Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Many liberal Democrats vote for the more moderate candidates in primaries, because they think half a loaf is better than none. The claim is that to win in the USA (or any first past the post system) you have to capture the middle. This is based on silly theory which requires the assumption that the set of eligible voters and the set of people who actually vote are the same. The contrasting view is that the key issue is getting people who might or might...

from Lars Syll We can either let theory guide us in our attempt to estimate causal relationships from data … or we don’t let theory guide us. If we let theory guide us, our causal inferences will be ‘incredible’ because our theoretical knowledge is itself not certain … If we do not let theory guide us, we have no good reason to believe that our causal conclusions are true either of the experimental population or of other populations because we have no understanding of the mechanisms that...

from Dean Baker Last week, New York Times columnist Timothy Egan had a piece headlined “Why Doesn’t Mark Zuckerberg Get It?” The piece then goes on to document how Facebook has become a medium for spreading lies and nonsense all over the world, that many ill-informed users have come to believe. This is what Egan wants Zuckerberg to “get.” While it would be nice if Zuckerberg understood the problems created by Facebook, and took effective measures to address them, the problem with Egan’s...

    Call for Papers for the Fifteenth Forum of the World Association for Political Economy   ‘Rethinking Economic Analysis: Political Economy vs Economics’   31 July – 2 August 2020, Panteion University, Athens, Greece The 15th WAPE Forum will be held 31 July – 2 August 2020 at Panteion University, Athens, Greece. It is co-organised by WAPE (World Association of Political Economy – http://www.wapeweb.org/) and GAPE (Greek Association of Political Economy –...

An introduction to Save the Post Office and Steve Hutkins. I am not quite sure how I got to Steve; but, I do remember chatting with Mark Jamison who also wrote at Save the Post Office and posting his words up at Angry Bear (Asking the Wrong Questions: Reflections on Amazon, the Post Office, and the Greater Good earlier this year. Mark and I still exchange emails and I owe him a trip out to western North Carolina. Steve is the blog owner, a Prof. of...

More than one million people marched in Santiago on October 26 to protest the Government’s security response to Chile’s current political crisis and to demand structural economic reforms to reduce inequality and increase social services. In this post I analyze these grievances from a quantitative perspective and explore what it would take to translate them into policy. This is my fourth inequality-related post. I use the same sources of data and framework of analysis as in my initial...

More than one million people marched in Santiago on October 26 to protest the Government’s security response to Chile’s current political crisis and to demand structural economic reforms to reduce inequality and increase social services. In this post I analyze these grievances from a quantitative perspective and explore what it would take to translate them into policy. This is my fourth inequality-related post. I use the same sources of data and framework of analysis as in my initial...