"There are 1011 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." - Richard Feynman, physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988)
Who Am I?
I am passionate about the use of field experiments in economics and the social sciences, and I have spent my career promoting their use. Before my dissertation at MIT in 1996, field experiments were quite rare in economics. Now there are dozens of people regularly performing field experiments to learn about economic and social behavior. Most people still consider economics to be an observational rather than an experimental science, but that has been changing significantly over the course of my career.
In addition to my new career performing the theater show EXPERIMENT and posting videos on TikTok and Instagram, I am a part-time Adjunct Professor at at the UC Berkeley School of Information. I have developed a course on field experiments for the master's program in data science at the School of Information. The course was first offered in Fall 2014 and has been offered three times per year ever since.
I retired from my primary job in March 2025, after eighteen years working as a research scientist for SiriusXM, Pandora, Google, and Yahoo!. primarily working on experiments to measure the effects of online advertising. I started my career as an economics professor at Vanderbilt University and at the University of Arizona.In 2010, I settled in Berkeley, California, with my wife Jill Sazama.
I have now lived in the same house in Berkeley twice as long as I've ever lived anywhere else in my life. I enjoy being
able to walk up and down our steep hill to take public transit.
I was proud to serve as the founding president of the PGSS Campaign, for fourteen years. The Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences was one of the best experiences of my life, but the school died in 2009 in state budget cuts. I led the effort to organize 2400 alumni to raise private funds after the school was cancelled in 2009, and we finally succeeded in restoring this summer program Carnegie Mellon University in summer 2013 after a four-year hiatus. I have been passionate about education for years, and PGSS is the only educational institution I've ever been involved with where all the students wanted to learn and all the teachers wanted to teach. The demise of this school was a terrible loss, so I am pleased to have played a key role in bringing it back.
In Berkeley, my activities include:
- Promoting the idea that we can improve our lives by thinking more like scientists. I've benefited from this a lot in my personal life, and I hope to help others do the same.
- Developing and performing a solo storytelling show called Experiment: like your life depends on it!, in which I share my most important life lessons in a dramatic way.
- Posting entertainment and wisdom on Instagram and TikTok, so people can get some idea what I offer on stage.
- Developing and teaching my course Experiments and Causal Inference at UC Berkeley.
- Pursuing research on field experiments. Here is a list of the research papersI've worked on over the course of my career.
- Advising startup companies, including EEDEE, Orcaqubits, and CodeCombat.
- Doing exercises to reprogram my muscles and fascia so that I can experience less pain. My low back was been stiff and sore since the age of 14, and in my fifties I've finally been healing myself with the help of an expert trained in Functional Range Conditioning.
- Enjoying the natural beauty of Berkeley, California. Here's a view of the bay from my house.
- Spending time with my wife Jill Sazama.
- Studying languages with Duolingo, LingQ, and WaniKani. I love to try to learn accurate phonetics and grammar in another language. I speak French pretty well, and I know lesser amounts of Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, and Spanish.
- Traveling: I've been fortunate to have been able to visit some very interesting locations for work travel: from Ithaca and Austin to Amsterdam, Zurich, London, Kiev, Tblisi, Jerusalem, Melbourne, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur. Now that I'm retired, I intend to spend more time visiting Latin America, and I also hope one day to make it to Africa.
