Stylized Fact

If you read across multiple disciplines, you end up acquiring a lot of jargon. Special terms that defined specifically within the particular field. One of the challenges is that some jargon is actually usefully meaningful and other jargon is purposefully vague. An intentional sleight of hand to circumvent actual missing knowledge.

Much of the jargon you end up understanding through context and sort the wheat from the chaff. However, there are other terms which you brush over, anticipating it will become specific as you read on. And then it doesn't but you don't realize that until you come across the term again weeks or months later when you read on assuming that it will become clear by the end of the article. And then it doesn't again. The cycle can continue a long time before you realize, "I don't have this nailed down" and finally look it up.

Such has been my experience with "Stylized Fact." I think I come across it most in economics but see it sufficiently rarely that I don't have a good sense how common a term it might be in other fields.

My working contextual assumption was that it meant, effectively, a cliche. Which is close but not quite accurate.

From Wikipedia.

In social sciences, especially economics, a stylized fact is a simplified presentation of an empirical finding. A stylized fact is often a broad generalization that summarizes data, which although essentially true may have inaccuracies in the detail.

A prominent example of a stylized fact is: "Education significantly raises lifetime income." Another stylized fact in economics is: "In advanced economies, real GDP growth fluctuates in a recurrent but irregular fashion".

However, scrutiny to detail will often produce counterexamples. In the case given above, holding a PhD may lower lifetime income, because of the years of lost earnings it implies and because many PhD holders enter academia instead of higher-paid fields. Nonetheless, broadly speaking, people with more education tend to earn more, so the above example is true in the sense of a stylized fact.

Stylized Fact is somewhat analogous to a heuristic. Something that is usefully true but not for which there are exceptions which are not understood in detail. Alternatively, and perhaps more skeptically: A stylized fact is a fact believed by all right thinking people without anyone having robustly proven it.

Sparked by reading In Search of Reforms for Growth: New Stylized Facts on Policy and Growth Outcomes by William Easterly. An interesting paper on its own merits but certainly sparked me to finally resolve what constituted a Stylized Fact.