The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (Penguin Science)

by Judea Pearl

The fates of path analysis in economics and sociology followed different trajectories, each leading to a betrayal of Wright’s ideas. Sociologists renamed path analysis as structural equation modeling (SEM), embraced diagrams, and used them extensively until 1970, when a computer package called LISREL automated the calculation of path coefficients (in some cases). Wright would have predicted what followed: path analysis turned into a rote method, and researchers became software users with little interest in what was going on under the hood. In the late 1980s, a public challenge (by statistician David Freedman) to explain the assumptions behind SEM went unanswered, and some leading SEM experts even disavowed that SEMs had anything to do with causality.