Businesses that rely on correlation will be misled with increasing confidence. Businesses that master causation will navigate complexity with increasing clarity.

Causation and correlation may sound alike but are very different. The former means the root of subsequent events, while the latter refers to an actual or apparent relationship between trends in which ...

John Hood explores how misinterpreting data can lead to flawed conclusions about government policies and their effectiveness.

Data purists would rap my knuckles for asking this question and reply, "Never". On the other hand, "data sophists" who're accustomed to lying with Big Data in even more crude ways would wonder, “Duh, ...

In traditional decision making, the metrics that impact the bottom line will almost always take precedence over the underlying drivers of change. The reasons behind a purchase decision fade into ...

CORRELATION, CAUSATION, AND BLOGGING....Kieran Healy is annoyed: You only have to hang around the world of social science research- or policy-related blogging for a few hours before you come across ...

After reading Dalton Conley’s piece on recent developments in social-science research (“The Data in Your Lap: How to Interpret Naturally Occurring Experiments,” The Review, December 19), I can only ...

A comment posted by a reader on a recent post reprimanded me for suggesting that marijuana caused relationships to go bad. In this instance the reader was mistaken, as I had specifically used the word ...

One hundred fifty world leaders, with President Barack Obama as the prime mover, and hundreds of their aides and hangers-on, gathered in Paris for an event called the "2014 United Nations Climate ...