Uncertainty and the perils of prediction with William M Briggs

Economics Explained host Gene Tunny speaks with statistician William M “Matt” Briggs about uncertainty and the perils of prediction. Matt is a consulting statistician and a policy advisor to the Heartland Institute. He has been a visiting Professor of Statistics at Central Michigan University and an Adjunct Professor of Statistics at the Cornell Medical School. Matt is the author of the 2016 book Uncertainty: The Soul of Modeling, Probability and Statistics, published by Springer. In the interview I mention Matt’s article Why is Economics plagued by Math? This article by Matt refers to a 2015 paper by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Romer Mathiness in the theory of economic growth. If you’re interested in learning more about Matt’s work, check out this video on YouTube: The crisis of evidence, or why probability and statistics cannot discover cause In my introductory remarks I quote from John Bohannon’s Science Magazine article: About 40% of economics experiments fail replication survey