J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 103

Darrick Hamilton: Racial and Gender Wage Gaps. From Equit...

Darrick Hamilton: Racial and Gender Wage Gaps. From Equitable Growth: Racial and Gender Wage Gaps: Overcoming Structural Barriers to Shared Growth: "July 9, 2019 1:00PM - 2:15PM. Rayburn House Office Building, 2261, 45 Independence Ave SW, Washington, DC 20515, USA...

#noted #2019-10-18

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-18:USGS: M 4.5 - 1km SSE of...

Very Briefly Noted 2019-10-18:

USGS: M 4.5 - 1km SSE of Pleasant Hill, CA https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc73291880/oaf/commentary: "2019-10-15 05:33:42 (UTC)37.938��N 122.058��W 14.6 km depth...

Cosma Shalizi: 36-401, Modern Regression http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/mreg/15/: "This course is an introduction to the real world of statistics and data analysis. We will explore real data sets, examine various models for the data, assess the validity of their assumptions, and determine which conclusions we can make (if any). Data analysis is a bit of an art; there may be several valid approaches. We will strongly emphasize the importance of critical thinking about the data and the question of interest. Our overall goal is to use a basic set of modeling tools to explore and analyze data and to present the results in a scientific report.... This is a class on linear statistical models: the oldest, most widely used, and mathematically simplest sort of statistical model. It serves as a first course in serious data analysis, as an introduction to statistical modeling and prediction, and as an initiation into a community of inquiry which has developed over two centuries and grown to include every branch of science, technology and policy...

Cosma Shalizi and Andrew Thomas: 36-350, Statistical Computing http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/statcomp/14/: "Computational data analysis is an essential part of modern statistics. Competent statisticians must not just be able to run existing programs, but to understand the principles on which they work. They must also be able to read, modify and write code, so that they can assemble the computational tools needed to solve their data-analysis problems, rather than distorting problems to fit tools provided by others.... The class may be unbearably redundant for those who already know a lot about programming. The class will be utterly incomprehensible for those who do not know statistics...

Cosma Shalizi: Syllabus for 36-402, Undergraduate Advanced Data Analysis https://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/uADA/17/: "We will build on the theory and applications of the linear model, introduced in 36-401, extending it to more general functional forms, and more general kinds of data, emphasizing the computation-intensive methods introduced since the 1980s. After taking the class, when you're faced with a new data-analysis problem, you should be able to (1) select appropriate methods, (2) use statistical software to implement them, (3) critically evaluate the resulting statistical models, and (4) communicate the results of your analyses to collaborators and to non-statisticians. During the class, you will do data analyses with existing software, and write your own simple programs to implement and extend key techniques. You will also have to write reports about your analyses...

Vivaldi https://vivaldi.com/: "The browser that puts you in control...

Joe Studwell (2013): How Asia Works: Success And Failure In The Worlds Most Dynamic Region https://delong.typepad.com/files/studwell.pdf

Mark C. Berger and Barry T. Hirsch (1983): The Civilian Earnings Experience of Vietnam���Era Veterans https://delong.typepad.com/files/civilian-earnings.pdf...

Richard R Bryant, V. A Samaranayake, and Allen Wilhite (1993): The Effect of Military Service on the Subsequent Civilian Wage of the Post-Vietnam Veteran https://delong.typepad.com/files/vietnam-veterans.pdf...

Joshua D. Angrist (1990): Lifetime Earnings and the Vietnam Era Draft Lottery: Evidence from Social Security
Administrative Records https://delong.typepad.com/files/draft-lottery.pdf...

BAHA: High-Peaked Colonial Revival

Wolf: GR304 Range https://www.consumerreports.org/products/pro-style-ranges/wolf-gr304-226337/overview/

Wikipedia: John R. Allen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Allen...

#noted #verybrieflynoted #2019-10-18

260,000 people in Buncombe County, NC���Asheville. That i...

260,000 people in Buncombe County, NC���Asheville. That is 60,000 households, low which perhaps 40 are in the nationwide top 0.1% with an income of 1.6 million a year or more. That is, I am told, the range in which one should perhaps start thinking about whether one wants an 8,000 square-foot house as one of one's items of conspicuous consumption. And such things sell slowly. So the thing that amazes me is not that the inventory of houses priced at more than two million in Asheville is twice annual turnover, but that 16 houses sold in that price range in grater Asheville last year. It's an index of plutocracy:

Candace Taylor: A Growing Problem in Real Estate: Too Many Too Big Houses: "Baby boomers and retirees built large, elaborate dream homes across the Sunbelt���only to find that few people want to buy them.... Elaborate, five or six-bedroom houses in warm climates, fueled in part by the easy credit of the real estate boom. Many baby boomers poured millions into these spacious homes, planning to live out their golden years in houses with all the bells and whistles. Now, many boomers are discovering that these large, high-maintenance houses no longer fit their needs as they grow older, but younger people aren���t buying them.... The problem is especially acute in areas with large clusters of retirees. In North Carolina���s Buncombe County, which draws retirees with its mild climate and Blue Ridge Mountain scenery, there are 34 homes priced over $2 million on the market, but only 16 sold in that price range in the past year, said Marilyn Wright, an agent at Premier Sotheby���s International Realty in Asheville...

#noted #2019-10-17

Sandy Li: ���Golden Week��� Property Sales Plunge in Majo...

Sandy Li: ���Golden Week��� Property Sales Plunge in Major Chinese Cities Amid Slowing Economy, Tight Mortgage Conditions https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3032030/golden-week-property-sales-plunge-major-chinese-cities-amid-slowing: "Sales of new homes in Beijing dropped to their lowest level since 2014 during the week following the National Day holiday. The seven-day holiday is traditionally a peak period for home sales.... Sales of new homes in Beijing dropped to their lowest level since 2014 during the week following the National Day holiday, according to data from the property information portal Zhuge.com.... Traditionally a peak period for sales, the seven-day holiday drew little interest from buyers who were unwilling to pursue big investments at a time when the national economy faces a slowdown caused by the trade war with the United States. Buyers��� appetite was further depleted by banks tightening mortgage loans and Beijing���s tougher measures to curb home prices.... Just 190 transactions were recorded in the primary residential market in Beijing during the golden week, down 19 per cent from 2018. In the secondary market, 41 used homes had changed hands, the second poorest golden week sales performance in the capital in the past five years...

#noted #2019-10-17

BREXIT!!!!!: Hugh Mannerings: " I'm not saying there...

BREXIT!!!!!: Hugh Mannerings:

" I'm not saying there wasn't a Democratic mandate for Brexit at the time. I'm just saying if I narrowly decided to order fish at a restaurant that was known for chicken, but said it was happy to offer fish, and so far I've been waiting three hours, and two chefs who promised to cook the fish had quit, and the third one is promising to deliver the fish in the next five minutes whether it's cooked or not, or indeed still alive, and all the waiting staff have spent the last few hours arguing amongst themselves about whether I wanted battered cod, grilled salmon, jellied deals, or dolphin kebabs, and if large parts of the restaurant appeared to be on fire, but no one was paying attention to it because they were all arguing about fish, I would like, just once, to be asked if I definitely still wanted the fish...

#2019-10-17 #noted

Nathan Lane: Manufacturing Revolutions: Industrial Policy...

Nathan Lane: Manufacturing Revolutions: Industrial Policy and Networks in South Korea https://delong.typepad.com/lane-korea.pdf: "This paper uses a historic big push intervention and newly digitized data from South Korea to study the effects of industrial policy on (short- and long-run) industrial development. In 1973 South Korea transitioned to a military dictatorship and drastically changed their development strategy. I find industries targeted by the regime���s big push grew significantly more than non-targeted industries along several key dimensions of industrial development. These developmental effects persisted after industrial policies were retrenched, following the 1979 assassination of the president. Furthermore, I estimate the spillovers of the industrial policies using exogenous variation in the exposure to the policy across the input-output network. I find evidence of persistent pecuniary externalities like those posited by big push development theorists, such as Albert Hirschman. In other words, I find that South Korea���s controversial industrial policy was successful in producing industrial development, the benefits of which persisted through time and in industries not directly targeted by the policies...

#noted #2019-10-17

Genetic counsellor Claude Mordan, an early Heinlein chara...

Genetic counsellor Claude Mordan, an early Heinlein character, waxes enthusiastic about the real point of an armed society���ot improve the breed by killing off the unalert, the weak, the stupid, those who are not quick with their hands, and those who are not quick with their wits, and so improve the breed.

Note that early Heinlein's authorial stand-in Hamilton Felix does not think much of this argument:

Robert A. Heinlein (1948): Beyond This Horizon https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1625793146: "'An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization. That���s a personal evaluation only. But gun-fighting has a strong biological use. We do not have enough things that kill off the weak and the stupid these days. But to stay alive as an armed citizen a man has to be either quick with his wits or with his hands, preferably both. It���s a good thing...

...���Maybe so,��� Felix answered slowly, ���but it does seem like there ought to be a better way to do it. This way is pretty sloppy. Sometimes the bystanders get burned.���

���The alert ones don���t,��� Mordan pointed out...

#sciencefiction #noted

Comment of the Day: Yes. Exactly. Humans are way too pron...

Comment of the Day: Yes. Exactly. Humans are way too prone to attribute human-level intelligence to whatever they are interacting with. Perhaps it has (had?) an evolutionary benefit, but it is a great obstacle to clear and correct thought:

Tracy Lightcap https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/superintelligence-the-idea-that-eats-smart-people.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340240a48c7daf200c#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a48c7daf200cin Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People: "I think the actual problem here is that a lot of intelligent people want to believe that computers aren't machines. They appear so ��� well, life-like. They can do calculations and comparisons faster then we can. That must mean that, in the long term, they'll become as intelligent as we are or even more! It stands to reason! No, it doesn't. A computer isn't all that much different from a Jacard loom. They are very sophisticated artifacts of human intelligence and they can do what we program them to do. Nothing more, though certainly nothing less. We can program them to mimic some of the trappings of intelligence if we'd like, but that's very different from saying that a machine can think. They can't, largely because they can't discern meaning in their ourput. That'll never change. Our problem isn't that computers will develop super intelligence; it's that we have such a hard time figuring out how to integrate them into our work. That is very slowly happening and we can count on some real snafus alongtheu way. That should scare us...

#commentoftheday #2019-10-17

Wikipedia: Lester C. Hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Wikipedia: Lester C. Hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lester_C._Hunt: "Lester Callaway Hunt, Sr. (July 8, 1892����� June 19, 1954), was a Democratic politician and dentist from the state of Wyoming. Hunt was the first to be elected to two consecutive terms as Wyoming's governor, serving as its 19th Governor from January 4, 1943, to January 3, 1949. In 1948, he was elected by an overwhelming margin to the U.S. Senate, and began his term on January 3, 1949. Hunt supported a number of federal social programs and advocated for federal support of low-cost health and dental insurance policies. He also supported a variety of programs proposed by the Eisenhower administration following the Republican landslide in the 1952 elections, including the abolition of racial segregation in the District of Columbia, and the expansion of Social Security. An outspoken opponent of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign, Hunt challenged McCarthy and his senatorial allies by championing a proposed law restricting Congressional immunity and allowing individuals to sue members of Congress for slanderous statements. In June 1953, Hunt's son was arrested in Washington, D.C., on charges of soliciting sex with an undercover male police officer. (Homosexual acts were prohibited by law at the time.) Several Republican senators, including McCarthy, threatened Hunt with prosecution of his son and wide publication of the event unless he abandoned plans to run for re-election and resigned immediately, which Hunt refused to do. His son was convicted and fined on October 6, 1953. On April 15, 1954, Hunt announced his intention to run for re-election. He changed his mind, however, after McCarthy renewed the threat to use his son's arrest against him. On June 19, 1954, Hunt committed suicide in his Senate office; the suicide dealt a serious blow to McCarthy's image...

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#noted #2019-10-17

Comment of the Day: Nathanael: Speech to 20th Congress of...

Comment of the Day: Nathanael: Speech to 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U. https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/speech-to-20th-congress-of-the-cpsu.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340240a4e033e1200b#comment-6a00e551f0800388340240a4e033e1200b: "Xi's triumph over the Chinese Central Committee also heralds an era of failure, incompetence, and self destruction similar to the Stalinist era in that it is a worthless cult of the individual. China did quite well during the 'no prominent individual' period after Deng ... That is over...

#commentoftheday #2019-10-17