Hi,
I've enjoyed reading the discussion on the difference between stats and econometrics. but it seems to me there's an important, subtle missing piece.
The term econometrics was coined in 1926 by Ragnar A. K. Frisch (1895-1973), a Norwegian economist who shared the first Nobel Prize in Economics in 1969 with another econometrics pioneer, Jan Tinbergen.
Frisch was a creative guy--he made up "macroeconomics" which caught on, but "polypoly" never did make it :-))
While many economists had used data and made calculations long before 1926, Frisch felt he needed a new word to describe how he interpreted and used empirical data in economics as probabilistic--I observe y, where y=true y + error. Say I got 10 wages and averaged them. Is that econometrics? Not unless, said Frisch, you interpreted each wage as containing the realization of a chance process. So, the word econometrics was tied explicitly to the probabilistic revolution in Economics.
That's probably more than you wanted to know and I wouldn't argue with anyone who said that today econometrics is statistical thinking and tools applied to econ data, but I thought you would find interesting that the origin of the word carried a deeper meaning.
***********************
Humberto Barreto
Department of Economics
Wabash College
Crawfordsville, IN 47933
Phone: 765-361-6315
FAX: 765-361-6277
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WWW: http://www.wabash.edu/depart/economic/barretoh/barretoh.html
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