There's no doubting the smash-hit economics research paper of the summer. It's “Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter?”, a working paper written by Tatu Westling, a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki.
Let's get the conclusions of the article over with first, because there is a serious lesson, somewhere. Westling discovers that national income is correlated with the average length of the erect penis in a country. Specifically, medium-sized erections are correlated with the highest national income (in 1985, as it happens) and small erections are associated with economic growth between 1960 and 1985.
To reach his conclusions, Westling performed a statistical technique that is known in the trade as a “cross-country growth regression”. Beloved of (some) development economists over the past couple of decades, it has been made possible partly by computers. But its deployment depends mostly on the careful cultivation of data sets describing GDP, political system, educational attainment and other variables, for large numbers of countries over many years. You throw the numbers into the computer and see which features of a country's economy are correlated with economic growth. Westling simply added some rather unconventional data.