About

M. D. Berg, Ph.D., Economics

I spent the first stretch of my career doing forensic economics work alongside Dwight Steward, back when neither of us knew it would become EmployStats. We were both just starting out — figuring out, case by case, how to put defensible numbers on things courts actually cared about.

After about ten years, the travel and the case load were taking too much from my family. My wife was right to insist that the university job was the better bet for our stability, so I stepped back from active practice and put my energy into teaching instead. Dwight kept building what he’d started, and it grew into EmployStats.

That university career ended up being a long one — thirty-plus years teaching economics and statistics, at the undergraduate and MBA level. If you want the honest version: most of what I know about how people misuse numbers, I learned watching students try to get away with it on exams.

I’ve since retired from teaching. My children are grown. These days I’m back with the EmployStats team, though in a different seat than when I started. I manage the data processing side of the operation and help design the calculators behind sites like injuryeconomics.com — and, more recently, maritalvaluation.com, a project that’s mine alone. Case work itself goes to the younger PhDs on the team now; I’m more useful behind the curtain than in front of a jury these days, and I’m at peace with that.

This site is where I write about the methodology behind that work — not specific cases, just the debates, the math, and the occasional thing I find genuinely interesting after thirty-plus years of looking at this stuff. “Ask the Economist” answers the practical questions people actually search for. “The Notebook” is for the slower, more technical arguments that the field hasn’t settled and probably won’t anytime soon.

If you want to reach me directly, the Contact page has my email.