andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-196 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: My Columbia colleague Irv Garfinkel recently came out with a book (with coauthors Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding), “Mythbusters: The U.S. Social Welfare State,” where they argue: The United States is a capitalist nation that has eschewed Scandinavian-style socialist policies in favor of capitalism and economic growth, right? Wrong. The U.S. is not only one of the largest welfare states in the world, but it is strong economically precisely because of its adoption of some socialist policies–with public education as the primary driver. The American welfare state faces large challenges. Restoring its historical lead in education is the most important but requires investing large sums in education–beginning with universal pre-school–and in complementary programs–including selected cash benefits for families with children–that aid children’s development. The American health insurance system is by far the most costly in the rich world, yet fails to insure one sixth of its population
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1 My Columbia colleague Irv Garfinkel recently came out with a book (with coauthors Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding), “Mythbusters: The U. [sent-1, score-0.289]
2 Social Welfare State,” where they argue: The United States is a capitalist nation that has eschewed Scandinavian-style socialist policies in favor of capitalism and economic growth, right? [sent-3, score-0.69]
3 is not only one of the largest welfare states in the world, but it is strong economically precisely because of its adoption of some socialist policies–with public education as the primary driver. [sent-7, score-1.202]
4 The American welfare state faces large challenges. [sent-8, score-0.576]
5 Restoring its historical lead in education is the most important but requires investing large sums in education–beginning with universal pre-school–and in complementary programs–including selected cash benefits for families with children–that aid children’s development. [sent-9, score-0.945]
6 The American health insurance system is by far the most costly in the rich world, yet fails to insure one sixth of its population, produces below average results, crowds out useful investments in children, and is the least equitably financed. [sent-10, score-0.964]
7 Achieving universal coverage, which will be nearly accomplished by the recently passed health care legislation, will increase costs but long term costs can be restrained with complete government financing. [sent-11, score-0.816]
8 a leader again in both commitment to the social welfare state and a productive, market-based economy. [sent-14, score-0.671]
9 I haven’t actually seen the book so I don’t know the details backing up their argument, but Irv has always been pretty close to the data so I expect the book is worth a careful look. [sent-15, score-0.331]
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Introduction: My Columbia colleague Irv Garfinkel recently came out with a book (with coauthors Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding), “Mythbusters: The U.S. Social Welfare State,” where they argue: The United States is a capitalist nation that has eschewed Scandinavian-style socialist policies in favor of capitalism and economic growth, right? Wrong. The U.S. is not only one of the largest welfare states in the world, but it is strong economically precisely because of its adoption of some socialist policies–with public education as the primary driver. The American welfare state faces large challenges. Restoring its historical lead in education is the most important but requires investing large sums in education–beginning with universal pre-school–and in complementary programs–including selected cash benefits for families with children–that aid children’s development. The American health insurance system is by far the most costly in the rich world, yet fails to insure one sixth of its population
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Introduction: I followed a link from Tyler Cowen to this bit by Daniel Kahneman: Education is an important determinant of income — one of the most important — but it is less important than most people think. If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10%. When you focus on education you neglect the myriad other factors that determine income. The differences of income among people who have the same education are huge. I think I know what he’s saying–if you regress income on education and other factors, and then you take education out of the model, R-squared decreases by 10%. Or something like that. Not necessarily R-squared, maybe you fit the big model, then get predictions for everyone putting in the mean value for education and look at the sd of incomes or the Gini index or whatever. Or something else along those lines. My problem is with the counterfactual: “If everyone had the same education . . .” I have a couple problems with this
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Introduction: An interview with me from 2012 : You’re a statistician and wrote a book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State , looking at why Americans vote the way they do. In an election year I think it would be a good time to revisit that question, not just for people in the US, but anyone around the world who wants to understand the realities – rather than the stereotypes – of how Americans vote. I regret the title I gave my book. I was too greedy. I wanted it to be an airport bestseller because I figured there were millions of people who are interested in politics and some subset of them are always looking at the statistics. It’s got a very grabby title and as a result people underestimated the content. They thought it was a popularisation of my work, or, at best, an expansion of an article we’d written. But it had tons of original material. If I’d given it a more serious, political science-y title, then all sorts of people would have wanted to read it, because they would
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Introduction: People seeking unemployment benefits or welfare would have to first pass a drug test under a proposal Sen. Orrin Hatch will try to add to legislation extending the social safety net during this time of economic turmoil. Hatch … said his idea would help battle drug addiction and could reduce the nation’s debt. He will try to get the Senate to include his amendment to a $140 billion bill extending tax breaks and social programs this week. “This amendment is a way to help people get off of drugs to become productive and healthy members of society, while ensuring that valuable taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted,” he said after announcing his amendment. “Too many Americans are locked into a life of a dangerous dependency not only on drugs, but the federal assistance that serves to enable their addiction.” I have a horrible vision of NSF and NIH dollars used to support the amphetamine dependencies of students pulling all-nighters in their bio labs. Something’s gotta be done about this
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Introduction: My article with Daniel and Yair has recently appeared in The Forum: We use multilevel modeling to estimate support for health-care reform by age, income, and state. Opposition to reform is concentrated among higher-income voters and those over 65. Attitudes do not vary much by state. Unfortunately, our poll data only go to 2004, but we suspect that much can be learned from the relative positions of different demographic groups and different states, despite swings in national opinion. We speculate on the political implications of these findings. The article features some pretty graphs that originally appeared on the blog. It’s in a special issue on health care politics that has several interesting articles, among which I’d like to single out this one by Bob Shapiro and Lawrence Jacobs entitled, “Simulating Representation: Elite Mobilization and Political Power in Health Care Reform”: The public’s core policy preferences have, for some time, favored expanding access to heal
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Introduction: Uberbloggers Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias were kind enough to link to my five-year-old post with graphs from Red State Blue State on time trends of average income by state. Here are the graphs : Yglesias’s take-home point: There isn’t that much change over time in states’ economic well-being. All things considered the best predictor of how rich a state was in 2000 was simply how rich it was in 1929…. Massachusetts and Connecticut have always been rich and Arkansas and Mississippi have always been poor. I’d like to point to a different feature of the graphs, which is that, although the rankings of the states haven’t changed much (as can be seen from the “2000 compared to 1929″ scale), the relative values of the incomes have converged quite a bit—at least, they converged from about 1930 to 1980 before hitting some level of stability. And the rankings have changed a bit. My impression (without checking the numbers) is that New York and Connecticut were
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Introduction: “Where academia meets public life” : The Changing Face of Violence Joel F. Harrington A debate has kicked off among scholars on whether we have become inherently more peaceful. A more important question is whether we actually understand the many forms violence takes. The Professor as Digital Native Interview with Mary Beard Why Central Bank Transparency May Be Overrated Brigitte Granville Be it ever so brilliant, communication in monetary policy is no panacea in today’s world of slow growth, high debt, and fiscal policy uncertainty. When Does Digital Activism Pack a Punch? Philip N. Howard A new project is collecting data to offer insights from digital campaigns around the world. Being ‘Different’ in a World of High Achievers Allison Stevens A Columbia professor writes about the challenges of raising a Down syndrome child – and the mixed reactions among her colleagues. A Grand Illusion Euny Hong How the top French schools remain incubators for the eli
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Introduction: When Sonia Sotomayor was nominated for the Supreme Court, and there was some discussion of having 6 Roman Catholics on the court at the same time, I posted the following historical graph: It’s time for an update: It’s still gonna take awhile for the Catholics to catch up. . . . And this one might be relevant too: It looks as if Jews and men have been overrepresented, also Episcopalians (which, as I noted earlier, are not necessarily considered Protestant in terms of religious doctrine but which I counted as such for the ethnic categorization). Religion is an interesting political variable because it’s nominally about religious belief but typically seems to be more about ethnicity.
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Introduction: I haven’t linked to the Baby Name Wizard in awhile. . . . Laura Wattenberg takes a look at the question , “Does a hard-to-pronounce baby name hurt you?” Critical thinking without “debunking”—this is the way to go.
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Introduction: My econ dept colleague Joseph Stiglitz suggests that financial fraudsters be sent to prison. He points out that the usual penalty–million-dollar fines–just isn’t enough for crimes whose rewards can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. That all makes sense, but why do the options have to be: 1. No punishment 2. A fine with little punishment or deterrent value 3. Prison. What’s the point of putting nonviolent criminals in prison? As I’ve said before , I’d prefer if the government just took all these convicted thieves’ assets along with 95% of their salary for several years, made them do community service (sorting bottles and cans at the local dump, perhaps; a financier should be good at this sort of thing, no?), etc. If restriction of personal freedom is judged be part of the sentence, they could be given some sort of electronic tag that would send a message to the police if you are ever more than 3 miles from your home. And a curfew so you have to stay home bet
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