andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-89 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson write : Financial crises are staggeringly costly. Only major wars rival them in the burdens they place on public finances. Taxpayers typically transfer enormous resources to banks, their stockholders, and creditors, while public debt explodes and the economy runs below full employment for years. This paper compares how relatively large, developed countries have handled bailouts over time. It analyzes why some have done better than others at containing costs and protecting taxpayers. The paper argues that political variables – the nature of competition within party systems and voting turnout – help explain why some countries do more than others to limit the moral hazards of bailouts. I know next to nothing about this topic, so I’ll just recommend you click through and read the article yourself. Here’s a bit more: Many recent papers have analyzed financial crises using large data bases filled with cases from all over the world. Our [Ferguson
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1 Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson write : Financial crises are staggeringly costly. [sent-1, score-0.401]
2 Only major wars rival them in the burdens they place on public finances. [sent-2, score-0.339]
3 Taxpayers typically transfer enormous resources to banks, their stockholders, and creditors, while public debt explodes and the economy runs below full employment for years. [sent-3, score-0.679]
4 This paper compares how relatively large, developed countries have handled bailouts over time. [sent-4, score-1.002]
5 It analyzes why some have done better than others at containing costs and protecting taxpayers. [sent-5, score-0.524]
6 The paper argues that political variables – the nature of competition within party systems and voting turnout – help explain why some countries do more than others to limit the moral hazards of bailouts. [sent-6, score-1.133]
7 I know next to nothing about this topic, so I’ll just recommend you click through and read the article yourself. [sent-7, score-0.079]
8 Here’s a bit more: Many recent papers have analyzed financial crises using large data bases filled with cases from all over the world. [sent-8, score-1.131]
9 We deliberately limit our concern to relatively large, developed countries that suffered systemic banking crisis involving the actual collapse (or near-collapse) of big financial houses. [sent-10, score-1.742]
10 They conclude their paper with some reflections on reactions to financial crises in the 1930s. [sent-11, score-1.047]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 89 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-16-A historical perspective on financial bailouts
Introduction: Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson write : Financial crises are staggeringly costly. Only major wars rival them in the burdens they place on public finances. Taxpayers typically transfer enormous resources to banks, their stockholders, and creditors, while public debt explodes and the economy runs below full employment for years. This paper compares how relatively large, developed countries have handled bailouts over time. It analyzes why some have done better than others at containing costs and protecting taxpayers. The paper argues that political variables – the nature of competition within party systems and voting turnout – help explain why some countries do more than others to limit the moral hazards of bailouts. I know next to nothing about this topic, so I’ll just recommend you click through and read the article yourself. Here’s a bit more: Many recent papers have analyzed financial crises using large data bases filled with cases from all over the world. Our [Ferguson
2 0.15465066 1493 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-12-Niall Ferguson, the John Yoo line, and the paradox of influence
Introduction: Life is continuous but we think in discrete terms. In applied statistics there’s the p=.05 line which tells us whether a finding is significant or not. Baseball has the Mendoza line. And academia has what might be called the John Yoo line : the point at which nothing you write gets taken seriously, and so you might as well become a hack because you have no scholarly reputation remaining. John Yoo, of course, became a hack because, I assume, he had nothing left to lose. In contrast, historian Niall Ferguson has reportedly been moved to hackery because he has so much to gain . At least that is the analysis of Stephen Marche ( link from Basbøll): Ferguson’s critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of academia or the media. Neither is right. Look at his speaking agent’s Web site. The fee: 50 to 75 grand per appearance. . . . Tha
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Introduction: Ashok Rao shreds the latest book from Niall Ferguson, who we’ve encountered most recently as the source of homophobic slurs but who used to be a serious scholar . Or maybe still is. Remember Linda, that character from the Kahneman and Tversky vignette who was deemed likely to be “a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement”? Maybe Ferguson is a serious scholar who is active in the being-a-hack movement. Perhaps when he’s not writing books where he distorts his sources, or giving lectures with unfortunate slurs, he’s doing historical research. It’s certainly possible. Rao describes how Ferguson distorts his source materials. This is a no-no for any historian, of course, but not such a surprise for Ferguson, who crossed over the John Yoo line awhile ago. Last year I wrote about the paradox of influence: Ferguson gets and keeps the big-money audience by telling them not what he (Ferguson) wants to say—not by giving them his unique insights and understanding—but rat
Introduction: We had some interesting comments on our recent reflections on Niall Ferguson’s ill-chosen remarks in which he attributed Keynes’s economic views (I don’t actually know exactly what Keyesianism is, but I think a key part is for the government to run surpluses during economic booms and deficits during recessions) to the Keynes being gay and marrying a ballerina and talking about poetry. The general idea, I think, is that people without kids don’t care so much about the future, and this motivated Keynes’s party-all-the-time attitude, which might have worked just fine for Eddie Murphy’s girlfriend in the 1980s and in San Francisco bathhouses of the 1970s but, according to Ferguson, is not the ticket for preserving today’s American empire. Some of the more robust defenders of Ferguson may have been disappointed by his followup remarks: “I should not have suggested . . . that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was g
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Introduction: A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of demographics in political trends . Today I’d like to show you how demographics help predict financial crises. Here are a few examples of countries with major crises. The working-age population in Japan peaked in the 1995 census . The 1995 Financial Crisis in Japan The working-age USA population growth slows down to unprecedented levels in 2008 (see figure below) Financial crisis of 2007-2010 . (Also, notice previous dips in 2001, 1991 and 1981, and consider the list of recessions .) China’s working-age population, age 15 to 64, has grown continuously. The labor pool will peak in 2015 and then decline. There are more charts in Demography and Growth report by the Reserve Bank of Australia: Wikipedia surveys the causes of the financial crisis, such as “liquidity shortfall in the United States banking system caused by the overvaluation of assets”. Oh my! Slightly better than the usu
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Introduction: Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson write : Financial crises are staggeringly costly. Only major wars rival them in the burdens they place on public finances. Taxpayers typically transfer enormous resources to banks, their stockholders, and creditors, while public debt explodes and the economy runs below full employment for years. This paper compares how relatively large, developed countries have handled bailouts over time. It analyzes why some have done better than others at containing costs and protecting taxpayers. The paper argues that political variables – the nature of competition within party systems and voting turnout – help explain why some countries do more than others to limit the moral hazards of bailouts. I know next to nothing about this topic, so I’ll just recommend you click through and read the article yourself. Here’s a bit more: Many recent papers have analyzed financial crises using large data bases filled with cases from all over the world. Our [Ferguson
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Introduction: History professor (or, as the news reports call him, “Harvard historian”) Niall Ferguson got in trouble when speaking at a conference of financial advisors. Tom Kostigen reports : Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of “poetry” rather than procreated. . . . Ferguson . . . says it’s only logical that Keynes would take this selfish worldview because he was an “effete” member of society. . . . Throughout his remarks, Ferguson referred to his “friends” in high places. They should all be embarrassed and ashamed of such a connection to such small-minded thinking. Ferguson says U.S. laws and institutions have become degenerate. Acc
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Introduction: I made the mistake of reading this article by Niall Ferguson summarizing his notorious new book. Here’s the best bit: Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic. They know the country has the right software. They just can’t understand why it’s running so damn slowly. What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic. Then we need to download the updates that are running more successfully
Introduction: We had some interesting comments on our recent reflections on Niall Ferguson’s ill-chosen remarks in which he attributed Keynes’s economic views (I don’t actually know exactly what Keyesianism is, but I think a key part is for the government to run surpluses during economic booms and deficits during recessions) to the Keynes being gay and marrying a ballerina and talking about poetry. The general idea, I think, is that people without kids don’t care so much about the future, and this motivated Keynes’s party-all-the-time attitude, which might have worked just fine for Eddie Murphy’s girlfriend in the 1980s and in San Francisco bathhouses of the 1970s but, according to Ferguson, is not the ticket for preserving today’s American empire. Some of the more robust defenders of Ferguson may have been disappointed by his followup remarks: “I should not have suggested . . . that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was g
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Introduction: Thomas Ferguson and Robert Johnson write : Financial crises are staggeringly costly. Only major wars rival them in the burdens they place on public finances. Taxpayers typically transfer enormous resources to banks, their stockholders, and creditors, while public debt explodes and the economy runs below full employment for years. This paper compares how relatively large, developed countries have handled bailouts over time. It analyzes why some have done better than others at containing costs and protecting taxpayers. The paper argues that political variables – the nature of competition within party systems and voting turnout – help explain why some countries do more than others to limit the moral hazards of bailouts. I know next to nothing about this topic, so I’ll just recommend you click through and read the article yourself. Here’s a bit more: Many recent papers have analyzed financial crises using large data bases filled with cases from all over the world. Our [Ferguson
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Introduction: Dan Hopkins sends along this article : [Hopkins] uses regression discontinuity design to estimate the turnout and election impacts of Spanish-language assistance provided under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act. Analyses of two different data sets – the Latino National Survey and California 1998 primary election returns – show that Spanish-language assistance increased turnout for citizens who speak little English. The California results also demonstrate that election procedures an influence outcomes, as support for ending bilingual education dropped markedly in heavily Spanish-speaking neighborhoods with Spanish-language assistance. The California analyses find hints of backlash among non-Hispanic white precincts, but not with the same size or certainty. Small changes in election procedures can influence who votes as well as what wins. Beyond the direct relevance of these results, I find this paper interesting as an example of research that is fundamentally quantitative. Th
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Introduction: The second best thing about this story (from Tom Scocca) is that Anderson spells “Tweets” with a capital T. But the best thing is that Scocca is numerate—he compares numbers on the logarithmic scale: Reminding Lake that he only had 169 Twitter followers was the saddest gambit of all. Jon Lee Anderson has 17,866 followers. And Kim Kardashian has, as I write this, 17,489,892 followers. That is: Jon Lee Anderson is 1/1,000 as important on Twitter, by his own standard, as Kim Kardashian. He is 10 times closer to Mitch Lake than he is to Kim Kardashian. How often do we see a popular journalist who understands orders of magnitude? Good job, Tom Scocca! P.S. Based on his “little twerp” comment, I also wonder if Anderson suffers from tall person syndrome—that’s the problem that some people of above-average height have, that they think they’re more important than other people because they literally look down on them. Don’t get me wrong—I have lots of tall friends who are complete
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