History does not normally provide us a series of controlled scientific experiments, in which everything is held constant except the variable of interest. On the contrary, there are many different factors at work in historical processes, and there are often no simple criteria for determining which factor(s) are responsible for a given event. As is often remarked, one can "prove" anything from statistics—and historical statistics are particularly notorious in this regard, because they can typically be interpreted to support almost any viewpoint. In our praxeological analyses, we shall discover numerous situations in which some cause has both short-term and long-term effects. For example, Cause A may lead to Effect B in its early stages, as well as Effect C later (see below, left). If one attempted to infer directly from history without the benefit of praxeological understanding, one might easily and mistakenly conclude that Effect C was caused by B rather than A (below, right). This latter kind of superficial analysis, unfortunately, is encountered quite frequently.
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Effect B 
