Rock Music, Oil Production and Causation Fallacies

I've been serving a lot of public policy vegetables this week, so here's some economic dessert. There are a lot of graphs out there that claim to prove causation when all they can surely demonstrate is correlation (take these, perhaps). But here's a graph via Gawker that elegantly explains how misleading some of these graphs can be:

The lesson here is not that Pitchfork's editors should get behind "Drill, baby, drill." The lesson is that US oil production has fallen steadily for 40 years, and Rolling Stone's editors are absurdly biased toward songs written between 1965 and 1980.

"I Got You Babe" by Sonny and Cher is number 444 on that list.

I'm just sayin'...

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/11/rock-music-oil-production-and-causation-fallacies/30172/