Sources

SRC-008

Morten Jerven, Poor Numbers

Source ID
SRC-008
Citation
Morten Jerven, Poor Numbers
URL or path
research/poor-numbers-how-we-are-misled-by-african-development-statistics-and-what-to-do-about-it-9780801467615_compress.pdf
Type
Book
Hierarchy tier
3
Published
2013
Accessed
2026-08-10
Claims
Literature position
Status
READ

Version history

The register keeps changing after the book is fixed in print. Each entry below was added to this row in the order shown.

  1. RETIERED 11 August 2026 under D-028 against EVIDENCE_PROTOCOL's six-level source hierarchy. The previous value was an ad hoc quality score on an undocumented scale. Tier now records SOURCE TYPE only; how far this project has checked the document is the Status column. Previous value: tier 3. Obtained by the author and read 10 August 2026. Cornell University Press, Cornell Studies in Political Economy. Population, corrected 10 August 2026: Jerven established direct contact with statisticians and/or stakeholders in twenty-three of the forty-eight countries of sub-Saharan Africa, 2007 to 2010, by unstructured interview in seven and by survey of national income accountants in the rest. Not the national statistical offices of twenty-three African countries, which is how this row and introduction v3 both described it. CORRECTION, 10 August 2026: this row previously recorded that the editorial report's aid-allocation characterisation returned no match on a full-text search for aid allocation, allocation of aid and aid is allocated, and concluded the characterisation was unsupported. The conclusion was reached by the wrong method. EVIDENCE_PROTOCOL requires searching the concept, not the phrase. The concept is in the book at least three times under allocate scarce resources, including Numbers we are currently using to allocate scarce resources are not good enough for these purposes, and the preface states that international development actors are making judgments based on erroneous statistics. Resource allocation is Jerven's subject and any differentiation of this book from his must not deny him it. COUNTS CORRECTED AT THE SENTENCE, 12 August 2026, on finding N4 of the v17 diff review. The previous correction appended a note and left the wrong numbers standing in the sentences above it, which is the same defect it was written to fix. Verified counts: the address occurs THREE times in the release markup, and the Libya passage is THREE paragraphs after the Syrian derivation.