andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-191 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: My Columbia colleague Sheena Iyengar (most famous among ARM readers for her speed-dating experiment) writes an interesting column on potential reactions to a tax on sugary drinks. The idea is that people might be so annoyed at being told what to do that they might buy more of the stuff, at least in the short term. On the other hand, given the famous subsidies involved in the production of high-fructose corn syrup, soda pop is probably a bit cheaper than it should be, so maybe it all balances out? I agree with Sheena that there’s something about loss of control that is particularly frustrating. One thing that bugs me when I buy a Coke is that I’m paying for the fees of Michael Jordan or whoever it is they have nowadays endorsing their product. I wish there were some way I could just pay for everything else but withhold the money that’s going into those silly celebrity endorsements.
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1 My Columbia colleague Sheena Iyengar (most famous among ARM readers for her speed-dating experiment) writes an interesting column on potential reactions to a tax on sugary drinks. [sent-1, score-0.896]
2 The idea is that people might be so annoyed at being told what to do that they might buy more of the stuff, at least in the short term. [sent-2, score-0.696]
3 On the other hand, given the famous subsidies involved in the production of high-fructose corn syrup, soda pop is probably a bit cheaper than it should be, so maybe it all balances out? [sent-3, score-1.194]
4 I agree with Sheena that there’s something about loss of control that is particularly frustrating. [sent-4, score-0.336]
5 One thing that bugs me when I buy a Coke is that I’m paying for the fees of Michael Jordan or whoever it is they have nowadays endorsing their product. [sent-5, score-1.05]
6 I wish there were some way I could just pay for everything else but withhold the money that’s going into those silly celebrity endorsements. [sent-6, score-0.737]
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same-blog 1 1.0 191 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-08-Angry about the soda tax
Introduction: My Columbia colleague Sheena Iyengar (most famous among ARM readers for her speed-dating experiment) writes an interesting column on potential reactions to a tax on sugary drinks. The idea is that people might be so annoyed at being told what to do that they might buy more of the stuff, at least in the short term. On the other hand, given the famous subsidies involved in the production of high-fructose corn syrup, soda pop is probably a bit cheaper than it should be, so maybe it all balances out? I agree with Sheena that there’s something about loss of control that is particularly frustrating. One thing that bugs me when I buy a Coke is that I’m paying for the fees of Michael Jordan or whoever it is they have nowadays endorsing their product. I wish there were some way I could just pay for everything else but withhold the money that’s going into those silly celebrity endorsements.
2 0.12595029 1003 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-11-$
Introduction: Felix Salmon relates the story of an economics Nobel Prize winner getting paid by a hedge fund. It would all seems pretty silly—sort of like Coca-Cola featuring Michael Jordan in their ads—except that hedge funds are disreputable nowadays and so it seems vaguely sleazy for a scholar to trade on his academic reputation to make free money in this way. It falls roughly in the same category as that notorious b-school prof in Inside Job who got $125K for writing a b.s. report about the financial stability of Iceland—and then, when they came back to him later and asked how he could’ve written it, he basically said: Hey, I don’t know anything about Iceland, I was just taking their money! That said, if a hedge fund offered me $125K to sit on their board, I’d probably take it! It’s hard to turn down free money. Or maybe not, I don’t really know. So far, when companies have paid me $, it’s been to do something for them, to consult or give a short course. I’d like to think that if
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Introduction: Visual Economics shows statistics on average food consumption in America: My brief feedback is that water is confounded with these results. They should have subtracted water content from the weight of all dietary items, as it inflates the proportion of milk, vegetable and fruit items that contain more water. They did that for soda (which is represented as sugar/corn syrup), amplifying the inconsistency. Time Magazine had a beautiful gallery that visualizes diets around the world in a more appealing way.
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Introduction: Underground norms from Jay Livingston. P.S. The Coke story is here (and is followed up in the comments).
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Introduction: I was going through the blog and noticed this note on an article by Mankiw and Weinzierl who implied that the state only has a right to tax things that are “unjustly wrestled from someone else.” This didn’t make much sense to me–whether it’s the sales tax, the income tax, or whatever, I see taxes as a way to raise money, not as a form of punishment. At the time, I conjectured this was a general difference in attitude between political scientists and economists, but in retrospect I realize I’m dealing with n=1 in each case. See here for further discussion of taxing “justly acquired endowments.” The only reason I’m bringing this all up now is that I think it is relevant to our recent discussion here and here of Mankiw’s work incentives. Mankiw objected to paying a higher marginal tax rate, and I think part of this is that he sees taxes as a form of punishment, and since he came by his income honestly he doesn’t think it’s fair to have to pay taxes on it. My perspective i
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same-blog 1 0.95309979 191 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-08-Angry about the soda tax
Introduction: My Columbia colleague Sheena Iyengar (most famous among ARM readers for her speed-dating experiment) writes an interesting column on potential reactions to a tax on sugary drinks. The idea is that people might be so annoyed at being told what to do that they might buy more of the stuff, at least in the short term. On the other hand, given the famous subsidies involved in the production of high-fructose corn syrup, soda pop is probably a bit cheaper than it should be, so maybe it all balances out? I agree with Sheena that there’s something about loss of control that is particularly frustrating. One thing that bugs me when I buy a Coke is that I’m paying for the fees of Michael Jordan or whoever it is they have nowadays endorsing their product. I wish there were some way I could just pay for everything else but withhold the money that’s going into those silly celebrity endorsements.
2 0.79858059 1003 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-11-$
Introduction: Felix Salmon relates the story of an economics Nobel Prize winner getting paid by a hedge fund. It would all seems pretty silly—sort of like Coca-Cola featuring Michael Jordan in their ads—except that hedge funds are disreputable nowadays and so it seems vaguely sleazy for a scholar to trade on his academic reputation to make free money in this way. It falls roughly in the same category as that notorious b-school prof in Inside Job who got $125K for writing a b.s. report about the financial stability of Iceland—and then, when they came back to him later and asked how he could’ve written it, he basically said: Hey, I don’t know anything about Iceland, I was just taking their money! That said, if a hedge fund offered me $125K to sit on their board, I’d probably take it! It’s hard to turn down free money. Or maybe not, I don’t really know. So far, when companies have paid me $, it’s been to do something for them, to consult or give a short course. I’d like to think that if
Introduction: Given Grandma Mankiw’s hypothetical distaste for Sonia Sotomayor’s spending habits (recall that Grandma “would have been shocked and appalled” by the judge’s lack of savings), I expect she (the grandmother) would be even more irritated by the success of Sotomayor’s recent book: Now that Sotomayor has a ton of money coming in, in addition to a well-paying job and pension for life, that would almost seem to validate Sotomayor’s foolish, foolish decision to enjoy herself in middle age rather than sock hundreds of thousands of dollars into a retirement account she likely would never touch during her lifetime. One interesting thing about this example is that Mankiw apparently holds within himself a descriptive and normative view of economics. Descriptively, he models people as “spenders” or “savers.” But, normatively, he seems to attribute higher values to the “savers.” (He also seems to be confused about the relation between saving to intertemporal preference (see my long p
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen pointed to an article by business-school professor Luigi Zingales about meritocracy. I’d expect a b-school prof to support the idea of meritocracy, and Zingales does not disappoint. But he says a bunch of other things that to me represent a confused conflation of ideas. Here’s Zingales: America became known as a land of opportunity—a place whose capitalist system benefited the hardworking and the virtuous [emphasis added]. In a word, it was a meritocracy. That’s interesting—and revealing. Here’s what I get when I look up “meritocracy” in the dictionary : 1 : a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement 2 : leadership selected on the basis of intellectual criteria Nothing here about “hardworking” or “virtuous.” In a meritocracy, you can be as hardworking as John Kruk or as virtuous as Kobe Bryant and you’ll still get ahead—if you have the talent and achievement. Throwing in “hardworking” and “virtuous”
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Introduction: My Columbia colleague Sheena Iyengar (most famous among ARM readers for her speed-dating experiment) writes an interesting column on potential reactions to a tax on sugary drinks. The idea is that people might be so annoyed at being told what to do that they might buy more of the stuff, at least in the short term. On the other hand, given the famous subsidies involved in the production of high-fructose corn syrup, soda pop is probably a bit cheaper than it should be, so maybe it all balances out? I agree with Sheena that there’s something about loss of control that is particularly frustrating. One thing that bugs me when I buy a Coke is that I’m paying for the fees of Michael Jordan or whoever it is they have nowadays endorsing their product. I wish there were some way I could just pay for everything else but withhold the money that’s going into those silly celebrity endorsements.
2 0.89964676 567 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-10-English-to-English translation
Introduction: It’s not just for Chaucer (or Mad Max) anymore. Peter Frase writes: It’s a shame that we neglect to re-translate older works into English merely because they were originally written in English. Languages change, and our reactions to words and formulations change. This is obvious when you read something like Chaucer, but it’s true to a more subtle degree of more recent writings. There is a pretty good chance that something written in the 19th century won’t mean the same thing to us that it meant to its contemporary readers. Thus it would make sense to re-translate Huckleberry Finn into modern language, in the same way we periodically get new translations of Homer or Dante or Thomas Mann. This is a point that applies equally well to non-fiction and social theory: in some ways, English-speaking sociologists are lucky that our canonical trio of classical theorists-Marx, Weber, and Durkheim-all wrote in another language. The most recent translation of Capital is eminently more readable
3 0.89281863 1040 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-03-Absolutely last Niall Ferguson post ever, in which I offer him serious advice
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
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Introduction: Ole Rogeberg writes: After reading your recent post , I thought you might find this interesting – especially the scanned interview that is included at the bottom of the posting. It’s an old OMNI interview with Walter Stewart that was the first thing I read (at a young and impressionable age ;) about the prevalence of errors, fraud and cheating in science, the institutional barriers to tackling it, the often high personal costs to whistleblowers, the difficulty of accessing scientific data to repeat published analyses, and the surprisingly negative attitude towards criticism within scientific communities. Highly recommended entertaining reading – with some good examples of scientific investigations into implausible effects. The post itself contains the info I once dug up about what happened to him later – he seems like an interesting and very determined guy: when the NIH tried to stop him from investigating scientific errors and fraud he went on a hunger strike. No idea what’s h
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