Jeffrey said that econometrics allows him to argue that poverty and income inequality instead of race and "southern culture" cause homicides.
My question would be how convincing are these results. A competent, racist econometrician could easily rework the data and "disapprove" your results. I used the word, brittle, to suggest that econometric results are not particularly convincing.
Can anyone name a major controversy that econometrics has settled? Jim Devine noted that we don't ever have proofs. My own feeling is that econometrics has diverted us from areas of research that would teach us more.
Why are economists were willing to grant that sophisticated mathematical models tend to be over done, while the same people are more accepting of econometric results?
I would say that if we are truly interested in empirical information, we should pay far more attention to the quality of the data that we use and less to sophisticated manipulation of that terribly imperfect data.
"J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." wrote:
> Michael,
> Scatter diagrams can be useful, but as they
> indicate only strictly bivariate correlations, they
> can also be very misleading for a lot of reasons.
> Barkley Rosser
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Perelman <michael at ecst.csuchico.edu>
> To: pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu <pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu>
> Cc: jdinardo at aris.ss.uci.edu <jdinardo at aris.ss.uci.edu>;
> lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
> Date: Monday, May 10, 1999 12:03 PM
> Subject: on econometrics
>
> >Can an econometric exercise ever produce anything more than a hint of an
> >interesting idea? I suspect that a skillful econometrician can find a
> >relationship
> >between any two arbitrary data sets.
> >
> >As econometric techniques become more sophisticated, become more
> >brittle.
> >
> >How is a sophisticated econometric model more convincing than a simple
> >scatter diagram?
> >
> >--
> >
> >Michael Perelman
> >Economics Department
> >California State University
> >michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
> >Chico, CA 95929
> >530-898-5321
> >fax 530-898-5901
> >
> >
> >
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu