DOCSLIB.ORG

Model: Mccloskey and the Craft of Economics

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Model: Mccloskey and the Craft of Economics Department of Economics Working Paper Series A ‘Model’ Model: McCloskey and the Craft of Economics Joshua C. Hall Working Paper No. 17-09 This paper can be found at the College of Business and Economics Working Paper Series homepage: http://business.wvu.edu/graduate-degrees/phd-economics/working-papers A “Model” Model: McCloskey and the Craft of Economics Joshua C. Hall Associate Professor of Economics Director, Center for Free Enterprise College of Business and Economics West Virginia University Morgantown, WV 26505-6025 [email protected] Abstract In this essay, I highlight some of the contributions of Deirdre McCloskey to the practice of economics as a teacher and scholar. I highlight her influence on my teaching and scholarship in the areas of economic education and economic freedom. JEL Codes: A00; A11; A23; B31 Keywords: rhetoric; economic freedom; storytelling Acknowledgements: This essay is based in part on comments made in honor of Deirdre McCloskey at a panel discussion on “The Ideas and Influence of Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, II” at Beloit College on November 3, 2016. A “Model” Model: McCloskey and the Craft of Economics 1 Introduction Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has made tremendous contributions to our understanding of the wealth and well-being of nations through both her teaching and scholarship. In thinking about how her work has influenced my own, I have to admit it was difficult to know where to begin given the breadth of her scholarship. Should I start with her work on open fields and enclosure in England that helped to get me interested in economic history while a masters student at Ohio University (McCloskey 1972; 1976; 1991)? Or her price theory book, which I used in my intermediate micro classes at Beloit College (McCloskey, 1985)? Her work with Stephen Ziliak that I seem to cite in most referee reports I write (McCloskey and Ziliak, 1996; Ziliak and McCloskey 2004; 2008)? Her advice to young economists, which I read in graduate school (McCloskey, 2000)? Her trilogy on the bourgeois era (McCloskey, 2006; 2010; 2016)? Ultimately, I didn’t know where to begin. So like any academic would, I pulled all her books off the shelves in my office and just started reading. Two things struck me while reading through her work. First, how much of her career has been focused on trying to improve the craft and practice of economics research and teaching. As an economist, McCloskey is definitely more Friedman than Stigler insofar as she believes in the power of teaching and preaching to change the economics profession and the world (McCloskey, 2001). By my rough estimate, at least 20 percent of her scholarly output is related to exhorting the economics profession to do a better job as teachers, researchers, and humans. The second thing that struck me while reading her work is how much of her advice I had internalized without realizing it. Her influence on me, and I suspect on many others, is so deep that we often don’t attribute our actions to her efforts. Folk wisdom has to come from somewhere and for many of us it came from Deirdre’s sustained scholarship urging us to do our jobs better, whether it is organizing a conference (McCloskey, 1994), running a seminar series (McCloskey, 1995), writing well (McCloskey, 1999a), focusing on “oomph” not statistical significance (McCloskey, 1999b), or trying to better explain important things about the world in our research (McCloskey, 1997). My claim is that Deirdre is one of the rare scholars whose influence shows up not only in her citation count, which is very high, but in the way that hundreds of economists go about their craft. As an economist, I certainly understand and appreciate comparative advantage and specialization. Not every economist needs to (or should be!) trying to nudge the economics profession towards the light. At the same time, the profession is better off as the result of her efforts.1 She is a model “model” of how to do well while doing good!2 Read widely, keep an open mind, admit error, pursue questions that interest you, make sure part of your work focuses on the great conversation started by Adam Smith (1776 [1998]), and if you feel something is wrong or can be improved then speak up.3 In the remainder of this essay, I will discuss some of my research on economic education and economic freedom. Along the way, I hope to illustrate how my scholarship, even while coming to conclusions that McCloskey might not agree with, is influenced by her efforts. I begin by discussing my efforts in the classroom and my subsequent research on economic education, 1 It might be that nothing much has changed if I have to continually refer to her work with Ziliak on statistical significance in numerous referee reports. My argument here is a marginal one and Deirdre and Stephen have certainly made an impact on the margin with their efforts. I am proof of that! At the same time, I (and undoubtedly they) wish there was more evidence of their work having more “oomph.” 2 Although in a different vein, very much in the same spirit as Tullock (1984[2016]). 3 A great example of her speaking out in favor of injustice is her commentary on Notre Dame ousting its heterodox faculty members and reconstituting a new economics department (McCloskey, 2003). 1 much of it conducted while beginning my career at Beloit College.4 I then move on to briefly discuss the core of my scholarship, the measurement of economic freedom and its consequences. I then conclude with some final thoughts about McCloskey as a model ‘model.’ 2 Economic Education Inside and Outside the Classroom From the very beginning of my academic career I have been interested in economic education. Perhaps that is because I know firsthand the difference between a good and a bad teacher. I earned a ‘C’ in principles of microeconomics and was so profoundly bored that I would frequently attend my American government class across the hall at 8:00 am and go home rather than sit through another boring lecture. Fortunately for me, I had to take principles of macroeconomics. What a change! From the very first lecture with Richard Vedder, the light bulb went off and economics was no longer difficult. He made economics come alive by talking both about current events but also his own work in economic history. Economics was no longer abstract diagrams, it was more stories about what happened in an attempt to better understand what was going on. Once I was taught about actual economics by Vedder, what was boring and unclear snapped into focus. My story would seem to resonate with what McCloskey has written about teaching economics. In her essay “The Natural,” McCloskey (1992: 239) argues that we cannot teach someone to think like an economist. “A nineteen-year old has intimations of immortality, comes directly from a socialized economy (called a family), and has no feel on the pulse for those 4 I would be remiss if I did not also mention the influence of Jeff Adams, Emily Chamlee-Wright, Bob Elder, Jerry Gustafson, and Warren Palmer. How fortunate was I to step into a department with over 100 years of excellent teaching. Combined with some great students, it was a marvelous place to work and learn. 2 tragedies of adult life that economists call scarcity and choice.” Instead, she argues, economists should not try to get students to “think like an economist” but rather just teach them economics facts and stories that they might be able to use in the future. At a minimum, teaching facts and stories might inspire them for future study. In one sense, I have tried to take much of this to heart. My principles lectures are primarily stories. Yes, I teach about supply and demand and equilibrium. But most of the action occurs in the movement to equilibrium. That’s where stories are important because they help students to articulate some of the numerous ways that an individual’s behavior might change in predictable ways to exogenous changes in markets. I try to get students to use what Emily Chamlee-Wright (2011) calls their “economic imagination.” The economic imagination is the ability to see and understand the different choices and outcomes that are likely to occur under different economic and political institutions. For many students this is difficult to do because, as McCloskey (1992) pointed out, they haven’t lived enough to see how reasonable people might respond to a situation. As I like to think about it, intuition can be a terrible guide to understanding individual choice if you have zero ability or experience that allows you to step into someone else’s shoes. For example, in teaching about child labor it has been my experience that many students cannot put themselves in the shoes of a young mother in a developing country who cannot afford to send her child to school and instead must send the child to work. For my young students being able to afford to have their kids go to school rather than work is not something they can fathom. Showing them that child labor doesn’t really vanish from an economy until average incomes reach $5,000 (Krueger, 1997) forces at least some of our young students to confront the existence of trade-offs. 3 When first learning economics, it is dangerous for students to ask “how would I respond in this situation” because they don’t have knowledge of all the relevant trade-offs, they are not actually facing the opportunity cost of a decision (Buchanan, 1979), and there is considerable heterogeneity in preferences across individuals that will influence how important a particular change is on the margin.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Foreword Jack Reardon
    Int. J. Pluralism and Economics Education, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2015 1 Foreword Jack Reardon Department of Management and Economics, School of Business, Hamline University, 1536 Hewitt Avenue, MS-A1740, St. Paul, MN 55104-1284, USA Email: [email protected] 1 A look back at the first five volumes of the IJPEE It is a pleasure to begin the sixth volume of the International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education. Looking back on our first five volumes, we published 141 articles in 19 issues, with authors from 31 nations, including: the USA, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Greece, Portugal, Latvia, Romania, Russia, China, India, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia. I am particularly proud that the IJPEE has given voice to authors in developing nations. In our first five volumes, we published four special issues: 1 implementing a new curriculum for economics after the crisis – a call for action 2 economics education in India 3 contending perspectives: 20 years out: what have our students learned? 4 Marx and Marxism: still relevant after the crisis. We also published special sections and/or symposia on the following topics: economics education in China; the Eurozone; sustainable development and economic growth; the environment; challenging economic icons; money, banking and the financial crisis; measurement and conception in economics; and institutional economics. The IJPEE has published articles by authors representing every school of thought in economics; and in addition, we have published authors from sociology, anthropology, psychology, physics, mathematics, management and finance.
    [Show full text]
  • The Statistical Legacy of William Sealy Gosset (“Student”)
    cdh Volume 25 Number 4 December 2008 Community Dental Health In this issue Effect of tooth loss on quality of life amongst the elderly in Sri Lanka Caries levels amongst teenagers in Milan, Italy Access to dental services for people with a physical disability in the UK The journal of the British Association for the Study of Community Dentistry and the European Association Published by of Dental Public Health FDI World Dental Press Ltd Community Dental Health Volume 25 Number 4 December 2008 Editorial 194 Original Communications Effect of tooth loss and denture status on oral health-related quality of life of older individuals from Sri Lanka C. Pallegedara and L. Ekanayake 196 The distribution of general dental practitioners with NHS contract numbers in relation to the distance of their practices from the seven dental undergraduate teaching hospitals in England outside London R. J. McCormick, R. Smith, D. Edwards, D. White and J. Langford 201 Evaluation of oral health-related quality of life questionnaires in a general child population L.G. Do and A. J. Spencer 205 Retention and effectiveness of fissure sealants in Kuwaiti school children R. Francis, A.K. Mascarenhas, P. Soparkar and S. Al-Mutawaa 211 Loss of sealant retention and subsequent caries development in a mobile dental clinic S. Tianviwat, V. Chongsuvivatwong and B. Sirisakulveroj 216 Oral health and treatment needs among 15-year-olds in Tehran, Iran R. Yazdani, M.M. Vehkalahti, M. Nouri and H. Murtomaa 221 The frequency of periodontal infrabony defects on panoramic radiographs of an adult population seeking dental care N.
    [Show full text]
  • Is There Life After Samuelson's Economics? Changing the Textbooks
    Is There Life after Samuelson’s Economics? Changing the Textbooks by Arjo Klamer, Deirdre McCloskey, and Stephen Ziliak forthcoming Post Autistic Economics Review May 2007 Obviously, yes. Samuelson's text, imitated now in literally hundreds of versions since 1948, is only the most recent model, each with roughly a sixty-year reign. Before Samuelson came Marshall’s Principles. And before that Mill’s Principles, and before that The Wealth of Nations. It's been sixty years since Samuelson. With most of our colleagues in the Post-Autistic Economics community, we believe it's time to change. Mainstream economics—or as we prefer here to call it, “Samuelsonian economics”—has reached sharply diminishing returns. Economics and its many hundreds of knock-offs are not suited to the needs of the current generation. Nowhere is the defensive scientific posture of Samuelsonian economics more evident than in today’s introductory textbooks. Economics is a plurality of conversations, but with a few honorable exceptions today’s textbooks don't deign to mention the fact. The actual economic conversation is heterogeneous. Yet the textbooks are startlingly homogeneous. The actual economic conversation is conducted by feminists and libertarians, empirical Marxists and postmodern Keynesians, historical institutionalists and mathematical Samuelsonians. But most of today’s textbooks teach Samuelsonianism pure and simple, period. They are dogmatic, one voiced, unethical. At bottom the monological textbooks are hostile to the student: "Enter our restricted version of economics, oh ye pathetic undergraduate, or be damned!" In The Economic Conversation we're trying a new approach.i We want to produce a book that reflects the actual conversation of economics, Samuelsonian to Post-Autistic.
    [Show full text]
  • Reply to Deirdre Mccloskey and Stephen Ziliak on Statistical Significance
    Discuss this article at Journaltalk: http://journaltalk.net/articles/5790 ECON JOURNAL WATCH 10(1) January 2013: 87-96 Reply to Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak on Statistical Significance Thomas Mayer1 LINK TO ABSTRACT Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak (2012) have graciously replied to my essay titled “Ziliak and McCloskey on Statistical Significance: An Assessment” (Mayer 2012). McCloskey and Ziliak’s (M-Z) criticisms can be grouped into fourteen points. I will discuss them in the sequence that M-Z do. Page references, unless otherwise indicated, are to M-Z’s reply, or to my paper. 1. M-Z say that although I got it right in 1980 I have now “reverted to an erroneous, pre-1980 understanding” (298). I am not aware of such a change. On re-reading my 1980 article (which devoted only one page to significance tests), I do not see the large difference between the “old Tom” and the “new Tom” that M- Z see, though I did make two points in 1980 that I omitted in 2012. One is that statistics courses warn students about the wrong-way-round use of significance tests; the other is that for some reason significance tests are not used in maximum likelihood methods to see whether the regression that gives the best fit is really better than another regression that attributes a very different value to the strategic coefficient. But, all in all, my 1980 paper is no closer than is my 2012 paper to Ziliak and McCloskey’s sweeping claims in The Cult of Statistical Significance (2008).
    [Show full text]
  • Carmen Elena Dorobăţ
    THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL ECONOMICS: REFLECTIONS ON ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL ISSUES Volume VIII Issue 2 Spring 2015 ISSN 1843-2298 Copyright note: No part of these works may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism. A brief history of international trade thought: from pre-doctrinal contributions to the 21st century heterodox international economics Carmen Elena Dorobăţ A brief history of international trade thought: from pre-doctrinal contributions to the 21st century heterodox international economics Carmen Elena Dorobăț Abstract: The present paper outlines the development of international trade thought, from the pre-doctrinal contributions of Greek philosophers and scholastic theologians, through the theories of the first schools of economic thought, and up to modern and contemporary trade theories. I follow filiations of ideas in a chronological order, and show how theoretical investigation into the causes and effects of international trade—and the rationale for government intervention—has evolved over the last two centuries. Keywords: international trade, history of economic thought Introduction For centuries, international trade in goods and services, and the development of the international division of labor have constituted a focus point of study for economists and philosophers alike. Research in this field usually revolves around three main lines of inquiry (Wu 2007): (a) what are the causes of international trade? (b) what are the effects of international trade?, and given these two aspects, (c) is government intervention in international trade necessary or beneficial? Broadly speaking, the first two questions belong to economic theory, while the latter is concerned with economic and trade policy.
    [Show full text]
  • Ziliak and Mccloskey's Criticisms of Significance Tests
    Discuss this article at Journaltalk: http://journaltalk.net/articles/5775 ECON JOURNAL WATCH 9(3) September 2012: 256-297 Ziliak and McCloskey’s Criticisms of Significance Tests: An Assessment Thomas Mayer1 LINK TO ABSTRACT If economists have natural constants, then the most well-known is 0.05. —Hugo Keuzenkamp and Jan Magnus (1995, 16) Significance tests are standard operating procedures in empirical economics and other behavioral sciences. They are also widely used in medical research, where the prevalence of small samples makes them particularly welcome. And—mainly in the form of error bars—they are also at home in the physical sciences (see Horowitz 2004). But they have many critics, particularly among psychologists, who have done much more work on the topic than have economists.2 Some members of the American Psychological Association even tried to ban their use in all journals published by the Association. That proposal was easily defeated, but some of the editors of those journals moved on their own to discourage significance tests, although with little effect; significance tests still reign in psychology. In medical research, however, the critics appear to have had considerable influence.3 1. University of California, Davis, Davis, CA 95616. I am indebted for excellent comments to Kevin Hoover and Deirdre McCloskey and to three outstanding referees for this journal. An earlier version was presented at the 2010 meeting of the Society of Government Economists. 2. For telling quotations from critics see Johnson (1999). 3. Fidler et al. (2004b, 626) explain the spread of the reform in part by a shift from testing to estimation that was facilitated by the medical literature, unlike psychology, using a common measurement scale, to “strictly enforced editorial policy, virtually simultaneous reforms in a number of leading journals, and the timely re-writing [of] textbooks to fit with policy recommendations.” But their description of the process suggests that an accidental factor, the coincidence of several strong-willed editors, also mattered.
    [Show full text]
  • Keukentafel Economics and the History of British Imperialism
    Forthcoming South African Economic History Review Keukentafel Economics and the History of British Imperialism Deirdre McCloskey Economics, History, English, and Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago Philosophy and Art and Cultural Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam I visited South Africa for the first time in September of 2006, thanks to Grietjie Verhoef and a great number of hosts around the country, for nearly two and a half weeks.1 In that time I watched some South African TV in English, and when English subtitles were provided I could follow the Afrikaans soap operas, too, noting the interesting contrasts with Dutch. I spoke at some length about the country with a couple of dozen South Africans. I read hurriedly most of Robert Ross’ Concise History of South Africa and some of Leonard Thompson’s A History of South Africa, as well as certain relevant parts of the Lonely Planet’s travel guide to South Africa. On Professor Verhoef’s recommendation I bought and read Robert Guest’s The Shackled Continent. And I have least bought Nelson Mandella’s autobiography, and some poetry in Afrikaans. You can add to this impressive scholarly activity a long acquaintance with certain Africanists, such as with Ralph Austen at the University of Chicago, who was a colleague of mine for twelve years, and with Phil Curtin at Johns Hopkins, whose former wife was an opera singer with my mother. I attended in 1974 a famous conference on the slave trade at Colby College in which the only black person in attendance, a Nigerian historian, was roundly attacked by Phil.
    [Show full text]
  • Sound and Fury: Mccloskey and Significance Testing in Economics
    Journal of Economic Methodology, Vol. 15, No. 1, March 2008, 1–37 Sound and fury: McCloskey and significance testing in economics Kevin D. Hoovera* and Mark V. Sieglerb aDepartments of Economics and Philosophy, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA; bDepartment of Economics, California State University, Sacramento, CA, USA For more than 20 years, Deidre McCloskey has campaigned to convince the economics profession that it is hopelessly confused about statistical significance. She argues that many practices associated with significance testing are bad science and that most economists routinely employ these bad practices: ‘Though to a child they look like science, with all that really hard math, no science is being done in these and 96 percent of the best empirical economics …’ (McCloskey 1999). McCloskey’s charges are analyzed and rejected. That statistical significance is not economic significance is a jejune and uncontroversial claim, and there is no convincing evidence that economists systematically mistake the two. Other elements of McCloskey’s analysis of statistical significance are shown to be ill- founded, and her criticisms of practices of economists are found to be based in inaccurate readings and tendentious interpretations of those economists’ work. Properly used, significance tests are a valuable tool for assessing signal strength, Downloaded By: [Duke University] At: 16:25 16 April 2008 for assisting in model specification, and for determining causal structure. Keywords: Deidre McCloskey; Stephen Ziliak; statistical significance; economic significance; significance tests; R.A. Fisher; Neyman-Pearson testing; specifica- tion search JEL codes: C10; C12; B41 1 The sin and the sinners For more than 20 years, since the publication of the first edition of The Rhetoric of Economics (1985a), Deirdre (ne´ Donald) N.
    [Show full text]
  • Stephen T. Ziliak
    Ziliak CV 2019 STEPHEN T. ZILIAK Professor of Economics Roosevelt University College of Arts and Sciences 430 S. Michigan Ave Chicago, IL 60605 USA https://blogs.roosevelt.edu/sziliak email: [email protected] office: (312) 341.3763 BIO Stephen Thomas Ziliak is Full Professor of Economics and Faculty Member of the Social Justice Studies Program at Roosevelt University where as a faculty member he was elected to and served on the Board of Trustees from 2010 to 2013. Concurrently he is Conjoint Professor of Business and Law, University of Newcastle, Australia; Faculty Affiliate in the Graduate Program of Economics, Colorado State University; and Faculty Member of the Angiogenesis Foundation, Cambridge. In 1996 at the University of Iowa he earned the Ph.D. in Economics and at the same time the first-ever awarded Ph.D. Certificate in the Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, also at the University of Iowa. Previous academic appointments include Emory University, Bowling Green State University, and Georgia Institute of Technology where at the latter he was voted “Faculty Member of the Year” (2001-2002, Student Government Association) and “Most Intellectual Professor” (2002-2003, Student Government Association). Ziliak joined Roosevelt in 2003 as Associate Professor of Economics in the School of Policy Studies. He has been a Visiting Professor of Economics, Statistics, Rhetoric, Justice, Law, Social Welfare, and Methodology at leading universities of the United States, Belgium, Denmark, England, France, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Turkey, and the Netherlands. His early work was on econometric methodology and archive-based quantitative economic history, where he established himself as a leading economic historian of welfare and charity in the United States.
    [Show full text]
  • Supreme Court of the United States ______
    No. 09-1156 IN THE Supreme Court of the United States __________ MATRIXX INITIATIVES, INC., ET AL., Petitioners, v. JAMES SIRACUSANO AND NECA-IBEW PENSION FUND, Respondents. __________ On Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit __________ BRIEF OF AMICI CURIAE STATISTICS EXPERTS PROFESSORS DEIRDRE N. McCLOSKEY AND STEPHEN T. ZILIAK IN SUPPORT OF RESPONDENTS __________ EDWARD LABATON Counsel of Record [email protected] IRA A. SCHOCHET CHRISTOPHER J. MCDONALD LABATON SUCHAROW LLP 140 Broadway New York, New York 10005 November 12, 2010 (212) 907-0700 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page TABLE OF AUTHORITIES ................................... iii INTEREST OF AMICI CURIAE ............................. 1 INTRODUCTION .................................................... 3 SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT ................................. 4 ARGUMENT ............................................................ 6 I. A CLARIFICATION OF HYPOTHESIS TESTING AND OF THE CONCEPT OF STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE IS WARRANTED IN THIS MATTER ................. 6 A. A Hypothesis Test Seeks to Deter- mine Whether Underlying Data Are Consistent with a Null Hypothesis ........... 6 B. Failing To Reject the Null Hypothe- sis Does Not Indicate that the Effect of Interest Is Meaningless or Unim- portant ........................................................ 7 C. There Are Two Types of Errors in Hypothesis Testing: Type I and Type II ........................................................ 9 D. The Balance of Type I and Type II Error Informs the Test One Per- forms and the Significance Level One Chooses ............................................. 10 II. STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE SHOULD BE WEIGHED AGAINST PRACTICAL IMPORTANCE ....................... 11 A. Practical Importance Exists when the Magnitude or Consequence of ii TABLE OF CONTENTS (continued) Page the Effect Being Studied Is Mea- ningfully Large ........................................ 12 B. The Potential Harm from Type II Error Is Large When Practical Im- portance Is High .....................................
    [Show full text]
  • Sound and Fury: Mccloskey and Significance Testing in Economics
    Sound and Fury: McCloskey and Significance Testing in Economics Kevin D. Hoover Department of Economics Duke University Box 90097 Durham, North Carolina 27708­0097 Tel. (919) 660­1876 E­mail [email protected] Mark V. Siegler Department of Economics California State University, Sacramento 6000 J. Street Sacramento, California 95819­6082 Tel. (916) 278-7079 E­mail [email protected] Revised, 6 March 2007 We thank Deirdre McCloskey for e­mail discussions and, with Stephen Ziliak, for providing us with the individual scores from their 1980s survey and for the individual scores broken down by question for the 1990s survey. We thank: Ryan Brady, for research assistance; and Paul Teller, A. Colin Cameron, Thomas Mayer, Clinton Greene, John Henry, Stephen Perez, Roger Backhouse, and four anonymous referees, for valuable comments on earlier drafts. We also appreciate the comments received when the paper was presented to the University of California, Davis Macroeconomics Workshop, the 2006 conference of the International Network for Economic Method, and a departmental seminar at the University of Kansas. Abstract of Sound and Fury: McCloskey and Significance Testing in Economics For more than twenty years, Deidre McCloskey has campaigned to convince the economics profession that it is hopelessly confused about statistical significance. She argues that many practices associated with significance testing are bad science and that most economists routinely employ these bad practices: “Though to a child they look like science, with all that really hard math, no science is being done in these and 96 percent of the best empirical economics. .” (McCloskey 1999). McCloskey’s charges are analyzed and rejected.
    [Show full text]
  • Stephen T. Ziliak Trustee and Professor of Economics Roosevelt University Department of Economics College of Arts and Sciences 430 S
    Revised: July 7, 2011 Stephen T. Ziliak Trustee and Professor of Economics Roosevelt University Department of Economics College of Arts and Sciences 430 S. Michigan Ave Chicago, IL 60605 http://sites.roosevelt.edu/sziliak http://stephentziliak.com email: [email protected] office: 312.341.3763 Short Biography Steve Ziliak is a Trustee and Professor of Economics at Roosevelt University, Chicago. His previous appointments include Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was voted “Faculty Member of the Year” (in 2002) and “Most Intellectual Professor” (in 2003). At the University of Iowa he earned (in 1996) the Ph.D. in Economics and, at the same time, the Ph.D. Certificate in the Rhetorics of the Human Sciences. His research has appeared in many leading journals including Lancet, Poetry, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Literature, Biological Theory, Journal of Economic History, and Journal of Economic Methodology. He has articles forthcoming in, among other journals, the Journal of Wine Economics, International Journal of Forecasting, and Significance—a journal of the Royal Statistical Society in partnership with the American Statistical Association. He is the lead author of The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (University of Michigan, 2008, with Deirdre N. McCloskey); with McCloskey and Arjo Klamer he is co-author of The Economic Conversation, an evolving textbook and blog, emphasizing dialogue and openness; and he edited and contributed to Measurement and Meaning in Economics: The Essential Deirdre McCloskey (Elgar, 2001). An Associate Editor of Historical Statistics of the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Ziliak’s work has been featured and discussed in Science, Nature, Poetry, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, BBC, NPR, Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Ed, Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Supreme Court of the United States.
    [Show full text]