How to Avoid Lying With Statistics (with Jeremy Weber)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2024

⏱️ 73 minutes

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Summary

There's often a gap between the textbook treatment of statistics and the cookbook treatment--how to cook up the numbers when you're in the kitchen of the real world. Jeremy Weber of the University of Pittsburgh and the author of Statistics for Public Policy hopes his book can close that gap. He talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how to use numbers thoughtfully and honestly.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done
0:24.5	going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is February 1st, 2024,
0:40.0	and my guest is Economist and author Jeremy Weber.
0:43.4	He is the author of statistics for public policy,
0:47.1	a practical guide to being mostly right
0:49.7	or at least respectably wrong,
0:52.0	which is the topic of our conversation.
0:53.8	Jeremy, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:55.6	Thanks so much for having to me.
0:58.0	It's a privilege.
0:59.0	How did you come to write this book?
1:01.0	The book was in development in my head for probably more than a decade.
1:11.3	It began after I spent four years working in the federal government in a federal the Economic Research Service. And that was a great place to be as a recent Econ PhD grad and I was, it was a mix of
1:30.0	and more academic research, very policy-oriented research, and generating real official
1:36.7	federal government statistics, interacting with policy people.
1:42.4	Then I went into academia to teach statistics to with policy
1:45.0	students.
1:46.0	And the book I was using, the course that I inherited,
1:51.0	very quickly, I had the feeling I was more or less wasting
1:57.1	students time or at the very least there were huge gaps such that when they left my class,
2:04.0	they weren't going to be prepared to use any of this
	...

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