agelman | December 31, 2009My colleague Macartan Humphreys recently came out with book, Coethnicity (with James Habyarimana, Daniel Posner, and Jeremy Weinstein, addresses the question of why public services and civic cooperation tend to be worse in areas with more ethnic variation. To put it another way: people in homogeneous areas work well together, whereas in areas of ethnic diversity, there's a lot less cooperation.
From one perspective, this one falls into the "duh" category. Of course, we cooperate with people who are more like us! But it's not so simple. Macartan and his colleagues discuss and discard a…
agelman | December 30, 2009There's some psychological/political/sociological phenomenon, I can't remember what it's called, in which you tend to think of yourself and your allies as a diverse coalition, while thinking of the people on the other side as a monolithic bloc. I was thinking about this when I read this comment by Jeffrey Toobin:
The President is pro-choice . . . But, like many modern pro-choice Democrats, he has worked so hard to be respectful of his opponents on this issue that he sometimes seems to cede them the moral high ground. In his book "The Audacity of Hope," he describes the "undeniably difficult…
agelman | December 30, 2009Yesterday I posted this graph, a parallel-coordinates plot showing health care spending and life expectancy in a sample of countries:
I remarked that a scatterplot should be better. Commenter Freddy posted a link to the data, so, just for laffs, I spent a few minutes making a scatterplot containing all the same information. Here it is. (Clicking on any of the graphs gives a larger version.)
How do the two graphs compare? There are some ways in which the first graph is better, but I think these have to do with that graph being made by a professional graphic designer--at least, I assume…
agelman | December 29, 2009I recently blogged on the following ridiculous (to me) quote from economist Gary Becker:
According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent "suicides" in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life.
In my first entry I dealt with Becker's idea pretty quickly and with a bit of mockery ("Sure, 'counterintuitive' is fine, but this seems to be going off the deep end . . ."), and my commenters had no problem with it. But then I updated with a more elaborate argument and discussion of how Becker could…
agelman | December 29, 2009David Blei points me to this report by Lars Backstrom, Jonathan Chang, Cameron Marlow, and Itamar Rosenn on an estimate of the proportion of Facebook users who are white, black, hispanic, and asian (or, should I say, White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian).
Facebook users don't specify race/ethnicity, but they do give their last name, and Backstrom et al. use Census data on the ethnic breakdowns of last names to estimate the proportion of Facebook users in each of several Census-defined ethnic categories. They present their results for several snapshots of Facebook from 2006 through 2009.
Their…
agelman | December 28, 2009I recently reviewed Bryan Caplan's book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, for the journal Political Psychology. I wish I thought this book was all wrong, because then I could've titled my review, "The Myth of the Myth of the Rational Voter." But, no, I saw a lot of truth in Caplan's arguments. Here's what i wrote:
Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter was originally titled "The logic of collective belief: the political economy of voter irrationality," and its basic argument goes as follows:
(1) It is rational for people to vote and to make their preferences based on their views of…
agelman | December 21, 2009Stephen Dubner quotes Gary Becker as saying:
According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent "suicides" in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life.
Dubner describes this as making "perfect sense" and as being "so unusual and so valuable."
When I first saw this I was irritated and whipped off a quick entry on the sister blog. But then I had some more systematic thoughts of how Becker's silly-clever statement, and Dubner's reaction to it, demonstrate several logical fallacies that I haven't…
agelman | December 20, 2009The following is the last paragraph in a (positive) referee report I just wrote. It's relevant for lots of other articles too, I think, so I'll repeat it here:
Just as a side note, I recommend that the authors post their estimates immediately; I imagine their numbers will be picked up right away and be used by other researchers. First, this is good for the authors, as others will cite their work; second, these numbers should help advance research in the field; and, third, people will take the estimates seriously enough that, if there are problems, they will be uncovered. It makes sense to…
agelman | December 19, 2009Mike Spagat writes:
I hope that this new paper [by Michael Spagat, Andrew Mack, Tara Cooper, and Joakim Kreutz] on serious errors in a paper on conflict mortality published in the British Medical Journal will interest you. For one thing I believe that it is highly teachable. Beyond I think that it's important for the conflict field (if I do say so myself). Another aspect of this is that the BMJ is refusing to recognized that there are any problems with the paper. This seems to be sadly typical behavior of journals when they make mistakes.
Spagat et al's paper begins:
In a much-cited…
ajakulin | December 18, 2009Wired reports a great new opportunity to make money online by suing internet companies for revealing the data:
An in-the-closet lesbian mother is suing Netflix for privacy invasion, alleging the movie rental company made it possible for her to be outed when it disclosed insufficiently anonymous information about nearly half-a-million customers as part of its $1 million contest to improve its recommendation system.
I'm not sure whether the litigators have read this particular section of the Netflix prize rules:
To prevent certain inferences being drawn about the Netflix customer base, some…
agelman | December 15, 2009Here's the entry from the statistical lexicon:
The "All Else Equal" Fallacy: Assuming that everything else is held constant, even when it's not gonna be.
My original note about this fallacy came a couple years ago when New York Times columnist John Tierney made the counterintuitive claim (later blogged by Steven Levitt) that driving a car is good for the environment. As I wrote at the time:
These guys are making a classic statistical error, I think, which is to assume that all else is held constant. This is the error that also leads people to misinterpret regression coefficients causally. (…
agelman | December 13, 2009I recently came across some links showing readers how to make their own data analysis and graphics from scratch. This is great stuff--spreading power tools to the masses and all that.
From Nathan Yau: How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools and How to Make an Interactive Area Graph with Flare. I don't actually think the interactive area graphs are so great--they work with the Baby Name Wizard but to me they don't do much in the example that Nathan shows--but, that doesn't really matter, what's cool here is that he's showing us all exactly how to do it. This stuff is gonna…
agelman | December 11, 2009Jenny quotes Erica Wagner:
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote for more than four decades on an Underwood portable. For him, his machine was a kind of first editor. "If this typewriter doesn't like a story, it refuses to work," he said. "I don't get a man to correct it since I know if I get a good idea the machine will make peace with me again. I don't believe my own words saying this, but I've had the experience so many times that I'm really astonished. But the typewriter is 42 years old. It should have some literary experience, it should have a mind of its own."
Hey, I've been writing for almost 42…
agelman | December 11, 2009From Ubs:
How fast is Rickey? Rickey is so fast that he can steal more bases than Rickey. (And nobody steals more bases than Rickey.)
agelman | December 11, 2009From the co-author of the celebrated Scholarpedia article on Bayesian statistics...
agelman | December 10, 2009Stephen Dubner quotes Gary Becker as saying:
According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent "suicides" in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life.
Dubner describes this as making "perfect sense" and as being "so unusual and so valuable." One might wonder why something that makes so much sense and is so beautifully written etc. is "so unusual."
To me it seems less like economics and more like a way of getting oneself off the hook, morally speaking. If, when other people get sick and die…
agelman | December 9, 2009A journalist contacted me to ask what I thought about this article by Marshall Burke, Edward Miguel, Shanker Satyanath, John Dykema, and David Lobell:
Armed conflict within nations has had disastrous humanitarian consequences throughout much of the world. Here we [Burke et al.] undertake the first comprehensive examination of the potential impact of global climate change on armed conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. We find strong historical linkages between civil war and temperature in Africa, with warmer years leading to significant increases in the likelihood of war. When combined with climate…
agelman | December 5, 2009Tyler Cowen writes:
Breaking a three-day stalemate, the Senate approved an amendment to its health care legislation that would require insurance companies to offer free mammograms and other preventive services to women.
The vote was 61 to 39, with three Republicans joining 56 Democrats and the two independents in favor.
This happened directly after the release of evidence showing that many mammograms do not pass a comparative effectiveness test. Once the test became a public issue at all...well, now you see what happens.
It's a problem when one branch of the government recommends less…
agelman | December 4, 2009A few months ago I read Charles Seife's excellent book, "Sun in a bottle: The strange history of fusion and the science of wishful thinking." One thing I found charming about the book was that it lumped crackpot cold fusion, nutty plans to use H-bombs to carve out artificial harbors in Alaska, and mainstream tokomaks into the same category: wildly-hyped but unsuccessful promises to change the world. The "wishful thinking" framing seems to fit all these stories pretty well, much better than the usual distinction between the good science of big-budget lasers and tokomaks and the bad science…
agelman | December 4, 2009Tom Ball writes:
Didn't know if you had seen this article [by Jason Richwine] about political allegiance and IQ but wanted to make sure you did. I'm surprised the author hasn't heard or seen of your work on Red and Blue states! What do you think?
I think the article raises some interesting issues but he seems to be undecided about whether to take the line that intelligent Americans mostly have conservative views ("[George W.] Bush's IQ is at least as high as John Kerry's" and "Even among the nation's smartest people, liberal elites could easily be in the minority politically") or the…