Causal Analysis in Theory and Practice

(Re-edited: 5/6/15, 4 pm)

Michael A Lewis (Hunter College) sent us the following query:

Dear Judea,
I was reading a book by the late statistician David Freedman and in it he uses the term “response schedule” to refer to an equation which represents a causal relationship between variables. It appears that he’s using that term as a synonym for “structural equation” the one you use. In your view, am I correct in regarding these as synonyms? Also, Freedman seemed to be of the belief that response schedules only make sense if the causal variable can be regarded as amenable to manipulation. So variables like race, gender, maybe even socioeconomic status, etc. cannot sensibly be regarded as causes since they can’t be manipulated. I’m wondering what your view is of this manipulation perspective.
Michael

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My answer is: Yes. Freedman’s “response schedule” is a synonym for “structural equation.” The reason why Freedman did not say so explicitly has to do with his long and rather bumpy journey from statistical to causal thinking. Freedman, like most statisticians in the 1980’s could not make sense of the Structural Equation Models (SEM) that social scientists (e.g., Duncan) and econometricians (e.g., Goldberger) have adopted for representing causal relations. As a result, he criticized and ridiculed this enterprise relentlessly. In his (1987) paper “As others see us,” for example, he went as far as “proving” that the entire enterprise is grounded in logical contradictions. The fact that SEM researchers at that time could not defend their enterprise effectively (they were as confused about SEM as statisticians — judging by the way they responded to his paper) only intensified Freedman criticism. It continued well into the 1990’s, with renewed attacks on anything connected with causality, including the causal search program of Spirtes, Glymour and Scheines.

I have had a long and friendly correspondence with Freedman since 1993 and, going over a file of over 200 emails, it appears that it was around 1994 when he began to convert to causal thinking. First through the do-operator (by his own admission) and, later, by realizing that structural equations offer a neat way of encoding counterfactuals.

I speculate that the reason Freedman could not say plainly that causality is based on structural equations was that it would have been too hard for him to admit that he was in error criticizing a model that he misunderstood, and, that is so simple to understand. This oversight was not entirely his fault; for someone trying to understand the world from a statistical view point, structural equations do not make any sense; the asymmetric nature of the equations and those slippery “error terms” stand outside the prism of the statistical paradigm. Indeed, even today, very few statisticians feel comfortable in the company of structural equations. (How many statistics textbooks do we know that discuss structural equations?)

So, what do you do when you come to realize that a concept you ridiculed for 20 years is the key to understanding causation? Freedman decided not to say “I erred”, but to argue that the concept was not rigorous enough for statisticians to understood. He thus formalized “response schedule” and treated it as a novel mathematical object. The fact is, however, that if we strip “response schedule” from its superlatives, we find that it is just what you and I call a “function”. i.e., a mapping between the states of one variable onto the states of another. Some of Freedman’s disciples are admiring this invention (See R. Berk’s 2004 book on regression) but most people that I know just look at it and say: This is what a structural equation is.

The story of David Freedman is the story of statistical science itself and the painful journey the field has taken through the causal reformation. Starting with the structural equations of Sewal Wright (1921), and going through Freedman’s “response schedule”, the field still can’t swallow the fundamental building block of scientific thinking, in which Nature is encoded as a society of sensing and responding variables. Funny, econometrics is yet to start its reformation, though it has been housing SEM since Haavelmo (1943). (How many econometrics textbooks do we know which teach students how to read counterfactuals from structural equations?).

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I now go to your second question, concerning the mantra “no causation without manipulation.” I do not believe anyone takes this slogan as a restriction nowadays, including its authors, Holland and Rubin. It will remain a relic of an era when statisticians tried to define causation with the only mental tool available to them: the randomized controlled trial (RCT).

I summed it up in Causality, 2009, p. 361: “To suppress talk about how gender causes the many biological, social, and psychological distinctions between males an females is to suppress 90% of our knowledge about gender differences”

I further elaborated on this issue in (Bollen and Pearl 2014 p. 313) saying:

“Pearl (2011) further shows that this restriction has led to harmful consequence by forcing investigators to compromise their research questions only to avoid the manipulability restriction. The essential ingredient of causation, as argued in Pearl (2009: 361), is responsiveness, namely, the capacity of some variables to respond to variations in other variables, regardless of how those variations came about.”

In (Causality 2009 p. 361) I also find this paragraph: “It is for that reason, perhaps, that scientists invented counterfactuals; it permit them to state and conceive the realization of antecedent conditions without specifying the physical means by which these conditions are established;”

All in all, you have touched on one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of science, featuring a respectable scientific community that clings desperately to an outdated dogma, while resisting, adamantly, the light that shines around it. This chapter deserves a major headline in Kuhn’s book on scientific revolutions. As I once wrote: “It is easier to teach Copernicus in the Vatican than discuss causation with a statistician.” But this was in the 1990’s, before causal inference became fashionable. Today, after a vicious 100-year war of reformation, things are begining to change (See http://www.nasonline.org/programs/sackler-colloquia/completed_colloquia/Big-data.html). I hope your upcoming book further accelerates the transition.