From Lars Syll Professor Swann (2019) seems implicitly to be endorsing the traditional theorem/proof style for teaching econometrics but with a few more theorems to be memorized. This style of teaching prepares students to join the monks in Asymptopia, a small pristine mountain village, where the monks read the tomes, worship the god of Consistency, and pray all day for the coming of the Revelation, when the estimates with an infinite sample will be revealed. Dirty limited real data sets with unknown properties are not allowed in Asymptopia, only hypothetical data with known properties. Not far away in the mountains is the village of Euphoria where celibate priests compose essays regarding human sexuality. Down on the plains is the very large city of Real Data, where applied economists
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from Lars Syll
Professor Swann (2019) seems implicitly to be endorsing the traditional theorem/proof style for teaching econometrics but with a few more theorems to be memorized. This style of teaching prepares students to join the monks in Asymptopia, a small pristine mountain village, where the monks read the tomes, worship the god of Consistency, and pray all day for the coming of the Revelation, when the estimates with an infinite sample will be revealed. Dirty limited real data sets with unknown properties are not allowed in Asymptopia, only hypothetical data with known properties. Not far away in the mountains is the village of Euphoria where celibate priests compose essays regarding human sexuality. Down on the plains is the very large city of Real Data, where applied economists torture dirty data until the data confess, providing the right signs and big t-values. Although Real Data is infinitely far from Asymptopia, these applied econometricians are fond of supporting the “Scientific” character of their work with quotations from the spiritual essays of the Monks of Asymptopia.