Stephen T. Ziliak’s research while affiliated with Roosevelt University and other places

JEDI stands for justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. JEDI is a global movement, with networks connecting academic, business, and grass roots organizations. A definition of “JEDI statistics” and “impermissible inequality” is proposed and illustrated with stories from government work, university teaching, and academic research regarding race, ethics, and social justice in statistics. I recently had the pleasure of discussing these ideas on a panel with Wendy Martinez, Safiya Umoja Noble, Donna LaLonde and participants in a plenary session of SDSS 2021, “Equitable and Inclusive Data and Technology.” I thank them for their comments, and Wendy Martinez, notably.¹¹ https://ww2.amstat.org/meetings/sdss/2021/onlineprogram/AbstractDetails.cfm?AbstractID=309823 There are in front of us unlimited possibilities for good by exploring the Venn diagram-overlaps of JEDI philosophy and statistics, JEDI and economic statistics, JEDI and department culture; JEDI medicine, JEDI coding, JEDI wealth and ownership, JEDI history and the historians of statistics, and so forth, striding toward our future for an antiracist and inclusive statistics and society.²² To explain a little more, in 1996 I earned a PhD Certificate in the Rhetoric of the Human Sciences at the same time I completed the PhD in Economics. I teach Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, too, and since 2007 I have taught annually a course on “Theories of Justice in Economics and Philosophy” to PhD, MA, and BA students at Roosevelt University and in short courses at several universities in Europe.

A crisis of validity has emerged from three related crises of science, that is, the crises of statistical significance and complete randomization, of replication, and of reproducibility. Guinnessometrics takes commonplace assumptions and methods of statistical science and stands them on their head, from little p-values to unstructured Big Data. Guinnessometrics focuses instead on the substantive significance which emerges from a small series of independent and economical yet balanced and repeated experiments. Originally developed and market-tested by William S. Gosset aka “Student” in his job as Head Experimental Brewer at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin, Gosset’s economic and common sense approach to statistical inference and scientific method has been unwisely neglected. In many areas of science and life, the 10 principles of Guinnessometrics or G-values outlined here can help. Other things equal, the larger the G-values, the better the science and judgment. By now a colleague, neighbor, or YouTube junkie has probably shown you one of those wacky psychology experiments in a video involving a gorilla, and testing the limits of human cognition. In one video, a person wearing a gorilla suit suddenly appears on the scene among humans, who are themselves engaged in some ordinary, mundane activity such as passing a basketball. The funny thing is, prankster researchers have discovered, when observers are asked to think about the mundane activity (such as by counting the number of observed passes of a basketball), the unexpected gorilla is frequently unseen (for discussion see Kahneman 2011 Kahneman, D. (2011), Thinking Fast and Slow, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. [Google Scholar]). The gorilla is invisible. People don’t see it.

In The Darwin Economy a distinguished behavioral economist, Robert Frank, promises to put Adam Smith’s “invisible hand narrative” into “context.” Neglecting history, empirical evidence, original sources, and a voluminous secondary literature, he fails to deliver. Frank predicts that one hundred years from now professional economists will name not Adam Smith but Charles Darwin as the intellectual founder of their discipline. The reason he gives is “Darwin’s wedge” – a term he coins to emphasize a divergence between individual and group interests which in turn causes wasteful competition and collective loss. He credits Darwin for the insight. We find the very same “wedge” and insight in a book wholly neglected by Frank and most economists after Stigler, namely, Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Working with original sources we show that Frank’s view of the invisible hand – and thus of modern economics – is not sustainable. Contextual economics after Schmoller is of course voluminous but the literature is hardly known by Frank, who is wedded to the axiomatic approach and “no cash on the table” conjecture favored by most neoclassicals. We highlight the problem with evidence on the economics of labor-managed firms and with a revival of a once-famous study by Carleton Parker on large scale farming, unregulated migrant labor, and the Wheatland Hop Field riot of 1913. JEL Codes: B3, N3, J6, B41, Q10 In The Darwin Economy a distinguished behavioral economist, Robert Frank, promises to put Adam Smith’s “invisible hand narrative” into “context.” Neglecting history, empirical evidence, original sources, and a voluminous secondary literature, he fails to deliver. Frank predicts that one hundred years from now professional economists will name not Adam Smith but Charles Darwin as the intellectual founder of their discipline. The reason he gives is “Darwin’s wedge” – a term he coins to emphasize a divergence between individual and group interests which in turn causes wasteful competition and collective loss. He credits Darwin for the insight. We find the very same “wedge” and insight in a book wholly neglected by Frank and most economists after Stigler, namely, Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Working with original sources we show that Frank’s view of the invisible hand – and thus of modern economics – is not sustainable. Contextual economics after Schmoller is of course voluminous but the literature is hardly known by Frank, who is wedded to the axiomatic approach and “no cash on the table” conjecture favored by most neoclassicals. We highlight the problem with evidence on the economics of labor-managed firms and with a revival of a once-famous study by Carleton Parker on large scale farming, unregulated migrant labor, and the Wheatland Hop Field riot of 1913.

A science, business, or law that is basing its validity on the level of p-values, t statistics and other tests of statistical significance is looking less and less relevant and more and more unethical. Today’s economist uses a lot of wit putting a clever index of opportunity cost into his models; but then, like the amnesiac, he fails to see opportunity cost in statistical estimates he makes of those same models. Medicine, psychology, pharmacology and other fields are similarly damaged by this fundamental error of science, keeping bad treatments on the market and good ones out. A few small changes to the style of the published research paper using statistical methods can bring large beneficial effects to more than academic research papers. It is suggested that misuse of statistical significance be added to the definition of scientific misconduct currently enforced by the NIH, NSF, Office of Research Integrity and others.

Words – the symbolic language used to communicate – are portrayed by social scientists as at the same time powerful and powerless in affecting social change. The question is, however, not whether words are powerful – it is not clear if these theories can be reconciled – but when they are powerful and towards what consequence. This panel symposium facilitates a multi-diciplinary dialogue on the topic, by bringing four eminent scholars from sociology, psychology, economics and communication studies to reflect on their fields' insights and engage in dialogue.

For more than a century, the economics profession has extended its reach to encompass policy formation and institutional design while largely ignoring the ethical challenges that attend the profession’s influence over the lives of others. Economists have proved to be disinterested in ethics, which, embracing emotivism, they often treat as a matter of preference, and hostile to professional economic ethics, which they incorrectly equate with a code of conduct that would be at best ineffectual and at worst disruptive to good economic practice. But good ethical reasoning is not reducible to mere tastes, and professional ethics is not reducible to a code. Instead, professional economic ethics refers to a new field of investigation—a tradition of sustained inquiry into the irrepressible ethical entailments of academic and applied economic practice. The risks and costs of establishing the field are real, but a profession that purports to enhance social welfare cannot avoid them.