Making Numbers Count – Heath & Starr

The one-sentence summary

There is a range of simple techniques that can help people understand and act on the numbers you present to them.

Can’t be bothered to read it? Listen to the 5-minute summary in two parts.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Subtitled The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers, this book is all about how to ensure that people understand numbers and act accordingly.
• Numbers are essential and we use them every day to make sense of the world, but humans aren’t built to understand them.
• How much bigger is a billion than a million? A million seconds is twelve days – a billion seconds is 32 years. Through much of history, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five – anything from six to infinity was known as ‘lots’.
• The world has become more complex but our brains are still wired in the past.
• The book offers over thirty principles to help, such as:
• Simple perspective cues: one simple comparison sentence doubles how accurately people recall facts
• Convert to a process: capitalize on our intuitive sense of time (“5 gigabytes of music storage” turns into “2 months of commutes, without repeating a song.”)
• Emotional measuring sticks: Frame the number in a way that people already care about (“that medical protocol would save twice as many women as curing breast cancer.”)
• Help people understand through simple, familiar comparisons by converting abstract numbers into concrete objects.
• Recast your numbers into different dimensions such as time, space, distance or money.
• Subitizing is a process that enables us to recognize very small numbers such as 1, 2 or 3, and sometimes 4 or 5. After that, we tend to lose track. So it pays to translate everything for an audience. To help people grasp your numbers, ground them in the familiar, using concrete examples and human scale.
• For example, 97.5% of the world’s water is salinated. Of the 2.5% that’s fresh, over 99% is trapped in glaciers and snowfields. So, only 0.25% of the world’s water is drinkable. It’s a compelling statistic but it could be expressed like this: Imagine a gallon jug filled with 3 ice cubes next to it. All the water in the jug is salt water. The ices cubes are the only fresh water, and humans can only drink the drops melting off them.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• Try focusing on the number 1 to start with. This anchors the point. Our temptation is to go for staggering numbers. The authors call this big-ism. It wows our senses but doesn’t cultivate understanding, such as referencing Everest or an Olympic size swimming pool. We know what they are but can’t relate them to specifics. Compare these two statements. 1. Livestock are responsible for 14.5% of global greenhouse emissions, or 2. If cows were a country, they would be the third-highest producer of greenhouse emissions among all nations.
• Or: If everyone in the world ate as much meat as Americans, the land required to raise livestock would equal 138% of the inhabitable land on earth, as opposed to: If everyone in the world ate as much meat as Americans, all inhabitable land on earth would have to be used to raise livestock, and we’d still need an additional landmass as big as Africa and Australia combined.
• When presenting, simplify all numbers by rounding them – no-one remembers fractions. Use whole numbers, not too many, and preferably small ones. If that’s not possible, use a percentage. Speak your audience’s language, because the fundamental goal is to be understood. Give them the gift of enough spare mental capacity left over to see the full picture.
• Following these rules will prevent what is called psychophysical numbing, which is when, as numbers increase, the ability we have to respond to them emotionally decreases. We can emote to the tragic suffering of one person, but when applied to thousands, it becomes abstract.
• The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two was a paper published by George Miller in 1956 which offered evidence suggesting that our brains can retain and manipulate around 7 different pieces of information at a time without a high risk of error. That appears to be the approximate limit of our ability to process information effectively.
• The billionaire’s staircase explains wealth differences in households. 50% of Americans have a household wealth of less that $100,000 dollars. When compared with the billions of Jeff Bezos, 1 in 2 will never take the first step up the staircase and only 1 in 4 would get to the fourth step. The staircase would have 1,930,000 steps and take two months to climb if a person did so for 9 hours a day.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• Not much. This will be helpful to anyone trying to present numbers and make it easier for their audience to understand and act upon them.