Part 2: A Selected History of Quantitative Causal Inference

The Extraordinary Role of Data Workers and Data Theorists at Princeton and Harvard

In a previous substack, I discussed the emergence of the counterfactual idea for defining causal effects to John Stuart Mill and Jerzy Neyman’s 1923 article. I then noted how Ronald Fisher, reading Neyman’s article, immediately put two and two together and deduced that if you physically randomized treatments, you could solve the causal inference proble…