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Oscar_Cunningham comments on [Retracted] Simpson's paradox strikes again: there is no great stagnation? - Less Wrong Discussion
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How so?
It is impolite to mention demographic change, especially when racial differences are obvious. "Our increases in income are counteracted by the swelling ranks of poor non-whites" does not make newspaper editors happy.
But they're not "counteracted" at all. White people's wages have actually increased. You don't have to try very hard to put a positive spin on the fact that everyone is making more money, women are becoming more equal with men, and previously poor non-whites are now finding more jobs. What's not to like?
It seems unlikely to me that people discovered this explanation for the data and then covered it up. More likely that they simply hadn't noticed that Simpson's paradox was in effect (maybe because they never even looked at the demographic data).
Cowen built a lot on the median income in The Great Stagnation; reading it, there was not a whisper about demographics, though Cowen is a pretty honest author usually (and in fact was the one who publicized this one!).
Drat, I hat-tipped Cowen instead of David Henderson of Econlog, in an example of the Matthew Effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect_(sociology)#Sociologyofscience
Publicized it, I said, not discovered it. Cowen has a huge readership, and pretty much anyone who ever hears of this will do so because Cowen publicized it; and Cowen knows this, so the honesty argument is still true.
No, I got it from Henderson's blog, but the source data got lost and reconstructed as Tyler. I haven't seen any Marginal Revolution post publicizing it.
Whoops, you're right; it was Henderson/EconLog, not Cowen.
They are for the metric of median wages.
There's a similar situation with PISA scores: American students of all races are the highest or second highest scorers of that race. The average American PISA score is mediocre, though, because the US's racial balance is not, say, Shanghai's or Finland's racial balance.
You don't understand academic culture. Steve Landsburg (like myself) is a college professor. Because of political correctness almost no college professor would dare point out what Landsburg just did.
You're underestimating both how good economists are at math and how bad we are at resisting political correctness.
It's not just impolite, it's an act that makes one unclean.