There is an assumption by many politicians and believing citizens, the USPS is supposed to be profitable entity and run like a business. This is what the Postmaster General brings to the table as a solution. It was never the goal of the USPS to be such. Its task is to deliver mail to every place in the nation at the same amount of time. This in itself costs. PMG Dejoy believes this is ok. The USPS can penalize people who live outside of a 50-mile...

Ali Jadidzadeh and I recently undertook some statistical analysis on behalf of Infrastructure Canada (Canada’s lead federal government agency on homelessness). Here’s a ‘top 10’ overview of our analysis: https://nickfalvo.ca/economic-and-social-factors-associated-with-the-use-of-homeless-shelters/

Is the p-value dead? .[embedded content] All science entails human judgement, and using statistical models doesn’t relieve us of that necessity. Working with misspecified models, the scientific value of significance testing is actually zero —  even though you’re making valid statistical inferences! Statistical models and concomitant significance tests are no substitutes for doing real science. In its standard form, a significance test is not the kind of...

Subscriber to Reich’s column so I steal a commentary now and then. Funds given to Semiconductor corporations are being used to buy back stocks rather than invest in new capabilities and facilities. In 2010, we took hits on pricing by as much as a 20% increase in pricing. A take it or leave it proposal. Sure there was increased demand which has nothing to do with cost. Indeed, the price increase did similar to what Robert discusses below....

This not much of a post. It is promoting an extension of the premium credits for those who could not afford healthcare insurance previously. A simple read and a necessary one to make people aware. 195 Congress Members were Calling for an Extension of Enhanced Premium Tax Credits – MedCity News, Marissa Plescia In letters, members of Congress were urging their leadership to extend the enhanced premium healthcare tax credits which are expiring in...

Why home insurance rates are rising so fast across the US. Climate change plays a big role, The Conversation Millions of Americans have been watching with growing alarm as their homeowner insurance premiums rise and their coverage shrinks. Nationwide, premiums rose 34% between 2017 and 2023, and they continued to rise in 2024 across much of the country. To add insult to injury, those rates go even higher if you make a claim – as much as 25% if...

This paper investigates the impact of different varieties of capitalism (VoC) on societal happiness. It begins with a critique of Neoclassical welfare economics which emphasizes Pareto optimality, and it argues for focusing on reported societal happiness. The paper identifies five VoC. Using a sample of twenty-six high-income countries drawn from the 2020 World Happiness Report, […]

Economists and Wall Street analysts simply do not understand accounting. 

– by New Deal democrat This morning’s repeat house price indexes from the FHFA and Case Shiller continued to show deceleration in this metric which is very important to home buyers. Specifically, in the three month average through July, U.S. house prices rose 0.2% according to Case Shiller’s national index, and only 0.1% according to the slightly more leading Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) purchase only index, both on a seasonally adjusted...

It is instructive to consider cases in which most people readily accept causal claims in the absence of randomized experiments. Nowadays, few people doubt the effects of tobacco smoking on lung cancer. But in the 1950s, tobacco lobbyists embraced the idea that a genetic predisposition caused both a tendency to smoke and lung cancer … In other words, they claimed that there was an unblocked backdoor path. This idea was dispelled not by randomized, controlled experiments in...