Category Archives: Dubious statistics

Former Health Insurance Executive Debunks Trump Attacks on Single Payer

Even with health care polling as the top issue with voters, Trump is one of the loudest, but far from the only, politician out to demonize single payer.

Mortality Risk, Valuing Lives, and the Impact on Health Care

The way economists think about the value of lives influences health care policy, and some of their ideas may be producing bad outcomes.

Mischaracterizing HAMP and Principal Reduction: A Regression Discontinuity Test Error

Explaining a fundamental error in a widely-touted paper on HAMP modifications.

What’s the Problem with Financialization?

Some of the analytical sleights of hand used to promote the ideology of financializatation.

“Fatally Flawed” Paper on HAMP Mortgage Program Gets Program Design Backwards, Botches Regression Analysis, Yielding Propagandistic Findings

How a new paper on HAMP manages, by not understanding the program. to whitewash it as well as promote financialization.

Estimating the Impact of Climate Change Costs on Growth: Is Degrowth Already Here?

Some back of the envelope estimates show that the economic cost of climate change is already cutting into growth in a big way….and it will only get much worse.

FICO Gets Creative With Credit Scores to Facilitate Getting More Americans in Debt

FICO is evil.

Brexit Derivatives Risk: Did the City Overplay Its £38 Trillion Hand?

Novating UK derivatives contracts entered into by EU clearinghouse members is a ginormous mess, particularly in a Brexit crashout. But how serious a mess?

Inequality Represents a Wasted Opportunity for Poverty Reduction

If poverty is falling, why you should still care about what happens to inequality.

Disaster Profiteers vs. the People of Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico shows how distress and grifting too often go hand in hand.

Steve Keen: How Economics Became a Cult

Steve Keen, author of Debunking Economics and one of the few economists to foresee the crisis, explains what is wrong with the discipline.

The Fracking Industry’s Water Nightmare: Injection Wells Damage Production Wells, Rising Disposal Costs Will Increase Industry Losses

The fracking industry’s wastewater disposal is an unrecognized production and economic problem that is going from bad to worse.

Why Dodd-Frank Is a Protection Racket for Banks

How Dodd-Frank left banks’ massive lending and safety-net subsidies intact.

The Bank of International Settlement’s Claudio Borio, Who Warned About the Crisis, Says the World Economy Is About to Get Very Sick

BIS chief economist Claudio Borio warns that central bankers have overdone the liquidity party, and investors are not being paid enough to take ris