A Very Good Paper

And it's short! The economist who wrote it, Donald McCloskey, is now Deirdre McCloskey. All the papers I've read by McCloskey are interesting, informative, and well written. This is a two pager on statistical significance. I remember when I took econometrics from Dr. Fletcher sophomore year, she spoke about the difference between statistical and economic significance. It's a very important difference, yet gets often overlooked. It took a while for me really to understand what she meant, and I'm sure my understanding will broaden in the future. McCloskey's paper is concise and illuminates the difference from a perspective I hadn't considered. It also office a nice little history of statistical significance. I found this at Marginal Revolution in this post, which itself is worth reading.