I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that they talked to absolutely no one local (Pakistani or Muslim) before they published this. The threshold before people pay zakat is like $300 so fluctuations in silver price has very low effect. Do you think someone with $300 in savings is giving donations?<p>Government only deducts the zakat from the checking account. I am from Pakistan and very few people(basically salaried employees for corps/govt which is a very small portion of population) have bank accounts and the main use is to just withdraw the salary immediately every month. People who are on the threshold of $300 lifetime savings have almost negligible chance of owning a bank account.So I am going to call BS on this paper. There are so many problems with the data in this paper that I can't even. Also quite racist to say factually that a lot of charity money goes to fund terrorist attacks and the proof for this is nada. They are using metrics for terrorist attacks in Pakistan (most of which used to happen indiscriminately in public places in metros where most people with bank accounts live). Do you really think that people living in metros are bankrolling indiscriminate terrorist attacks against themselves?
Correlation is not causality!<p>Also,...<p>Over-fitting data.<p>My god these things drive me crazy.<p>If it’s real, then he should be able to answer this question posted on Twitter by Gregory Allen Perry ( @gallenperry ):<p><i>What is the payout on a $1000 bet that a terrorist attack in will occur in Kashmir in the month of February with no less than 20 victims killed if the price of silver drops by 5% immediately prior to Pakistani tax assessment in the year before?</i><p>If he can’t answer a question at least somewhat in the same vein as that, then this is crap. If he can (within any reasonable degree of confidence), then I’m wrong.
Reminds me of these charts: <a href="https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations" rel="nofollow">https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations</a>
Link to the actual paper<p><a href="https://t.co/s0NZ1PcpQf" rel="nofollow">https://t.co/s0NZ1PcpQf</a><p>Is it normal for econ papers to use the first person? Super weird to read. His Latex formatting is a mess too. Check out page 37 for a scatter plot of rock solid correlation, lol. Not going to read the full 56 page mess because that's a job for an unpaid reviewer, not an unpaid commentator.<p>That being said, there's a shit ton of easy hidden variables here. Mountains of them. People are going to talk about spurious correlations, which is fine, but there' s a more subtle trick here, the hidden variable.<p>Sunscreen use is correlated with an increase in shark attacks and increase in hot dog sales. Are sharks attracted to sunscreen? Is there a secret ingredient in hot suncreen that makes people eat hot dogs? I can come up with pretty good explanations, that pass a qucik sniff test, all day long.<p>The answer is of course not. More people are simply at the beach. More people --> more collisions with sharks, more hot dogs shoved down gullets.<p>Not familiar enough with the culture of Pakistan to point out the specific variables, but that's the guess.
> predict the probabilities<p>Yeah that's all I needed to read to know that this is BS.<p>On a more serious note, if charities are indeed funding terrorism, you wouldn't have data on them. Especially in Pakistan where keeping data is something only the reputable orgs do.<p>This "paper" is not peer-reviewed and it will never get published. Just a usual case of a smartass thinking they can justify that their correlation means something when in fact it doesn't.
Fluctuations in stork births can predict human births. Sidebar: Did you know that's why storks carry babies in cartoons?<p>"Correlation is not causation."
612 grams of silver is $342 today. Those who have life-savings of $342 in bank or more, get auto-taxed. At this level, we are talking about the un-banked mostly, so they don't have accounts in the first place. In other words, nearly all bank accounts get auto-taxed, so silver price fluctuations do not really affect this.<p>Second, try to calculate the silver price fluctuations, and calculate the ACTUAL dollar amount that becomes disposable to spend. Its peanuts.<p>Finally, this category of people do not give charity. They take charity.
Full paper here: <a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2019/preliminary/paper/A5fDSNfK" rel="nofollow">https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2019/preliminary/paper/A5f...</a>
This seems extremely far-fetched, see for example comment on Twitter pointing out some flaws.<p>Reminds me of that company that revived millions of dollars for their software for finding hidden messages on the internet and somehow predicting terror attacks.