Gary Smith points us to this news article: Geoffrey Hinton is a legendary computer scientist . . . Naturally, people paid attention when Hinton declared in 2016, “We should stop training radiologists now, it’s just completely obvious within five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.” The US Food and Drug Administration […]
Archive of posts filed under the Economics category.
“Causal Inference: The Mixtape”
A few years ago we reviewed “Mostly Harmless Econometrics,” by Josh Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke. And now we have another friendly introduction to causal inference by an economist, presented as a readable paperback book with a fun title. I’m speaking of “Causal Inference: The Mixtape,” by Scott Cunningham. I like the book—all the blurbs on […]
Thinking fast, slow, and not at all: System 3 jumps the shark
By now, we’re all familiar with the three modes of thought. From wikipedia: System 1 is fast, instinctive and emotional. System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. System 3 is when you say things that sound good but make no sense. System 3 can get activated when you trust what someone tells you […]
New book coming out by Fischer Black!
Gur Huberman has the scoop. At first I was surprised to hear about this, but then I looked up Black on Wikipedia and, hey, he’s only 83, so why not write a book. He also got some prominent academics to promote it, so that’s cool.
Postmodernism for zillionaires
“Postmodernism” in academia is the approach of saying nonsense using a bunch of technical-sounding jargon. At least, I think that’s what postmodernism is . . . Hmm, let’s check wikipedia: Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid- to late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism, marking a departure from […]
When can a predictive model improve by anticipating behavioral reactions to its predictions?
This is Jessica. Most of my research involves data interfaces in some way or another, and recently I’ve felt pulled toward asking more theoretical questions about what effects interfaces can or should have in different settings. For instance, the title of the post is one question I’ve started thinking about: In situations where a statistical […]
“Prediction Markets in a Polarized Society”
Rajiv Sethi writes about some weird things in election prediction markets, such as Donald Trump being given a one-in-eight chance of being the election winner . . . weeks after he’d lost the election. Sethi writes: There’s a position size limit of $850 dollars per contract in this market, which also happens to have hit […]
EU proposing to regulate the use of Bayesian estimation
The European Commission just released their Proposal for a Regulation on a European approach for Artificial Intelligence. They finally get around to a definition of “AI” on page 60 of the report (link above): ‘artificial intelligence system’ (AI system) means software that is developed with one or more of the techniques and approaches listed in […]
Cancer patients be criming? Some discussion and meta-discussion of statistical modeling, causal inference, and social science:
1. Meta-story Someone pointed me to a news report of a statistics-based research claim and asked me what I thought of it. I read through the press summary and the underlying research paper. At this point, it’s natural to anticipate one of two endpoints: I like the paper, or I don’t. The results seem reasonable […]
In making minimal corrections and not acknowledging that he made these errors, Rajan is dealing with the symptoms but not the underlying problem, which is that he’s processing recent history via conventional wisdom.
Raghuram Rajan is an academic and policy star, University of Chicago professor, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, and former chief economic advisor to the government of India, and featured many times in NPR and other prestige media. He also appears to be in the habit of telling purportedly data-backed stories that aren’t […]
More on that credulity thing
I see five problems here that together form a feedback loop with bad consequences. Here are the problems: 1. Irrelevant or misunderstood statistical or econometric theory; 2. Poorly-executed research; 3. Other people in the field being loath to criticize, taking published or even preprinted claims as correct until proved otherwise; 4. Journalists taking published or […]
Understanding the value of bloc voting, using the Congressional Progressive Caucus as an example:
Daniel Stock writes: I’m a public policy PhD student, interested in economic policy and a bit of political science. I recently saw that the Congressional Progressive Caucus instituted bloc voting rules a few months ago: if at least two thirds of them agree on a bill or amendment, then all CPC members are bound to […]
Call for a moratorium on the use of the term “prisoner’s dilemma”
Palko writes: I’m not sure what the best way to get the ball rolling here would be (perhaps a kickstarter?) but we need to have a strictly enforced rule that no journalist or pundit is allowed to mention the prisoner’s dilemma for the next five or ten years, however long it takes to learn to […]
Many years ago, when he was a baby economist . . .
Jonathan Falk writes: Many years ago, when I was a baby economist, a fight broke out in my firm between two economists. There was a question as to whether a particular change in the telecommunications laws had spurred productivity improvements or not. There a trend of x% per year in productivity improvements that had gone […]
Estimating the college wealth premium: Not so easy
Dale Lehman writes: Here’s the article referenced on Marginal Revolution today. I thought it might be of interest and worth blogging about. It is quite thorough and fairly complex. The results are quite striking – and important. My big concern relates to a critical variable – financial literacy. On page 14 they claim that it […]
Substack.
I read this interesting article by Anna Wiener about Substack, which is a sort of branded blogging and RSS platform that allows writers to charge subscriptions. The topic was interesting to me in part because I’ve been blogging for a long time and in part because as a citizen and consumer of news I am […]
Postdoctoral opportunity with Sarah Cowan and Jennifer Hill: causal inference for Universal Basic Income (UBI)
See below from Sarah Cowan: I write to announce the launch of the Cash Transfer Lab. Our mission is to build an evidence base regarding cash transfer policies like a Universal Basic Income. We answer the fundamental questions of how a Universal Basic Income policy would transform American families, communities and economies. The first major […]
Regression discontinuity analysis is often a disaster. So what should you do instead? Here’s my recommendation:
Summary If you have an observational study with outcome y treatment variable z and pre-treatment predictors X, and treatment assignment depends only on X, then you can estimate the average causal effect by regressing y on z and X and looking at the coefficient of z. If there is lack of complete overlap in X […]
Bayesian methods and what they offer compared to classical econometrics
A well-known economist who wishes to remain anonymous writes: Can you write about this agent? He’s getting exponentially big on Twitter. The link is to an econometrician, Jeffrey Wooldridge, who writes: Many useful procedures—shrinkage, for example—can be derived from a Bayesian perspective. But those estimators can be studied from a frequentist perspective, and no strong […]
This one pushes all my buttons
August Wartin writes: Just wanted to make you aware of this ongoing discussion about an article in JPE: It’s the same professor Lidbom that was involved in this discussion a few years ago (I believe you mentioned something about it on your blog). Indeed, we blogged it here. Here’s the abstract of Lidbom’s more recent […]