“People are constantly looking at the world around them and trying to learn from it, and that’s natural,” MIT economist Joshua Angrist says. “But it turns out to be very difficult to sort out cause and effect, because the world is complicated, with many things happening at once.”
Angrist, the Ford Professor of Economics, has long been one of the leading advocates of research that uses “ceteris paribus” principles. Now, along with Jorn-Steffen Pischke of the London School of Economics, Angrist has written a book on the subject for a general audience, “Mastering ‘Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect,” published this month by Princeton University Press.