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LinkedIn ... Peter Burgess

About statistics ... cause and effect and correlation ... to Rick ???

This is a message I have sent to Rick via LinkedIn

About statistics ... cause and effect and correlation

Dear Rick

I have no idea how I became connected to you on the LinkedIn platform ... but your work with statistics at the Federal Reserve in New York is interesting to me.

Since I was a student a little over 50 years ago, I have been bothered by the proliferation of 'statistical method' in the analysis of society and the economy ... of focus on correlation while ignoring the more useful cause and effect.

In my work as a corporate management accountant, I was pretty clear about cause and effect in everything we did. Accounting made it possible to be quite solid in making projections and doing 'what ifs'.

I have been arguing for a long time that something similar to corporate accounting ... I call it TrueValueMetrics ... applied to economic activity at the community level would enable a good understanding of cause and effect and in due time result in significant progress towards a better quality of life at the community level ... something that is not possible at the macro level of statistical economics.

My question is simply whether you know of others who are thinking along these lines. I believe there are some, if not many. I also recognize the immense difficulty of changing any major time series on national and institutional statistics. This obviously is external to that arena.

In anticipation

Peter Burgess
Peter Burgess