Most writers who lament the ubiquity of statistics focus on the ways proponents of a particular cause misuse or distort data to make their case. Boyle, though, takes a step back to ponder why we are obsessed with numbers in the first place and to examine our seeming need to quantify everything.

Boyle is the author of Funny Money (1999), a look at the growing number of ways of conducting financial transactions. 

He alternates his chapters between ruminating over our attempts to measure abstractions like happiness and satisfaction and profiling misguided efforts at numerical precision throughout history. Jeremy Bentham, Robert Malthus, Frederick Taylor, John Maynard Keynes, and Edgar Cahn all come under Boyle's scrutiny. 

At the same time, we are left to consider Boyle's fascinating observation that the very act of measuring something changes its nature and often turns it into something else.

At the same time, we are left to consider Boyle's fascinating observation that the very act of measuring something changes its nature and often turns it into something else.