Thomas Sowell on Checking Citations

This is from Thomas Sowell's excellent autobiography Man of Letters:

[M]y mentor in economics, the late Nobel Laureate George Stigler, once suggested that anyone who spent an afternoon in a library checking up on footnote citations was likely to find the experience disillusioning. Years later, when I had occasion to follow the trail of a footnote on a familiar proposition in labor economics, I found that the evidence for it collapsed like a house of cards. My wife, an attorney, says that she has similar experiences when following up on citations in court cases.

 I've had similar experiences. Either the citation backing some claim is from an extremely weak paper, or perhaps the cited paper doesn't at all support the claim.

Man of Letters is great. It's literally a collection of letters he's written to people over the decades. His narrative autobiography, A Personal Odyssey, is also excellent.
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I'll try to do more posts like this. I have a lot of highlighted pages in my Kindle books and even physical books. I might as well share the things I've found interesting.