Angrist, Joshua D. & Pischke, Jörn-Steffen: Mastering ’metrics: The path from cause to effect

In ancient times the 1 “metre” was considered the basic structure of a verse in poetry. In Classical Greek and Latin, the art of metric was mastered by the greatest poets such as Homer and Virgil. At the time, the central themes for poetry were the “dactylic hexameter” or the “hendecasyllabic”, and the rules governing poems were strictly codified and based on quantitative measurement of syllables’ length and weight. That was the “Path” to aesthetic and rhythm in poetry which was considered the highest expression in art, possibly the only one leading to the revelation of “Truth”. The new book by Joshua Angrist and Steffen Pischke, “Mastering ‘metrics: the path from cause to effect” proposes a similar “Path” to uncover the “Truth” hidden in numbers and statistics. While the authors appear to be more familiar with “Kung-Fu” TV series, rather than with classical literature, the Latin word “ceteris paribus” (Latin for “other things being equal”) features as a central theme throughout the whole book, both as a reference in designing empirical studies and when thinking about the underlying “causal” relationships at work