Reader Jack S. sent over this chart (link): The first problem readers encounter with this image is "What is MMI?" I like to think of any presentation as a set of tearout pages. Even if the image is part of...
Reader Jack S. sent over this chart (link): The first problem readers encounter with this image is "What is MMI?" I like to think of any presentation as a set of tearout pages. Even if the image is part of...
Nick C. on Twitter sent us to the following chart of salaries in Major League Soccer. (link) This chart is hosted at Tableau, which is one of the modern visualization software suites. It appears to be a user submission. Alas,...
David Jinkins writes: The objective of this paper is to measure the relative importance of conspicous consumption to Americans and Chinese. To this end, I estimate the parameters of a utility function borrowed from recent theoretical work using American and Chinese data. The main parameter of interest governs the amount that individuals care about peer [...]The post A Structural Comparison of Conspicuous Consumption in China and the United States appeared…
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 [...]The post Crime novels for economists appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social…
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 [...]The post The recursion of pop-econ appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social…
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 [...]The post Is Felix Salmon wrong on free TV? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…
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. [...]The post Against optimism about social science appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and…
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 post 7 ways to separate errors from statistics appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…
The Economist imitates USA Today, but without the whimsy. Joe D. submitted this via Twitter. (link)
