The Future of Ecological Inference Research: A Reply to Freedman et Al.

I appreciate the editor’s invitation to reply to Freedman et al.’s (1998) review of “A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data” (Princeton University Press.) I welcome this scholarly critique and JASA’s decision to publish in this field. Ecological inference is a large and very important area for applications that is especially rich with open statistical questions. I hope this discussion stimulates much new scholarship. Freedman et al. raise several interesting issues, but also misrepresent or misunderstand the prior literature, my approach, and their own empirical analyses, and compound the problem, by refusing requests from me and the editor to make their data and software available for this note. Some clarification is thus in order.