Follow the visible hand, and click!
Drunk on RCTs? Try
Guinnessometrics.
Read Ziliak's take on
Levitt and List (2009) and the
randomization school.
Published in the inaugural issue
of the
Review of Behavioral Economics
(vol 1, no 1, 2014).
Click on the title:
Balanced versus Randomized Field Experiments in
Economics: Why W.S.Gosset aka "Student" Matters
Stephen T. Ziliak gave a keynote address at the prestigious
Gordon Research Conference
on Computer Aided Drug Design, Mount Snow Resort, Vermont, July 21st,
2013. Ziliak talked about “The
Cult of Statistical Significance and
the Future of Biometrics after
Gosset,
Fisher, and
Matrixx v. Siracusano".

Read more at
Anthony Nicholls'
A Different Conference
and
OpenEye
The Cult of Statistical Significance
is featured in a New York Times article by Casey Mulligan, “The
Perils of Significant Misunderstandings in Evaluating Medicaid”
(June 26, 2013).

Comment
by David McKenzie at
The World Bank
(June 27, 2013)and
Dean Baker at CEPR
Article by Steve Ziliak, "Unsignificant
Statistics," launches Junk Science
Week at
The Financial Post
(June 11, 2013).
Ziliak's
"Unsignificant Statistics" is featured
by the American Statistical Association, "Statisticians
in the News"

Comments on Ziliak's "Unsignificant
Statistics" by statistician
William M. Briggs aka The Statistician
to the Stars (June 13, 2013) and by
physicist
Lubos Motl in The
Reference Frame (June 17th, 2013).
And:
Normal Deviate (Larry
Wasserman, June 14th, 2013);
Economist's View
(link, June 13th 2013)
Mathblogging
(June 14th).
Ask me Anything on
reddit, Thursday March 28, 2013 at
6:00 PM ET. Proof of my identity is
here.

Ziliak and McCloskey publish rejoinder to Thomas Mayer, "We
Agree that Statistical Significance Proves Essentially Nothing,"
Econ Journal Watch, January 2013.
Join the conversation at
Olle
Häggström's hävdar
and Deborah Mayo's Error Statistics blog.

Ziliak on reddit's
Ask
Me Anything/Ask Social Science, Feb. 28, 2013, 6 PM Eastern.
Does Statistical Significance Stink?
The U.S. Supreme Court decided yes, it
does, 9-0, in Matrixx vs. Siracuano - the "Zicam" case (March 22,
2011).
Ziliak and McCloskey - authors of
The Cult of Statistical
Significance - were invited to file with the Court a brief of amici curiae, which you can find
here
and
here.
Read more at
Economist's View (Mark Thoma),
BBC Radio 4
"More or Less" (Tim Harford), and
The Wall
Street Journal (Carl Bialik).

Ziliak-McCloskey research on statistical
significance, the Supreme Court, and "the standard error of science," is featured
in
Big Think
(Dec. 11, 2012).
...and in
Slate,"Why do people love to say that
correlation does not imply causation?" by Daniel Engber (Oct. 2, 2012).
Article by Stephen T. Ziliak forthcoming in
Significance
magazine (Royal Statistical Society): "Visualizing Uncertainty: Is a
Picture Worth a Thousand Regressions?"

Article by Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N.
McCloskey published in September 2012 issue of
Econ Journal Watch:
"Statistical Significance in the New Tom and the Old Tom: A Reply to Thomas
Mayer"
Here is the original article by Thomas Mayer: "Ziliak
and McCloskey's Criticisms of Significance Tests: An Assessment"
Ziliak on Higgs boson and statistical
significance, in
The Wall Street Journal: "The
Particle Proof," by Carl Bialik, July 6, 2012.

Ziliak article on behavioral econometrics, published in the July
2012 issue of the
International Journal of Forecasting.
When forecasting economic variables are
scatter plots better than standard regression output, such as R-squared and
t-stats?
See "Visualizing Economic Uncertainty: On the Soyer-Hogarth Experiment,"
posted at
Economist's View (July 11, 2012).
And read
articles in the same issue by
J. Scott Armstrong,
Daniel G. Goldstein,
Robin
Hogarth,
Keith Ord,
Emre Soyer,
Nassim N. Taleb
and
Stephen T. Ziliak
Fermenting Knowledge

Lavoisier Gosset
What
scientific discovery was made by an economist doing a study of fermentation?
a. Oxygen,
b. Carbon
Dioxide, c. Chemistry's Balanced Equation and the Principle of
Conservation of Mass, d. Small Sample Theory and Analysis, e.
The Advantage of Balanced over Random Designs of Experiments, or f.
All of the Above?
Yes,
amazingly, "f. All of the Above," is correct.

Read more in Stephen T. Ziliak's "W.S. Gosset and Some Neglected Concepts in Experimental
Statistics: Guinnessometrics II,"
Journal of Wine Economics
6, 255-277.
And:
Sarah Kliff in Ezra Klein's Wonkblog, "Guinnesses's Big Contribution to
Economics Research,The Washington Post;
"Recommended
economics writing," at
The Economist;
"The
Statistical Significance of Beer,"
Freakonomics
"Guinnessometrics:
Saving Science and Statistics with Beer,"Chicago
Magazine
"Beer
and Stats,"
The University of Michigan Press
"Beer,
Statistics, and Quality,"
Minitab
"Beerometrics:
Econometrics and the Science of Beer,"Beeronomics
"We Know Now,"
The Irish Times
"In the News,"
American Association of Wine Economists

Steve Ziliak and the Roosevelt University Department of Economics
are featured in the March 7th, 2012 issue of Remapping Debate,
"Reform
Agenda: Classes That Make You Think,"
by Mike Alberti.
And by the same author, in the March 8th issue of Remapping Debate:
"Don't Know Much About History, Don't Know Much
Economy"
Invisible hand;
Mother of inflated hope,
Mistress of despair!
- S.T. Ziliak, "Haiku
Economics," Poetry
CXCVII, No. 4
[Jan. 2011], p. 314
"Haiku
Economics", by Stephen T. Ziliak, was cited by
Poetry as one of the ten "most-read
articles" of 2011.

Ziliak's article, on the relation between haiku and economics, appears
in the January 2011 "The View From Here" column. And according
to the Associate Editor of Poetry, "Haiku Economics" is probably
the most-read article in that column's history.
Previous contributors to "The View From Here" column include Richard
Rorty, Christopher Hitchens, Lynda Barry, Neko Case, and John Wooden --
the poet and legendary UCLA basketball coach.
Read more at
Poetry,
The Economist,
Freakonomics/New York Times,
Haiku Foundation,
The Atlantic,
Anticap, the
Wall Street Journal,
Chronicle of Higher Ed,
Haiku Society of America,
James Geary, and
Better Living through Beowulf
Listen in at "Haiku
and You" at Boston NPR's On Point program (with Tom
Ashbrook)
See "On Haiku and 'The Invisible Hand,' by Ariel Ramchandani (The
Economist, Jan. '11)
Review of Ziliak's and McCloskey's best-selling book at The University of Michigan
Press---The
Cult of Statistical Significance---
by Terry Weight, in the November 2011 issue of
Significance
magazine
(Royal Statistical Society and American Statistical Association).

Read more at
Gosset Laboratory
and
here.
[November
2nd, 2011, Cambridge, MA]
Seventy
Harvard [students]walked out of
Professor Greg Mankiw's Introductory Economics class in "protest",
the students said, of "the bias inherent" in his course.

We
at
[Roosevelt
University]and [INET]
- the Institute for New Economic Thinking - are not surprised
by student discontent, and wish to help.
Here, for example, is a
syllabus for
The
Grapes of Wrath course I've taught since 1996,
offering a pluralistic alternative to Mankiw.
A
good protest needs a good protest novel. Steinbeck's couldn't be more
relevant to the current milieu [video].
Read more at [AntiCap],
"We are not Mankiw," by David Ruccio;
[Better
Living Through Beowulf], "Steinbeck makes Microeconomics
Real," by Robin Bates; and
[Economist's
View], "A Bluesy Road-Novel with a Lot of Economic Theory and
Analysis," by Mark Thoma.
#Occupy
yourself, with
Limericks
What is
rhetoric
and why do people dread it?

Read Ziliak's
essay on "Rhetoric"
in the Second Edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
(Gale), William A. Darity, Jr. Ed.
See also: The Economist, Johnson blog, "Did
the Internet Kill Rhetoric?"
The Cult of Statistical Significance:
Health
Science after Matrixx v Siracusano,
lecture and discussion, University of Wisconsin-Madison, School of
Medicine and Public Health & Robert Wood Johnson Scholars, Oct. 10,
2011. [video]

And see: Stephen T. Ziliak, "Matrixx v. Siracusano and Student v.
Fisher: Statistical Significance on Trial,"in
Significance
8 (3, 2011), pp. 131-134,
Royal Statistical Society and American
Statistical Association (September issue).
[Did the Crisis Affect My Teaching?]

"Not much," I explain in a recent
video
interview. I've always taught from
conflict and crisis, starting in 1996 when I first assigned John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath and
Studs Terkel's
Hard Times to students of
economics.
Tom Joad is not a simple utility
maximizer, true; but he has a moral conscience and love, even better.
Learn
more in this short video on
The
Teaching of Economics,
produced by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)History
of Economics Playground &
The Kids, Mount
Washington Hotel, Bretton Woods, NH, April 8-11, 2011.
[Should Economists
Sign a Code of Ethics?]

Ziliak says "yes" but not every economist
agrees. Watch this short
video
on
Ethics in Economics,
produced by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)History
of Economics Playground &
The Kids, Mount
Washington Hotel, Bretton Woods, NH, April 8-11, 2011
The
History of Economics Society
is pleased to invite nominations for "Best Article in the History of
Economics", 2011-2012.
Send nominations to the Chair, Prof. Stephen T. Ziliak (sziliak@roosevelt.edu).
Details are
here.

Lavoisier
Economic Science
Trivia Question:
What
scientific discovery was made by an economist during a routine
analysis of fermentation?
a. Oxygen, b. Carbon
Dioxide, c. Chemistry's Balanced Equation and the Principle of
Conservation of Mass, d. Small Sample Theory and Analysis (Statistics),
e. All of the Above.
Yes,
amazingly, "e. All of the Above," is correct! The discoveries were made
by Priestley (beer), Priestley (beer), Lavoisier (wine), and Gosset aka
"Student" (beer), an Oxford-trained chemist who pioneered econometric
theory and analysis in his job as experimental brewer of Guinness, St. James's Gate, Dublin.
Source: "W.S. Gosset and Some Neglected Concepts in Experimental
Statistics: Guinnessometrics II," by Stephen T. Ziliak,
Journal of Wine Economics
(Fall 2011) mini-symposium on
Beeronomics.

The second conference on
Beeronomics: the Economics of Beer and Brewing
is being held this September 21-24, 2011, in Freising,
Germany. "Hop" on over! I can "barley" wait.

Statisticians
discuss the future of statistical significance testing in light of
the March 22nd, 2011 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Matrixx v. Siracusano,
in a late-breaking session of the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) 2011
Supreme
Court Finds Statistical Significance Is Not Necessary for Causation
Authors:
Stephen T. Ziliak* (Roosevelt), Joseph "Jay" Kadane (Carnegie Mellon),
Donald Rubin (Harvard) and Daniel T. Kaplan (Macalester College)
*
Downloadable
pdf of Ziliak's JSM 2011, Miami Beach
talk:
"Matrixx v. Siracusano and Student v.
Fisher: Statistical Significance on Trial"
* Read more, at Milo Schield's
StatLit.org
"Matrixx v. Siracusano and Student v.
Fisher: Statistical Significance on Trial" appears in
Significance
8 (3, 2011), pp. 131-134,
Royal Statistical Society and American
Statistical Association (September issue).
Here is the
Brief of
Amici Curiae by McCloskey and Ziliak (2010), on the crucial
difference between statistical significance and practical importance,
filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Respondents.
For the full
story, see Ziliak and McCloskey,
The
Cult of Statistical Significance:

What's wrong with randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in
economics, medicine, and other fields of science?
What is "valid" in
experimental design and evaluation, and how did randomization plus
significance become the gold standard?
Read Stephen T. Ziliak's,
"Field
Experiments in Economics: Comment on an Article by Levitt
and List"
(CREATES Research Paper No. 2011-25)
And, "The Validus Medicus and a
new gold standard,"
Lancet (vol. 376, July 31, 2010)

Visit
Mark Thoma's Economist's View,
and read:
"Randomized
Field Experiments were Tried and
Rejected More Than a Century Ago"*
*=
"Recommended
Economics Writing", by The Economist, July 20th
2011
*=
"Statisticians
in the News,"American Statistical Association, July 2011
Here is Ziliak's reply
to Stephen Senn,
"Significant errors-Author's Reply",
Lancet (vol.376, Oct 23, 2010)
For a Bayesian view and further discussion, read Ziliak's & McCloskey's
article published in
Biological Theory
Enjoy this p-value video posted by
Tim Harford, the
one and only "Undercover Economist":

Listen to BBC Radio 4,
More or Less, this Friday, April 15 and
Sunday, April 17. Tim and I talk about the "significance" of the Supreme
Court decision, Matrixx v. Siracusano, rejecting "statistical
significance".
Read a companion article, "Statistically
Significant: The U.S. Supreme Court Takes a View," by Open
University's
Kevin McConway
And read a blog post by
Shaun Manning at
the University of Michigan Press
Ziliak's and McCloskey's research
on statistical significance is featured
in the Wall Street Journal, by Carl Bialik (aka "The Numbers
Guy").
*Read
Mr. Bialik's blog
*And
the print edition

As Mr. Bialik explains, on March 22, 2011, the Supreme
Court of the United States
unanimously rejected the claim by
Petitioners, Matrixx,Inc., that a bright-line standard of "statistical
significance" - a fixed and pre-determined level of Type I error -
is necessary for proving a fact. The Court's strong ruling against
"significance" is particularly relevant to big pharmaceutical and other
biomedical firms which have to report to the
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC) on "adverse effects" from product consumption.
On November 12, 2010, McCloskey and Ziliak filed an
amicus brief with the Supreme
Court, explaining to the Court the difference between "statistical"
significance and "practical" importance. In oral argument on
January 10, 2011,
Justice Sotomayor thanked "amici" for
doing a "wonderful job".
In other words, the Supreme Court agrees unanimously with a view well- established by McCloskey and Ziliak, that statistical significance is neither necessary
nor sufficient for proving a commercial or scientific result.
Read more at Mark Thoma's blog:
Economist's View
Andrew Gelman's blog &
The University
of Michigan Press
Watch videos from the April 2011 Bretton Woods
conference here, at the
Institute
for New Economic Thinking (INET):

Ziliak appointed to the
Economics Curriculum Committee Task Force, at
the
Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Q: Did
Keynes and Morgenthau appear 67 years later, for the Bretton
Woods conference?
A: Ask the incredibly visible hand.
 
Bretton Woods haiku
Chicago memory;
Crashing sounds are fading
The snow capped mountain.
Share value 'It'-list:
It is not a strategy,
It is a result.
Late-night Bretton
Woods;
Sleepless, Morgenthau dreams of
Maynard's pirouettes.
On a slick white slope
Epistemological
Inequality.
O Lady Justice
What did you hear when Adair
Whispered to the sky?
Our famished nations
do not understand the rules
IMF, confess!
Read Stephen T. Ziliak's "Haiku Economics", in the
January 2011 issue of
Poetry:

Read
more at
Poetry,
The Economist,
Freakonomics/New York Times,
Haiku Foundation,
The Atlantic,
Anticap, the
Wall Street Journal,
Chronicle of Higher Ed,
Haiku Society of America,
James Geary, and
Better Living through Beowulf
Listen in at "Haiku
and You" at Boston NPR's On Point program (with Tom
Ashbrook)
Enjoy "On Haiku and 'The Invisible Hand,' by Ariel Ramchandani (The
Economist, Jan. '11)
Ziliak and McCloskey file
amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme
Court, explaining the difference between "statistical" significance and
"practical" importance:

The argument is scheduled
for January 10, 2011.
Read more at Mark Thoma's blog,
Economist's View
Consider submitting a paper to the second
Beeronomics conference ("The
Economics of Beer and Brewing"),
Freising, Germany, September 21-24,
2011.
Breaking news on Peace, Love & Happiness:
Raymond Smullyan
repairs big holes in
Chicago streets and logic-bringing order, music & smiles to
all! October 21-23, 2010
Learn more
right
here.
Ziliak's and McCloskey's The Cult of Statistical Significance
is featured in
Notices
of the American
Mathematical Society - reviewed by
Olle Häggström

What's
wrong with randomized controlled trials? How did RCTs become the
standard for statistically-based experimental science?
Read: "The Validus Medicus and a
new gold standard,"
Lancet (vol. 376, July 31, 2010)

Read Ziliak's
reply
to Stephen Senn,
"Significant errors-Author's Reply",
Lancet (vol.376, Oct 23, 2010)
Ziliak's
& McCloskey's book, The Cult of Statistical Significance,
featured in Science News (vol. 177, no. 7,
2010):
"Odds
are, it's wrong," by Tom Siegfried

<Read more at:
Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences,
National Institutes of Health,
Statistical Modeling (Andrew Gelman),
Psychology Today,
Marginal Revolution,
Wall Street
Blips,
William Briggs,
Geary Behavioural Economics Blog
&
Scholarly Kitchen>
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
(The MIT Press & Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research)
+
This way to the t-table
+
[Read
more at
Forecasting Principles]
Ziliak's
& McCloskey's book, The Cult of Statistical Significance,
featured in an article on the statistics of global warming, in
The
Vancouver Sun
(Feb. 22, 2010), by Peter McKnight

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
Monthly Labor Review,
by
Bruce Bergman, BLS
in
SIAM News,
by James Case
in
Notices
of the American
Mathematical Society,
by
Olle Häggström
in
Times Higher Ed, Steve
Fuller
in
Law & Social Inquiry,
Richard Lempert
in
London Book Review
in
Statistical Papers,
Walter
Krämer
in
EH-Net (Economic History),
Philip Coelho
in
Administrative Science Quarterly,
Xueguang Zhou
in
European Journal of Epidemiology,
Olli Miettinen
in
Canadian Journal of Sociology,
Victor Thiessen
in
Skeptical Inquirer,
Peter Lamal
in
Journal of Economic Issues,
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 Tom
Leinster,
at
The n-Category Cafe
by
Charles Annis,
at
Statistical Engineering
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
by
Jane Davidson, at
Genuine Evaluation
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
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. |