How (not) to make valid causal inferences

Created
Sun, 15/03/2026 - 00:08
Updated
Sun, 15/03/2026 - 00:08
Traditionally, analysts use data on stopped individuals to study bias by computing the difference in violence rates between stopped minority and white civilians, while controlling for observable differences between these two sets of encounters. We term this the “naïve estimator” … However, without further assumptions, this quantity will have no causal interpretation so long as […]