Everybody Lies

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Dey Street, 288 pages, $27.99. To many people, Big Data is less shiny than it was a year ago. After Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, her vaunted analytics team took much of the blame for failing to spot warnings in the Midwestern states that cost her the presidency. But according to research by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist at Google, Clinton's real mistake was not to rely too much on newfangled statistics, but rather too little. Had Clinton's team made better use of such information, they might have concluded, before it was too late, that the foundations of her "blue firewall" were cracking. This is just one of the striking findings in "Everybody Lies," a whirlwind tour of the modern human psyche using search data as its guide. Some of the book's discoveries reaffirm conventional wisdom. The empirical findings in "Everybody Lies" are so intriguing that the book would be a page-turner even if it were structured as a mere laundry list. But Stephens-Davidowitz also puts forward a deft argument: the web will revolutionize social science just as the microscope and telescope transformed the natural sciences. Modern microeconomics, sociology, political science and quantitative psychology all depend to a large extent on surveys of, at most, a few thousand respondents. He believes it will revolutionize the way academics do research. Stephens-Davidowitz is not just any knee-jerk cheerleader for the Big Data revolution. He calls for extreme caution in extending the use of Big Data from large groups of people to making decisions about individuals.

ECONOMIST