You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My guest this week is John

Lancaster, whose many books include Whoops, Why Everyone O owes Everyone and No One Can Pay on the 2008 financial crisis, how to speak money, and most recently the collection, reality and other stories, two of which appeared in the LRB.

He has a piece in the current issue of the paper on unreliable numbers.

It's a review of four books, making it count, statistics and statecraft in the

early People's Republic of China by Arunab Ghosh, expected goals, the story of how data conquered

football by Rory Smith, bad data, how governments, politicians and the rest of us get misled

by numbers by Georgina Sturge, and follow the money, how much does Britain cost by Paul Johnson.

Hello, John, and thank you very much for joining me.

Hi, Tom. Thanks for having me.

So you have in previous pieces quoted Hegel's dictum that quantity changes quality,

but these books describe something slightly different from that, more like quantity

supplanting quality. Or, as you put it in the piece,

discussions that were once about values and beliefs about what a society wants to see when it

looks at itself in the mirror have increasingly turned to arguments about numbers, data,

statistics. Someone endorsing that shift might describe it as, I don't know, as facts replacing

fantasies, but it isn't quite that, is it?

Yes, I mean, I think it depends how heavily you want to lean on the word fact.

It's definitely a shift in styles of argument.

I mean, I've noticed across my adult lifetime that when politicians, people in public life

are trying to win arguments, they use

convincing sounding numbers much more than they used to. And, you know, I've long noticed that,

been interested in it, been curious about what was happening there. And the funny thing is that

...