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Sound and fury: McCloskey and significance testing in economics

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Date
2008-03-01
Authors
Hoover, KD
Siegler, MV
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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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Journal article
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/2045
Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1080/13501780801913298
Publication 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.
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Scholars@Duke

Hoover

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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