Discussion: Living beyond our means

摘要

As someone who has been advocating 'living beyond one's means' since before the Reagan administration, I welcome Thomas's endorsement of the idea. If we embrace the maxim that statistics is about variation, then we should stand ready to explore how that variation varies with covariates. Assuming, as theory may tempt us to do, that covariates shift only the central tendency of the response, while variation around the central tendency remains unperturbed, is rarely plausible. Signal plus iid noise is a dangerous fiction.