A review by heather_goodreid
Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

2.0

I feel a little unconvinced that google searches are a good proxy of people’s true beliefs and wishes generally except in a few cases. I also didn’t like his detached discussion of racism and violence that have real world impact. That’s not exactly a problem with his scholarship but I didn’t like it. One major issue I couldn’t shake was the bisexual erasure in discussion of who’s gay. He also talked about himself a little too much. There some standout topics he touched on that I did enjoy, largely discussing the work of other economists. His work around what things people seem worried about was interesting and his general look at voting trends was pretty clever. I’m just not convinced of a one to one definitive conclusion on the individual level from the data