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medpundit |
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Wednesday, January 28, 2004I like your site, and am a regular reader, but you demean yourself when you make derogatory comments about fields of research you know nothing about. Your pompous suggestion that the entire field of econometrics (which has been around for nearly a century) amounts to "making stuff up" is absurd. If you have a problem with the specification of the model or the data used by Eric Finkelstein and his colleagues, then you should explain what exactly your objection is. If you have no credible objections, then the decent thing to do is apologize to Finkelstein et al. for baselessly denigrating their work. I think I said they "took a wild guess", not that they "made things up." There's a difference. But, when a conclusion is based on a model rather than reality, then it's just a theory, not a fact. Especially when that model is defined this way: An econometric model is an economic model formulated so that its parameters can be estimated if one makes the assumption that the model is correct. It would have been much more accurate for the media had reported the finding as "Economists conjecture that obesity costs taxpayers billions of dollars," rather than stating it as an objective fact. posted by Sydney on 1/28/2004 05:34:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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