The table below shows clearly that as industrialization waned, household credit increased. My explanation is that this is what Deming predicted. As wealth creation stopped, U. S. citizens, used to ever-increasing standard of living, turned to credit to finance their lifestyle choices.
Single number estimates are virtually always wrong because there is measurement spread and the values observed depend on the measuring method used.
The bad news is that I have been doing a terrible job keeping this up to date. The good news is that I just moved and in the process came across a whole bunch of publications, including many by Deming, that I will proceed to read, comment on and extract what I feel are the [...]
We all operate using a version of what we feel is a reflection of the “way that things are.” What happens when that version is based on variability is, at the end of the day, a prime driver of statistical thinking. My friend Marc Hersch has been doing some interesting writing that raises the issue [...]
I have added a link (on the lower right) to a copy of Deming’s speech to Japanese management given at the Mount Hakone Conference Center in August 1950. Ichiro Ishikawa (Kaoru Ishikawa’s father) estimated that top management from corporations representing 75% of the corporate wealth of Japan were present learned from this speech. So it [...]
