Tag Archives: measurement

This is a big deal even though it won't be noticed by most people. However, precise measurement essential to science and measurement involves application of metrics defined by criteria. The units and their criteria are arbitrary. There was no such thing as a kilogram prior to the development and introduction of the metric system. Same with other measurement systems. The "trick" is to establish a constant criterion in a relative universe. That is as close to an absolute as human can...

Abstract Professor Yasuhiro Sakai (see 2016; 2018) has argued that there is an mysterious problem in the A Treatise on Probability, 1921 in chapter 3 on page 39 (page 42 of the 1973 CWJMK edition). He argues that there is an unsolved mystery that involves this diagram that has remained unexplained in the literature. The mystery is that Keynes does not explain what he is doing in the analysis involving the diagram starting on the lower half of page 38 and ending on page 40 of chapter III....

What we need is to disaggregate growth and report on the progress of all Americans. Instead of the one-number-fits-all approach of GDP growth, this new system would report growth for Americans along the income curve, much as the graphs above do. It might indicate, for example, that the bottom 50 percent of Americans experienced growth of 1.3 percent while Americans in the top 1 percent of earners experienced 4.5 percent income growth. Unfortunately, such a system is not currently possible....

On Friday all the researchers in the new Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence(ESCoE) met at its home in the National Institute to catch up on the range of projects and it was terrific to hear about the progress and challenges across the entire span of the research programme. One of the projects is concerned with measuring uncertainty in economic statistics and communicating that uncertainty. The discussion sent me back to Oskar Morgenstern’s 1950 On the Accuracy of Economic...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Above: Maintaining attention for a long interview is always a challenge Fake news is already disrupting Kenya’s election. Qualtrics, the research software company, did a randomized experiment testing the kinds of extra questions researchers embed in surveys to make sure respondents are paying attention and answering thoughtfully. They found including those questions earlier in a survey actually led to respondents performing...