Book Mailing: Starting June 10, hardcover copies of The Data Detective will be shipped to paid registrants.
Please note: The stated registration fee for this event only applies to customers residing in Canada and the U.S.A. If you are registering for this livestream from outside of these countries, please contact events@rotman.utoronto.ca regarding your registration as shipping fees vary depending on your location.
Book Synopsis: Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us. That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics—we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us.” If we can toss aside our fears and learn to approach them clearly—understanding how our own preconceptions lead us astray—statistics can point to ways we can live better and work smarter.
As “perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world” (New Statesman), Tim Harford is an expert at taking complicated ideas and untangling them for millions of readers. In The Data Detective, he uses new research in science and psychology to set out ten strategies for using statistics to erase our biases and replace them with new ideas that use virtues like patience, curiosity, and good sense to better understand ourselves and the world. As a result, The Data Detective is a big-idea book about statistics and human behavior that is fresh, unexpected, and insightful.
About Our Speakers:
Tim Harford is an award-winning journalist, economist, and broadcaster. He's the author of the bestselling The Undercover Economist, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, Messy, Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy, Adapt, and The Logic of Life. Harford is currently a senior columnist at the Financial Times and host of the BBC Radio 4 program More or Less. He has been named Economics Commentator of the Year (2014), won the Rybczynski Prize (2014–2015) for the best business-relevant economics writing, and won the Bastiat Prize for economic journalism (2006). He's a visiting fellow of Nuffield College at the University of Oxford and lives in Oxford with his family.
Heski Bar-Isaac is Professor of Integrative Thinking, Finance, and Economic Analysis and Policy. He currently serves as Area Coordinator for the Economic Analysis & Policy Area, and managing editor of the Economic Journal; he has broad research interests in applications of game theory and information economics to questions on antitrust, corporate governance and human resource policies.
Questions: events@rotman.utoronto.ca, Daniel Ellul