By Wallace C. Turbrville, the former CEO of VMAC LLC who writes at New Deal 2.0 In the 1930s, a great many Southerners had no access to electricity. The Roosevelt administration perceived an enormous opportunity to restructure the region’s economy. By building facilities to bring power to the rural South, jobs would be created from […]
Read more...One of the odd things I observe is the way some posts or issues regularly elicit heated reactions. For instance, early in the days of euro wobbliness, some readers in Europe would go a bit off the deep end at the suggestion that the Eurozone has serious structural weaknesses. It wasn’t so much that these […]
Read more...By Mirco Tonin and Michael Vlassopoulos, lecturers in economics at the University of Southampton; cross posted from VoxEU Aside by Yves; I have very mixed feelings about publishing this article. First, any study that reaches men v. women generalizations has to be viewed with a lot of skepticism. For groups as large as men and […]
Read more...It isn’t hard to see that the lack of decent information about how serious the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is is almost certainly due to obfuscation on the part of BP. The puzzling part is how BP can fantasize that it ultimately gains from this conduct, and why the Obama Administration tolerates it. The frustration […]
Read more...We’ve followed the story of the slow but increasing and badly needed pushback against Monsanto’s predatory business practices, which force farmers to buy Monsanto seed annually, rather than re-use it. Worse, Monsanto seed has been genetically engineered so as to require the use of Monsanto herbicides and fertilizers. And with (until recently) the seeds patent […]
Read more...One of my friends is a biomedical engineer who gave up doing science because it involved too much drawing of lines through scatter diagrams to claim the existence of relationships in order to keep the grant money coming in. She got a law degree, and worked for the National Institutes of Health, Big Pharma, a […]
Read more...By George Washington of Washington’s Blog. As I have repeatedly noted, mainstream economists and financial advisors have been using faulty and unrealistic models for years. See this, this, this, this, this and this. And I have pointed out numerous times that economists and advisors have a financial incentive to use faulty models. For example, I […]
Read more...Readers may recall a 2008 study that found a link between testosterone levels and same-day trading performance. A typical summary: John Coates and Joe Herbert from the University of Cambridge shadowed 17 male traders over 8 working days as they went about their business in a mid-sized City of London trading floor (the City is […]
Read more...By George Washington of Washington’s Blog. Investors are basically rational, right? In fact, as many studies have demonstrated, the answer is no. But instead of wading through all of the investment psychology research, let’s look at research into people’s basic reasoning abilities. Bear with me for a minute. A study in an area unrelated to […]
Read more...A fascinating and somewhat disturbing article at the New York Review of Books by Jerome Groopman looks at what counts for progress in medical diagnosis and finds it to be more of a mixed bag than most readers would assume. This won’t come as much of a surprise to those who know a bit about […]
Read more...I have to admit, I have a weakness for the intersection of the daft and science: Male readers will no doubt assume that this means the original owner of the gas mask bra must strip in the case of emergency, and that that the real point of this exercise. But the bra was designed by […]
Read more...Conspiracy theorists will have to wait until the article described in Inside Science is published to determine whether it delivers on its claims. It purports to analyze stock holding across 48 countries and alleges they are held in very few hands. But the work was done by physicists, which means they may not have understood […]
Read more...Submitted by Richard Alford, a former economist at the New York Fed. Since them, he has worked in the financial industry as a trading floor economist and strategist on both the sell side and the buy side. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our model, but in ourselves–apologies to W Shakespeare The economics profession […]
Read more...Submitted by Richard Smith: This is the Black Swan gospel according to Triana. Taleb endorses it in a characteristically incendiary and intemperate foreword. He does come out all guns blazing, and you just have to go with that. Or chuck a glass of water over him, if he’s in range, I suppose. A quick recap […]
Read more...Nassim Nicholas Taleb gave a presentation in New York yesterday which hews closely to a recent piece of his, although his talk did include some additional interesting charts and anecdotes. The article is worthwhile, and worth your attention, but let me highlight the two things I found most interesting. First was his “fourth quadrant” construct. […]
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