Recent Blog Posts
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The Times' Rorshach Geithner Story
Apr 27 20099:26 am EDT -
Sinking Animal Spirits
Apr 27 20098:45 am EDT -
Counter-cyclical Urban Policy
Apr 26 200910:00 am EDT -
Be Your Own Counterfeiter
Apr 26 20099:36 am EDT -
Being Tim Geithner
Apr 25 200912:37 pm EDT -
Notes From a Press Conference Naif
Apr 25 20099:41 am EDT -
What Good is the News?
Apr 25 20098:32 am EDT -
Stressful Enough
Apr 24 20092:29 pm EDT -
Not Regretting the Pound
Apr 24 20091:09 pm EDT -
Introducing the New Ford Squeeze
Apr 24 20099:47 am EDT
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The Limits of Empiricism, Revisited
Deirdre McCloskey is in fine fighting form, at least by the standards of statisticians:
Good fit is not the same thing as importance. In fact, usually it has nothing to do with importance.
I think she's absolutely right. People who use a lot of statistical analysis, economists among them, tend to gravitate towards the measurable. Often, important things aren't easy to measure, and things which are easy to measure aren't important. While statistical analysis should be used to examine some a priori hypothesis, too often hypotheses are constructed around whatever data might be lying around. And if the data is crap, the results of any statistical analysis on that data will also be crap, no matter how good your fit.
(Earlier: The Limits of Empiricism)






