The book was great and I think the main shinning point was to base each arguments on actual measures, but that's far from creating an irrefutable narrative.
At the end of the day those are numbers they chose and dressed, and other researchers will come up other equally true numbers that they'll filter and present in a different light.
An instance of this is in this article is the number of infant mortality: sure it's improving, but birth rates are also plummeting. To me the overall picture on infants is greyish and I'm not sure it's overall better than a few decades ago (I have no idea, didn't crunch the numbers), but here we're only getting the bright side and shown a sheer positive trend.
My point is probably that having numbers to back a claim is better but they still need to be looked at critically and in a context
The book was great and I think the main shinning point was to base each arguments on actual measures, but that's far from creating an irrefutable narrative.
At the end of the day those are numbers they chose and dressed, and other researchers will come up other equally true numbers that they'll filter and present in a different light.
An instance of this is in this article is the number of infant mortality: sure it's improving, but birth rates are also plummeting. To me the overall picture on infants is greyish and I'm not sure it's overall better than a few decades ago (I have no idea, didn't crunch the numbers), but here we're only getting the bright side and shown a sheer positive trend.
My point is probably that having numbers to back a claim is better but they still need to be looked at critically and in a context