economics
emjohnson | December 13, 2009Journalist Robert Eshelman is blogging from Copenhagen throughout the UN Climate Conference and offers this cogent observation:
If there's going to be an agreement, it will come down mostly to money. The E.U. might offer more money and the U.S. might provide a counteroffer. There might be some movement on emissions targets from the E.U. but with the Senate's recent reduction of its emissions target, the door seems to be closed on Obama offering greater cuts. Offers of financing, particularly around addressing deforestation, might woo a number of developing and poor countries and secure their…
emjohnson | December 9, 2009The so-called "Danish Text" agreement that was leaked to the Guardian newspaper has resulted in a firestorm of controversy. By far the most hostile reporting about the outrage that poor nations have expressed has been from the Financial Times.
FT Commentator Fiona Harvey wrote yesterday that:
The more the spotlight falls upon this Danish text, the more like a Danish pastry it looks.
Here's an assertion from Newsweek:
"Under the plan, by 2050 poor countries would have to limit per capita emissions at 1.44 tons, while rich countries would be given extra leeway at 2.67 tons per person."
Really…
emjohnson | December 3, 2009
Okay, so this is actually from last year's anniversary of the Bhopal disaster. And it's not actually a representative from Dow, but Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men. But wouldn't it be nice if the perpetrators of this tragedy actually had come clean?
mikethemadbiologist | December 3, 2009It's between fifteen to twenty one cents of every dollar spent by hospitals. A recent study examined the costs of antibiotic resistant infections in hospitals. The main finding (italics mine):
The total attributable hospital and societal cost ranges for ARI in the expanded sample were as follows: hospital, $3.4-$5.4 million; mortality, $7.0-$9.2 million; lost productivity, $162,624-$322,707; and total, $10.7-$15.0 million. The total medical cost, if distributed to all sample patients, added $2512-$3929 (16.8%-26.3%) to the mean unadjusted hospital cost for all sample patients.
(An aside:…
mikethemadbiologist | December 1, 2009Over at Underbelly, Buce, in commenting on Bruce Bartlett's new book, makes a point about what he calls "supply side lite" that I'm inclined to agree with:
First, supply side lite. How much extra income will we garner if we tax all incomes over $200,000 at 100 percent? The answer is none: no one will work for nothing. Taxes are incentives, and incentives change behavior. As Bartlett correctly argues, this is really nothing new. Taxes on heroin, shotguns, human trafficking, are designed not for revenue: they are designed to discourage disfavored behavior.
But the devil is in the details.…
emjohnson | December 1, 2009
There are two fundamental misconceptions surrounding the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle ten years ago this week. One is that the protests represented a "riot" and that the majority of protesters were violent. The second is that the protests were counter-productive and actually hurt the cause of reform that would benefit poor countries trying to have their voices heard. Both of these are wrong and, in fact, are just the opposite.
Many of those who went to Seattle did intend to shut down the proceedings, which they did nonviolently by creating blockades and…
emjohnson | November 30, 2009This week, ten years ago, between 50,000 and 100,000 protesters from a wide variety of labor, environmental and global justice organizations descended on the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference being held in Seattle and prevented delegates from reaching the convention hall. This effectively shut down the talks and focused public attention on an undemocratic institution that had previously been little understood. Delegates from more than forty poor African, Caribbean and Latin American nations were united in opposition to their treatment by the wealthy countries and the public…
emjohnson | November 30, 2009The New York Times Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Thomas Friedman, by his own definition, is insane. Many understood this when he published The Lexus and the Olive Tree and asserted that military socialism was a good thing because it promoted American business:
McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. And these fighting forces and institutions are paid for by American taxpayer…
mikethemadbiologist | November 19, 2009At TPM, Josh Marshall asks an "obvious" 'framing' question about the ARRA:
Why was the Stimulus Bill called the 'stimulus bill' and not a 'jobs bill'?
To which Atrios responds with a "Pretty Obvious Answer":
Because for whatever reason, economist lingo is what people in the Obama administration are comfortable with.
I actually don't think that has much to do with it at all. I can't be certain, but someone in the Hopey Changey administration must have thought of calling the stimulus bill a "jobs bill" (if nobody did, then these guys are a lot dumber than most people think they are). They…
razib | November 16, 2009Changes in the world of personal genomics. Dan MacArthur has the details on 23andMe changing up its offerings, perhaps signalling that the money gush is long over. And deCode is finally dead. Of course, just because the .com bubble burst doesn't mean that the internet is no longer a part of our lives. New players will likely emerge in the wake of this creative destruction, and old players will adapt to survive.
razib | November 13, 2009First, in The New Republic, Malcolm Gladwell's Secret Of Success:
The first sentence here is a classically Gladwellian assertion about what the rest of us think. The rest of the paragraph consists of, more or less, made up numbers and figures which Gladwell claims constitute a "rule". Seriously, read these sentences again. Where does he get these figures? Anyway, the exchange ended on this note:
CHARLIE ROSE: Everyone always has this question when I tell them your story and hand your book out to people, and they say what does that say about gift and superb talent?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: I remain…
razib | November 13, 2009Two Are Charged With Helping Madoff Falsify Records:
Two computer programmers who worked for Bernard L. Madoff's brokerage firm were arrested on Friday on criminal charges of helping perpetuate his long-running Ponzi scheme.
The two men -- Jerome O'Hara of Malvern, N.Y., and George Perez of East Brunswick, N.J. -- were also sued by securities regulators, who said they had helped keep the Madoff fraud running for more than 15 years and took "hush money" to keep it secret.
The criminal and civil complaints accuse the men of creating and maintaining the software that enabled Mr. Madoff to…
emjohnson | November 11, 2009In an overwhelming majority members of the Graduate Employee's Organization (GEO) at the University of Illinois at at Urbana-Champaign authorized their union to to go on strike if the university doesn't change direction in their current negotiations.
According to a GEO Press Release sent out Monday:
Over the course of a three day vote, an overwhelming 92% of participating GEO members chose to authorize a strike against the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. With the vote, GEO members have given the strike committee of the GEO a clear mandate to call a strike at any time. The…
emjohnson | November 5, 2009Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot,
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
On this day, in 1604, Guy Fawkes was arrested in his attempt to overthrow the English monarchy by blowing up the House of Lords and assassinate King James I (who would have been present at the time). Since his arrest Fawkes' crime has been condemned as terrorism motivated by fanatical Catholic outrage against the Protestant regime of James I. However, is the religious angle enough to explain his actions and those of his conspirators? What was at the…
mikethemadbiologist | November 3, 2009It's not a failure of monetary policy, but fiscal policy.
Over at The Quantum Pontiff, ScienceBlogling Dave Bacon asks if college tuition is a bubble:
But what I find interesting, and what I've never been able to figure out, is the larger trend (ignore the last two years, please). Why are tuition prices increasing at such a fast rate for four year colleges? For example, see slide 5 of this presentation where one sees that over the last three decades, the inflation adjusted price of college has more than tripled at public four year universities and gone up nearly as much a private four year…
razib | November 2, 2009As I gave a nod to statistical tricks and subtle shell games very recently, the material I review subsequently should be viewed with skepticism and caution. A few days ago I also pointed to a paper which describes and models intergenerational transfers of wealth across various societies. In other words, what parents transmit to children. From the perspective of someone who reads this blog, obviously parents transmit genes to their offspring.
To the left is an old scatterplot from Francis Galton which shows the dependence of the height of children upon the average height of parents.…
razib | October 28, 2009This critique by Ted Goertzl, Myths of Murder and Multiple Regression, is making the rounds. It made me think of this old apocryphal story:
There is a famous anecdote inspired by Euler's arguments with secular philosophers over religion, which is set during Euler's second stint at the St. Petersburg academy. The French philosopher Denis Diderot was visiting Russia on Catherine the Great's invitation. However, the Empress was alarmed that the philosopher's arguments for atheism were influencing members of her court, and so Euler was asked to confront the Frenchman. Diderot was later informed…
mikethemadbiologist | October 21, 2009...if by stimulate, you mean wind up in banks that aren't lending any money. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
In May 2008, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) started mailing Economic Stimulus Payments (also called tax rebates) to an estimated 130 million income tax filers. In order to examine the impact of these payments, special questions were included in the Interview component of the Consumer Expenditure Survey from June 2008 through March 2009 to collect information on the amount of payment received, form in which it was received (electronic funds transfer or check), and how it was…
mikethemadbiologist | October 17, 2009One problem stemming from the collapse of housing prices is that many households, even if they can still make their overpriced mortgages, are going to be paying far more for their houses than they should. That means less money for other things, from the frivolous to the important. So I've always wondered if we'll ever get a flood of walkaways--people who let the bank foreclose on the house. I realize some people will want to stay in their homes--maybe they don't want to pull their kids out of a school they like, or it's just the wrong time to think about a move. But for many, the rational…
razib | October 15, 2009What's different about Kiva:
Contrast Kiva with, for example, UNICEF. Kiva makes it possible to trace the path of your donation, to the extent that such tracing is realistic (and it largely turns out to be more along the lines of "you funded a certain MFI" rather than "you funded a certain person"). UNICEF doesn't even seem to have a breakdown of how much money is going to each continent. We definitely can't find information on questions like (a) What specific projects are you funding? (b) What is your role in each? (c) What new projects are planned, and where? (d) How is each project going,…