David Crowe discusses Peter Schryvers new book “Bad Data” with the author. It describes some of the many ways that numbers are used in our society, from measuring the performance of children in school with tests, or trying to quantify the safety of a highway. While numbers can be useful, they can also lead to completely counter-productive, and often counter-intuitive outcomes, and there are some fascinating stories in the book that illustrates this. Many of the topics David has covered on this show are subject to measurement. We haven’t covered education a lot, but certainly medicine, justice and politics are subject to massive amounts of measurements and analysis, sometimes ignoring reality for the magical power of the numbers.