{"id":12979,"date":"2018-06-04T05:00:31","date_gmt":"2018-06-04T10:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=12979"},"modified":"2018-06-03T11:21:11","modified_gmt":"2018-06-03T16:21:11","slug":"metrics-monday-causality-and-copenhagen-course-lectures-1-and-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/12979","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Metrics Monday: Causality and Copenhagen Course, Lectures 1 and 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve been reading this blog for more than a few months, you may remember that I was invited to teach a course titled <a href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/12836\">Causal Inference with Observational Data<\/a> by the University of Copenhagen&#8217;s Department of Food and Resource Economics. I co-taught the course from May 14 to 18 with my Copenhagen colleague Arne Henningsen&#8211;I taught the lectures, and he taught the labs.<\/p>\n<p>I wanted to make the lectures for the course publicly available bit by bit, and so today I am posting the first two lectures: 1. <a href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/CIWODCopenhagen1.pdf\">Introduction<\/a>, and 2. <a href=\"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/CIWODCopenhagen2.pdf\">Causality<\/a>. I will be posting lectures 3 to 8 over the next few weeks.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of causality, Judea Pearl&#8211;a pioneer of causality, with his eponymous <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/052189560X\/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=marfbel-20&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=052189560X&amp;linkId=0ed13e39fa233c5212daefdf3072454c\">textbook<\/a>&#8211;has a new popular-press book out discussing his pioneering work and the Causal Revolution of the last 30 years, titled <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/046509760X\/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=marfbel-20&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=046509760X&amp;linkId=254cda23eddce056e0c57ad3f562c1eb\"><em>The Book of Why<\/em><\/a>. I started reading it last week and it is excellent.<\/p>\n<p>Also, a <a href=\"http:\/\/econometricsense.blogspot.com\/2018\/04\/he-who-must-not-be-namedor-can-we-say.html\">post<\/a> last month by Matt Bogard drew my attention to this\u00a0<em>American Journal of Public Health<\/em>\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ajph.aphapublications.org\/doi\/abs\/10.2105\/AJPH.2018.304337\">article<\/a>, in which the author argues that authors (and reviewers and editors) should stop being afraid to use the word &#8220;causal,&#8221; arguing that &#8220;being explicit about the causal objective of a study reduces ambiguity in the scientific question, errors in the analysis, and excesses in the interpretation of the results.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The article&#8217;s clever title aside, I feel as though this might be a public health-specific problem. In the literature in which I work, the causal goal of the typical study, although often implicit, is usually pretty obvious, and by talking of associations and being gun-shy regarding using the word &#8220;causality,&#8221; we are only exercising the proper caution necessary when speaking to policy makers, who often exhibit wishful thinking.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve been reading this blog for more than a few months, you may remember that I was invited to teach a course titled Causal&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/12979\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8216;Metrics Monday: Causality and Copenhagen Course, Lectures 1 and 2<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-3nl","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12979"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12997,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12979\/revisions\/12997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}