Milton Friedman has died

Milton Friedman who won the 1976 Nobel prize for economics, has died. Whilst he is most well known as an economist (The Guardian described him as Margaret Thatcher's monetarist guru) , he was also developed the Friedman test, which is a non-parametric equivalent of a one-way ANOVA. I mention this because it reminds us that the people that developed statistical tests didn't do it in a vacuum - they did it because they were researchers, and had a problem to solve, in economics (as here) or in some other substantive field. As I've said before, statistical tests aren't, therefore, about statistics, they are about psychology, or sociology, or health, or economics. Textbooks that appear to be about statistics are not really about statistics - they are about stuff that matters.