Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is March 6, 2017, and my guest is author and blogger Andrew Gelman, professor of

statistics and political science at Columbia University.

Andrew's a very dangerous man for me.

As a listers know, I've been increasingly skeptical over the years about the reliability

of various types of statistical analyses and psychology, economics, epidemiology, and

coming across your work, Andrew, which I've done lately and been reading your blog.

You've confirmed a lot of my biases, which is always a little bit dangerous, but in such

an interesting way.

So I'm hoping to learn a lot in this conversation along with our listeners, and at the end,

we'll talk about whether I've gone too far and become too comfortable.

So I want to start with something very, and at the other point I want to make before we

start is that it's sometimes hard to talk about statistics and data over the phone.

And in a podcast, we're going to do the best we can without a whiteboard.

But I'm hoping that both beginners and sophisticated users of statistics will find things of interest

...