At 10:24 PM 5/5/2005 -0500, Dan M. wrote: >> Unless you and Dan have some brilliant economic theory as to why >> Republicans tend to cause recessions and Democrats tend to produce >> uninterrupted economic growth regardless of the business cycle, your >> analysis is deeply flawed. > >This is one area where we differ. I believe that data come first, theory >comes second.
In Economics, the prevalence of spurious correlations makes that a dangerous paradigm. I won't say that no serious Economists follow that paradigm, but "data mining" is broadly looked upon with skepticism in Economics. One reason for this is that Economics relies heavily upon time-series data, and any two non-stationary time series will tend towards correlation over time. To give an example from another case of mixing Economics and Presidential Politics, there is a Economics professor - I believe at Yale - out there, who on a bit of lark constructed an Economic model that predicts the outcome of the two-way US Presidential race based upon economic factors. By all the usual statistical tests, this model is very robust. And yet, every four years that same model is spectacularly wrong. And so, after each Presidential election the model is tweaked to account for the latest observation - all to no avail. Every four years the model's future predictions are invariably wrong. So, to return to the original point, the data says that 8 out of 9 recession have occurred under Republican Presidencies. Do you believe that this is inherently significant? JDG _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
