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from Asad Zaman Friday, 26th Jan 2017: Lecture by Dr. Asad Zaman, VC PIDE to students at University of Cambridge, Center of Development Studies for Religion & Development paper. 40 minute video recording of lecture on you-tube. Part 1: “What Is Spirituality?”:  Modern Secular thought takes spirituality and religion to be diseases which affect weak minds not properly trained in the scientific method. Part I of this lecture explains why this view, which is based on positivist ideas, is...

I saw three people wearing Tom Brady jerseys in the supermarket today.  I don’t watch football and I am bad with faces, but I would venture a guess that not one of the three was the Tom Brady who will be playing in the Super Bowl today.  For one, none of them looked the part.  If forced to provide a description of Tom Brady, I would go with somewhere north of 6 feet, fit, athletic and most importantly, somewhere else.  I don’t know where the Super Bowl is...

According to the European Commission, Spain does well. And it does: after 6 years of decline employment has increased with 1,2 million. This is, when it comes to EU job creation, a decisive development! But… well, look at graph 1. Employment is nowhere where it has to be. And double digit increases in the number of tourists won’t last forever – Spain will need a new growth sector (or a more equitable division of labor). When it comes to this:  half of the employment increase took place...

Ashoka Mody on Bloomberg Then came the cardinal error: At the IMF’s Board, over the fierce opposition of several executive directors, the Europeans and Americans pushed through a bailout program that, contrary to the fund’s rules, did not impose losses on Greece’s private creditors. The decision was based on a spurious claim that “restructuring” private debt would trigger a global financial meltdown. Thus, European governments and the IMF lent Greece a vast sum to repay its existing...

In an article in today’s Mail on Sunday, David Rose makes the extraordinary claim that “world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data, accusing the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of manipulating the data to show more warming in a 2015 study by Tom Karl and coauthors. What he fails to mention is that the new NOAA results have been validated by independent data from satellites, buoys and Argo floats and that many other...

from Dean Baker The trade deals negotiated in the last quarter century are becoming less focused on traditional trade barriers like tariffs and quotas. Instead, they are imposing a regulation structure on the parties, which tend to be very business oriented. In many cases, the rules being required under the trade deals would never be accepted if they went through the normal political process. The renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement allows the United States, Canada and...

from David Ruccio Regular readers know I take statistics quite seriously. So, as it turns out, did Stephen Jay Gould who, in the most poignant story about statistics of which I am aware, explained how important it is to go beyond the abstractions of central tendencies and understand the distribution of variation within the numbers. And right now, when the numbers are under attack—when, for example, the new Trump administration is threatening to purge the inconvenient numbers about climate...

Better than expected. Lots of seasonality to January numbers. For example, warm weather that adds a few construction jobs gets magnified, and due to light temporary help hiring during the holiday season there were fewer workers to layoff in January, giving a boost to temporary help type measures. Meanwhile, however, the deceleration trend in the year over year chart continues, and wage growth remains subdued and last month’s downward revision indicated prior concerns were...

from Lars Syll Eminent statistician David Salsburg is rightfully very critical of the way social scientists — including economists and econometricians — uncritically and without arguments have come to simply assume that one can apply probability distributions from statistical theory on their own area of research: We assume there is an abstract space of elementary things called ‘events’ … If a measure on the abstract space of events fulfills certain axioms, then it is a probability. To use...