Statisticians and Economists Look at Each Other
But I'm not a supervising technician! I'm a technical supervisor!
Social Science Statistics Blog: Is There a Statistics/Economics Divide?: OK, so now that I have a job, I feel like I can stick my foot in something smelly to see what happens. When I was on the market this past year, I was often asked about the difference (lawyers are always careful to ask about "the difference, if any") between a degree in statistics and a degree in something more "traditional"... particular interest in the difference between statistics and economics/econometrics. I had a certain amount of trouble answering the question.... [T]he statistical version of things... is that statisticians invent data analysis techniques and methods that, after ten to twenty-five to forty years, filter into or are reinvented by other fields....
So what is the difference between an empirical, data-centered economist and an applied statistician?... [E]conomists tend to focus more on parameter estimation, asymptotics, unbiasedness, and paper-and-pencil solutions to problems (which can then be implemented via canned software like STATA), whereas applied statisticians are leaning more towards imputation and predictive inference, Bayesian thinking, and computational solutions to problems (which require programming in packages such as R)...
