What is more for cancer patients: increased screening or treatment innovation?

Let’s get this out of the way: both are clearly important.  Within appropriate screening, patients don’t get the treatment they need.  Further, delayed screening can make treatments less effective if the cancer has progressed or metastasized.  On the other hand, without effective treatment, screening won’t have a major impact on patient outcomes. The question is,…

Heckman’s “Econometric Causality”

Nobel laureate James Heckman has a nice summary of how applied econometricians and policy researchers should define causality. Some of the more interesting points I have excerpted below. On the source of randomness in a sample “One reason why many statistical models are incomplete is that they do not specify the sources of randomness generating…