How Statistics Fool Us Into Bad Policy

The PPE Podcast

In another episode of the Governance and Policy Podcast, we interview Dr Phil Magness, Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also an economic historian whose work covers the intersection of history and political economy.

Here, he shares his thoughts about how statistics and mathematical models may sometimes be misused or even abused, leading us into bad policy decisions. We discuss the flawed data collection that led to coronavirus city lockdowns and the problems in the research of Thomas Piketty, and his collaborators Saez and Zucman.