Cathy O'Neil on Wall St and Occupy Wall Street

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2013

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

Cathy O'Neil, data scientist and blogger at mathbabe.org, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about her journey from Wall Street to Occupy Wall Street. She talks about her experiences on Wall Street that ultimately led her to join the Occupy Wall Street movement. Along the way, the conversation includes a look at the reliability of financial modeling, the role financial models played in the crisis, and the potential for shame to limit dishonest behavior in the financial sector and elsewhere.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:06.4	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:11.0	Our website is econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast, and find links
0:16.3	and other information related to today's conversation.
0:19.0	You'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going
0:23.3	back to 2006.
0:25.4	Our email address is maladycontalk.org.
0:28.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:29.8	Today is January 25th, 2013, and my guest is Kathy O'Neill, a data scientist who blogs
0:39.0	at mathbabe.org, Kathy, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:42.7	Thank you.
0:43.7	Now, I ended up at your website, mathbabe somehow, I don't remember how, and I ended up
0:48.5	reading a long post you wrote about Nate Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise.
0:53.2	In your views on models and data, particularly in the financial sector, how we should think
0:56.8	about them, and those are topics that come up often on this program, and two things jumped
1:01.4	out at me as I read your words.
1:02.9	One is that we had very similar views about the problems on Wall Street, and the second
1:07.2	was that we had very different ideas, radically different actually on what to do about those
1:12.0	problems.
1:13.0	You're involved with Occupy Wall Street, maybe I should be too, or maybe you shouldn't
1:17.7	be, but there's something weird going on there.
1:20.0	The first three quarters of your post, or so, could have been written by me, though I
	...

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