Catherine Rampell writes: On Monday the Nobel Foundation, which bestows the world’s most prestigious academic, literary and humanitarian prizes, said it was reducing the cash awarded with Nobel Prizes by about 20 percent. . . . Peter A. Diamond, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who also received the Nobel in economic [...]
The following chart by the Financial Times reminds me of the famous Napoleon Russian Campaign map: I also love it when geographical data, in this case average house price data by region, are plotted without a map. If plotted on...
Reader Jamie D. wasn't very amused by the following chart, from the Freakonomics blog (link): Jamie summarized his view as follows: First of all, a quick look of the graph makes you think you're comparing states with helmet laws vs....
Following on our recent discussion of contradictory findings on happiness, David Austin writes: A pellucid discussion of happiness and happiness research is Fred Feldman, What is This Thing Called Happiness? (Oxford University Press, 2010). And here...
More and more I feel like economics reporting is based on crude principles of adding up “good news” and “bad news.” Sometimes this makes sense: by almost any measure, an unemployment rate of 10% is bad news compared to an unemployment rate of 5%. Other times, though, the good/bad news framework seems so tangled. For [...]
Rohin Dhar points me to this post: At Priceonomics, we’ve learned that our users don’t want to buy used products. Rather, they want to buy inexpensive products, and used items happen to be inexpensive. Let someone else eat the initial depreciation, Priceonomics users will swoop in later and get a good deal. . . . [...]
In response to my comments on his recent opinion article on the the human tendency to overvalue information presented as stories, Reid Hastie writes: Andrew (and Commenters) … I’d like to try to clarify some of the statements and implications in my Bloomberg article on “Our Gift for Good Stories …” The essay is what [...]
Jonathan Cantor points me to an opinion piece by psychologist Reid Hastie, “Our Gift for Good Stories Blinds Us to the Truth.” I have mixed feelings about Hastie’s article. On one hand I do think his point is important. It’s not new to me, but presumably it’s new to many readers of bloomberg.com. I like [...]
I received the following email the other day: Dear Dr. Gelman, I am emailing to let you know that your accepted article for Economic Inquiry will be published in print in the forthcoming April 2012 Issue. You will be receiving hard copies of the journal from Wiley-Blackwell for distribution to yourself and the Co Authors. [...]
While doing some research for my statistics blog, I came across a beauty by Lane Kenworthy from almost a year ago (link) via this post by John Schmitt (link). How embarrassing is the cost effectiveness of U.S. health care spending?...
