Movie: Moneyball

This movie is not as good as the NYT thinks it is, but it is still worth seeing.

My sense from the Wikipedia page for Billy Beane, the Oakland A's manager whose adoption of statistically guided baseball led to remarkable success on a low budget, is that most of the personal narrative in the movie has little to do with reality.

I am told the book upon which the movie is based is quite good.

And then there is the puzzle, identified by Greg Mankiw, as to why the nerdy assistant in the movie was transformed from a Harvard grad into an economics grad.

Recommended, but not as strongly as in the Times, and partly because it is fun to see good use made of simple statistical methods.