One of the things that was beaten into us during our political science classes was the fact that you could not attribute causation in any human endeavor. There are just too many variables. What we can do is determine how strong one factor is correlated with another. If the correlation is strong then the stat is meaningful. Ultimately, that’s what we’re trying to do with The Value of Things. We want to find meaningful statistics.
Obviously, sometimes we will succeed and sometimes we will fail. Success and failure is also often left up to the eye of the beholder.