andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-311 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Mark Palko links to a blog by Megan McArdle which reproduces a list entitled, “What You Paid For: 2009 tax receipt for a taxpayer earning $34,140 and paying $5,400 in federal income tax and FICA (selected items).” McArdle writes, “isn’t it possible that the widespread support for programs like Social Security and Medicare rests on the fact that most people don’t realize just how big a portion of your paycheck those programs consume?” But, as Palko points out, the FICA and Medicare withholdings are actually already right there on your W-2 form. So the real problem is not a lack of information but that people aren’t reading their W-2 forms more carefully. (Also, I don’t know if people are so upset about their withholdings for Social Security and Medicare, given that they’ll be getting that money back when they retire.) I’m more concerned about the list itself, though. I think a lot of cognitive-perceptual effects are involved in what gets a separate line item, and what doesn
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1 Mark Palko links to a blog by Megan McArdle which reproduces a list entitled, “What You Paid For: 2009 tax receipt for a taxpayer earning $34,140 and paying $5,400 in federal income tax and FICA (selected items). [sent-1, score-0.936]
2 ” McArdle writes, “isn’t it possible that the widespread support for programs like Social Security and Medicare rests on the fact that most people don’t realize just how big a portion of your paycheck those programs consume? [sent-2, score-0.541]
3 ” But, as Palko points out, the FICA and Medicare withholdings are actually already right there on your W-2 form. [sent-3, score-0.265]
4 So the real problem is not a lack of information but that people aren’t reading their W-2 forms more carefully. [sent-4, score-0.247]
5 (Also, I don’t know if people are so upset about their withholdings for Social Security and Medicare, given that they’ll be getting that money back when they retire. [sent-5, score-0.528]
6 ) I’m more concerned about the list itself, though. [sent-6, score-0.163]
7 I think a lot of cognitive-perceptual effects are involved in what gets a separate line item, and what doesn’t. [sent-7, score-0.145]
8 For example, I see the FBI but not the CIA, the NSA, or weapons procurement. [sent-8, score-0.105]
9 There’s a line for “salary and benefits for members of Congress” but nothing for the courts system or the White House. [sent-9, score-0.308]
10 So, while I agree with McArdle that “more information is generally better,” I’m not quite sure how to get there. [sent-11, score-0.095]
11 I’d be very very suspicious of the choice of items that happens to end up included on the hypothetical itemized tax bill. [sent-12, score-0.469]
12 Especially If it’s really true that people don’t notice those boxes on their W-2 form with FICA and Medicare payments, I also seem to recall seeing some glossy government documents with charts showing where the money is coming from and where it goes. [sent-13, score-0.653]
13 Maybe there’s some place other than a W-2 form to put this information where people will notice it. [sent-14, score-0.395]
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Introduction: Mark Palko links to a blog by Megan McArdle which reproduces a list entitled, “What You Paid For: 2009 tax receipt for a taxpayer earning $34,140 and paying $5,400 in federal income tax and FICA (selected items).” McArdle writes, “isn’t it possible that the widespread support for programs like Social Security and Medicare rests on the fact that most people don’t realize just how big a portion of your paycheck those programs consume?” But, as Palko points out, the FICA and Medicare withholdings are actually already right there on your W-2 form. So the real problem is not a lack of information but that people aren’t reading their W-2 forms more carefully. (Also, I don’t know if people are so upset about their withholdings for Social Security and Medicare, given that they’ll be getting that money back when they retire.) I’m more concerned about the list itself, though. I think a lot of cognitive-perceptual effects are involved in what gets a separate line item, and what doesn
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Introduction: Despite the title, this post is mostly not about economics or even politics but rather about the central role of comparisons in statistics and statistical graphics. It started when someone pointed me to this article in which Megan McArdle points out the misleadingness of a graph that seems to show a bimodal income distribution but only by combining cells in the tail: McArdle makes a good point: of course, if you spread the histogram along a uniform scale (or, for that matter, a log scale), you don’t see that bump at the high end. McArdle reproduces some Census charts showing income stability over the past few decades: Before I had a chance to chance to write about this, I noticed that Mark Palko did the job for me. Palko writes: To the extent that statistics includes data visualization, this is definitely bad statistics. When trying to depict trends and relationships, you generally want to get as much of the pertinent information as possible into the same grap
Introduction: Pointing to this news article by Megan McArdle discussing a recent study of Medicaid recipients, Jonathan Falk writes: Forget the interpretation for a moment, and the political spin, but haven’t we reached an interesting point when a journalist says things like: When you do an RCT with more than 12,000 people in it, and your defense of your hypothesis is that maybe the study just didn’t have enough power, what you’re actually saying is “the beneficial effects are probably pretty small”. and A good Bayesian—and aren’t most of us are supposed to be good Bayesians these days?—should be updating in light of this new information. Given this result, what is the likelihood that Obamacare will have a positive impact on the average health of Americans? Every one of us, for or against, should be revising that probability downwards. I’m not saying that you have to revise it to zero; I certainly haven’t. But however high it was yesterday, it should be somewhat lower today. This
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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
Introduction: Greg Mankiw writes (link from Tyler Cowen ): Without any taxes, accepting that editor’s assignment would have yielded my children an extra $10,000. With taxes, it yields only $1,000. In effect, once the entire tax system is taken into account, my family’s marginal tax rate is about 90 percent. Is it any wonder that I [Mankiw] turn down most of the money-making opportunities I am offered? By contrast, without the tax increases advocated by the Obama administration, the numbers would look quite different. I would face a lower income tax rate, a lower Medicare tax rate, and no deduction phaseout or estate tax. Taking that writing assignment would yield my kids about $2,000. I would have twice the incentive to keep working. First, the good news Obama’s tax rates are much lower than Mankiw had anticipated! According to the above quote, his marginal tax rate is currently 80% but threatens to rise to 90%. But, in October 2008, Mankiw calculated that Obama’s would tax his m
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Introduction: Mark Palko links to a blog by Megan McArdle which reproduces a list entitled, “What You Paid For: 2009 tax receipt for a taxpayer earning $34,140 and paying $5,400 in federal income tax and FICA (selected items).” McArdle writes, “isn’t it possible that the widespread support for programs like Social Security and Medicare rests on the fact that most people don’t realize just how big a portion of your paycheck those programs consume?” But, as Palko points out, the FICA and Medicare withholdings are actually already right there on your W-2 form. So the real problem is not a lack of information but that people aren’t reading their W-2 forms more carefully. (Also, I don’t know if people are so upset about their withholdings for Social Security and Medicare, given that they’ll be getting that money back when they retire.) I’m more concerned about the list itself, though. I think a lot of cognitive-perceptual effects are involved in what gets a separate line item, and what doesn
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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: Catherine Rampell writes : On Monday the Nobel Foundation, which bestows the world’s most prestigious academic, literary and humanitarian prizes, said it was reducing the cash awarded with Nobel Prizes by about 20 percent. . . . Peter A. Diamond, a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who also received the Nobel in economic science in 2010, observed that over the long run, cutting the cash award could dilute the prize’s prestige. But he added that Monday’s news overstates the financial blow to future laureates. “One of the things that comes with the prize, besides the prestige and the money,” he said, “is the opportunities to make more money.” I wouldn’t think these guys need the money, but I suppose it’s part of their professional code that they have to say that? (Recall our earlier discussion of the economist who said he’d stop working once his marginal tax rate reached the anticipated value of 93%.)
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