How much would you gamble to get a new pill, pesticide or field experimental result? Consider the typical losses in the Winter 2009 issue of Biological Theory 4 (Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research)

          + This way to the t-table + 

    Guinness: 250 years of clever counting

Click on Lavoisier to discover the "significance" of Guinness to science

Read more at:  Economist's View, Economist.com,   Salon.com, Schumpeter's Century  

    [Noted as a "Highlight" of the 2009 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM 2009)]

"The Cult of Statistical Significance"

                 from Amstat.org,                    [Statisticians of Interest]:

       "Steve Ziliak's session at JSM is titled the same as his book [with Deirdre N. McCloskey]: The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives. The book, published in 2008, has been reviewed by Science, Nature Medicine, BBC Radio, Financial Times, the Economist, Cato Journal, and many others. Ziliak will be available for interviews between August 1, Saturday morning, and August 3, Monday afternoon."
 

      Reviews of Ziliak's and McCloskey's  

 The Cult of Statistical Significance

         (University of Michigan Press, 2008)

    in Science, by Theodore M. Porter  

    in Nature Medicine, by Jessica Ancker   

    in Journal of Economic Literature,               by Saul Hymans

    in SIAM News, by James Case        

    in Times Higher Ed, by Steve Fuller              

    in Law & Social Inquiry, by Richard Lempert

    in London Book Review

    in EH-Net (Economic History), by Philip Coelho  

   in Administrative Science Quarterly,           by Xueguang Zhou

   in European Journal of Epidemiology,          by Olli Miettinen

   in Canadian Journal of Sociology,                by Victor Thiessen

    in Skeptical Inquirer, by Peter Lamal

    in Journal of Economic Issues, by Ron Smith

   in Journal of Economic Methodology,           by Tom Engsted

    in Cato Journal, by Peter Van Doren

    in Economic Affairs, by Art Carden

  in Erasmus Journal for Economics &            Philosophy, by Aris Spanos

   in Hungarian Economic Review                    (Közgazdasági Szemle), by Tamás Dusek

"Guinnessometrics" and The Cult  discussed on BBC Radio's "More or Less," with Tim Harford. Listen to a podcast of the Jan. 23rd, 2009 episode.

Image copyright: BBC Radio 4 

     The Cult of Statistical Significance lands on the top shelf at StatLit

     . . . and at the Eastern Book Company, "Outstanding Academic Title of 2008, Social and Behavioral Sciences"

     What do Guinness and "Student's" t-test have in common? Read about W. S. Gosset (aka "Student"), R. A. Fisher, and The Cult of Statistical Significance in Tim Harford's "The Undercover Economist," Financial Times, Feb. 7., '09.

           "Lovely day for a Regression!"

           "Gosset for Strength!"

                 Image copyright: Financial Times

     Listen to Deirdre McCloskey's podcast lecture on The Cult at the National Economists Club (NEC), Washington, DC, Dec. 4, 2008.

Blog reviews and interviews:

by Andrew Gelman,

at Statistical Modeling

by Mark Thoma,

at Economist's View

by Leland Teschler,

at Machine Design

by John D. Cook,

at The Endeavor

by Arnold Kling,

at EconLib  

by Cliff Norman

at Profound Knowledge (Deming) 

  by Jacob Grier, at Liquidity Preference

and: World Association of Medical Editors

       Voice of the Employee       

Converge

Jules and James (Climate Change)

Chance

          Trinidad & Tobago Review               ("Throwing a Book at Crime," by Kevin Baldeosingh)      

     LSE's Cognition & Culture Blog         (Olivier Morin)

John Myles White

University of Michigan Press

The Bayesian Heresy

William M. Briggs

The Bayesian Investor

Christopher Hayes

 Homo Phileconomicus

Coert Visser

David Pannell

Common Tragedies (Environment)

History of Economics Playground

ALISE (Library and Information Science)

[The Haiku Connection]

      "Economists embrace haiku," by Erica Alini, The Wall Street Journal, Real Time Economics blog, July 2, 2009

[Read more at Mark Thoma's blog,  Economist's View]

       [Read "Drinking the Haiku Economics     Kool Aid," at Open Economics]               

     [Read Fred Lee's Heterodox Economics Newsletter]

 [Read Laura Janota's article in        Roosevelt Review]

[Read Tina Owen's article in Iowa Insider]

     See Ziliak's "Haiku Economics," in The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 31, '08, page one): "Fannie, Freddie, Bear & Hard Times: Wall Street's Collapse, Told in Rhymes," by Mary Pilon.

     Post a poem at Mary's blog,   "The Wallet"

  . . . and at Steve Levitt's and Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics-New York Times blog.

        Enjoy a little haiku Q & A in "Verses of Economy," by Steve Kolowich, The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 22, 2009, A6), 

        Step up to NPR's "Recession Haiku Challenge," at Planet Money 

        Keep the flow going with West Wing Writers of haiku, at Podium Pundits

        . . .and read Haiku Economics: Little Teaching Aids for Big Economic Pluralists, forthcoming in International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education

                                                                   Wall Street Journal; New York Times and itchys               

      "Limeraiku" is the marriage - or elopement - of haiku and limerick. See page 291, The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse (1978), edited by Kingsley Amis. What is financial or economic limeraiku? As Shaw and Amis remind us, limerick poems (unlike haiku) are strictly made by breaking taboo.

There was an old man

from Lehman, who yanks Big Hank's . . .

Jewels? No way, man.

Recessional plea

from Treasury: "Fax the tax,

int'rest, usury!"

There's a crude old cow

from Camdentown, who spits chips:

"Curry! Mayo! Now!"

Recent articles by Ziliak about Gosset, Fisher, & the history of "statistical significance":

Guinnessometrics: The Economic Foundation of Student's t, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2008   

Size Matters: The Standard Error of Regressions in the American Economic Review, Journal of Socio-Economics  

On R. A. Fisher and the Copyright History of Student's t  (Note: an early version of this article was titled "The Great Skew")

The Fallacy of the Transposed Conditional in Medical and Biological Research 

McCloskey and Ziliak reply to critics Hoover and Siegler, in Journal of Economic Methodology.

Ziliak and McCloskey reply to critics Elliott, Granger, Horowitz, Leamer, Thorbecke, Wooldridge, Zellner, and others, in Journal of Socio-economics

Ziliak and McCloskey reply to Schelling, in Econ Journal Watch

McCloskey and Ziliak reply to Spanos, in Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics

         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

What is the history of self-reliance? Has abolishing welfare helped out in the past?

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 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 

      What does the suppression of black unemployment rates have to do with statistical significance?

      Read a blog interview to find out

     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 learned haiku from a friend, the late Etheridge Knight, a great American poet & haiku master:

Invisible hand:

Mother of inflated hope,

Mistress of despair.

Cooling temperatures

Teens, chilly away from Lake

Ghetto kids rejoice!

From first principles

you find an end-state result:

The state should stop now.

Corrugated steel

Fence-links cap off prison wall/

Blackbird pecks at chains.

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, Denoument Gallery, Indianapolis, 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.                  

       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.