Political economy

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 867647221

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-93157

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Chapman, Sydney John http://d-nb.info/gnd/123743141

Title:: Political economy

Place of publication:: London [u.a.]

Publisher:: Williams & Norgate [u.a.]

Year of publication:: 1912

Scope:: 1 Online-Ressource (255 Seiten)

Collection:: Economics Books

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

SEMAINE D ETUDE SUR LE ROLE DE L’ANALYSE ECONOMETRIOUE ETC. 08G tain that the estimates we have now are very questionable. But 20 or 30 years ago the same was true for national income figures and many people were saying at that time that this sort of calculation was useless and had no meaning at all, and so on. My second point. What Professor THEIL has said is very interest- ing indeed, as far as the proposal for some general statement con- cluding this colloquium is concerned. I have read in the introduction to the Study Week that econometrics has made much progress and so on, and to-day we hear from a very competent colleague that the work of every statistician in the world may after all be very questionable, not only from the scientific point of view but from the point of view of honesty. What you have said is terrible indeed. Terrible. For if you were right, this would mean that statisticians are dishonest. Personally I do not accept this point. I believe that statisticians do not revise their estimates when they differ from other estimates, and I can supply very good proof of it. For exam- ple, there are differences between the various estimates CoLIN CLARK has given for the capital output ratios of different countries at different times. These estimates are indeed very different from one country to another and from one time to another. As you know, CoLIN CLARK has not made any personal calculations on this. The figures published by him are estimates made by different statisticians around the world, using very different methods and taking into account statistical materials which are absolutely not comparable. Not only are these figures not the same, but their order of magnitude is absolutely different. We therefore cannot suspect the statisticians of having modified their estimates in order to be in agreement witl. the other evaluations. The contrary is the case. But if these figures are absolutely different, they are distributed lognormally and their median is practically the same as median for the United States from 1880 to 1956. Thus we can conclude that there is an unquestionable reality behind these very different esti- mates and we can conclude that the differences are due to some random influences 1 Allais - pag. 293

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