There’s an excellent little new humorous website called Spurious Correlations. Well, OK, humorous perhaps only to economics geeks but humorous all the same. And it’s a site that contains a deep and important lesson about economics (and the other social sciences of lesser importance of course). Which is that spurious correlations are indeed spurious. Another way of putting much the same point is that correlation is not the same as causality and that’s something we get told all the time but unfortunately not all of us take the care to remember it. For example, it is possible to show a correlation … Continue reading Eat Cheese and Be Strangled by Your Bedsheets?