We document strong and robust negative correlations between the length of the title of an economics article and different measures of scientific quality. Analyzing all articles published between 1970 and 2011 and referenced in EconLit, we find that articles with shorter titles tend to be published in better journals, to be more cited and to be more innovative...
Title length http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/title-length.html
Sembra che molta scienza dietro il bando delle sigarette, in particolare gli studi sul fumo passivo, fosse tarocca...
Slate explores the implications of the junk science used to ban smoking on grounds of secondhand dangers. I believe we are in an age of rising puritanism. Tobacco is the drug in the cross hairs. It is low brow. Interestingly alcohol and marijuana are higher and rising status. Once again, mood affiliation and out-group shaming guides public policy.
...
Il bello è che se anche non lo fosse i provvedimenti legislativi sono comunque anti scientifici...
According to the Coase Theorem, externalities do not call for government regulation unless it is too costly to privately negotiate an efficient solution.
In the case of indoor smoke, it is almost never costly to negotiate the optimal solution. That's because in most cases the optimal policy toward indoor smoking will be the policy that maximizes the value of the property. Thus a restaurant owner will have an incentive to set a smoking policy that maximizes the value of her business. Ditto for the owners of office buildings, apartments and airplanes. Actual public policies toward second hand smoke are almost nothing like what the science would suggestion...
Sì accusano I conservatori di negare la scientificità del riscaldamento globale Ma questa negazione riguarda comunque un solo principio scientifico, chi invece sopporta il bando delle sigarette così com'è ora nega almeno due insegnamenti della scienza...
1. The science of how to establish statistical significance when there is publication bias in favor of rejecting the null hypothesis.
2. The science of the Coase Theorem, and particularly its implications for public policy.
A volte la scienza ci piace e a volte no spesso Questo dipende dalle conseguenze politiche di ciò che ci dice più che dalla nostra mentalità scientifica
Many people claim that some conservatives reject the science of global warming because they are not comfortable with the policy responses proposed by people on the other side. I prefer not to attack motives, but if that is your view, shouldn't you also be asking how many progressives reject the science of second hand smoke, and also the science of when to use government regulations, solely because they don't like the policy implications of those two types of science?...
What would a scientific cigarette policy look like?, by Scott Sumner https://www.econlib.org/archives/2018/02/what_would_a_sc.html
Vuoi scoprire le teorie del complotto che hanno qualche possibilità di essere vere? Comincio con le eliminare quelle che hanno testimoni isolate e poi fare lo stesso con le confessioni in punto di morte.
psychological research on self-deception and the literature on the unreliability of witness testimony suggest that our minds can talk us into believing all sorts of things happened that actually didn’t. So witnesses don’t sway me much...
Guarda agli eventi improbabili...
We might instead look for a very improbable series of events and decide there might be a conspiracy behind them. When I read about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the accounts boggle my mind ...
Alcune Teorie del complotto sono eventi banali raccontati in modo particolarmente drammatico avete in mente le musichette inquitanti della gabanelli?
Another set of candidates are claims that a semi-secret group actually is controlling the world, such as the Trilateral Commission was once believed to do. Yet the most plausible versions of these views simply boil down to wealthy, well-connected people having a lot of influence...
Lo sport È un settore dove le manipolazioni sono probabili...
It’s possible that the fixing of major sporting events might still be going on, and perhaps has been going on for a long time. If Volkswagen AG will doctor its emissions software, or Wells Fargo & Co. will create millions of phony accounts for profit, is it so implausible that a few major athletes -- or better yet referees -- throw games or at least influence the point spread, either for money or to neuter mob threats to their families?...
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-19/aliens-bigfoot-illuminati-do-conspiracy-theories-stand-up
Come introdurre un congedo parentale a costo zero per le casse dello Stato
Following an idea Shapiro developed for the Independent Women's Forum, their op-ed explains how Social Security could offer the benefit through its current financing if the people who take parental leave would accept a delay in their future retirement benefit
Would a Parental Leave Benefit Increase Support for Social Security? Should We Want That?, by Contributing Guest https://www.econlib.org/archives/2018/03/would_a_parenta.html
Il libro: Steven Slomach and Philip Fernbach tell us in The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.
Premessa sappiamo molto meno di quel che crediamo di sapere. Come funziona una bicicletta? Come funziona un accendino? Come funziona un bagno? Quando valutiamo la nostra conoscenza siamo molto più ottimisti rispetto a quando siamo chiamati a dimostrarlo. Perché?
Sopravvalutiamo la nostra conoscenza perché sappiamo che a conoscere è comunque il nostro alveare. L' llusione della conoscenza riguarda in particolar modo coloro che appartengono a gruppi Dov'è la conoscenza è particolarmente elevata The Collective Hivemind
the most important reason that we’re ignorant about so many things is that we don’t have to be knowledgeable. As social animals, humans have divided up labour since the days of the hunter-gatherer. In today’s knowledge economy, things are no different....there is no clear defined boundary between one person’s knowledge from another...We also suffer from the knowledge illusion because we confuse what experts know with what we ourselves know. The fact that I can access someone else’s knowledge makes me feel like I already know what I’m talking about...Children suffer from an illusion of comprehension because they can access the knowledge they need. It is in their textbook and in the heads of their teacher...As a collective species, we’re really intelligent. But as individuals, it appears that most of us suffer from a lack of humility.
Ignorance Is Bliss, Illusion Is Not https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/ignorance-is-bliss-illusion-is-not-c97d3d7b016f?source=rss----5977fd7213bd---4
Ogni volta che si insulta il governo dicendo che è stupido ed ignorante Si fanno fondamentalmente due cose...
You further cement the idea in your head that Trump voter = stupid.
You create greater social consequences for those around you voicing anything pro-Trump, thus encouraging greater homogenization of your social group.
You reduce your ability to reasonably engage with ideas that don’t fit your group’s narrative.
Closing your mind http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/closing-your-mind/
LA SCIENZA NN LA FA LA COMUNITÀ A MAGGIORANZA...NEANCHE QUELLA SCIENTIFICA
How will the public know when scientists have determined which scenario is right? It is tempting, but unreliable, to trust what appears to be the majority opinion. Adrian Currie, a philosopher of science at Cambridge University, worries that the feverish competition in academia coupled with the need to curry favor with colleagues—in order to get published, get tenure, or get grant money—rewards timid research at the expense of maverick undertakings
L ASTEROIDE ERA LA TEORIA STANDARD
impacters say they have come even closer to total certainty. “I would argue that the hypothesis has reached the level of the evolution hypothesis,” says Sean Gulick, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the Chicxulub crater. “We have it nailed down, the case is closed,” Buck Sharpton, a geologist and scientist emeritus at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, has said.
MA C È CHI SI OPPONE
She argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978 and then abandoned by all but a small number of scientists. Her research, undertaken with specialists around the world and featured in leading scientific journals, has forced other scientists to take a second look at their data
CAPIRE È IMPORTANTE X L UOMO
Vincent Courtillot writes in his book Evolutionary Catastrophes, “I believe the ancient catastrophes whose traces geologists are now exhuming are worthy of our attention, not just for the sake of our culture or our understanding of the zigzaggy path that led to the emergence of our own species, but quite practically to understand how to keep from becoming extinct ourselves.”
ILLUMINA ANCHE IL CAMMINO DELLA SCIENZA
This dispute illuminates the messy way that science progresses, and how this idealized process, ostensibly guided by objective reason and the search for truth, is shaped by ego, power, and politics. Keller has had to endure decades of ridicule to make scientists reconsider an idea they had confidently rejected.
GRADUALISTI VS CATASTROFISTI
Alvarez’s theory was a boon for the catastrophist school of thought, which maintains that the Earth is shaped by sudden, violent events—and can turn on its occupants in a heartbeat. The impacters contend that the fossils of both marine- and land-dwelling organisms show an abrupt and instantaneous die-off at virtually the same moment, geologically speaking, that the asteroid hit. “If you look at the extinction rate up to the event and you look at the recovery after, this is the most sudden of all the known extinctions,” Sean Gulick says. “This one is like a knife-sharp boundary in the geologic record”—consistent with the kind of destruction an asteroid could cause.
Alvarez’s theory initially faced strong opposition from the gradualists, who argue that enormous planetary changes tend to result from slower, less adrenaline-pumping forces. Among those who disagreed with him was Keller.
GUARDARE AI PRECEDENTI
She had a promising lead: The Earth’s four prior mass extinctions are each associated with enormous volcanic eruptions that lasted about 1 million years apiece. The fifth extinction, the one that doomed the dinosaurs, occurred just as one of the largest volcanoes in history seethed in the Deccan Traps.
DIFETTI DEL VULCANISMO
The planet’s species went extinct “almost overnight,” Smit insists, too quickly to be caused by Deccan volcanism. India’s volcanoes hiccuped for hundreds of thousands of years, too weakly and for too long to be deadly, Keller’s critics contend. They argue that there is no evidence that species suffered while Deccan simmered, and that the biggest volcanic eruptions occurred after the extinction, too late to have been the catalyst.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/dinosaur-extinction-debate/565769/
Scopri perchè la politica è un teatro
DUBBIO
Politicians are notoriously fond of “dodging questions.” But why would anyone do this? If a wife asks her husband, “Where were you last night?,” dodging the question is practically his worst possible option. After all, if he won’t answer, her common-sense reaction is to assume the worst.
ESEMPI
“Who do you respect more – veterans or teachers?”
“What is the maximum number of American deaths we should pay to defeat Saddam Hussein?”
“How should we respond if a welfare recipient spends their entire check on the first day of the month?”
“What is the biggest problem we should do nothing to fix?”
Why Dodge the Question?, by Bryan Caplan https://www.econlib.org/why-dodge-the-question/
This study investigates posture on mental math performance. 125 students (M = 23.5 years) participated as part of a class activity. Half the students sat in an erect position while the other half sat in a slouched position and were asked to mentally subtract 7 serially from 964 for 30 seconds. They then reversed the positions before repeating the math subtraction task beginning at 834. They rated the math task difficulty on a scale from 0 (none) to 10 (extreme). The math test was rated significantly more difficult while sitting slouched (M = 6.2) than while sitting erect (M = 4.9) ANOVA [F(1,243) = 17.06, p < 0.001].
https://nationalaffairs.com/blog/detail/findings-a-daily-roundup/nonsense
Due motivi primo meno rischi di guerra secondo troppa immigrazione
What went wrong in the West and with liberalism? http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/what-went-wrong-2.html
Non significa barare
John Cochrane has a very simple thought experiment to show that the conventional wisdom on stock buybacks is wrong. Yes, when a company buys outstanding shares of its own stock, there is one force that pushes up the stock price. But there is another force that pushes down the stock price–namely, the company’s available cash goes down. In the simplest analysis, those two effects should exactly cancel out
Potpourri https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2018/08/potpourri-388.html
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2017/10/an-exercise-for-my-readers.html?m=1
Tagliare le tasse sul capitale aumenta gli stipendi
An open economy has the production function y = f(k), where y is output per worker and k is capital per worker. The capital stock adjusts so that the after-tax marginal product of capital equals the exogenously given world interest rate r.
r = (1-t)f '(k).
Wages are set by the marginal product of labor, which (by Euler's theorem) equals
w = f(k) -f '(k)*k.
We cut the tax rate t. Because f '(k)*k is the tax base, the static cost of the tax cut (per worker) is
dx = -f '(k)*k*dt.
How much will the tax cut increase wages? In particular, what is dw/dx? The first person to email me the correct answer will get a shout-out on my blog.
By the way, the same calculation would apply to the steady-state of a Ramsey model of a closed economy, where r would be interpreted as the rate of time preference.
Bonus question: If there are positive externalities to capital accumulation, as suggested by DeLong and Summers, would the effect of the tax cut on wages be larger or smaller than in the standard neoclassical model above?
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Update: Casey Mulligan, who has been thinking along similar lines, was the first to email me the correct answer:
dw/dx = 1/(1 - t).
So if the tax rate is one third, then every dollar of tax cut to capital (on a static basis) raises wages by $1.50.
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2017/10/an-exercise-for-my-readers.html?m=1
