Sound and fury: McCloskey and significance testing in economics
Abstract
For more than 20 years, Deidre McCloskey has campaigned to convince the economics
profession that it is hopelessly confused about statistical significance. She argues
that many practices associated with significance testing are bad science and that
most economists routinely employ these bad practices: 'Though to a child they look
like science, with all that really hard math, no science is being done in these and
96 percent of the best empirical economics ' (McCloskey 1999). McCloskey's charges
are analyzed and rejected. That statistical significance is not economic significance
is a jejune and uncontroversial claim, and there is no convincing evidence that economists
systematically mistake the two. Other elements of McCloskey's analysis of statistical
significance are shown to be ill-founded, and her criticisms of practices of economists
are found to be based in inaccurate readings and tendentious interpretations of those
economists' work. Properly used, significance tests are a valuable tool for assessing
signal strength, for assisting in model specification, and for determining causal
structure.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/2045Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1080/13501780801913298Publication Info
Hoover, KD; & Siegler, MV (2008). Sound and fury: McCloskey and significance testing in economics. Journal of Economic Methodology, 15(1). pp. 1-37. 10.1080/13501780801913298. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/2045.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Kevin Douglas Hoover
Professor of Economics
Professor Hoover's research interests include macroeconomics, monetary economics,
the history of economics, and the philosophy and methodology of empirical economics.
His recent work in economics has focused on the application of causal search methodologies
for structural vector autoregression, the history of microfoundational programs in
macroeconomics, and Roy Harrod's early work on dynamic macroeconomics. In philosophy,
he has concentrated on issues related to causality, especially in economi

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