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

Trusting statistics

I had a Facebook discussion yesterday about statistics. At one point, my interlocutor posted “You should know better than anyone that statistics can be manipulated to actually show the opposite of what is real.” Well, just to be clear, that’s not a problem with statistics, that’s a problem of motivated reasoning, which is not a […]

Congratulations to Kim Kardashian

From the World Economic Forum: Kim Kardashian is an unlikely champion of statistics, but a tweet from the reality TV star in January 2017 contained a startling figure that has been named International Statistic of the Year. She shared a table showing a range of violent or unexpected ways people meet their deaths annually in […]

Another View of the Data

While I applaud the cautious optimism of Spencer and Tom, I’m more inclined to quote Joseph Brusuelas: [T]he January payrolls added a dollop of Zen like logic to a recovery that is shaping up like no other. An additional 111,000 workers entered the labor force, yet the unemployment rate fell to 9.7% while private sector […]

Green Shoots Data Defined

As a rule, the Shiller Index uses the CPI as reported for All Urban Consumers (CPIAUCNS on Fred(r)). But the Index is only updated Quarterly, so monthly data is estimated. Which produces a very interesting difference over August, not to mention September expectations: The annualised inflation rate between June and August is 0.39%, which just […]

The Real Difference with 2004

While there was a lot of blather about “values voters” swinging the 2004 Presidential election to the man who had none, the real story has always been that the HENRYs went for W’s policies. That changed in 2008: Guess who won Joe the Plumber’s vote…real people who make about $42,000 a year, the median income […]

Four years is too long, Brad

Ms. mochi-tsuki discovers that the Washington Post has no copyeditors and cannot do math. If this were another blog, I would be typing “Why, oh why, can’t we have a better press corps” here. Instead, let’s just leave it at: if you can’t extract data from the census correctly, what are you doing publishing a […]

And I thought I was a night person.

EDITED TO CLARIFY APPARENT CONFUSION: The evil* Aaron Shiff of 26econ.com [edited to clarify that he is not—to my knowledge, at least—the Aaron in Coventry] discovered Google Web History. Being a natural follower, I checked my own breakdown. It appears I do a lot of Google searching during the two hours the children are Not […]