My first assignment for causal inference is a personal essay
Values and causes shape our life trajectory
The first day of class in my causal inference class was last week at Baylor, where I’m a professor. The first assignment was one that had been bubbling in my head for a long time, but I think ironically it was pushed in a particular direction as I thought about a substack I wrote recently about “why economists don’t like conditional independence”. As I said in that essay, conditional independence is great. If you have it, and common support, then there are some truly spectacular ways to recover all the interesting causal parameters, from the ATE to the ATU surprisingly. Not every day that you have a chance to estimate the causal effect of a treatment for people who opted out of it. I’ve always thought that that would interesting — the effect of the path not chosen.
But in the essay I wrote, I noted that the conditional independence assumption isn’t “strong” or even “wrong” — rather, it’s offensive. To economists, anyway. And that doesn’t mean it is offensive as an actual realit…
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