IEA Book Club Event with Alex Edmans

The IEA Book Club hosted author Alex Edmans on his latest book, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It.

Our lives are minefields of misinformation. It ripples through our social media feeds, our daily headlines, and the pronouncements of politicians, business leaders, and best-selling authors. Stories, statistics, and studies are everywhere, allowing people to find evidence to support whatever position they want. Many of these sources are flawed, yet by playing on our emotions and preying on our biases, they can gain widespread acceptance, warp our views, and distort our decisions.

This book is written to help the reader separate fact from fiction. There are already good books on misinformation, but they typically list hundreds of ways in which people can deceive us; it’s hard to remember each one and put this knowledge into practice.

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School and an expert in the use and misuse of data and evidence.  He has given the TED talk What to Trust in a Post-Truth World with 2 million views, spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and testified in the UK Parliament.

Alex served as Managing Editor of the Review of Finance, the leading academic finance journal in Europe. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Harvard Business Review, and been interviewed by Bloomberg, BBC, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox, ITV, NPR, Reuters, Sky News, and Sky Sports. He was previously a tenured professor at Wharton and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.

Alex’s first book, Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit, was featured in the Financial Times Best Business Books of 2020 and has been translated into nine languages. Alex was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021 and won 25 teaching awards at LBS and Wharton. Alex has a BA from Oxford and a PhD from MIT as a Fulbright Scholar, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.