Think Economically

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August 14, 2012 • 1:29 pm 0

Video – Introduction to Statistics part 1

So I’m set up for recording video again. I’ve got a new prep this semester: Business Statistics. The videos should combine with the ones I’ve already posted to create a full 2-course sequence in statistics for business applications. My goal is to post one every Tuesday and Thursday. I hope you enjoy! As always, feedback, positive and negative, is welcome.

Today’s video – Intro to Statistics part 1.

Filed under: Stat videos, data, intro, introduction, lecture notes, math, statistics, video, YouTube

August 13, 2012 • 11:55 am 0

Home is … somewhere, right?

There was an interesting sermon this week–one I didn’t expect to like–about real estate and home, and how a life is woven in there somehow. It is complicated, the intermingling between the rapidly shifting economic forces that have untethered us and our traditions; the difficulties in negotiating, or even understanding, how we should live differently with constraints lifted, how to take Polonius’s advice to “neither a borrower nor a lender be” when it seems to make so little sense to miss out on record-low interest rates.

I was reminded of Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, which is a beautiful story.

And it doesn’t make sense. The advice of past generations is not useful, sometimes. And sometimes it is. And picking apart the difference is actually super-difficult.

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Filed under: Uncategorized, blame, economics, goodness, housing, philosophy, politics, religion, sermon, sermons, Unitarian Universalism, UU

July 25, 2012 • 8:51 am 0

Hark! A Vagrant plug, and a link to a sad and touching comic

Kate Beaton is my favorite working comic artist. This one’s a touching story about loss, and small towns.

Filed under: Uncategorized, art, comics, economic determinism, existential alienation, Hark! A Vagrant, Kate Beaton, loss, man those faces just knock you over, sadness, small towns, story, webcomics

July 24, 2012 • 4:51 pm 0

Brief: rich people make more of the money, labor pays more of the taxes

So, via my friend (and rich person supporter extraordinaire) Bob Buschman, Ari Fleischer bloviates nonsensically about the rich being unfairly taxed. Buried in there is the following:

The top 20% in 1979 made 44.9% of the nation’s income and paid 55.3% of all federal taxes. Thirty years later, the top 20% made 50.8% of the nation’s income and their share of federal taxes paid had jumped to 67.9%.

And the top 1%? In 1979, this group earned 8.9% of the nation’s income and paid 14.2% of all federal taxes. In 2009, they earned 13.4% of the nation’s income but their share of the federal tax burden rose to 22.3%.

So the top 20% went from making 44.9% of income to making 50.8% of income, and the top 1%? From 8.9% of income to 13.4% of income. Fleischer’s upset that their share of the tax burden rose faster, but guess what–if they (and by they, I mean we, of course) made 100% of income, they’d pay 100% of the taxes.

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Filed under: Uncategorized, Adam Smith, capital, capitalism, current-events, data, economic policy, economics, egalitarianism, labor, offshore accounts, one percent, Policy, property rights, sweet lord that's a lot of hidden lucre, tax policy, taxation, taxes, thievery

July 23, 2012 • 3:22 pm 0

The real real problem with financial regulatory reform: closing our model

“How come good people do bad things?”

So people are thinking and talking about this and there are two glaring problems in the discussion. First, “the structure of regulation” will never be done, complete, finished–it’s a game we make up as we go along. Second, the question “How come good people do bad things?” is the wrong question.

Jim Surowiecki argues that regulators need to focus more on “preventing malfeasance from happening.” John Kay argues that we need “a structure of regulation” that fixes perverse incentives and makes people–or financial institutions–more trustworthy.

Felix Salmon shoots holes in both of them, basically saying “yeah, good luck with that.” Which I’d like to reinterpret: for real, good luck.

The answer: people do things, and smart people do creative things, and there is no fix–there is managing society, and if everyone does what people do, it’ll never end. There is no regulation to solve it–but we have to put up a dam and pile up the levees or the torrent of human intention will go places we don’t want it.

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Filed under: Uncategorized, analysis, business, current-events, economics, economy, ethics, Felix Salmon, finance, financial regulation, Matt Yglesias, morality

July 11, 2012 • 9:59 am 1

Training your elephant: how to make yourself do what you already promised yourself you would do.

Some of my students have asked me for advice on how to achieve, and as someone who almost failed out of college, then went on to finish a Ph.D., I suppose I’m in a position to provide some advice on the matter. I tried to boil it down for one of them, and the three most important things that I came to were:

Making active decisions about how you spend your time.
Setting long-term goals.
Driving your discount rate down.

These are really important to me. I still feel like the person who almost ruined his life, and I think of the disciplined exercise of these as a bulwark against the loss of everything I hold dear. It’s been a decade since I really behaved badly, but it’s an ever-present fear.

The third one is the least straight-forward, and the first one is the hardest to do in practice, and I was thinking about what stands in the way. Time inconsistency of preferences is closely related to the interface between spending time wisely and your discount rate, and it can throw the whole thing off, though, and so I wanted to talk a little about it.

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Filed under: Uncategorized, cognitive behavioral therapy, discipline, discounting, dual model of mind, dynamic inconsistency, economics, exercise, impulse control, indulgence, Jonathan Haidt, meditation, not actually about training elephants, preferences, procrastination, psychology, rational plans, running, self-help, self-management

July 2, 2012 • 3:01 pm 0

Art, baseball, story and self-reference: post-modernism can’t make you more naked than naked.

So I got into a discussion this weekend about movies and television shows and books, and we were throwing stories around, by which I mean naming and recommending and panning narratives by title, and there wasn’t that much more to it, except that when you’re dropping the references to which the referents are hundreds or thousands of pages or dozens of hours as the final product of thousands of person-hours of writing and directing and costumery and millions of dollars or blood and tears invested, then the mind can reel a bit when you try to wrap your head around it.

by Zaphod

On the face of it, though, it was just a bunch of people talking about the books and movies and TV shows that they like. The idea that one could be entertained or enlightened by the exchange of references seems to be a source of some angst. It need not be a source of guilt. Postmodernism isn’t really going to destroy anything worth caring deeply about after all, except maybe its adherents’ career prospects, eventually. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Uncategorized, again i apologize for the length of this thing, art, baseball, David Foster Wallace, emergent phenomena, fiction, logorrhea, meaning, movies, narrative, nihilism, philosophy, Sheila Heti, story, teleology, television, Totino's Pizza Rolls are terrible and delicious but mostly terrible

June 29, 2012 • 11:11 am 0

Mending walls and reading minds: explicating poetry and finding real human connection with fictional characters

So, as the result of a Facebook conversation that is totally tangential, I just reread and explicated Frost’s “Mending Wall.” I forgot how much I missed poetry. And prose, for that matter, but really just dialogue and subtext and the myriad gaps that are open to interpretation in any scene. It set my mind spinning and I wanted to get some of it down. What I got? Explication, David Foster Wallace, social anxiety, mindblindness, Borat’s cousin, and the flip side of existential loneliness.

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Filed under: Uncategorized, conversation, David Foster Wallace, fiction, good fences make good neighbors, I apologize for the contents herein, literature, logorrhea, maturity, mindblindness, poetry, rabbit holes, relative solitude, social anxiety, subtext, televison

June 27, 2012 • 3:26 pm 0

Minivans, booyah. Search costs, the internets, weak ties, and our used car purchasing experience.

We just bought a used minivan, and it was by far the best car purchasing experience of my life. There was so much to it, so many improvements in the process as a result of technology, that the overall result was really stunning. There is so much really excellent information out there. Stronger “weak ties” lead to broader access to private sellers, while the power of search, through sites like autotrader.com, provides price information across dealerships. It felt like we knew what we were doing.

We ended up with a nice minivan that looks pretty much like the following. This is not ours, but it looks like ours, which is why we need to put a sticker on its feet so we can tell the difference. Check out this sweet ride:

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Filed under: Uncategorized, autotrader, car markets, cars, consumer reports, dealerships, economics, heated seats, Honda, markets, minivan, Odyssey, reliability, used cars, VHS ftw, weak ties, where the party is at

June 25, 2012 • 6:34 am 0

Watching the odds change: Baseball Prospectus’s’s Playoff Odds and the 2012 New York Mets

So, last night, R.A. Dickey was knocked out of his astral plane and the world is a worse place for it (stupid Yankees). The Mets took 1 of 3 against the Yankees, mostly because their bullpen is terrible. I’d link to a facts, but when your bullpen combines to lose 17 games before July, I lose the will to finish sentences.

But I don’t like bad news; I like good news, because of confirmation bias and a slew of other behavioral problems I have. And so, I’d like to draw your attention to Baseball Prospectus’ Playoff Odds Report. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Uncategorized, baseball, baseball odds, Baseball Prospectus, fandom, Mets, New York Mets, playoffs, postseason, probability

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Think Economically

Video – Introduction to Statistics part 1

Home is … somewhere, right?

Hark! A Vagrant plug, and a link to a sad and touching comic

Brief: rich people make more of the money, labor pays more of the taxes

The real real problem with financial regulatory reform: closing our model

Training your elephant: how to make yourself do what you already promised yourself you would do.

Art, baseball, story and self-reference: post-modernism can’t make you more naked than naked.

Minivans, booyah. Search costs, the internets, weak ties, and our used car purchasing experience.

Watching the odds change: Baseball Prospectus’s’s Playoff Odds and the 2012 New York Mets

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