Everyone knows that correlation doesn't imply causation, but researchers invariably need to come up with plausible explanations (i.e., models) for the patterns found in their data. However, very different models can "explain" the same pattern. The books The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It and Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Oxford economist Paul Collier try to explain why some countries have remained poor using data from econometric studies. In his very interesting review (PDF), Mike McGovern, a political anthropologist at Yale, critiques the types of explanations found in popular economics books. Statistician Andrew Gelman has further thoughts on descriptive statistics, causal inference, and story time.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear on Jul 13, 2011 - 59 comments

Beginnings at the Library of Congress. The origins of the Universe, humanity and society as viewed by different cultural and religious traditions; and their attempts to explain it all.
The Talk.Origins Archive presents a more scientific view of physical and biological beginnings.
posted by plep on May 3, 2003 - 6 comments

Explaining it all? Now if only someone could explain the year itself before we have to slog through it for 364 more days. (Flash)
posted by fpatrick on Jan 1, 2001 - 5 comments