Horace Secrist (October 9, 1881 – March 5, 1943) was an American statistician and economist, a professor and the director of the Bureau of Economic Research at Northwestern University.
Secrist was born in Farmington, Utah, and received his education at Brigham Young College, Brigham Young University, and the University of Wisconsin,[1][2][3] where he earned a bachelor's degree in economics in 1907[4] and a PhD in 1911 with a dissertation titled "An Economic Analysis of the Constitutional Restrictions Upon Public Indebtedness in the United States".
[1] He died at 61 following an operation in Evanston, Illinois, from the effects of a long-term disability.
[7][8][12][13] Mathematical statistician Harold Hotelling pointed out in a review, and in a subsequent rebuttal of Secrist's response, that this argument constituted a misunderstanding of regression to the mean, which ensured the observed effect given the method of grouping of the observed results that Secrist had used.
[7][8][14][15][16][17] Secrist stated in his preface that in addition to exhaustive testing of his results on different areas of business, he had asked 38 American and European statisticians and economists to review them.