Hello and welcome to the Data Detective episode of Slate Money, your guide to the

Business Earned Finance News of the Week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Emily Peck. Hello. Hello Emily.

Hi. How's your employment situation these days? I am a little less employed these days.

Today was my last official day at Huff Post which just did a lot of layoffs.

So we don't know what I'll be doing next yet, but it'll be something cool, I'm sure.

It'll be awesome. We look forward to finding out what it's going to be no one more so than Tim Harford welcome.

Hello Felix, hello Emily. Tim I don't know I've lost track of how many times we've had you on this show.

It's always fantastic to have you on this show.

You have a new book out called The Data Detective, which we are going to talk all about is really fascinating about statistics and how to think about them, how to use them.

We're going to talk about the stimulus of course, the $1.9 trillion that has just been passed,

signed into law by resident Biden and we'll talk about the effect of all that but kind of the thing that we've all

been waiting for and then we are going to go into enormous detail about is people.

Of course we have a whole section on people and we and we have a slate plus on Florence Nightingale.

It's an awesome show so stay tuned for all of that coming up on sleep money.

So Tim we need to we need to kick off by talking about your book, which is statistics

are not quite as terrible as maybe they have a reputation for being. Is that the

TLD are here? Yeah, Cori Doctoro, the blogger and science fiction author, said it should have been called how to truth with

statistics. It's actually called the data detective in the US and it's called

other things in other parts of the world because because publishing but it's about making the case that statistics are extremely useful.

There are sort of radar that show us vital truths about the world and that ordinary people asking fairly straightforward questions can make sense of them.

You don't need to be an expert.

It doesn't need to be too complicated.

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