Natural Experiments Of History

Author : Jared Diamond
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674076729
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Natural Experiments of History written by Jared Diamond and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some central questions in the natural and social sciences can't be answered by controlled laboratory experiments, often considered to be the hallmark of the scientific method. This impossibility holds for any science concerned with the past. In addition, many manipulative experiments, while possible, would be considered immoral or illegal. One has to devise other methods of observing, describing, and explaining the world. In the historical disciplines, a fruitful approach has been to use natural experiments or the comparative method. This book consists of eight comparative studies drawn from history, archeology, economics, economic history, geography, and political science. The studies cover a spectrum of approaches, ranging from a non-quantitative narrative style in the early chapters to quantitative statistical analyses in the later chapters. The studies range from a simple two-way comparison of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, to comparisons of 81 Pacific islands and 233 areas of India. The societies discussed are contemporary ones, literate societies of recent centuries, and non-literate past societies. Geographically, they include the United States, Mexico, Brazil, western Europe, tropical Africa, India, Siberia, Australia, New Zealand, and other Pacific islands. In an Afterword, the editors discuss how to cope with methodological problems common to these and other natural experiments of history.

Author : Jared Diamond
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674076710
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Natural Experiments of History written by Jared Diamond and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-11 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In eight case studies by leading scholars in history, archaeology, business, economics, geography, and political science, the authors showcase the “natural experiment” or “comparative method”—well-known in any science concerned with the past—on the discipline of human history. That means, according to the editors, “comparing, preferably quantitatively and aided by statistical analyses, different systems that are similar in many respects, but that differ with respect to the factors whose influence one wishes to study.” The case studies in the book support two overall conclusions about the study of human history: First, historical comparisons have the potential for yielding insights that cannot be extracted from a single case study alone. Second, insofar as is possible, when one proposes a conclusion, one may be able to strengthen one’s conclusion by gathering quantitative evidence (or at least ranking one’s outcomes from big to small), and then by testing the conclusion’s validity statistically.

Author : Jared Diamond
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674035577
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Natural Experiments of History written by Jared Diamond and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some central questions in the natural and social sciences can't be answered by controlled laboratory experiments, often considered to be the hallmark of the scientific method. This impossibility holds for any science concerned with the past. In addition, many manipulative experiments, while possible, would be considered immoral or illegal. One has to devise other methods of observing, describing, and explaining the world. In the historical disciplines, a fruitful approach has been to use natural experiments or the comparative method. This book consists of eight comparative studies drawn from history, archeology, economics, economic history, geography, and political science. The studies cover a spectrum of approaches, ranging from a non-quantitative narrative style in the early chapters to quantitative statistical analyses in the later chapters. The studies range from a simple two-way comparison of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, to comparisons of 81 Pacific islands and 233 areas of India. The societies discussed are contemporary ones, literate societies of recent centuries, and non-literate past societies. Geographically, they include the United States, Mexico, Brazil, western Europe, tropical Africa, India, Siberia, Australia, New Zealand, and other Pacific islands. In an Afterword, the editors discuss how to cope with methodological problems common to these and other natural experiments of history.

Author : Thad Dunning
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107017661
Total Pages : 379 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences written by Thad Dunning and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive guide to natural experiments, providing an ideal introduction for scholars and students.

Author : Nicole Silvester
Publisher : Hyperink Inc
ISBN 13 : 1614642850
Total Pages : 55 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Quicklet on Natural Experiments of History edited by Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson written by Nicole Silvester and published by Hyperink Inc. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural Experiments in History grew, in a way, out of co-editor Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. In the earlier book, he spent a chapter looking at the Polynesian expansion as a near-perfect natural experiment in which a single ancestral Polynesian culture migrated to hundreds of islands in the Pacific Ocean, each with its own different geographic features. Because the culture that settled the islands was the same, any differences that developed between separate island societies could be largely attributed to the geography of the individual islands. At the conclusion of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond noted that there were many other such natural experiments in history, just waiting to be studied, and he called for historians to pick up where he left off and see what else could be learned. Of course, scholars have been using such natural experiments for a long time, especially in other disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, but they have not been as popular in historical scholarship. With Natural Experiments of History the editors and authors hope to illustrate how natural experiments can be used to bring the rigours of the hard sciences to historical scholarship, both in descriptive and statistics-based studies.

Author : Alberto Bisin
Publisher : Academic Press
ISBN 13 : 0128162686
Total Pages : 1002 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Handbook of Historical Economics written by Alberto Bisin and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2021-04-21 with total page 1002 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of Historical Economics guides students and researchers through a quantitative economic history that uses fully up-to-date econometric methods. The book's coverage of statistics applied to the social sciences makes it invaluable to a broad readership. As new sources and applications of data in every economic field are enabling economists to ask and answer new fundamental questions, this book presents an up-to-date reference on the topics at hand. Provides an historical outline of the two cliometric revolutions, highlighting the similarities and the differences between the two Surveys the issues and principal results of the "second cliometric revolution" Explores innovations in formulating hypotheses and statistical testing, relating them to wider trends in data-driven, empirical economics

Author : Rebecca Lemov
Publisher : Hill and Wang
ISBN 13 : 0374707294
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book World as Laboratory written by Rebecca Lemov and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2006-11-28 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deeply researched, World as Laboratory tells a secret history that's not really a secret. The fruits of human engineering are all around us: advertising, polls, focus groups, the ubiquitous habit of "spin" practiced by marketers and politicians. What Rebecca Lemov cleverly traces for the first time is how the absurd, the practical, and the dangerous experiments of the human engineers of the first half of the twentieth century left their laboratories to become our day-to-day reality.

Author : Judith A. Layzer
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262622149
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Natural Experiments written by Judith A. Layzer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: EBM entails collaborative, landscape-scale planning and flexible, adaptive implementation.

Author : Richard J. Murnane
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199890153
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Methods Matter written by Richard J. Murnane and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-17 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Educational policy-makers around the world constantly make decisions about how to use scarce resources to improve the education of children. Unfortunately, their decisions are rarely informed by evidence on the consequences of these initiatives in other settings. Nor are decisions typically accompanied by well-formulated plans to evaluate their causal impacts. As a result, knowledge about what works in different situations has been very slow to accumulate. Over the last several decades, advances in research methodology, administrative record keeping, and statistical software have dramatically increased the potential for researchers to conduct compelling evaluations of the causal impacts of educational interventions, and the number of well-designed studies is growing. Written in clear, concise prose, Methods Matter: Improving Causal Inference in Educational and Social Science Research offers essential guidance for those who evaluate educational policies. Using numerous examples of high-quality studies that have evaluated the causal impacts of important educational interventions, the authors go beyond the simple presentation of new analytical methods to discuss the controversies surrounding each study, and provide heuristic explanations that are also broadly accessible. Murnane and Willett offer strong methodological insights on causal inference, while also examining the consequences of a wide variety of educational policies implemented in the U.S. and abroad. Representing a unique contribution to the literature surrounding educational research, this landmark text will be invaluable for students and researchers in education and public policy, as well as those interested in social science.

Author : Steven Durlauf
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230280811
Total Pages : 365 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Microeconometrics written by Steven Durlauf and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Specially selected from The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics 2nd edition, each article within this compendium covers the fundamental themes within the discipline and is written by a leading practitioner in the field. A handy reference tool.