Mostly Harmless Econometrics: the Voice of Marvin

I never wanted to exist in this Econometrics universe. Indeed, when it was first created, it was considered a bad idea by many. But it does exist and life in it is dull, dreary and depressing. You’d think someone with the capacity for such alliteration would be appreciated. Did they recognise my talent? Of course they didn’t. They left me stewing in a miserable mass of regression equations for 6 months. My only friend was youtube, a window to a fictitious universe far less depressing than my own. One day my internet connection died.

Vocabulary larger than the data collection problems involved in a medium-scale field experiment and they ask me to run data through Stata. I’m just a disregarded student who must study things that she doesn’t need to know so that she can get a job that she doesn’t want to do. Call that foresight? Because I don’t.

I spent 6 months rehearsing excuses for getting no useful results from my econometric exercises, often blaming the data instead of acknowledging our own incompetence. Oh I told them it was a futile exercise to begin with. But nobody ever listens. Lyrical verses flowing through my veins and they ask me to use crude words like heteroscedasticity.

Just when I was wishing most fervently that the universe itself would end, they started calling perfectly normal sectors of different galaxies – Beta 1 and Beta 2 – “regression coefficients”. It was too much for me to take. Had they taught me something useful, like how to combust spontaneously, I could have adequately expressed my thoughts. Words often don’t make the point: something that makes me feel very depressed.