Traffic drops 75%. Pollution barely moves. Why?

A shop owner is robbed — loss: €2,000. She starts closing early out of fear. The fear costs her seven to eleven times more than the crime. A nurse trained in West Africa moves to a city with thousands of unfilled nursing positions. She cleans offices. A teacher rents a "cheap" apartment on the periphery. When you add the car, the fuel, and the commute, it costs more than the city centre.

Every number in this book is real. Every character is invented. The gap between them is the point.

Statistics Don't Cough follows Logic — a corgi, an interplanetary quality-management consultant, and the narrator — as he applies structured diagnostic thinking to one European city: Modena, Italy. Six chapters. Six patterns of thinking that make intelligent, well-intentioned people get complex problems wrong. Real data from air quality monitoring stations, census records, municipal budgets, and peer-reviewed research. Fictional characters who live inside that data.

Six patterns:
• Why we solve the wrong problem
• Why we blame what we can see
• Why the price tag lies
• Why we're afraid of the wrong things
• Why solving one problem makes others worse
• Why building a solution is not the same as keeping it

Drawing on evidence from Barcelona, Copenhagen, Ljubljana, Singapore, and dozens of published sources, this book is for anyone who suspects that the obvious answer is usually the expensive one — and wants a method for finding the real one.

Every number is real. Every character is invented. The gap between them is the point.

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