Gary Nance Smith (born 1945) is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College. His research on financial markets statistical reasoning, and artificial intelligence, often involves stock market anomalies, statistical fallacies, and the misuse of data have been widely cited. Early history and education Smith earned his B. S. in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College and enrolled in Yale University’s graduate economics program. After taking classes from James Tobin and William Brainard, he decided to focus on macroeconomics. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1971 and was hired as an assistant professor. In a demonstration of the law of comparative advantage, Smith taught the first-year graduate course in macroeconomics while Tobin taught the first-year graduate course in microeconomics. The economics department polled students about what courses they would like added to the curriculum and the runaway winners were Marx and the stock market. Smith wasn’t interested in Marx, but the chair of his thesis committee was Tobin, who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, in part for his analysis of financial markets. So, Smith volunteered to create a stock market course and asked Tobin to recommend a textbook. His immediate answer was John Burr Williams’ The Theory of Investment Value, which had been published more than 30 years earlier, in 1938, and was not really a textbook. It was Williams’ Ph.D. thesis and had been rejected by several publishers for being overly academic (it had algebraic symbols!). Harvard University Press published it, but Williams had to pay part of the printing cost himself. This stock-market course pulled Smith away from macroeconomics towards finance, and the use and misuse of statistics in finance pulled Smith towards a lifelong interest in the abuse of data and statistical analysis. Tobin once wryly observed that the bad old days when researchers had to do calculations by hand were actually a blessing. In today's language, it was a feature, not a flaw. The calculations were so hard that people thought hard before they calculated. Today, with terabytes of data and lightning-fast computers, it is too easy to calculate first, think later. Smith argues that it is better to think hard before calculating. Notable contributions The Housing Market Smith has been a lifelong proponent of value investing, buying stocks based on the cash they generate, instead of trying to predict short-term movements in stock prices. The same principles apply to