Our society is churning out more numbers than ever before, whether in the form of spreadsheets, brokerage statements, survey results, or just the numbers on the sports pages. Unfortunately, people's ability to understand and analyze numbers isn't keeping pace with today's whizzing data streams. And the benefits of living in the Information Age are available only to those who can process the information in front of them.
What the Numbers Say offers remedies to this national problem. Through a series of witty and engaging discussions, the authors introduce original quantitative...

In its efforts to control the use of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and other illegal drugs, the United States spends about $35 billion per year in public funds. Almost half a million dealers and users are under incarceration. In this book, David Boyum and Peter Reuter provide an assessment of how well this massive investment of tax dollars and government authority is working. Boyum and Reuter show that America s drug problem is mainly a legacy of the epidemics of heroin, cocaine, and crack use during the 1970s and 1980s, which left us with aging cohorts of criminally active and increasingly...