Freakonomics

This is a book jointly written by a journalist and an economist. It has one central theme, which I describe as "don't confuse correlation with causation". In other words, if two measures X and Y both move in the same direction by the same amount, you cannot infer that either causes, or even influences, the other.

If you are a person who, like me, has spent his life absorbed by and interested in numbers, statistics and politics, this book has nothing to say to you. If not, however - maybe you are more interested in words than numbers - the book has lots of entertaining examples of how this matters. And because there are lots, it becomes quite repetitive and you may well get to the point where you say "OK I get it; move on".

Which is what I did, after reading half the book.

It is pretentiously sub-titled "A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything". Don't let that encourage you. Or put you off. This is not Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe and Everything). It's a publisher's tag line.

Newspaper sub-editors often ignore the correlation/causation issue. Misleading headlines abound, even though they may be negated by the detail in the article. Do they want to encourage lazy readers? We - you and I, valued readers - know that just because the number of covid-19 positive tests goes down one day, it doesn't necessarily mean that fewer people have become infected.

Donald Trump knows: "Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!"