On 5/5/05, JDG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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.
Sorry, you need to go back to class on that one. The spurious regression problem applies to time series where they both grow over time. The binary variable 'party of President', or 'party in control on Congress', the economic data works for both, is not a time-series growing 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. It was not spectacularly or even invariablby wrong, although sometimes I believe he went back after the election and choose variables that could make it very wrong as a demonstration. There were several long discussions and papers I've read on using econometric models for elections and the problems of having a means of validating models before an election. People too often strive for these perfect models and use all the data and all the time series available which means there is no means of testing it. 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? If you don't like where the the data is leading do you always close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and go Nah, Nah, Nah, Nah? JDG > -- Gary Denton Easter Lemming Blogs http://elemming.blogspot.com http://elemming2.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
