Book review of “Observation and Experiment: An Introduction to Causal Inference” by Paul R. Rosenbaum

The economist Paul Samuelson said, “My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.” Paul Rosenbaum brings this perspective to causal inference in his new book Observation and Experiment: An Introduction to Causal Inference (Harvard University Press, 2017). The book is a luminous presentation of concepts and strategies for causal inference with a minimum of technical material. An example of how Rosenbaum explains causal inference in a literary way is his use of a passage from Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” to illuminate how causal questions involve comparing potential outcomes under two or more treatments where we can only see one potential outcome: