If You Love Data and Books ...

Are you looking for a last-minute holiday gift for a data-curious person in your life? Or want to get a head start on Valentine’s Day shopping? After all, no gift says “I love you” quite like a book about statistics.

Taylor & Francis, which publishes CRC Press and Routledge books, is having a year-end sale. A 30% discount is available on my books Measuring Crime: Behind the Statistics and Sampling: Design and Analysis as well as every other book in the catalog. When you visit the CRC Press website, use discount code ADS19.

If Measuring Crime: Behind the Statistics piqued your interest about where statistics you encounter come from, I highly recommend Chaitra Nagaraja’s new book Measuring Society, the next volume in the ASA-CRC Series on Statistical Reasoning in Science and Society.

Nagaraja tells the stories behind today’s statistics on

Jobs. Where do statistics about unemployment come from, and what do they mean?
Inequality. You often read statements about rising inequality in society. But how is inequality measured, and how can we tell if it is increasing? Nagaraja explains one oft-cited measure, the Gini coefficient, through pictures and examples. She also discusses how statistics comparing CEO to worker salaries can be misleading.
House prices. How do you compare housing prices across areas? You might think one can just look at the average or median sales price, but is that a fair comparison if one area has larger homes than another? How do you account for houses that are rarely sold, or those that are sold multiple times in a short time period?
Inflation. In the United States, inflation is measured by changes in the Consumer Price Index, “a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of consumer goods and services.” The index, though, depends on what goods and services are included in the basket, how much each good or service “counts” toward the index, and how are the prices measured. What happens with different baskets or weightings?
Poverty. The poverty measure currently used in the United States was developed in the mid-1960s by Mollie Orshansky, an economist in the Social Security Administration. She estimated that about a third of a household’s after-tax income was spent on food, and thus suggested that a household be considered poor if its income, divided by three, was too small to pay for a minimum food diet. How well does this measure hold up today, and what alternatives might be considered?
Deprivation. There is more to deprivation than just income. Edith Abbott, the early 20th-century pioneer of crime statistics featured in Measuring Crime: Behind the Statistics, presented statistics on overcrowding in her book The Tenements of Chicago, 1908-1935. Nagaraja tells how various deprivation indices, which include characteristics such as home ownership and overcrowding, are calculated, and how these measures relate to poverty rates.

Nagaraja’s book is written for readers without a background in statistics (she explains concepts through examples and graphs—no equations or formulas!) but statisticians will enjoy it too (this statistician certainly did). She writes in an entertaining, breezy style to tell the stories of the people and societal forces behind the statistics we see today.