Talk:Jan Kmenta

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Economics

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I assume the tag on top that says it doesn't sound encyclopedic enough refers to the sentences below, and possibly to a couple of others:

"The book embodies the essence of Kmenta’s approach to both econometrics and statistics which is perhaps best – if informally—characterized as “It’s all very easy once you really understand it – don’t bother memorizing anything, just do the algebra and think about what you are doing and why. Keep things as simple as possible.” Seemingly obvious, this requires a true gift for exposition as well as fundamental understanding."

I pondered over how to write this and finally just put it in as it is (even though the tone is wrong and it is inadequate in conveying what I was trying to say). It is easy to make it more sterile but it is very difficult to improve the piece at the same time. The fact is that while Kmenta was an important early developer of econometrics (easily justified by technical analysis of his contributions but perhaps not interesting to the Wikipedia audience in general, he also is well-known for his ability to get to the heart of a problem and convey it to others. All over the world people tell him that while they studied econometrics in school, they learned if from his book. I have interviewed a large number of econometricians in my lifetime, and interacted with even more on projects too numerous to count. A distressing number of them can pass the tests and use the canned programs but they don't really understand what they are doing and why. Kmenta's ability to make difficult concepts easy -- so that they can be properly applied -- is an important part of his contribution to econometrics.

I am not happy with the text above, and the text in a few other similar spots, but I hope they can be improved without discarding the essence of the point. Verity (the retired Prof) (talk) 23:47, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]