Author

Sanne Blauw

Sanne Blauw (b. 1986) has an MSc in Econometrics and completed her PhD in 2014 with the dissertation ‘Well-to-do or Doing Well’, on income inequality, trust and happiness. But, she asked herself, can you measure happiness? This question launched her career in journalism. She became Numeracy Correspondent for De Correspondent, with one goal: to unveil the bizarre influence of numbers on our lives. Sanne Blauw has also given a TEDx Talk on how to deal with misleading numbers in the news. What should you do when you meet a poll in the wild? How do you tame a graph? And how can you keep from drowning in a flood of misleading statistics?

The Biggest Bestseller of All Time (with This Title)

The Biggest Bestseller of All Time (with This Title)

How Numbers Lead and Mislead Us

(De Correspondent, 2018, 208 pages)

Numbers are everywhere – they might denote calories, work targets, statistics or the temperature outside – and while they are not as objective as they seem, figures still colour and shape our daily landscape. Econometrist and journalist Sanne Blauw penned this book for people who don’t know anything about num­bers, yet face them every day in some form or other. Unfortunately, we are inclined to take all these figures present­ed to us as true, while all too often they are misleading or simply incorrect.

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Photo: Lise Straatsma
Authors and translators Writers