Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money.

From full global headquarters, this is Motley Full Money. Welcome to Motley Full Money. I'm Chris Held.

We wrap up Summer with two classic conversations. Dan Heath talks about the

business of making decisions, but we kick off the show with naked statistics.

Charlie Wielin is the best selling author of Naked Economics and a professor of public policy and economics at Dartmouth College.

His latest book is Naked Statistics, stripping the dread from the data.

And he joins me in studio now, the rare in studio gas. Thanks for being here.

Oh, it's going to be with you. When it comes to statistics and the broader economy, what?

It just seems like one of those things where now we're inundated with statistics, particularly in pop culture,

in the advent of moneyball and all that sort of thing, we have to be getting some pretty big things wrong.

What are we getting wrong when it comes to the broader economy?

Well, we're getting something partially wrong in the sense people are obsessed with the idea whether statistics lie or not.

And they do when people lie with statistics, they lie without statistics. Those are people who are pathologically lying.

The more subtle point is that statistics in anybody's hands have a point of view.

So the way I like to think about it is it's a little like an American courtroom where the prosecution and the defense get all the same raw data.

All the interviews, all the depositions, all the evidence and so on.

But if you were to show up in that courtroom and watch the trial, they would each present the data in their own way.

They would selectively pick which data they wanted to present. They would emphasize some things more than others.

We all do that implicitly or explicitly. So statistics are just the tools that we use to make sense of all these raw data,

but there's a lot of picking and choosing going on.

What do you think of the GDP, which seems to be everyone's, if not favorite data point for the health of the economy,

certainly the data point that is at the ready?

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