The Honest Rainmaker

"AJ Liebling was an old-time magazine journalist. This particular book was based on a bunch of articles about an old guy he knew, who went by the name of Colonel John R Stingo. It wasn’t his real name, but it was the name he liked to be called by. He had gone through life doing a number of things, including newspaper writing, and one of the things he had done was rainmaking. They would go to farm areas of the United States and make contracts with farmers, about how they would make it rain. Their entire rainmaking was based on actuarial principles. They worked out the frequency of precipitation and they would write very clever contracts – of the heads-I-win, tails-you-lose variety. So if it rained they would get all sorts of payments and if it didn’t rain they would have to pay. But they would somehow always set up the contract so they wouldn’t have to pay… Liebling is one of the great writers of all time and I felt that this particular book had strong statistical content. The statistical content is that you have to have a sense of the probability of rain for it to work out. They probably did, on occasion. That’s kind of the point – it’s this lovable rogue, this guy who was never as successful as all that, but he would somehow just manage to stay afloat. To me it felt very statistical, the whole book. There was something about it…but it’s basically story telling. Most people wouldn’t consider it a statistics book. Another book along the same lines that I’d recommend is Jimmy the Greek’s autobiography. Jimmy the Greek was a Vegas oddsmaker, he got famous in the 1970s when he was a TV football commentator, eventually got thrown off the air after making some vaguely racist comments. Anyway, his autobiography is great, it’s full of statistical stories, starting with how he made his first fortune taking bets on the 1948 election. But that’s another story…"