Recent articles by Ziliak

            About "significance":

Guinnessometrics: The Economic Foundation of Student's t   

The Great Skew: R. A. Fisher and the Copyright History of Student's t  

McCloskey and Ziliak reply to critics Hoover and Siegler

Ziliak and McCloskey reply to critics Elliott, Granger, Horowitz, Leamer, Thorbecke, Wooldridge, Zellner, and others

Ziliak and McCloskey reply to Schelling

         Recent articles by Ziliak on the collapse of the welfare state, on the collapse of the fact/value split, and on teaching pluralism in economics:

Ziliak (with Klamer and McCloskey) launches unusual economics textbook

[Hot] article on history of self-reliance: has abolishing welfare worked in the past? Ziliak's findings challenge economists and historians left, right, and center

On the positive/normative distinction: what's new about the old collapse of it? "Nothing," as Ziliak explains in the new International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by William Darity, Jr.  

Ziliak (with Joan Hannon) on 400 years of public welfare in America: perspective by incongruity!

       Ziliak, working in collaboration with the economic historians Joan Hannon and Price Fishback, published there a "time-line" of significant events and legislation in U.S. social welfare history, from 1588 to 1997. The unusual table will be of interest to any worker in the areas of social welfare history and philanthropy.

               U.S. Welfare History Time-line

       New Course, Roosevelt University,                     Spring 2008:

ECON 426 THEORIES OF JUSTICE IN ECONOMICS  (Ziliak)  CHANGE: IT'S AN M.A.-LEVEL COURSE

                       Syllabus

The course will ask and examine some fundamental questions about economic justice in a dialogical and inter-disciplinary context. Students will read selections from classic texts (Aristotle to Sen) and original journal articles by contemporary theorists. Ideas about economic "self reliance" - what it is and how to achieve it -- will be central to our inquiry.

Prerequisites: ECON 323   

New Book, March 2008:

 The Cult of Statistical Significance is the place to begin your post-Fisherian, post-Kuhnian statistical education. 

           See Contents / Order Now 

     Expert scientists believe they're testing hypotheses with their conventional tests of statistical significance. They’re not. 

     They think the “existence” of one kind of precision under conditions of random error--namely, statistical significance--can answer the scientific, quantitative question of estimation, which is a question of “size-matters/how much.” It can’t. 

     They think the null procedure routine since Fisher can answer the pragmatic question about the distribution of reasonable degrees of belief over a range of possibly believable if radically different hypotheses. It can’t, won’t, and never will. Today’s scientist neither tests nor estimates—he “testimates.” 

     "Student" (aka William Sealy Gosset, 1876-1937) worried about careless uses of his test.  He had reason to.  

      After Fisher, testimation is the outcome.  Testimation is the unhappy marriage of the fallacy of the transposed conditional to the sizeless stare of statistical significance. It is ruining the quantitative solidity of the sciences descended from Galton and Pearson and especially from Ronald A. Fisher. And its reckless policy recommendations are costing us jobs, justice, ecology, and even human lives.

     In 1908 "Student" changed some sciences with his small sample test of significance.  Now those sciences are stagnating or declining through their reckless and illogical deployments of "Student's" test, just as "Student" himself always warned they could.

     Click here to learn about the neglected "Student" and the strange evolution of his test after Fisher picked it up and made it central to the sciences.

       Stephen T. Ziliak is an economist whose work spans the fields of history, philosophy, rhetoric, statistics, and social policy.

       He experiments with a kind of economic poetry or criticism, too, in what he calls haiku economics - "as if economics is so efficient". He was a friend and student of the late Etheridge Knight, a great American poet & haiku master:

The dirty canal

slips a curvy finger up

skyscraper canyon.

Invisible hand:

Mother of inflated hope,

Mistress of despair.

Click here to order Haiku Economics, No. 1 (Rethinking Marxism, vol. 14(3), 2002)

Etheridge Knight (1931-1991)

"America's greatest poet in the oral tradition." 

       - Robert Bly to Steve Ziliak, Jan. 1991

       Ziliak earned graduate degrees from the University of Iowa in both Economics(Ph.D., 1996) and the Rhetoric of the Social Sciences (Ph.D. Certificate, 1996). A frequent collaborator with Deirdre McCloskey, Ziliak is the author or editor of three books (with McCloskey) and over sixty scholarly articles.

                           CV

        An expert at historical archival research, Ziliak is best known for his work on American social welfare and on the history, theory, and practice of hypothesis testing in the life and human sciences.

        His major study of the use and misuse of statistical significance in economics, medicine, and other sciences, The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice and Lives (with Deirdre McCloskey, University of Michigan Press) was published in March 2008.

       Ziliak has taught at a number of institutions around the United States, including Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology where, in 2002, he was awarded "Faculty Member of the Year" and, in the following year, "Most Intellectual Professor." He is currently Professor of Economics at Roosevelt University.

 [If you are enrolled in a course taught by Prof. Z, please refer to the Blackboard site.]

       A prize-winning teacher, Ziliak is the author of an unusual micro and macro textbook, The Economic Conversation(Palgrave/MacMillan), which aims to change the way economics is taught. Co-authored with Arjo Klamer and Deirdre McCloskey, nearly a third of The Economic Conversation is written in Socratic dialogue.        

       Ziliak's main project now is on the scientific character of William Sealy Gosset (1876-1937) aka "Student" of "Student's" t. Most scientists have learned about "Student's" t from Fisher or a Fisher disciple. This has been bad for "Student"--and science.

      Fisher misled some sciences in the 20th century. From the very beginning, in 1904, "Student" took an economic approach to the logic of uncertainty. Karl Pearson, and then especially Ronald Fisher, wouldn't listen to "Student." In the 1920s and 1930s Gosset, this "Student," improved upon his own economic approach, inventing the statistical ideas of power and loss, which he gave to Egon S. Pearson and Jerzy Neyman to formalize. Gosset was in these and other regards a great scientist. His economic approach to for example the test of statistical significance and the statistical design of experiments can repair the damage done in science and policy by today's Fisherian methods.