The Arithmetic of Life and Death

I think this book should be read by every school age child. George Shaffner goes through the numbers. It shows us how precious we really are. It also is a motivator to stay in school.

I orginally bought this book to help me in explaining a few basic decisions to young people in need of a different approach to reasoning. It served its purpose well and I applaude the author for it. There are times when you have to sit down with people and "figure" things out before an intelligent decision can be made. This one helps you through the process.

This is an amazing book and should be required reading for anybody who lives in the modern world.

Fundamental insights to guide life decisions. Short, sharp and easy to read. Excellent.

The author is not a professional mathematician and in some ways this is good because he writes at a level that most people can understand. In some ways though this has its problems, for example he errors in explaining the impact of inflation. He states that 5% inflation reduces your buying power by a factor of .95, this is incorrect, it would reduce it by a factor of 1/1.05 which equals .9524 (approximately), this is close to .95, but not the same, and this error is entirely germaine to his argument in that chapter. Many of the chapters seems to be more on business management than arithmetic and I didn't expect that when I was buying the book. But if you know what you're getting, and you're prepared to take the "proofs" the author offers with a grain of salt, this can be an amusing little book.

Interesting. A different point of view. Worth the reader's time.

While books on arithmetic certainly aren't for everyone, I found this one to be interesting, and at times fascinating. My favorite chapter, and one that I plan to use at my daughter's school is on how 8th graders can get a job that pays $45/hour. "What kind of job is that," I'm sure you ask... The answer, of course, is "Stay in School". Since high school graduates on average make significantly more than dropouts, you can assign that difference an hourly rate for the hours that remain till graduation day. Sometimes interesting, sometimes fascinating, sometimes a bit of a stretch, but for an engineer, math fan, statistician, etc., definitely worth the buy.

George Shaffner has been able to explain some of the more difficult concepts in life and spun them with statistics. Usually a dry subject, his approach is light and humoress and gets the arithmetic lesson across succinctly.For those who don't know how arithmetic could possibly apply in their lifetime, they should read Shaffner's book and discover how it pervades.Whether it's trying to convince your child to stay in school, or learning for yourself what the odds are of getting caught in an indiscretion, George shows with numbers just how to support your case.There is a whole subseries within this book on motivation in the market place. Following the author's constructs, you can apply simple arithmetic to your life.George Shaffner presents the numbers. You have to decide which route is the most feasible to take. It's usually not a life or death situation, but once you do the arithmetic, the choice is simple.