Brittany and Michael Present “Pioneers in Difference-in-Differences”, Part 2

In the second installment in the “5 Pioneers in Difference-in-differences”, Brittany and Michael from TikTok introduce us to the father of epidemiology himself, Dr John Snow. I first learned about John Snow from a great chapter in a great book on statistics by David Freedman. But I didn’t really see the diff in diff connection though until Thomas Coleman’s interesting paper.

It’s amazing to consider the role of moral courage in science. We aren’t often taught that moral courage, speaking the truth well, might in fact be part of the scientific method, but our first two Pioneers in diff-in-diff both showed it. Both men were largely unsuccessful among their contemporaries in convincing others abt disease transmission, and one has to suspect they knew that they wouldn’t, but they cared about the truth and as a bonus they worked hard at how to best show the truth to others. So congratulations to Dr Snow for a great study using a diff-in-diff design to present compelling evidence that chol…