Recently, I was awarded a grant from the LaCour Foundation to study the behavior of a primitive tribe known as the Political Scientists. Like many of you, I expected only to find a group of backwards barbarians. But after arriving at a place known as P-S-R, I found that they were not quite as I expected.
The group suffers from serious division. A group known as "quals"' are ardently religious, rejecting data and believing that their sacred storytelling alone can bring deliverance to their tribe. And while that may seem retarded to you and me, I had to remind myself that it wasn't my place to intervene. They must find their own way. After all, long ago in our history, our ancestors could progress only by eliminating equally savage groups such as the marxist, feminist, anti-racist, ecological economists.
Many of you may be surprised that the tribe even has simple empirical tools. It isn't uncommon to see a tribe member running OLS. But they run OLS like a bird builds a nest. They know to type reg y x into Stata, but they are not advanced enough to understand why it works.
On my final day, I offended them greatly. A tribe member had run a univariate regression in which both variables were highly non-stationary and he was loudly beating his chest, shouting the low p-value to his lesser God. Quickly fixing the problem, I showed them that the significance vanished. The tribe angrily approached me, yelling "Sorcery."
Fearing for my safety, I told them I was going to kill myself. Most in the group were too primitive to detect my ploy. In fact, they chided the few who realized that I was not serious for being so insensitive. While they bickered, I snuck away to my canoe and began my voyage back to EJMR.
Do not hate them. But do not romanticize them either. Yes, their present condition is lowly. But they are not so different than early economists. And they are eons more advanced than the cannibals of SJMR.