""Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts is terrific. It demonstrates that quantitative misrepresentation is not an idiosyncratic problem but one that is widespread and often detrimental. The authors make sense of the numbers that are thrown around so liberally by interested parties and which so often influence or even determine important and costly public policies."--John Mueller, Ohio State University" ""Statistics can be like sausages: the more you know about how they're produced, the less appetizing they seem. Each essay in this excellent collection explores how political considerations rework best guesses and stab-in-the-dark estimates into h̀ard numbers' that, in turn, are used to justify international policies on human trafficking, illicit drugs, and warfare, Readers risk losing their complacent confidence in ẁhat the data show.'"--Joel Best, University of Delaware, author of Stat-Spotting: A Field Guide to Identifying Dubious Data" ""This is a terrific, innovative, and coherent volume that combines the insights of The Wire with outstanding recent scholarship. Puncturing many myths-sometimes uncomfortably so-chapters both systematic and vivid show the dangers of basing public policy on numbers that no one should count on, including exaggerating numbers of victims or, the opposite, deliberately downplaying gross state violations. The authors show how and why unreliable numbers persist, what it takes-politically and methodologically-to develop better estimates, and why it matters. Not uncontroversial, Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts will be of great interest to social scientists, policy wonks, and the wider reading public."--Lynn Eden, Stanford University" ""Scoffing at the politicization of numbers in policy debates is now standard fare. This book is the first to move from scoffing to a serious analysis of the process of politicization."--Peter Reuter, University of Maryland College Park."

""This intriguing collection of essays is a refreshing counterpoint to the all too commonly accepted view that numbers and only numbers matter to scholarship and to policy and that such numbers are but neutral and accurate reflections of fact. This volume ably demonstrates the dangers of problematic statistics and dubious measures in the fields of armed conflict and transnational crime. Its findings should generate an abundance of healthy skepticism."--Martha Crenshaw, Stanford University"--Jacket.