Review of Social Workers Count: Numbers and Social Issues by Michael Anthony Lewis

Abstract

Lewis, Michael Anthony. 2017. Social Workers Count: Numbers and Social Issues. 2019. New York: Oxford University Press. 223 pp. ISBN 978-019046713-5 The numeracy movement, although largely birthed within the mathematics community, is an outside-the-box endeavor which has always sought to break down or at least transgress traditional disciplinary boundaries. Michael Anthony Lewis’s book is a testament that this effort is succeeding. Lewis is a social worker and sociologist with an impressive resume, author of Economics for Social Workers, co-editor of The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee, and member of the faculty at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. Although explicitly targeted to social work students and professionals, the nine chapters here provide a good quantitative literacy education accessible to the general public and include a great many of the topics one would find in a "standard" quantitative literacy text written by a mathematician. The examples, despite being rooted in social work, are interesting and relevant to those outside that discipline, and speak to Lewis’s breadth of knowledge and the skill of being able to make connections between different types of knowledge and evidence that is inherent in being a numerate person.