Economists have been rewarded all too well for fetishing numbers and mathematics. The self-conscious effort within the discipline to turn it into a science (a goal most real scientists would deem to be impossible, given the fickle nature of human behavior), which meant making it more mathematical, has resulted in economists being better paid than […]
Read more...This post first appeared on May 11, 2007 I am beginning to suspect that many are reacting to the overstimulation of the modern world – the accelerating pace of change, data overload, time pressure, work and relationship instability – by turning off their brains. The rise of fundamentalism and the “family values” push, both efforts […]
Read more...If only it was that easy. First sentence: “Pick up a piece of text and start reading and it usually becomes clear pretty quickly whether you’re reading a nonfictional news story or a fictional novel.” They lost me right there. Hat tip to Alea.
Read more...Reader Francois T highlighted a story at Washington Monthly that I recommend highly to readers. It illustrates how the intersection of corporate pursuit of profit and regulatory backfires can produce tidy oligopolies that pursue rent-seeking behavior with impunity. From his e-mail: A well-intentioned move by Congress in 1986, followed by another one in 1996 converted […]
Read more...Readers may know I have perilous little sympathy for Big Pharma. The industry too often wraps itself in the mantle of science, in particular, claiming its needs its high profits and hence high prices to support its research and development efforts. In fact, it spends more on marketing than on R&D (and perilous few industries […]
Read more...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...