Prisoners of Overwork: A Dilemma The New York Times has an illuminating article today summarizing recent research on the gender effects of mandatory overwork in professional jobs. Lawyers, people in finance and other client-centered occupations are increasingly required to be available round-the-clock, with 50-60 or more hours of work per week the norm. Among other costs, the […]
Panetta and Trump: Who are You Calling Chumps? Leon Panetta: Trump treats Americans like we’re chumps Check out the entire interview as it was excellent. But I had to look up this old fashion word: a person who is easily tricked : a stupid or foolish person OK – Trump supporters are easily tricked. But Trump […]
Statistical Significance and the Sweet Siren of Self-Confirmation: A Reply to Taylor Just as Ulysses had himself chained to the mast of his ship so he wouldn’t succumb to the lure of the Sirens, John Ionnidis and others have argued we must bind ourselves to the discipline of statistical significance lest we fall victim to confirmation bias. […]
Free Speech, Safety and the Triumph of Neoliberalism I’m reading another article about debates over free speech on campus, this time at Williams College, an elite school in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts. A faculty petition asks to formalize and tighten the college’s policy on free speech by adopting the Chicago Principles, which state that “concerns about […]
Trump Drops The Other Iran Oil Shoe US SecState Pompeo announced early today that the waivers granted to 8 nations allowing them to continue to import oil from Iran will not bee renewed when they expire in early May. I am not sure of the identity of three of those nations, but the big five […]
The scary headlines of the past few days have been well-discussed below by Dale Coberly and Barkley Rosser. Data, however, is only as good as its assumptions, and the overall trend is well worth a glance. (Note: I took the 2013-2017 data from BC professor (and director of their Center for Retirement Research) Alicia H. […]
(Dan here…Social Security is an issue that seems to generate a lot of firm beliefs and passion, as witness recent threads. It is rare that people refer to actuary material. On the other sides of the issue are people like Andrew Biggs, who is knowledgeable and smart in his arguments. I am posting this as […]
Media Continues VSP Story On Social Security Here we go again. We have arrived at the time for the release of the annual Social Security Administration (SSA) report. It got the usual headlines across the media, that the SSA will “run out of money” in 2034. Most of the stories played it all scary, although […]
I think this one year old brilliant as usual post by Noah Smith is well worth another read. I googled [noah smith mud moats] when I ran into a mud moat in a comment section flame war. Click the link but I will attempt to summarize. First a very very common debating trick is to […]