His paper Let’s Take the Con out of Econometrics was highly influential. It changed the direction of econometric research.
There are several economics Nobels sitting out there, including Koopmans, Klein, and Tinbergen, that would not be considered prizeworthy in light of Leamer’s critique.
Now it’s called eometrics.
I am half way through the article. This is a double/triple read, he gets into details. This is not a paper read and reported on in one day.
My first shot. Think of a group of observers, the trade press. They attend a liquidation auction of the observed. The observers must disturb the observed to get real time data. Their disturbance pattern is the mis-specification matrix. The observed become more ill-sampled, the observed are the data covariance model. But sample space is conserved, the auction is held in a slightly congested auction house. There is thus the inherent market uncertainty, always there, never left. The solution set becomes quantum sets, the aggregate tier up. The inherent uncertainty the quantum error separating sets.
I found your comment very cryptic. Koopmans didn’t even do econometrics. And is the problem with Tinbergen and Klein that they didn’t make their assumptions adequately transparent, or that his work did not really advance knowledge at all?
I think that everything that Leamer wrote is subsumed under was is now called Bayesian approaches. You find all this stuff in Andrew Gelman’s blog all the time.
I do not believe that you understand Leamer. His critique applies to researchers who use Bayesian methods as well as classical methods. Either method has to be done with absolute purity (no preliminary look at the data) to avoid his critique. In practice, no one obeys absolute purity, so that the professional response to the Leamer critique is to look for natural experiments.
I do not agree at all. It is not necessary to be pure, it is only necessary to be transparent. Explain what the prior was before the test, how it was arrived at, and how the test led to updating the prior.
Still interested in understanding how Koopmans is implicated.
I’m curious what your opinion on Christopher Sims’s econometric work is now.
I would prefer seeing Dierdre McCloskey receive the Nobel Prize. Much of what she wrote early in her career was very consistent with Leamer’s work, and her continued work in the past two decades has been path-breaking.