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.
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Today is February 1, 2024, and my guest is economist and author Jeremy Weber.
He is the author of Statistics for Public Policy, a practical guide to being mostly right, or at least respectably wrong, which is the topic of our conversation.
Jeremy, welcome to Econ Talk.
Thanks so much for having me.
It's a privilege.
How did you come to write this book?
The book was in development in my head for probably more than a decade.
It began after I spent four years working in the federal government in a federal statistics agency, the Economic Research Service, and that was a great place to be as a recent Econ PhD grad.
And it was a mix of more academic research, very policy oriented research, and generating real official federal government statistics, interacting with policy people.
Then I went into academia to teach statistics to policy students, and the book I was using, the course that I inherited very quickly.
I had the feeling I was more or less wasting students time, where at the very least, there were huge gaps such that when they left my class, they weren't going to be prepared to use any of this to help anyone in a practical setting.
And from that point on, I started to accumulate notes on things that if I were to write a book, I would want to include, and things that I was now using to complement the statistics textbook to give my students more.
And then in 2019, I spent a year and a half at the Council of Economic Advisors.
And that was like an accelerator for this whole idea, because being engrossed in that environment gave me many examples, many ideas.