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from C. P Chandrasekhar & Jayati Ghosh The world has been preoccupied with the Covid-19 pandemic, and this has also affected policymakers everywhere. There is much more recognition today of the terrible effects of underfunding public health over decades and how this affects the resilience of economies and societies. Yet this official preoccupation with addressing the spread of infectious disease appears to have had an unanticipated negative effect: less policy attention to concerns of...

from Peter Radford Just a quick thought prompted by my reading of a talk given by Allison Stanger during the Santa Fe Institute’s 2019 Fall symposium.  First she gives us a nice quote from Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition” who says the question is not … “whether we are the masters or slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy the world and...

from Lars Syll There is first of all the central question of methodology — the logic of applying the method of multiple correlation to unanalysed economic material, which we know to be non-homogeneous through time. If we are dealing with the action of numerically measurable, independent forces, adequately analysed so that we were dealing with independent atomic factors and between them completely comprehensive, acting with fluctuating relative strength on material constant and homogeneous...

from Dean Baker I saw this piece last week on the soaring price of baseball cards, and naturally started thinking about Bitcoin. The article begins with a story about how a rare LeBron James trading card (it’s all sports cards, not just baseball cards) would now sell for over $3 million, more than ten times its price in 2016. It then reports on how the prices for rare cards of other famous players have also gone through the roof, with even cards of less great players selling for several...

from Peter Radford Are they associated? We all know that one of the central problems of economics is the existence of uncertainty.  At least since Frank Knight’s work in the 1920s, uncertainty has been something of concern to economists.  Knight’s description of uncertainty as being a condition in which no probability distribution existed, or could exist, has led some of the most eminent theorists of economics to argue that theorizing is simply not possible.  Which is a rather formidable...

Update: An expanded version of this post has now been published at Inside Story By special request from regular commenter James Wimberley (and with some suggestions from him), some thoughts on the failure of the Texas electricity market to deal with unexpected cold weather. Texas lost power when neighboring states, which also experienced the freeze did not. This is part because it has a mostly separate electricity grid. The Texas Interconnection has been kept separate from the...

Angrybearblog December 22,2020 “Eyeballing, the first shot looks 80-90% effective.” (Moderna) and “my guess is that the first shot was about 90% effective over this period.” (Pfizer). Angrybearblog December 24,2020 New England Journal of Medicine February 17 2021 We used documents submitted to the Food and Drug Administration2 to derive the vaccine efficacy beginning from 2 weeks after the first dose to before the second dose...

Tags: open thread

from Lars Syll Being able to model a credible world, a world that somehow could be considered ‘similar’ to the real world is not the same as investigating the real world. The minimalist demand on models in terms of ‘credibility’ and ‘consistency’ has to give away to stronger epistemic demands. Claims in a ‘consistent’ model do not per se give a warrant for exporting the claims to real-world target systems. Questions of external validity are important more specifically also when it comes...

from Peter Radford Keeping the conversation going. Let’s start with Shannon, from his personal papers published in 1993 … “The word ‘information’ has been given different meanings by various writers in the general field of information theory.  It is likely that at least a number of these will prove sufficiently useful in certain applications to deserve further study and permanent recognition.  It is hardly to be expected that a single concept of information would satisfactorily account...