But while the issue is there and it's waiting for someone to pick it apart and expose it for the big travesty we've made out of it, Boyle (the author) instead delivers a dull, borderline pulseless book, that demands a very dear effort from the reader.
It's a flaw seen in many other books too: a not-so-charismatic author who has grasped the issue he wants to delve into but lacks the talent to lay it out in a way that will keep you reading. What you should be expecting are pages upon pages with platitudes, flashbacks in history with blitz biographies about people who introduced scientific counting, more platitudes, a dry style of writting, but worst of all (and i'd be willing to swallow the rest if it wasn't for that) no solution offered.
David Boyle does make clear, albeit tiresomely, that numbers and counting have only contributed to making us further unhappy and are simply adding to more confusion, added manipulation from politicians and corporations and the lengthening of our illusions as we try to solve problems by measuring and countermeasuring them. He does show that actually a lot of the things we measure are indeed not measurable and he does add that other things that should be -maybe- measured are not.
But that's where the contradiction begins to unravel and there's no saving the ship afterwards. If the solution is measuring "other" things then we'd have some sort of schizzophrenia where we try to solve one problem by replacing it with another of actually similar nature. That doesn't really sound too convincing or promising.
There's several bits of data and trivia included in this book which at points make it worthwhile but in the end most of it is lost amid the pointlessness of the rest.
Ultimately, what you have when you're done is more food for thought which is not actually inspired directly by the book itself but rather indirectly. There's an issue in there somewhere (about this you'll feel certain) but the irony is that "Tyranny in numbers" almost challenges you to write another book yourself and actually propose something. That can't be a good sign, now can it?
This book starts slowly, but is well-structured. The background provided on Bentham/Malthus/Mills is sometimes tedious and occasionally superfluous, but mostly necessary and builds the foundational context to appreciate fully ideas presented later in the book. I think that the author includes personal details that paint a POSSIBLY unjustified mechanistic, and thus, inhuman, aspect into the personalities discussed and therefore their theory (utilitarianism). But, maybe the emphasis is necessary to accurately capture the personalities involved. Anyway, the author gets an 8 for objectivity. In my opinion, there's gotta be some polemic content for it to be interesting, otherwise you just have a textbook. He strikes a good balance.
The first half of the book discussed above answers the question "Where did all this [stuff] come from?". The latter half of the book concerns itself mainly with "How did it all come about?". Keynes and his ideas in suitable context is developed here and I personally found the content regarding him to be fascinating. He is now a permanent addition to my previously blank list of responses to the "who would you wanna have dinner with?" question. I never realized how distorted and abused his conception has become.
The remainder of the book brings us up to date and I learned a thing or two. Now, I'm going to put the most important part at the end. In order to enjoy this book at all, you have to accept one of the following two hypothesis:
(1) It is government's role to be concerned with the "general welfare" of the populace
or
(2) Government is going to be concerned with same regardless so at least it ought to make some sort of sense granting the false assumption (1). Whatever the heck that means. In other words, suspend reality and try to find some enjoyment in the simplistic and misguided attempts to get around the problems created by that same false assumption.
It was a good read and thought-provoking, I'm not going to spoil it anymore. I'd give it a 4.3 stars if possible, but they have us restrained to integers. Ha-ha-ha!