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cc59f9b
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When I applied to graduate school many years ago, I wrote an essay expressing my puzzlement at how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets. Part of that problem is political will; we could take a lot of people off the streets tomorrow if we made it a national priority. But I have also come to realize that NASA had it easy. Rockets conform to the unchanging laws of physics. We know where the..
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humanity
politics
goverment
incentives
social-policy
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Charles Wheelan |
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6c9df28
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A market economy is to economics what democracy is to government: a decent, if flawed, choice among many bad alternatives.
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free-market
markets
economics
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Charles Wheelan |
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9164ab6
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It's easy to lie with statistics, but it's hard to tell the truth without them.
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Charles Wheelan |
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dd4f502
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At a time when we can split the atom, land on the moon, and decode the human genome, why do 2 billion people live on less than $2 a day?
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Charles Wheelan |
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b566154
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Most economists would concede that, in theory, government has the tools to smooth the business cycle. The problem is that fiscal policy is not made in theory; it's made in Congress.
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Charles Wheelan |
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a28d02a
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In a basic agricultural society, it's easy enough to swap five chickens for a new dress or to pay a schoolteacher with a goat and three sacks of rice. Barter works less well in a more advanced economy. The logistical challenges of using chickens to buy books on Amazon.com would be formidable.
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economics
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Charles Wheelan |
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b8558c7
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The greatest risks are never the ones you can see and measure, but the ones you can't see and therefore can never measure. The ones that seem so far outside the boundary of normal probability that you can't imagine they could happen in your lifetime--even though, of course, they do happen, more often than you care to realize.
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Charles Wheelan |
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1f174a5
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Economic development is not a zero-sum game; the world does not need poor countries in order to have rich countries, nor must some people be poor in order for others to be rich. Families who live in public housing on the South Side of Chicago are not poor because Bill Gates lives in a big house. They are poor despite the fact that Bill Gates lives in a big house. For a complex array of reasons, America's poor have not shared in the producti..
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Charles Wheelan |
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464d45a
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The real cost of something is what you must give up in order to get it, which is almost always more than just cash.
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Charles Wheelan |
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437e21a
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Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it maximized his utility.
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Charles Wheelan |
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d529ad0
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Making money takes time, so when we shop, we're really spending time. The real cost of living isn't measured in dollars and cents but in the hours and minutes we must work to live."1"
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Charles Wheelan |
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1693c24
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How much does it cost to treat leprosy? One $3 dose of antibiotic will cure a mild case; a $20 regimen of three antibiotics will cure a more severe case. The World Health Organization even provides the drugs free, but India's health care infrastructure is not good enough to identify the afflicted and get them the medicine they need. So, more than 100,000 people in India are horribly disfigured by a disease that costs $3 to cure. That is wha..
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education
knowledge
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Charles Wheelan |
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f07fef9
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Economics is like gravity: Ignore it and you will be in for some rude surprises.
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Charles Wheelan |
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d7490d9
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Probability doesn't make mistakes; people using probability make mistakes.
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Charles Wheelan |
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9c371f3
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So it is with statistics; no amount of fancy analysis can make up for fundamentally flawed data. Hence the expression "garbage in, garbage out."
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Charles Wheelan |
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7d6e269
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I once interviewed Robert Solow, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Economics and a noted baseball enthusiast. I asked if it bothered him that he received less money for winning the Nobel Prize than Roger Clemens, who was pitching for the Red Sox at the time, earned in a single season. "No," Solow said. "There are a lot of good economists, but there is only one Roger Clemens." That is how economists think."
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Charles Wheelan |
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ec07ec0
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Here is one of the most important things to remember when doing research that involves regression analysis: Try not to kill anyone. You can even put a little Post-it note on your computer monitor: "Do not kill people with your research." Because some very smart people have inadvertently violated that rule."
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Charles Wheelan |
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117952c
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Think about ethanol again. The benefits of that $7 billion tax subsidy are bestowed on a small group of farmers, making it quite lucrative for each one of them. Meanwhile, the costs are spread over the remaining 98 percent of us, putting ethanol somewhere below good oral hygiene on our list of everyday concerns. The opposite would be true with my plan to have left-handed voters pay subsidies to right-handed voters. There are roughly nine ri..
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economics
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Charles Wheelan |
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a974667
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Two percent who care deeply about something are a more potent political force than the 98 percent who feel the opposite but aren't motivated enough to do anything about it.
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Charles Wheelan |
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1a654ad
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One of the most bizarre and intriguing findings is that people with brain damage may be particularly good investors. Why? Because damage to certain parts of the brain can impair the emotional responses that cause the rest of us to do foolish things. A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and the University of Iowa conducted an experiment that compared the investment decisions made by fifteen patients with damage to the areas ..
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Charles Wheelan |
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94878c0
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Meanwhile, time is one of our most scarce resources. At the moment, you are reading instead of working, playing with the dog, applying to law school, shopping for groceries, or having sex. Life is about trade-offs, and so is economics.
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Charles Wheelan |
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e9abb02
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We've built a society that values civil liberties even at the expense of social order.
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Charles Wheelan |
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d4bfcfa
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Technology displaces workers in the short run but does not lead to mass unemployment in the long run.
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Charles Wheelan |
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aeb8368
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As a rule of thumb, the sample size must be at least 30 for the central limit theorem to hold true.) This
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Charles Wheelan |
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b42f379
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During the twentieth century, communist governments killed some 100 million of their own people in peacetime, either by repression or by famine.
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Charles Wheelan |
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7be5d05
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Families who live in public housing on the South Side of Chicago are not poor because Bill Gates lives in a big house.
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Charles Wheelan |
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6e96cae
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what economic benefit smokers provide for nonsmokers (they die earlier, leaving more Social Security and pension benefits for the rest of us),
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Charles Wheelan |
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fc304a8
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Consider a nonstatistics example: Did the U.S. invasion of Iraq make America safer? There is only one intellectually honest answer: We will never know. The reason we will never know is that we do not know--and cannot know--what would have happened if the United States had not invaded Iraq. True, the United States did not find weapons of mass destruction. But it is possible that on the day after the United States did not invade Iraq Saddam H..
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Charles Wheelan |
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54470c4
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the most dangerous kind of job stress stems from having "low control" over one's responsibilities."
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Charles Wheelan |
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5f23ea3
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Regression analysis is the hydrogen bomb of the statistics arsenal.
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Charles Wheelan |
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9d2c2ce
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The authors propose "a New Deal for globalization--one thatlinks engagement with the world economy to a substantial redistribution of income." Remember, this isn't hippy talk. These are the capitalists who see angry workers with pitchforks loitering outside the gates of a very profitable factory, and they are making a very pragmatic calculation: Throw these people some food (and maybe some movie tickets and beer) before we all end up worse ..
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welfare
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Charles Wheelan |
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f8e45b2
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North
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Charles Wheelan |
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08cacfb
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The [Value at Risk model] was like a faulty speedometer, which is arguably worse than no speedometer at all. If you place too much faith in the broken speedometer, you will be oblivious to other signs that your speed is unsafe. In contrast, if there is no speedometer at all, you have no choice but to look around for clues as to how fast you are really going.
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Charles Wheelan |
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f1679a7
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Descriptive statistics exist to simplify, which always implies some loss of nuance or detail.
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Charles Wheelan |
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af897cb
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The good news is that these descriptive statistics give us a manageable and meaningful summary of the underlying phenomenon. That's what this chapter is about. The bad news is that any simplification invites abuse. Descriptive statistics can be like online dating profiles: technically accurate and yet pretty darn misleading.
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Charles Wheelan |
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0d234bb
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If you consider people, not countries, global inequality is falling rapidly.
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Charles Wheelan |
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3e962b2
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Is the journey still worthwhile if the mountain turns out to be enshrouded in fog at the top?
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Charles Wheelan |
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8def26a
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Change is inevitable; but progress depends on what we do with that change.
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Charles Wheelan |
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5715971
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Here is one of the most important things to remember when doing research that involves regression analysis: Try not to kill anyone. You can even put a little Post-it note on your computer monitor: "Do not kill people with your research."
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Charles Wheelan |
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a6b8079
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Statistics is like a high-caliber weapon: helpful when used correctly and potentially disastrous in the wrong hands.
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Charles Wheelan |
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d9f366c
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The world is producing more and more data, ever faster and faster. Yet, as the New York Times has noted, "Data is merely the raw material of knowledge."3* Statistics is the most powerful tool we have for using information to some meaningful end,"
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Charles Wheelan |
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592bea8
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The democratic process will always favor small, well-organized groups at the expense of large, diffuse groups.
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Charles Wheelan |
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ff336df
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Less obviously, concern for the environment is a luxury good. Wealthy Americans are willing to spend more money to protect the environment as a fraction of their incomes than are less wealthy Americans. The same relationship holds true across countries; wealthy nations devote a greater share of their resources to protecting the environment than do poor countries.
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Charles Wheelan |
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b3fdec1
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ethanol may actually make some kinds of air pollution worse. It evaporates faster than pure gasoline, contributing to ozone problems in hot temperatures. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ethanol does reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent relative to gasoline, but it calculated that devoting the entire U.S. corn crop to make ethanol would replace only a small fraction of Ame..
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economics
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Charles Wheelan |