Gore vs. Unabomber
Can you tell who is who on this test? Now admittedly there is sample bias (I’m sure they had to cherry pick the Unabomber’s saner moments). But I scored only 25%!javascript:void(0)
Read more...Category Archives: Politics
"Political Compass" Test
More test fun. Dani Rodrik pointed to this test (which he found via Greg Mankiw). The test measures your views on the right/left and authoritarian/libertarian axes. The results section plots where you stand and you can see where you stand relative to contemporary and historical figures. The contemporary grid below:Full disclosure: I’m located pretty close […]
Read more...Foreclosure Stats: Pick a Number, Any Number
We’ve noted more than once that quite a few government statistics near and dear to analysts and investors, such as GDP, inflation, and employment growth, are pretty iffy. So you don’t think we are unfairly singling out the government, some measures produced by the private sector are also questionable. A prime example is foreclosure statistics, […]
Read more...The Anthropology of the Econ
A few days ago, Chris Hayes’ article in The Nation, “Hip Heterodoxy,” set off a huge chatter among economics blogs raising the question of heterodoxy in the profession (which by all counts is very much in retreat). The article below, “Life Among the Econ,” by Axel Leijonhufvud on the culture and ritual of the Econ, […]
Read more...Evidence that Employment Stats Are "Wildly" Overstated
Barry Ritholtz via Seeking Alpha gives yet another example of a disheartening trend, namely, that government-issued statistics that investors, economists, and businesses for analytical and planning purposes are increasingly dubious. The case in point is the employment statistics. While the widely cited Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly employment report has showed tepid to reasonable employment […]
Read more..."How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic"
This is a great post on Gristmill (courtesy Brad DeLong): How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic Below is a complete listing of the articles in “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments […]
Read more...Larry Summers: "Practical Steps to Climate Control"
Larry Summers keeps getting better and better as an op-ed writer. His current article in the Financial Times lays out a series of practical recommendations on what to do about climate change. He focuses on the problem of the developing world, since they will account for 75% of the increase in greenhouse gases, and as […]
Read more...Hobsbawm on the Future, or More Accurately, Lack Thereof, of Empires
If by some bizarre happenstance you do not know who Eric Hobsbawm is, it is never too late to find out. The Guardian’s website reported on a recent lecture he made on the declining role of empires. It’s a testament to the stature of the 89 year old Marxist historian that he was invited to […]
Read more...Top 25 Censored Stories
To clarify: this list of “censored,” meaning seriously underreported, articles is for 2007 and covers stories from roughly July 2005 through June 2006. I call you attention to it primarily because it’s important, but secondarily, because we actually discussed a few on this blog (they appear to continue to be underreported), despite the fact that […]
Read more..."US Defies Kabul on Destroying Opium Crop"
This was the headline of the lead story in the weekend edition of the Financial Times, and oddly, it appears to have been picked up in no other news organ tracked by Google News. Now even though other advanced countries have drug problems too, the US is the only one that thinks it can fly […]
Read more...Income Inequality’s False Culprits
Kash Mansouri at The Street Light has an excellent post, “Income Inequality, International Comparisons,” which goes a long way towards debunking the myth that income inequality is the result of education, or technology, or globalization. Note how the debate over inequality has evolved. We’ve (largely) gone from the denial phase to the “we have to […]
Read more...Stiglitz: China Holds the Better Cards if Things Get Ugly
Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz can be blunt. In an interview with MarketWatch, he says that our dependence on Chinese capital puts us in a not-so-great bargaining position. He also pointed out in Congressional testimony that the Chinese have no reason to open their financial markets since they don’t need capital. And our focus […]
Read more...China Negotiations: Paulson Coming Up Empty-Handed?
We predicted, given China’s blistering response to America’s imposition of countervailing duties on coated paper manufacturers (a small amount of goods, but a big shot across the bow) and its aggressive posture in the negotiation of the language of the third IPCC report, that Paulson’s efforts to obtain trade concessions and a revaluation of the […]
Read more...Interpretation of Bernanke Speech on Subprimes
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has made an effort to be more transparent than his prececessor Alan Greenspan, but even Bernanke can be improved by translation. From Calculated Risk: Remarks by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke: The Subprime Mortgage Market The recent sharp increases in subprime mortgage loan delinquencies and in the number of homes entering foreclosure […]
Read more...More on Fictitious Inflation Stats
One of Barry Rithotlz’s themes has been the idea of “inflation ex-inflation,” meaning the BLS’s predilection to define core inflation in such a way so as to exclude any item, like energy, whose price just might happen to be going up. We’ve noted a more general decline in the accuracy of government-generated economic statistics, particularly […]
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