Stephen T. Ziliak (born October 17, 1963) is an American professor of economics. He is currently a faculty member of the Angiogenesis Foundation, conjoint professor of business and law at the University of Newcastle in Australia, and professor of economics at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois. He previously taught for the Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, and Bowling Green State University. Much of his work has focused on welfare and poverty, rhetoric, public policy, and the history and philosophy of science and statistics.[1] Most known for his works in the field of statistical significance, Ziliak gained notoriety from his 1996 article, "The Standard Error of Regressions",[2] from a sequel study in 2004 called "Size Matters",[3] and for his University of Michigan Press best-selling and critically acclaimed book The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (2008)[4] all coauthored with Deirdre McCloskey.[3][5][6][7][8]
Ziliak received a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Indiana University Bloomington, a PhD in economics, and a PhD Certificate in the Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, both from the University of Iowa. While at University of Iowa, he served as resident scholar in the Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry, where he met among others Steve Fuller, Bruno Latour, and Wayne C. Booth, and co-authored the now-famous paper "The Standard Error of Regressions".
Following the completion of his PhD degrees, he has taught at Bowling Green State University, Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and (currently) Roosevelt University, and he has been a visiting professor at more than a dozen other universities, law schools, and medical centers across the United States and Europe. In 2002 he won the Helen Potter Award for Best Article in Social Economics ("Pauper Fiction in Economic Science: `Paupers in Almshouses' and the Odd Fit of Oliver Twist").[9] In that same year at Georgia Tech he won the "Faculty Member of the Year" award and in 2003 he was voted "Most Intellectual Professor".[10]
After college, but prior to his academic career, Ziliak served as county welfare caseworker and, following that, labor market analyst for the Indiana Department of Workforce Development, both in Indianapolis.
Work on statistical significance
While at University of Iowa, Ziliak became friends with his dissertation adviser, Deirdre McCloskey. He and McCloskey shared an interest in the fields of rhetoric and statistical significance — namely how the two concepts merge in modern economics. Ziliak had discovered one big cost of the "significance mistake" early on in his job with Workforce Development, in 1987. By U.S. Department of Labor policy he learned he was not allowed to publish black youth unemployment rates for Indiana's labor markets: "not statistically significant," the Labor Department said, meaning the p-values exceeded 0.10 (p less than or equal to 0.10 was the Labor Department's bright line cut-off for publishing estimates).[11]
In their paper, "The Standard Error of Regressions," McCloskey and Ziliak argue that econometrics greatly over-values and misuses statistical significance testing — Student's t-test. They claim econometricians rely too heavily on statistical significance, but too little on "actual" economic significance. The paper also reviews and critiques over 40 years' worth of published papers in economic journals on their use of statistical significance.
In a reply to critics, Ziliak and McCloskey did a follow-up study of the 1996 research and claimed that the significance problem had grown even larger, causing false inferences and decisions in from 70% in the 1980s to 80% of the 1990s articles published in the American Economic Review. "Size Matters: The Standard Error of Regressions in the American Economic Review" was presented by Ziliak at the 2004 meetings of the American Economic Association. The article and a reply to critics ("Significance Redux") were published in a special issue of the Journal of Socio-Economics.[12] Published cooperatively at the same time in Econ Journal Watch (2004), "Size Matters" maintains its rank as one of the top-most downloaded articles in that journal's history.
Ziliak was a lead author on the twenty-four statistician team which crafted in 2015-2016 the "American Statistical Association Statement on Statistical Significance and P-Values," edited by Ronald Wasserstein and Nicole Lazar.[13][14][15]
His article "How Large are Your G-values? Try Gosset's Guinnessometrics When a Little 'p' Is Not Enough" was published in a follow-up special issue of The American Statistician (2019 73 sup1), a major re-think of statistical testing, estimation, and reporting in "A world beyond p<0.05" for which Ziliak also served as associate editor.
The Cult of Statistical Significance
His book, The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives (2008) challenges the history, philosophy, and practice of all the testing sciences, from economics to medicine, and has been widely reviewed in journals and the media.[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] It was the beer-brewing Gosset aka "Student", Ziliak discovered in the archives, not the biologist R. A. Fisher, who provided the firmer foundation for modern statistics, decisions, and experimental design. The book featured in a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court case, Matrixx Initiatives v. Siracusano et al., wherein the justices unanimously decided against using statistical significance as a standard for adverse event reporting in U.S. securities law.[25] Ziliak and McCloskey were invited to submit to the court a brief of amici curiae ("friends of the court") wherein they explain the most important differences between economic, legal, and human significance versus mere statistical significance. Ziliak wrote about the case for Significance magazine, inspiring published letters from A.W.F. Edwards and Dennis Lindley, who later befriended Ziliak in correspondence over W.S. Gosset and R.A. Fisher.[25][26]
Haiku Economics
In 2002, Ziliak published a poetry collection called "Haiku economics".[27] Ziliak's most famous haiku is:
His invisible hand haiku has been erroneously credited to Etheridge Knight and Matsuo Basho.[29] In 2008 and 2009 Ziliak's work on haiku economics gained international attention following a series of articles published in the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and National Public Radio.[30][31][32][33][34] In 2011 he published an essay in Poetry magazine, "Haiku Economics: On Money, Metaphor, and the Invisible Hand".[35]
Guinnessometrics
Ziliak's current projects include Guinnessometrics,[36] a wholesale rethinking of experimental philosophy and econometric practice.[37] He argues that randomization plus statistical significance does not equal validity, but that it must be proven by other means, including deliberately balanced and stratified experiments, small series of independent and repeated samples controlling for real error, and an economic approach to the logic of uncertainty.
In July 2008 Ziliak was invited by the International Biometric Society and the Irish Statistical Association to present his work in Dublin on "Guinnessometrics: The Economic Foundation of Student's t," in celebration of the 100th anniversary of W.S. Gosset's aka "Student's" t-distribution and test.[38] In 2010 Ziliak and British statistician Stephen Senn exchanged views in The Lancet.[39][40]
Renganomics and rap
Ziliak's other contributions include a competitive learning game he calls renganomics.[41] Renganomics is a combination of economic science with an ancient Japanese poetic form called renga. The idea is to create a spontaneous, collaboratively written poem about the economy and economic science in the form of linked classical haiku poems (5-7-5 sound counts) followed by two lines of 7 sounds (14 sounds for the couplet). The renga form is created by writing a verse and then passing the poem on to the next person in the circle, given a predetermined time constraint and stakes. It is supposed to challenge notions of the spontaneous order and central planning alike, while allowing both policies to air ideas, desires, and complaints.
In May 2015 Ziliak produced an economics rap video with his students at Roosevelt University, "Fear the Economics Textbook (Story of the Next Crook)".[41] The video, featured in Inside Higher Ed, The National Review, Rethinking Economics[42] and elsewhere, is in part a statement of Ziliak's pluralist and dialogical teaching philosophy and view of history, and at the same time a reply to the popular Keynes-Hayek rap videos.[43][44][45]
Welfare reform
On the strength of his dissertation, "Essays on Self-Reliance: The United States in the Era of Scientific Charity," he was appointed associate editor for the millennial edition of Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to the Present (General Eds. S. Carter, R. Sutch, et al.)[46][47] Ziliak argued in his dissertation and in a series of articles against the 1996 welfare reform act (PRWORA). He argued on the basis of novel econometric and social historical evidence he produced on previous, 19th century attempts to abolish welfare and to replace it with private charity ("scientific charity", so called). Economic theory of welfare is distorted, he argued, by a "Malthusian vice" and "Contradiction of compassion". Private charity expanded more than previous observers predicted. But labor market outcomes were about the same as one finds in late 20th century welfare programs.[48][49]
Ethics and economics
Ziliak's historical research on previous attempts to privatize welfare for the poor has questioned the virtue-ethical philosophies of Victorians, Old and New, from Herbert Spencer to Gertrude Himmelfarb. In The Bourgeois Virtues (2006, xviii) his former dissertation adviser and long-time coauthor Deirdre N. McCloskey thanks Ziliak (together with Arjo Klamer and Helen McCloskey, Deirdre's mother) for "disagreeing with me about the bourgeois virtues".[citation needed]The Cult of Statistical Significance drew attention to the ethics of statistical significance testing and the frequently large yet neglected consequences for human and other life when the test is misused and misinterpreted as Ziliak and McCloskey claim it frequently is. Haiku economics is fundamentally an attempt to bring feelings and individual experience back inside the dismal science.[citation needed] In his 2011 essay on "Haiku Economics," published in Poetry magazine, Ziliak noted the influence of Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography. More recently, In a series of papers comparing Gosset's deliberately balanced experimental designs with Fisher's randomized, Ziliak argues that most randomized controlled trials lack both ethical and economic justification. His paper "The Unprincipled Randomization Principle in Economics and Medicine" (with Edward Teather-Posadas), published in the Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics (2015), argues that most randomized controlled trials (RCTs) fail every ethical code, from Smith's "impartial spectator" and Pareto efficiency to Rawls's difference principle, except possibly "vulgar utilitarianism" (page 436), an "ethic" which even most economists reject.[citation needed]
Ziliak, Stephen T. (2011). "W.S. Gosset and Some Neglected Concepts in Experimental Statistics: Guinnessometrics II". Journal of Wine Economics. 6 (2): 252–277. doi:10.1017/S1931436100001632.
Ziliak, Stephen T.; Teather-Posadas, Edward R. (2016). "The Unprincipled Randomization Principle in Economics and Medicine". In Demartino, George F.; McCloskey, Deirdre (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics. pp.422–452. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199766635.013.44. ISBN978-0-19-976663-5.
Ziliak, Stephen T (June 2004). "Self-Reliance Before the Welfare State: Evidence from the Charity Organization Movement in the United States". The Journal of Economic History. 64 (2): 433–461. doi:10.1017/S002205070400275X. ProQuest216417885.
Ziliak, S T (1997). "Kicking the Malthusian Vice: Lessons from the Abolition of 'Welfare' in the Late Nineteenth Century". Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance. 37 (2): 449–68. doi:10.1016/S1062-9769(97)90037-5.
Ziliak S T. (2001) D. N. McCloskey and the Rhetoric of a Scientific Economics, pp. ix-xxvi, in S. T. Ziliak, ed., Measurement and Meaning in Economics (2001).
Ziliak S T. (2001) What are Models for?, In Warren J. Samuels and Jeff E. Biddle, eds., Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology 19-A (Elsevier Press, 2001): pages 149–159.
Ziliak S T. (2002) Pauper Fiction in Economic Science: `Paupers in Almshouses' and the Odd Fit of Oliver Twist, Review of Social Economy 55 (2, June 2002): pages 159–181.
Ziliak S T (2004) The Significance of the Economics Research Paper, In Edward Fullbrook, ed., A Guide to What's Wrong with Economics (Anthem Press 2004), Chp. 21: pages 223–236.
↑ McCloskey, Deirdre N.; Ziliak, Stephen T. (1 January 1996). "The Standard Error of Regressions". Journal of Economic Literature. 34 (1): 97–114. JSTOR2729411.[non-primary source needed]
↑ Ziliak, S. T., & Mccloskey, D. N. (2008). The cult of statistical significance: How the standard error costs us jobs, justice and lives. University of Michigan Press.[non-primary source needed][pageneeded]
↑ Ziliak, Stephen T. (June 2002). "Pauper Fiction in Economic Science: 'Paupers in Almshouses' and the Odd Fit of Oliver Twist". Review of Social Economy. 60 (2): 159–181. doi:10.1080/00346760210146622.[non-primary source needed]
↑ Bergman, Bruce (February 2010). "Wallowing in Significance". Monthly Labor Review.
↑ Hoover, Kevin D.; Siegler, Mark V. (2008-03-01). "The rhetoric of 'Signifying nothing': a rejoinder to Ziliak and McCloskey". Journal of Economic Methodology. 15 (1): 57–68. doi:10.1080/13501780801913546. ISSN1350-178X. S2CID17253046.
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