- “And almost invariably, I see the same colleague in our communal kitchen, who asks with delight, “Joe, what are you having for lunch today?” The types of bean and cheese rotate, as does the fruit—which depends on the season—but I do not inform my co-worker of these variations when I laugh off her very clever and funny question.”
In an article about the comforts of routine and habit when it comes to food, I found this excerpt to be pleasingly meta. You know who should especially read this article? Statisticians – especially aspiring statisticians.
..
.. - “Take his celebrated work with David Card on the minimum wage. They looked at how relative hiring patterns changed when one state raised its minimum wage and one right on its border did not. Not much except the minimum wage differed between the two situations, so it was about as close to a controlled experiment as economists will ever get. Alan was a pioneer in the exploitation of such natural experiments. After Alan showed what kind of evidence can be marshaled to study a labor-market intervention, economists have raised their standard of what constitutes convincing evidence. What followed has been called a “credibility revolution” in empirical economics.”
Unless you are a student of economics, it is unlikely that you will have heard of Alan Krueger. More’s the pity – for as the title of this article will tell you, his work likely has already affected you, no matter where in the world you are reading this.
..
.. - “The issue, Statistical Inference in the 21st Century: A World Beyond P<0.05, calls for an end to the practice of using a probability value (p-value) of less than 0.05 as strong evidence against a null hypothesis or a value greater than 0.05 as strong evidence favoring a null hypothesis. Instead, p-values should be reported as continuous quantities and described in language stating what the value means in the scientific context.”
Statistics is harder, and more confusing than you think. Yet another example is this article – each of the quotes in the article make for thoughtful reading.
..
.. - “…Section 230 has proved an “awesome benefit” for the tech platforms. It has encouraged astonishing innovation and accelerated the growth of some of the richest companies on the planet. But it has also allowed billions of people to post anything they like online with almost no constraint. Some of that content is inspirational, much of it trivial, and a small sliver grotesque and harmful. Social networks do not discriminate.”
The FT on whether Facebook and its ilk are publishers or postmen. The import of section 230 is quite staggering, and I’d like to read the book mentioned in the article for that reason.
..
.. - “We ran similar regressions controlling for industry and found that — even after controlling for industry — elite MBAs did not produce positive statistically significant alpha. Elite MBAs did perform relatively well as CEOs in healthcare and consumer staples, but relatively poorly in energy and materials businesses, though those results were not statistically significant. Our study is not the only one to come to this conclusion. A study by economists at the University of Hawaii asked similar questions and found that firm performance is not predicted by the educational background of the CEOs.”
A regression based exercise (which of course comes with its own set of problems) on whether education (type and quality) and experience matters for CEO performance. Short answer: it doesn’t. I was tempted to excerpt the concluding paragraph, but I’ll leave it to the reader to discover.
Skip to content
EconForEverybody 