On March 19, 2025, Isaiah Andrews, a Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, delivered the annual Uwe Reinhardt Distinguished Lecture at Princeton.

Andrews presented his paper, “Communicating Scientific Uncertainty via Approximate Posteriors.”

“What this paper thinks about is a very common practice in economics, but also in lots of other fields, which is summarizing what we learned from an empirical study by point estimates and standard errors,” said Andrews. “This is an estimate for ‘how effective do we think the thing we’re studying is?’ and then a standard error, which measures ‘how much uncertainty do we have around that conclusion?’ Unfortunately, there’s a lot of evidence in different settings in economics that the assumptions that justify these methods can fail, and the resulting uncertainty measures can be unreliable. What we are looking to do in this project is to develop a general purpose tool for assessing ‘What, if anything, are we losing by summarizing the data in this way?’”

Understanding whether a study’s assumptions, and therefore findings, are accurate matters immensely because these studies can affect people’s lives via decision makers. For example, studies that estimate the impact of different kinds of job training programs or the impact of growing up in different neighborhoods. Andrews explains, “in order for us to decide, ‘is this policy worth adopting or not?’ it’s important that we have a sense of how confident we are in the conclusion.”

His prior work with co-author Jesse Shapiro relating to issues around scientific communication and how to convey results laid the groundwork for this paper. “I think about these issues around failure of the normal approximation. Boiling everything down to a point estimate in standard error is losing us something,” Andrews said. “The idea here was both wanting to bring together those two strands of research and wanting to see what we could do towards developing a very concrete and simple formula that people could roll out in practice to determine if the current way they are summarizing results is good or bad—is it working or not?”

About Isaiah Andrews

Isaiah Andrews is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor of Economics at MIT. His research centers econometrics with the goal of refining research methods to improve applied studies.

In 2021, the American Economic Association awarded Andrews with the John Bates Clark Medal in recognition of his significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. He has also earned the MacArthur Fellowship, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and is a Fellow of the Econometric Society. Andrews earned the Robert M. Solow Prize for Excellence in Reasearch and Teaching in 2014.

Andrews teaches classes on econometrics and research in economics at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He earned his B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from Yale University in 2009 and his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in 2014.

Reflecting on the importance of mentorship, Andrews shared, “I benefited hugely from my mentors as a grad student and junior faculty member. Those relationships, I think, made a real difference to the course of my career.” He continued, “I try to provide similar mentorship to my students. I think the highest marginal return activity that I do day to day is advising students. These are extremely smart, extremely capable people with a huge amount of potential, and so whatever I can do to help them realize more of that potential, that helps not only them and their careers, but also the evolution of the field.”

The Uwe Reinhardt Distinguished Lecture

The Uwe Reinhardt Distinguished Lectureship was created through a gift from Gilchrist B. Berg (’73) in honor of Uwe E. Reinhardt, Princeton’s James Madison Professor of Political Economy, professor of economics and public affairs.

Reinhardt, who was a member of Princeton’s faculty for nearly 50 years, was one of the nation’s leading economists, with particular expertise in the American health care system. His advice was frequently sought by policymakers, journalists, and health-related organizations here and abroad, as well as by Congress. He was also known as a charismatic and generous teacher with an incisive wit and a warm, irreverent personality, which endeared him to generations of students and colleagues.

You can learn more here about the Uwe Reinhardt Distinguished Lecture series and the Uwe Reinhardt Professorship in Economics.