A long standing pet peeve is how the use of figures has been fetishized in political discourse and in our society generally, to the point where many people too easily swayed by argument that invoke data (I discussed this phenomenon at length in the business context in a 2006 article for the Conference Board Review, […]
Read more...How climate change denialists have opened up a new front in their attacks on climate science.
Read more...What’s at stake: Rather than being unified by the application of the common behavioral model of the rational agent, economists increasingly recognize themselves in the careful application of a common empirical toolkit used to tease out causal relationships, creating a premium for papers that mix a clever identification strategy with access to new data.
Read more...Lambert here: For people who like to “connect the dots,” there is actually a mathematically grounded discipline that studies such networks (or graphs) formally.
Read more...Debunking the idea that genetically modified food has been proven to be safe.
Read more...If you’ve read The Men Who Stare at Goats, you already know that the defense establishment has a peculiar fondness for funding quackery. But this is still a doozy.
Read more...Yves here. I’m using this post as an object lesson in what is right and wrong with a lot of economics research to help readers look at research reports and academic studies more critically. That often happens with post VoxEU articles; they have some, or even a lot, of interesting data and analysis, but there’s often some nails-on-the-chalkboard remarks or a bias in how the authors have approached the topic. Readers, needless to say, generally pounce on these shortcomings.
Here, the authors take up a legitimate topic: are surveys on wellbeing asking the right questions?
Read more...You can’t talk about whether economics is a science without getting clear on what you mean by “science”.
Read more...Mainstream economics today can be made to say anything. But in being able to do this it says nothing.
Read more...A new Wall Street Journal story probes the frequency and casualness with which Facebook ran experiments with the explicit aim of manipulating users’ emotions. Some commentators pooh poohed the concern about the study, saying that companies try influencing customers all the time. But the difference here is that manipulation usually takes place in a selling context, where the aims of the vendor, to persuade you to buy their product, are clear. Here, the study exposed initially, that of skewing the mix of articles in nearly 700,000 Facebook subscribers’ news feeds, was done in a context where participants would have no reason to question the information they were being given.
While the controversial emotions study may have been Facebook’s most questionable study, it is the tip of an experimentation iceberg.
Read more...An urgent warning from PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
Read more...In the context of such progress, it is remarkable that even the most successful scientists and most promising trainees are increasingly pessimistic about the future of their chosen career. Based on extensive observations and discussions, we believe that these concerns are justified and that the biomedical research enterprise in the United States is on an unsustainable path.
Climate scientists are understating their findings to a significant degree. “Least drama” might be too kind a characterization. “Self censorship” might be closer to the mark.
Read more...Varoufakis spoke with Senior Editor Peter Suderman about what he learned as a video game economist, the failings of his chosen academic profession, and how computer games and virtual online worlds might be the future of macroeconomics.
Read more...Economists flunk one of their own tests, and that says a lot about what “economics” really is about.
Read more...From a reader: “two eminent professors with decades of serious work have been dumped unceremoniously by Columbia because they could no longer bring in the grant millions for the university business to extract rent from. This is Ivy-league neoliberalism at its worst thanks to the spineless Democrats/Obama White House allowing government science funding to get pummeled while Bush’s tax cuts are preserved. “
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