Trump's jobs data denialism won't fool anyone
I’ve had a fun weekend 1 visiting family in Kansas City, but I figured this story was timely enough to be worth publishing on a Sunday. Also, time flies: It’s August, which means that it’s time for a new Subscriber Questions post, ideally this week unless further news intervenes. You can submit your questions in the comments to SBSQ #22.
If you’d asked me 20 years ago, when I made a living playing online poker and running projections for Baseball Prospectus, I would have told you that, of course, I’m a Data Guy. Treat the numbers with caution, because it’s easy to build bad models or otherwise screw up in umpteen ways when working with complex statistical data under deadline pressure. But at the end of the day, we all have to make decisions based on incomplete information. Businesses particularly face this problem: new hires or capital investments typically have a long time horizon. If you’re not going to make these choices based on your best estimate of the situation, given the relevant uncertainties — well, what exactly are you going to base them on?
These days, I’d say my relationship with the Data Guy label has become more fraught. In one of my particular subfields, election forecasting, there’s been a lot of bad work, which probably did more to misinform the conversation than contribute to it. And more broadly, I do buy to some extent that “science has been politicized”. Sometimes I've seen the admonition “just trust the numbers” used as a blunt insturment to suppress legitimate dissent. Data is collected by and interpreted by humans, and human error and bias play a role at every step of the process.
