Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. My guest today is Ian Ayers, the William K. Townsend Professor

at Yale Law School and a Professor at Yale School of Management. He's also the author

of Supercrunchers, why thinking my numbers is the new way to be smart. Stay tuned at the

end of this podcast for a post script where I expand on some of the issues raised by today's

conversation. Ian, welcome to econtalk. That's great to be here. Your book is about the triumph

of facts over intuition. You argue we can make better decisions as individuals, as business

executives, and as a society if we pay attention to the facts. Particularly facts are findings

that come out of statistical analysis. I want to confess from the start that I had a little

bit of a schizophrenic reaction to the book. I'm a big fan of facts and statistics, but the

devil's in the details, particularly when it comes to statistical analysis and even plain

statistics. I want to start with letting you make the case for Supercrunching, the use

of numbers and the use of data and analysis. Tell us about the Orleashian filter story and

Bill James in what they tell us. Sure. Orleashian filter is one of the great statistical

economists in the world, and he also has a passion for wine. He's combined the two by going

out and doing the statistical analysis of the quality of Bordeaux. He has collected historical

information on the growing temperature and the rainfall, yet in Bordeaux regions of France,

and he has done a statistical analysis, a technique called a multivariate regression,

to find underlying correlations, underlying causal influences between the growing conditions,

...