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Todd Zywicki suggests that increased advertising for legal services has increased bankruptcy filings. I tend to think that to indicate causation, Zywicki ought to at least demonstrate whether the trend in bankruptcy filings was flat before the Supreme Court found lawyers’ commercial speech constitutionally protected in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona. Unfortunately (for him, at least), Zywicki’s graph starts in 1979, two years after the 1977 ruling in Bates.
Even if he could show that, considering that this time period also corresponds with the emergence of the consumer credit card industry it would be difficult to disentangle the two effects. Slithery D is also unimpressed.
This is my entry in today’s OTB Traffic Jam.
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3 comments:
The saying that correlation != causation has always been a pet peeve of mine. Not because is isn’t true – of course it is – but because it concedes too much, namely that there is a correlation. In many cases, possibly this one, there may not even be that.
Well, correlation (in statistical terms) just means that the two things appear to a relationship with each other; in day-to-day language we might use a stronger definition, e.g. two things actually have a relationship, we’re just not sure about the causal mechanism.
That’s what I mean. To say they correlate means they have something to do with each other. In this case (and many others where the saying i used) it’s quite possible they do not, e.g., the higher bankruptcies could have been the result of the consumer credit industry, and the timing of advertised legal services could be a mere coincidence.