How To Lie With Statistics

Summary

Now available in audio for the first time! Darrell Huff's celebrated classic "How to Lie With Statistics" is a straight-forward and engaging guide to understanding the manipulation and misrepresentation of information that could be lurking behind every graph, chart, and infographic. Originally published in 1954, it remains as relevant and necessary as ever in our digital world where information is king—and as easy to distort and manipulate as it is to access.

A pre-cursor to modern popular science books like Steven D. Levitt's "Freakonomics" and Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers", Huff runs the gamut of every popularly used type of statistic, probes such things as the sample study, the tabulation method, the interview technique, or the way the results are derived from the figures, and points up the countless number of dodges which are used to full rather than to inform. Critically acclaimed by media outlets like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and recommended by Bill Gates as a perfect beach read, "How to Lie With Statistics" stands as the go-to book for understanding the use of statistics by teachers and leaders everywhere.

"A hilarious exploration of mathematical mendacity…. Every time you pick it up, what happens? Bang goes another illusion!" — The New York Times

"In one short take after another, Huff picks apart the ways in which marketers use statistics, charts, graphics and other ways of presenting numbers to baffle and trick the public. The chapter “How to Talk Back to a Statistic” is a brilliant step-by-step guide to figuring out how someone is trying to deceive you with data." — Wall Street Journal

"A great introduction to the use of statistics, and a great refresher for anyone who's already well versed in it." — Bill Gates

"Mr. Huff's lively, human-interest treatment of the dry-as-bones subject of statistics is a timely tonic…This book needed to be written, and makes its points in an entertaining, highly readable manner."— Management Review

"Illustrator and author pool their considerable talents to provide light lively reading and cartoon far which will entertain, really inform, and take the wind out of many an overblown statistical sail." — Library Journal

"A pleasantly subversive little book, guaranteed to undermine your faith in the almighty statistic." — Atlantic