This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 24th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Author Tim Harford says it's fun to punctuate myths or expose baseless theories, but it's far more useful to help people

track down the truth.

And in a world where statistics matter more than ever, finding the signal in the noise is often

quite difficult.

His new book is The Data Detective,

10 easy rules to make sense of statistics.

We spoke last week.

You tell a story in your book about Irving Fisher. Why does he figure so

prominently in your book? Why Irving Fisher was an amazing man, remarkable individual.

He was also ruined by the failure of his economic forecast

and I think perhaps more importantly not just that his

economic forecast failed because let's be honest who who among us has not made an

economic forecast that's failed?

But because he was so slow to change his mind, he absolutely clung on to what he believed,

to the strength of his convictions and which in some

ways is admirable but sadly the strength of his convictions were that the very

peak of the market late 1929 was in fact a sustainable plateau and the more the market fell

the more he saw it as a buying opportunity and he just borrowed more and

invested more and kept finding ways to believe that the crash wasn't real and in

the end it ruined him and I was fascinated by this story of a man who's so smart, in many ways so admirable, so interested in the data and yet somehow not able to back out of the corner that he had got himself into.

...