The Numbers Game

Russ Roberts explores the challenges of accurately measuring and understanding the economy and economic policy.

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About the show

An animated series discussing the challenges of accurately measuring and understanding the economy and economic policy.We often hear that the middle class is stagnating and making no economic progress over the last four decades. Those making this claim use statistics to back up this pessimistic conclusion. Yet it is easy to find other statistics that lead to a different conclusion and that show that the middle class's standard of living has in fact been growing. This series explores how different assumptions can easily change our perception of how the economy treats the middle class. The bottom line is that data questions like these are often more complicated than they appear to be.

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Russ Roberts

Visiting Fellow

Russ Roberts is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2006, he founded the award-winning weekly podcast EconTalk, which has featured guests including Milton Friedman, Martha Nussbaum, Christopher Hitchens, Agnes Callard, Bill James, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Amor Towles, and Emily Oster. All 875+ episodes remain available free of charge at EconTalk.org and reach an audience of more than 125,000 listeners in 200 countries. His two rap videos on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, created with filmmaker John Papola, have had more than 13 million YouTube views, have been subtitled in 11 languages, and are used in high school and college classrooms around the world. His poem and animated video “It’s a Wonderful Loaf” (https://wonderfulloaf.org) is an ode to emergent order. His series on the challenge of using data to establish truth, The Numbers Game, can be found at PolicyEd.org. His latest book is Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us (Portfolio, 2022), a look at big life decisions that we make with little help from quantitative data. Other books include Gambling with Other People's Money: How Perverse Incentives Caused the Financial Crisis (Hoover Institution Press, 2019) and How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness (Portfolio, 2014). The latter takes lessons from Adam Smith’s little-known masterpiece The Theory of Moral Sentiments and applies them to modern life. In 2021, Roberts became the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem, Israel, a liberal arts college dedicated to great ideas and books with the goal of creating the next generation of Israeli leadership.

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