Gary Smith
Pomona College
Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics
Gary Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University and was an assistant professor there for seven years. He has won two teaching awards and written or co-authored more than eighty academic papers and thirteen books. His Standard Deviation: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics (Overlook/Duckworth, 2015) was a London Times Book of the Week and debunks a variety of dubious and misleading statistical practices. His most recent book, The AI Delusion (Oxford University Press, 2018) argues that, in this age of Big Data, the real danger is not that computers are smarter than we are, but that because we think computers are smarter, we trust computers to make important decisions for us. His statistical and financial research has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Motley Fool, Scientific American, MarketWatch, NewsWeek and BusinessWeek.