From The Economist: “Two economists, Deirdre McCloskey of the University of Illinois, and Stephen Ziliak of Roosevelt University, think their colleagues do a lousy job of making sense of figures, often falling prey to elementary errors. But their biggest gripe is that, blinded by statistical wizardry, many economists fail to think about the way in which the world really works.” [...]
“In their latest work, Ms McCloskey and Mr Ziliak looked at all the AER articles in the 1990s, and found that more than four-fifths of them are guilty of the same sin. Indeed, so pervasive is the cult of statistical significance, say the authors, that ever more economists dispense altogether with the awkward question of whether the patterns they uncover have anything meaningful to say about the real world.”
