Statistics Is Sexy

9 August 2009 at 8:48 am Peter G. Klein 4 comments

| Peter Klein |

So say Hal Varian, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Peter Orszag, among others quoted in this NY Times piece (via Laura M). “I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” says Varian, who now toils away as chief economist at Google, though he’s not far from the hearts of most economics PhD students. Here’s Brynjolfsson: “We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured. But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze, and make sense of the data.”

The article doesn’t actually say much about the substance of the “new” statistics, but the writer has in mind inductive, very-large-N, data-mining exercises (the kind of analysis not taught to social-science and business-administration graduate students, except perhaps some marketing and finance PhDs). Of course we still make our students take multiple semesters of classical statistics and econometrics.

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Education, Methods/Methodology/Theory of Science.

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4 Comments Add your own

1. michael webster | 9 August 2009 at 9:32 am

A couple years ago, Hal Varian was saying economists who understood auction theory were going to be the next “rock stars”
2. Rafe | 9 August 2009 at 5:04 pm

One of the downsides of modern computers is the way they facilitate data mining. When you could only do one run of a regression model per day, feeding a deck of punched cards into the machine, you had to think about the questions you asked.
3. Cliff Grammich | 9 August 2009 at 7:05 pm

That’s an excellent point, Rafe. I also wonder if it applies to typewriters (or even handwriting), word processors, and modern prose of all types.

Interesting article, Peter, and a theme Nathan Yau at flowingdata.com raises from time to time, but I just can’t see data becoming sexy, or eliciting much more than a MEGO reaction from most persons.
4. Statistics is Sexy | Factonista | 10 August 2009 at 8:59 am

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