Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service where you'll weekly guide

the numbers all around us in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Halford.

It's not just how we count that matters but what we choose to count.

That's what Deborah Stone has been addressing in her book, Counting, How we Use Numbers to

Decide what Matters.

Deborah Stone is a political scientist and professor at Brandeis University in the US.

Her book covers such weighty matters as Covid, GDP and race, but it starts on a somewhat

lighter note.

The Children's Book, One Fish, Two Fish, Redfish, Bluefish by Dr Zeus.

This is actually a book I read to my children, one that was read to me as a child.

In fact I know pretty much every word of it, off by heart.

So I started by asking Deborah Stone what inspired her to start her book about counting with

Dr Zeus.

I remembered One Fish, Two Fish as a counting book and I wanted to see how kids learned

to count and what totally struck me when I went back to the book was that he never gets

passed to.

He gets so enchanted by all the different kinds of fish that he stops counting and instead

notices their differences.

Later on he says, not one of them is like another.

Don't ask us why, go ask your mother.

And this made me scratch my head.

I thought this is the problem with counting.

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