D. N. McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak have criticized economists and others for confounding statistical and substantive significance, and for committing the logical error of the transposed conditional. In doing so they sometimes misinterpret the function of significance tests. Nonetheless,...

When looked at individually there is little reason to think that economists lack integrity and are dishonest. Yet, when we look at academic papers written by economists we can see biases. This paper tries to reconcile these two observations by arguing that the constraints the profession sets on...