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Italy Annoys Economists

Steve Sailer has a good bit on Italy today via the New York Times. Italy mystifies economists by refusing to embrace the conventional wisdom Economists said that Mr. Barbera had a point, but they also said that worrying about this issue was like fretting about the head cold of a

The War Dividend

I was looking up some information on PID controllers yesterday, and I discovered that the PID controller was originally invented to steer ships for the Navy. Well, not exactly steer, but rather keep them going in a constant direction given both random wave motion and steady breeze or currents. I

Apparently I'm half-Bayesian

Steve Hsu links to a paper by Judea Pearl on Bayesian statistics and causality. Judea Pearl: I turned Bayesian in 1971, as soon as I began reading Savage’s monograph The Foundations of Statistical Inference [Savage, 1962]. The arguments were unassailable: (i) It is plain silly to ignore what we

More on the consensus of Economists

I was randomly browsing this morning, and I came across Castles of Sand by Mansized Target. Literally random, I clicked the link by picking up the laptop and hitting the touchpad. I am comforted that others have suspicions too. Consider the view of economists on something like free trade, for

Income distributions by undergraduate major

Something I hear pretty frequently when I bring up one of these Payscale reports is that I should include an estimate of the spread in the data. This is an excellent point, so I turned again to the National Center for Education Statistics. They have a PowerStats tool that lets

Salary and Compensation Databases

I just posted a page that contains links to salary and compensation information. This is the sort of question that came up repeatedly on the PhysicsForums, so I decided that I should put my learnings in one place.

The Consensus of Economists

Something that made the rounds a couple weeks ago was a survey of the views of professional economists. I thought the survey was interesting. It reminded me of the introduction to Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics, one of my favorite economics books. Sowell started off with what every economist