Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Substantively misleading reporting on winners in oil manipulations

Yves Smith writes to blast more ‘reporting’. I also follow Angry Bear Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts whom Mark Thoma has recently been linking, who has a unique style for his thoughts, on ‘ballance’ in reporting. It isn’t until paragraph 14, when cursory readers have already checked out, that we get a mention of who really wins […]

More on Michigan Voting

The U.S. Election Atlas shows the Michigan county by county results for the general election in 2008.  Note that they have inexplicably reversed the normal Red-Blue color coding.   Contrast those results with the 2012 Republican primary results. In the Lower Peninsula, the counties that went for Romney in a big way generally went for Obama […]

What is meritocracy?

Andrew Gelman points to our confusions regarding merit in our social perceptions of winners and losers. I might make a list of naughty and nice sayings for another post. Tyler Cowen pointed to an article by business-school professor Luigi Zingales about meritocracy. I’d expect a b-school prof to support the idea of meritocracy, and Zingales […]