The life of a number-crunching analyst
I just discovered this Freakonomics blog post by Justin Wolfers, thanks to his post about it on Google+. The post includes some brilliant visualizations of the life of a number-crunching analyst by Elisabeth Fosslien. Enjoy it here: http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/02/29/the-life-of-the-number-crunching-analyst/
The depressing assessment of experts on the latest “rescue package” for Greece
This depressed me yesterday. Read it and be depressed yourself today. From Ezra Klein's Wonkblog on washingtonpost.com:
Seminar on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years – Introduction
Ah, the sudden appearance of all the essays on Graeber's book is now explained. One more worth reading, and setting the stage for the follow-ups on Crooked Timber, by Christ Bertram.
Seminar on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years – Introduction:
(Via Crooked Timber)
The unmourned death of the double coincidence
Yet more on Graeber's book, this time from John Quiggin.
The unmourned death of the double coincidence:
Graeber shows, convincingly enough for me, that the story conventionally told by economists, in which money emerges as a replacement for barter systems, is nonsense. In fact, as he notes this point has been made by anthropologists many times and ignored just as often. Thanks to the marvels of auto-googling, I’ve been aware for some time that my namesake, Alison Hingston Quiggin gave the definitive demonstration long ago in her ‘Survey of Primitive Money’. Graeber sharpens the point by arguing that the real source of money is as a way of specifying debts.
(Via Crooked Timber)
The world economy is not a tribute system
Having just posted about DeLong and Rossman on Graeber's book, here is another essay on the topic, from Crooked Timber. Choice excerpt follows; I recommend reading the whole thing.
The world economy is not a tribute system:
In short – if there is evidence to support Graeber’s rather sweeping claims about the nature of the global economic system, he doesn’t provide it to the reader. Perhaps this evidence is buried in his sources somewhere. Perhaps not. But when one self-consciously makes grand claims that everyone else is wrong, one should have good evidence, and be prepared to produce it up front. Graeber, unless he’s keeping it very close to his chest indeed, has no evidence at all. This doesn’t seem to me to live up to the (admittedly high) standard that Graeber sets for himself.
(Via Crooked Timber)
How the poor debtors still sell their daughters, How in the drought men still grow fat « Code and Culture
Brad DeLong points to this lengthy review of David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years". I am in the process of reading Graeber's book in bits and pieces in between my, rather pressing currently, stretches of work and the review is coming at the right time for me. Of particular interest is the example about Apple Inc. that points out that Graeber's claims about facts cannot always be trusted. DeLong has a long blog post on this. The original essay by Gabriel Rossman is here:
(Via codeandculture.wordpress.com)
Italy and Greece – it’s not fiscal
Mark Crosby makes a very good point and makes it well.
Italy and Greece – it’s not fiscal:
In Europe there are two responses to these developments. Globalisation can either be rejected or be embraced. Policies such as making it hard to shut down businesses support anti-globalisation, since globalisation is going to require firms and people to be adaptable and nimble. It is unfortunate that this might mean that the historical jewelry businesses in Italy have a future far less grand than the past. However, it is simply a fact that there is really no way to avoid this. Italians (and Greeks and others) must become more nimble and adaptable. Embracing globalisation means accepting that the future will be very different to the present and the past. It requires workers to be well educated, flexible, and talented. This is the real challenge for Greece and Italy.
(Via Core Economics)
The US News College Rankings Scam
Henry on Crooked Timber (I just had to repost the whole thing):
The US News College Rankings Scam:
Stephen Budiansky, via Cosma Shalizi’s Pinboard feed.
Back in ancient times when I worked at esteemed weekly newsmagazine U.S. News & World Report, I always loathed the annual college rankings report. Like all cash cows, however, the college guide was a sacred cow, so I just shut up about its obvious statistical absurdities and inherent mendacity. As a lesson in the evils of our times, it is perhaps inevitable that the college guide is now the only thing left of U.S. News.
A story in today’s New York Times reports that Claremont McKenna college has now been caught red handed submitting phony data to the college guide to boost its rankings. But the real scandal, as usual, is not the occasional flagrant instance of outright dishonesty but the routine corruption that is shot through the whole thing. … To increase selectivity (one of the statistics that go into U.S. News’s secret mumbo-jumbo formula to produce an overall ranking), many colleges deliberately encourage applications from students who don’t have a prayer of getting in. To increase average SAT scores, colleges offer huge scholarships to un-needy but high scoring applicants to lure them to attend their institution. (The Times story mentioned that other colleges have been offering payments to admitted students to retake the test to increase the school average.)
… One of my favorite bits of absurdity was what a friend on the faculty at Case Law School told me they were doing a few years ago: because one of the U.S. News data points was the percentage of graduates employed in their field, the law school simply hired any recent graduate who could not get a job at a law firm and put him to work in the library. Their other tactic was pure genius: the law school hired as adjunct professors local alumni who already had lucrative careers (thereby increasing the faculty-student ratio, a key U.S. News statistic used in determining ranking), paid them exorbitant salaries they did not need (thereby increasing average faculty salary, another U.S. News data point), then made it understood that since they did not really need all that money they were expected to donate it all back to the school (thereby increasing the alumni giving rate, another U.S. News data point): three birds with one stone! (I gather the new Case law dean has put an end to these shenanigans.)
Worth reading the whole thing (even though Budiansky’s site has one of those annoying and anti-social ‘if you cut and paste text from my site, you will get unasked for cruft about how you ought to click on the original link added to your pasted text’ installations).
(Via Crooked Timber)
Give Me Placebos Or Give Me Death
Counterintuitive and so very interesting.
Give Me Placebos Or Give Me Death:
Neuroskeptic has the story, and it appears not to be simply because healthy people are also more responsible, they controlled for measures of health.
(Via Cheap Talk)