In the first volume of his investigations into business cycles commissioned by the League of Nations, entitled Statistical Testing of Business Cycle Theories, published in 1939, Tinbergen exonerates the statistician and econometrician from his responsibility and explains:
The part which the statistician can play in this process of analysis must not be misunderstood. The theories which he submits to examination are handed over to him by the economist, and with the economist the responsibility for them must remain; for no statistical test can prove a theory to be correct.
While classical and Austrian economists would agree that an economic theory cannot be proven correct empirically, they would not as easily let the statistician off the hook. Indeed, the econometrician and statistician have some responsibility for the economic theories that come to be accepted, especially if one holds, as Tinbergen does, that those theories can be proven “incorrect, or at least incomplete, by showing that it does not cover a particular set of facts.”
This is an odd claim, since practically any theory is incomplete, but this does not mean that it is incorrect. Obviously there remains a twofold danger: A wrong theory might not be proven wrong, although it could be done in principle, and a true theory might be “proven wrong” mistakenly, because it is incomplete as it does not account for some particular set of facts. The econometrician would of course be responsible for these errors.
