I agree with Tyler and Matthew (and thus you) that Deringer left some information out that I believe would have made this book much more enjoyable to read. I found that the book was challenging to read, could it be because of the math? it is entirely possible. I do find that the book was decently written and the content that he provided was sufficient even though I didn’t really understand some of it. I was forced to glaze over some of the evidence he provided as it made little sense to me. I’m not a graph and statistics person and this book left me confused at several points.

I very much agree that this book was incredibly difficult to get through. It stinks that he had to write a book about math because it does automatically doom people not to like it. I am curious to see people’s opinions in our class who don’t mind the math, and whether they thought this was a well-written book or not. Even though he did include some, maybe more examples with common people interacting with numbers would have been helpful?

I agree with your assessment that Deringer did leave some information out during the middle chapters. I would have loved to see how the two-party system developed in England/Britain in the third chapter. Going into the two-party system might have been outside of his focus in this book, but at least a couple of paragraphs that give a brief overview would have been helpful. However, I did find this book to be very insightful and left me wanting to read more. His use of numbers and math could be overwhelming at some points but I did enjoy the graphs and tables. I also enjoyed that he mixed in some real-world events that vindicated some financial thinkers at the time. Overall, Calculated Values is a good book that has strong points and weak points. I believe that the strong points outweigh the bad and Deringer writes a compelling book and argument.