> More to the point, she said that the statistics used for almost all mainstream economics is flat-out wrong.
As someone who has worked extensively with both PhD statisticians and economists, but practices neither beyond what I've learned via osmosis, I couldn't care less what the statisticians think anymore. They were definitely smart, but completely useless. We had several projects where the economists came up with solutions that measurably and objectively worked to the order of 9 figure changes in the bottom line and reversals of decades-long trends...and they did it using data sets that the statisticians wouldn't even touch due to some religious moral panic from observational data. Statisticians always found some way to object to everything under grounds of being proper in some way or another, and rarely came to the table with anything more useful than "First we need to find some way to create a perfect alternate universe".
Econometrics has very rightly diverged from statistics. Economists do not have the luxury of the theoretical environments that statisticians require but never have to create. And as a social science, they don't have the luxury of measuring outputs of perfectly understood processes, but rather the ever changing output of cultures and personalities guided by 3.5 billion years of evolution. Maybe their ideas offend statisticians, but it's pretty hard to find something that exists in the real world that doesn't offend them, so I'm not concerned.