 6% to 7% per annum over the past two and a half decades, the growth of output per effective worker in the non- agricultural sector of these economies has been only 3% to 4% per annum. If one then allows for the doubling, tripling and even quadrupling of the investment to GDP ratio in these economies, one arrives at total factor productivity growth rates, both for the non- agricultural economy and for manufacturing in particular, which are well within the bounds of those experienced by the OECD and Latin American economies over equally long periods of time. While the growth of output and manufacturing exports in the newly industrializing economies of East Asia is virtually unprecedented, the growth of total factor productivity in these economies is not.
Download or read book The Tyranny of the Two Party System written by Lisa J. Disch and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002-05-07 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The closely contested presidential election of 2000, which many analysts felt was decided by voters for the Green Party, cast a spotlight on a structural contradiction of American politics. Critics charged that Green Party voters inadvertently contributed to the election of a conservative Republican president because they chose to "vote their conscience" rather than "choose between two evils." But why this choice of two? Is the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans an immutable and indispensable aspect of our democracy? Lisa Disch maintains that it is not. There is no constitutional warrant for two parties, and winner-take-all elections need not set third parties up to fail. She argues that the two-party system as we know it dates only to the twentieth century and that it thwarts democracy by wasting the votes and silencing the voices of dissenters. The Tyranny of the Two-Party System reexamines a once popular nineteenth-century strategy called fusion, in which a dominant-party candidate ran on the ballots of both the established party and a third party. In the nineteenth century fusion made possible something that many citizens wish were possible today: to register a protest vote that counts and that will not throw the election to the establishment candidate they least prefer. The book concludes by analyzing the 2000 presidential election as an object lesson in the tyranny of the two-party system and with suggestions for voting experiments to stimulate participation and make American democracy responsive to a broader range of citizens.
Download or read book Liberty Versus the Tyranny of Socialism written by Walter E. Williams and published by Hoover Press. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this selected collection of his syndicated newspaper columns, Walter Williams offers his sometimes controversial views on education, health, the environment, government, law and society, race, and a range of other topics. Although many of these essays focus on the growth of government and our loss of liberty, many others demonstrate how the tools of freemarket economics can be used to improve our lives in ways ordinary people can understand.
Download or read book Innumeracy in the Wild written by Ellen Peters and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Innumeracy in the Wild explains how numeric ability supports the quality of the decisions we make and, ultimately, the life outcomes we experience. It dissects three ways that people can be good or bad with numbers and how each of these numeric competencies matter to decision making. Furthermore, it delves into how we can use this knowledge to improve decision making. Understanding the roles of numeric ability (often called numeracy) is particularly important today due to widespread innumeracy. In addition, policies in health and financial domains have shifted towards giving consumers and patients more information (which is often numeric). These changes are intended to empower individuals to take charge of their own welfare. The evidence is clear, however, that not everybody is prepared to use this information effectively and that those who are less numerate tend to make worse decisions unless provided adequate support. The book discusses four main points: the complex and systematic psychological mechanisms that underlie objective numeracy's effects in judgment and decision making; the importance of numeracy to experiencing positive life outcomes especially in health and finances; the decision-making support provided by two additional ways of knowing and using numbers; and the methods that exploit existing evidence and enable those who are less comfortable with numbers to use them more effectively and make better choices in our complex, often numeric world"--
Download or read book Is That a Big Number written by Andrew Elliott and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Impressive statistics are thrown at us every day - the cost of health care; the size of an earthquake; the distance to the nearest star; the number of giraffes in the world. We know all these numbers are important - some more than others - and it's vaguely unsettling when we don't really have a clear sense of how remarkable or how ordinary they are. How do we work out what these figures actually mean? Are they significant, should we be worried, or excited, or impressed? How big is big, how small is small? With this entertaining and engaging book, help is at hand. Andrew Elliott gives us the tips and tools to make sense of numbers, to get a sense of proportion, to decipher what matters. It is a celebration of a numerate way of understanding the world. It shows how number skills help us to understand the everyday world close at hand, and how the same skills can be stretched to demystify the bigger numbers that we find in the wider contexts of science, politics, and the universe. Entertaining, full of practical examples, and memorable concepts, Is That A Big Number? renews our relationship with figures. If numbers are the musical notes with which the symphony of the universe is written, and you're struggling to hear the tune, then this is the book to get you humming again.
Download or read book Thinking in Numbers written by Daniel Tammet and published by . This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book that Daniel Tammet, bestselling author and mathematical savant, was born to write. In Tammet's world, numbers are beautiful and mathematics illuminates our lives and minds. Using anecdotes, everyday examples, and ruminations on history, literature, and more, Tammet allows us to share his unique insights and delight in the way numbers, fractions, and equations underpin all our lives. His idiosyncratic worldview gives us new perspecttives on the universal questions of what it is to be human and how we make meaning. This book will change the way you think about math and fire your imagination to see the world with fresh eyes.--From publisher description.
Download or read book Uncountable written by David Nirenberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-05-09 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging from math to literature to philosophy, Uncountable explains how numbers triumphed as the basis of knowledge—and compromise our sense of humanity. Our knowledge of mathematics has structured much of what we think we know about ourselves as individuals and communities, shaping our psychologies, sociologies, and economies. In pursuit of a more predictable and more controllable cosmos, we have extended mathematical insights and methods to more and more aspects of the world. Today those powers are greater than ever, as computation is applied to virtually every aspect of human activity. Yet, in the process, are we losing sight of the human? When we apply mathematics so broadly, what do we gain and what do we lose, and at what risk to humanity? These are the questions that David and Ricardo L. Nirenberg ask in Uncountable, a provocative account of how numerical relations became the cornerstone of human claims to knowledge, truth, and certainty. There is a limit to these number-based claims, they argue, which they set out to explore. The Nirenbergs, father and son, bring together their backgrounds in math, history, literature, religion, and philosophy, interweaving scientific experiments with readings of poems, setting crises in mathematics alongside world wars, and putting medieval Muslim and Buddhist philosophers in conversation with Einstein, Schrödinger, and other giants of modern physics. The result is a powerful lesson in what counts as knowledge and its deepest implications for how we live our lives.
