Stats of the Union 

 Dr. King, Esteemed Faculty, Members of the Advisory Board, My Fellow Stats Brats: 

 The rite of custom brings us together at a defining hour when decisions are hard and courage is needed. We enter the year 2007 with large endeavors under way and others that are ours to begin. In all of this, much is asked of us. We must have the will to face difficult challenges and determined reviewers, and the wisdom to face them together. 

 We’re not the first to come here with allegiances divided between structural equation modeling and proper counterfactual reasoning and Bayesian uncertainty in the air. Like many before us, we can work through our difference in difference equations, and we can achieve big things for the scientific community. Our readers don’t much care which department we sit in as long as we are willing to walk across campus when there is work to be done. Our job is to make research better for our readers, and to help them to build CVs of hope and opportunity, and this is the business before us tonight. 

 A future of hope and opportunity begins with a growing software library, and that is what we have. We’re now in the 19th month of uninterrupted dissertation research by many proud graduate students at IQSS, an effort that has created 1,947 pages of prose and equations, so far. Unemployment is low, ignorance is low, wages are rising. These dissertations are on the move, and our job is to keep it that way, not with more error term jabber but with more attention to potential outcomes and causality. 

 Next week, I’ll deliver a bound report on the state of my dissertation to the Registrar. Tonight, I want to discuss one statistical reform that deserves to be a priority for this Institute. 

 In particular, there’s the matter of appealing to causality fraudulently. These appeals are often slipped into manuscripts at the last hour when not even copy editors are watching. In 2005 alone, the number of appeals to causality across journals grew to over 13,000. Reviewers did not vet them. Don did not sign off on them. Yet they are treated as if they have the blessing of Don. The time has come to end this practice. So let us work together to reform the review process — expose every slippage to the light of day and cut the number  of unfounded appeals to causality at least in half by the end of this session.  
  
This is a decent and honorable Institute, and resilient too. We’ve been through a lot together. We’ve met challenges and faced dangers, and we know that more lie ahead. Yet we can go forward with confidence, because the stats of our union is strong, our cause in the world is right, and tonight that cause goes on. 

 God bless.