Thursday, September 5, 2019

The ladder of social science reasoning, 4 statements in increasing order of generality, or Why didn’t they say they were sorry when it turned out they’d messed up? — Andrew Gelman


Reinhart and Rogoff. Why didn't they take responsibility, a student asked Andrew Gelman. Statistics professor Gelman answers:  It wasn't actually about the data in the minds of R & R, so being wrong about it apparently made no significant difference to them. Empirical result? Meh.

Rationalists, or just ideologues with a cognitive bias?

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
The ladder of social science reasoning, 4 statements in increasing order of generality, or Why didn’t they say they were sorry when it turned out they’d messed up?
Andrew Gelman | Professor of Statistics and Political Science and Director of the Applied Statistics Center, Columbia University

See also

Paper by Mohsen Javdani and Ha-Joon Chang
Marginal Revolution
Ideological bias and argument from authority among economists
Tyler Cowen | Holbert C. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center

2 comments:

Ralph Musgrave said...

I've always thought the R&R spreadsheet error was less important than R&R's utter failure to understand the Econ 101 point that goverenments which issue their own currencies are wholly different to households. That is, R&R have always been convinced that government debt is a debt that has to be repaid at some point, like a household's mortgage.

And of course with a view to boosting the latter delusional nonsense, they employ the emotive phrase "debt overhang" with a view to making us all scared stiff of any rise in government debt.

Matt Franko said...

"goverenments which issue their own currencies are wholly different to households."

Well they think they are equivalent to households... sounds reasonable...

And btw the move isn't to "say your sorry!" like these liberal art losers suggest... the proper response is to make a corrective adjustment and get back into it...