Found this chart in Hemispheres magazine on board a United flight: A quick self-sufficiency test reveals the biggest shortcoming of this visual presentation. What would you guess is the difference in areas between the two white-ish sectors (pointing at 9...
This arrived a couple weeks ago from Nassim Taleb. Regardless of where your view falls on the black swan spectrum, I hope you'll like the graphic. One hallmark of a good graphic is that it repays careful study, as with a good map (which is a good ...
Found this chart in the magazine that Charles Schwab sends to customers: When there are two variables, and their correlation is of interest, a scatter plot is usually recommended. But not here! The text labels completely dominate this chart and...
Penn's First Annual PIER Workshop on Quantitative Tools for Macroeconomic Policy Analysis will take place in May 2015. The poster appears below (and here if the one below is a bit too small), and the website is here. We are interes...
Rescheduling Notice: I have been informed by the organizers that the Meetup tonight has to be rescheduled due to an unexpected problem with the venue. When a new date is set, I will let you know. *** Since I am...
Some of the comments engendered by the Black Swan post remind me of something I've wanted to say for a while: In sharp contrast to much popular perception, the financial crisis wasn't caused by models or modelers.Rather, the crisis was c...
Matthew Yglesias, writing for Vox, cited the following chart from a World Bank project: His comment was: "We can see that while China has overtaken Germany and Japan to become the world's second-largest economy (i.e., total area of the rectangle)...
Speaking of the newly-updated draft of Econometrics, now for some fun. Here's a question from the Chapter 6 EPC (exercises, problems and complements). Where does your reaction fall on the A-B spectrum below?Nassim Taleb is a financial markets trader (a...
Last week, Eric Chemi and Ariana Giorgi published an interesting article on “The Pay-for-Performance Myth” With all the public chatter about exorbitant executive compensation and income inequality, it’s useful to look at the relationship between chief executive officer pay and corporate performance. Typically, when the subject of their big pay packages arises, CEOs—usually through their spokespeople—say they are paid for performance. Does data back that up? An analysis of compensation data…
New York Times columnist Floyd Norris published a set of charts purportedly to show that the housing market in the U.S. is on the mend. Not so quick Floyd. His theory - originating from an economist at Hanley Wood, a...
