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Did you know that baseball players whose names begin with the letter “D” are more likely to die young? Or that Asian Americans are most susceptible to heart attacks on the fourth day of the month? Or that drinking a full pot of coffee every morning will add years to your life, but one cup a day increases the risk of pancreatic cancer? All of these “facts” have been argued with a straight face by credentialed researchers and backed up with reams of data and convincing statistics.As Nobel Prize–winning economist Ronald Coase once cynically observed, “If you torture data long enough, it will confess.” Lying with statistics is a time-honored con. In Standard Deviations, economics professor Gary Smith walks us through the various tricks and traps that people use to back up their own crackpot theories.



About the Author

Gary Smith

Gary Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He has written (or co-authored) ten books and seventy-five academic papers on finance, sports, and statistical pitfalls. His research has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Motley Fool, Newsweek and BusinessWeek. He was a guest speaker on CNBC, and a keynote speaker at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC and the Mortgage Finance Industry Summit in New York City. He received his B.A. in Mathematics with Honors from Harvey Mudd College and his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University.



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