THE DISMAL SCIENCE REMAINS DISMAL

WHEN HRISTOS DOUCOULIAGOS was a young economist in the mid-1990s, he got interested in all the ways economics was wrong about itself—bias, underpowered research, statistical shenanigans. Nobody wanted to hear it. “I’d go to seminars and people would say, ‘You’ll never get this published,’” Doucouliagos, now at Deakin University in Australia, says. “They’d say, ‘this is bordering on libel.’”…

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How to beat the bookies by turning their odds against them

Mathematicians had already developed bookie-beating models that attempt to predict sporting outcomes, but they are hard to devise and don’t perform consistently. So Lisandro Kaunitz at the University of Tokyo and his colleagues tried a more direct approach: using the bookmakers’ odds against them. The team studied data on nearly half a million football matches…

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