Jeffrey Miron is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, as well as being Director of Economics Studies at the Cato Institute.

We talked about the huge increase in the U.S. prison population – it really is striking:

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By now you know all about the Mueller investigation, you know all about the Russian collusion allegations, you know all about the denials, you know all about the Don Junior meeting in Trump Tower.

You might have an opinion on it, you might think that anyone on the Trump campaign team was entitled to seek opposition information from wherever, you might think that they were entitled to hear out the Russians who contacted them, you might think that it doesn’t matter whether those turned out to be FSB spies, or that the Trump team had no way of knowing that so you can’t hold that against them.

You might even think that a president who commits a crime is entitled to pardon himself.

You could agree or disagree with any of those positions and still be a loyal American.

But that leaves out one thing. I’ll get to it in a moment, but one thing to understand first. It’s surprisingly difficult for humans to make up random numbers. Our brains like patterns, we can’t get away from them.

For example, during the years of the Vietnam war, at five o’ clock every day, the U.S. military briefers would tell journalists how the war was going. It took a long time for the journalists to notice that the number of enemy dead in any given week never ended in the figure 0 or 5. Never 65 people killed, 64. Week in, week out for several years, the enemy dead was Never 60 it was 59, or 69, or 71.

Needless to say, the military were lying. In trying to pick random, precise-sounding numbers, they choose a pattern that was vastly improbable. There are a lot of mathematical tools that clever people can use to analyse large volumes of data, and see if that data is really coming from the source that it claims to be coming from.