by Why Africa is so poor A few years ago, two economics professors, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, published a paper, “The ‘Out of Africa’ Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development,” that drew inferences about poverty and genetics based on a statistical pattern … When the paper by Ashraf and Galor came out, I criticized it from a statistical perspective, questioning what I considered its overreach in making counterfactual causal claims … I argued (and continue to believe) that the problems in that paper reflect a more general issue in social science: There is an incentive to make strong and dramatic claims to get published in a top journal … Recently, Shiping Tang sent me a paper criticizing Ashraf and Galor from a data-analysis perspective … I have not tried to evaluate the details of Tang’s re-analysis because I continue to think that Ashraf and Galor’s paper is essentially an analysis of three data points (sub-Saharan Africa, remote Andean countries and Eurasia). It offered little more than the already-known stylized fact that sub-Saharan African countries are very poor, Amerindian countries are somewhat poor, and countries with Eurasians and their descendants tend to have middle or high incomes.
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Lars Pålsson Syll considers the following as important: Economics, Statistics & Econometrics
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Why Africa is so poor
A few years ago, two economics professors, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, published a paper, “The ‘Out of Africa’ Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development,” that drew inferences about poverty and genetics based on a statistical pattern …
When the paper by Ashraf and Galor came out, I criticized it from a statistical perspective, questioning what I considered its overreach in making counterfactual causal claims … I argued (and continue to believe) that the problems in that paper reflect a more general issue in social science: There is an incentive to make strong and dramatic claims to get published in a top journal …
Recently, Shiping Tang sent me a paper criticizing Ashraf and Galor from a data-analysis perspective … I have not tried to evaluate the details of Tang’s re-analysis because I continue to think that Ashraf and Galor’s paper is essentially an analysis of three data points (sub-Saharan Africa, remote Andean countries and Eurasia). It offered little more than the already-known stylized fact that sub-Saharan African countries are very poor, Amerindian countries are somewhat poor, and countries with Eurasians and their descendants tend to have middle or high incomes.