Statistics, R, Graphics and Fun

There are some scholars making research on “indices” this year, and a few of them are my teachers. The day before yesterday I saw there was a press conference about a development index of China, which triggered one of my old ideas on the function of statistics (analysis). I believe two conditions will make the work of statistics meaningless:

1. If we do nothing but just rank our samples; i.e. which is the first, and which is the last…
2. If our conclusions are “axioms“; i.e. anybody can know our conclusions without statistical analysis.

Unfortunately, what I read from the news seemed to satisfy these two conditions.

Yesterday I read a quotation from "Quotes of the Day" which by accident expressed a rule for statistical modelling:

… "I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."…

–Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This is interesting. It just indicated a rule of ethics: be honest and don't alter your data to "fit" your "marvelous" models.

Poor economists are said to be always searching for a non-exist black cat in a dark room, while poorer econometricians are regularly accused of finding one (see Peter Kennedy, A Guide to ?Econometrics, 3d ed., The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1992, p.82). The other day I saw another funny description:

“An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.”

Nicholas Chamfort

I believe statisticians will certainly be confronted with the same criticism too (at least in China)… Today when I was helping my supervisor review a manuscript, I just laughed to myself because the paper was almost completely useless, and the authors dared to say there were NO previous researches on their topic — that’s too ridiculous. In the sense of economics, I cannot find any significance of this paper — it only revealed the relationship between FDI, import & export trade using the Error Correction Model for Jiangsu Province. What’s the use of such a simple relationship? (This variable increases, that decreases, blabla…) Can it still hold when the model is applied to other districts?… In a word, ?a statstical model is useless if it only describes the past history.