Following up on this post by Noah Smith on economics in science fiction, Mark Palko writes on economics in crime fiction. Just as almost all science fiction is ultimately about politics, one could say that just about all crime fiction is about economics. But if I had to pick one crime novelist with an economics [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Economics category.
The recursion of pop-econ
Dave Berri posted the following at the Freakonomics blog: The “best” picture of 2012 was Argo. At least that’s the film that won the Oscar for best picture. According to the Oscars, the decision to give this award to Argo was made by the nearly 6,000 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts [...]
Is Felix Salmon wrong on free TV?
Mark Palko writes: Salmon is dismissive of the claim that there are fifty million over-the-air television viewers: The 50 million number, by the way, should not be considered particularly reliable: it’s Aereo’s guess as to the number of people who ever watch free-to-air TV, even if they mainly watch cable or satellite. (Maybe they have [...]
Against optimism about social science
Social science research has been getting pretty bad press recently, what with the Excel buccaneers who didn’t know how to handle data with different numbers of observations per country, and the psychologist who published dozens of papers based on fabricated data, and the Evilicious guy who wouldn’t let people review his data tapes, etc etc. [...]
7 ways to separate errors from statistics
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have been inspired by the recent Reinhardt and Rogoff debacle to list “six ways to separate lies from statistics” in economics research: 1. “Focus on how robust a finding is, meaning that different ways of looking at the evidence point to the same conclusion.” 2. Don’t confuse statistical with practical [...]
The blogroll
I encourage you to check out our linked blogs. Here’s what they’re all about: Cognitive and Behavioral Science BPS Research Digest: I haven’t been following this one recently, but it has lots of good links, I should probably check it more often. There are a couple things that bother me, though. The blog is sponsored [...]
Memo to Reinhart and Rogoff: I think it’s best to admit your errors and go on from there
Jeff Ratto points me to this news article by Dean Baker reporting the work of three economists, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin, who found errors in a much-cited article by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff analyzing historical statistics of economic growth and public debt. Mike Konczal provides a clear summary; that’s where I [...]
How effective are football coaches?
Dave Berri writes: A recent study published in the Social Science Quarterly suggests that these moves may not lead to the happiness the fans envision (HT: the Sports Economist). E. Scott Adler, Michael J. Berry, and David Doherty looked at coaching changes from 1997 to 2010. What they found should give pause to people who [...]
In which I disagree with John Maynard Keynes
In his review in 1938 of Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of Statistical Data, by H. Gray Funkhauser, for The Economic Journal, the great economist writes: Perhaps the most striking outcome of Mr. Funkhouser’s researches is the fact of the very slow progress which graphical methods made until quite recently. . . . In [...]
The disappearing or non-disappearing middle class
Despite the title, this post is mostly not about economics or even politics but rather about the central role of comparisons in statistics and statistical graphics. It started when someone pointed me to this article in which Megan McArdle points out the misleadingness of a graph that seems to show a bimodal income distribution but [...]
Everyone’s trading bias for variance at some point, it’s just done at different places in the analyses
Some things I respect When it comes to meta-models of statistics, here are two philosophies that I respect: 1. (My) Bayesian approach, which I associate with E. T. Jaynes, in which you construct models with strong assumptions, ride your models hard, check their fit to data, and then scrap them and improve them as necessary. [...]
Life in the C-suite: An graph that is both ugly and bad, and an unrelated story
Jemes Keirstead sends along this infographic: He hates it: First we’ve got an hourglass metaphor wrecked by the fact that “now” (i.e. the pinch point in the glass) is actually 3-5 years in the future and the past sand includes “up to three years” in the future. Then there are the percentages which are appear [...]
Krugman sets the bar too high
If being cantankerous and potty-mouthed is a bad thing, I’m in big trouble!
If a lottery is encouraging addictive gambling, don’t expand it!
This story from Vivian Yee seems just horrible to me. First the background: Pronto Lotto’s real business takes place in the carpeted, hushed area where its most devoted customers watch video screens from a scattering of tall silver tables, hour after hour, day after day. The players — mostly men, about a dozen at any [...]
The grasshopper wins, and Greg Mankiw’s grandmother would be “shocked and appalled” all over again
Given Grandma Mankiw’s hypothetical distaste for Sonia Sotomayor’s spending habits (recall that Grandma “would have been shocked and appalled” by the judge’s lack of savings), I expect she (the grandmother) would be even more irritated by the success of Sotomayor’s recent book: Now that Sotomayor has a ton of money coming in, in addition to [...]
A must-read paper on statistical analysis of experimental data
Russ Lyons points to an excellent article on statistical experimentation by Ron Kohavi, Alex Deng, Brian Frasca, Roger Longbotham, Toby Walker, Ya Xu, a group of software engineers (I presume) at Microsoft. Kohavi et al. write: Online controlled experiments are often utilized to make data-driven decisions at Amazon, Microsoft . . . deployment and mining [...]
Psychology can be improved by adding some economics
On this blog I’ve occasionally written about the problems that arise when economists act as amateur psychologists. But the problem can go the other way, too. For example, consider this blog by Berit Brogaard and Kristian Marlow (link from Abbas Raza). Brogaard and Marlow give several amusing stories about ripoffs (a restaurant that scams customers [...]
Thomas Hobbes would be spinning in his grave
A few years ago I watched a bunch of Speed Racer cartoons with Phil in a movie theater in the early 90s. These were low-budget Japanese cartoons from the 60s that we loved as kids. From my adult perspective, the best parts were during the characters’ long drives, where you could see Japanese industrial scenes [...]
Glenn Hubbard and I were on opposite sides of a court case and I didn’t even know it!
Matt Taibbi writes: Glenn Hubbard, Leading Academic and Mitt Romney Advisor, Took $1200 an Hour to Be Countrywide’s Expert Witness . . . Hidden among the reams of material recently filed in connection with the lawsuit of monoline insurer MBIA against Bank of America and Countrywide is a deposition of none other than Columbia University’s [...]
The spam just gets weirder and weirder
In the inbox today, under the header, “Hidden Costs behind Milk & Dairy Consumption (video)”: Hey Professor Gelman, Our site’s production team recently released a short video uncovering the local and global impact that milk has on our lives. After spending some time on your posts, I noticed you talked about dairy products and milk [...]
The latest in economics exceptionalism
Joseph Delaney writes: Is it fair to quote the definition of economics from the blurb for a book? If so, consider this definition in the blurb for Emily Oster’s new book: When Oster was expecting her first child, she felt powerless to make the right decisions for her pregnancy. How doctors think and what patients [...]
Economists argue about Bayes
Robert Bell pointed me to this post by Brad De Long on Bayesian statistics, and then I also noticed this from Noah Smith, who wrote: My impression is that although the Bayesian/Frequentist debate is interesting and intellectually fun, there’s really not much “there” there… despite being so-hip-right-now, Bayesian is not the Statistical Jesus. I’m happy [...]
That claim that students whose parents pay for more of college get worse grades
Theodore Vasiloudis writes: I came upon this article by Laura Hamilton, an assistant professor in the University of California at Merced, that claims that “The more money that parents provide for higher education, the lower the grades their children earn.” I can’t help but feel that there something wrong with the basis of the study [...]
Prior Selection for Vector Autoregressions
Brendan Nyhan sends along this paper by Domenico Giannone, Michele Lenza, and Giorgio Primiceri: Vector autoregressions are flexible time series models that can capture complex dynamic interrelationships among macroeconomic variables. However, their dense parameterization leads to unstable inference and inaccurate out-of-sample forecasts, particularly for models with many variables. A solution to this problem is to [...]
They’d rather be rigorous than right
Following up on my post responding to his question about that controversial claim that high genetic diversity, or low genetic diversity, is bad for the economy, Kyle Peyton writes: I’m happy to see you’ve articulated similar gripes I had w/ the piece, which makes me feel like I’m not crazy. I remember discussing this with [...]