andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-334 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Steven Levitt writes :. Diamond often would fall asleep in seminars, often for large chunks of time. What was amazing, however, is that he would open his eyes and then make by far the most insightful comment of the entire seminar! Now that we have n=2 [see the first part of the title of this blog entry], I’m wondering . . . maybe this sort of thing is more common than Levitt and I had realized. P.S. Levitt also writes: The one thing that puzzles me [Levitt] is why in the world would he want to be on the Board of the Federal Reserve? One thing economists just don’t understand are people’s preferences. To get meta here for a moment . . . just as Levitt can’t understand Diamond’s preferences, I find it extremely difficult to understand that Levitt is puzzled by Diamond’s desire to serve on the Federal Reserve, It’s obvious, no? Diamond has expertise on macroeconomics and, I assume, some strong and well-informed opinions on monetary policy; the Federal Reserve determ
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1 Diamond often would fall asleep in seminars, often for large chunks of time. [sent-2, score-0.321]
2 What was amazing, however, is that he would open his eyes and then make by far the most insightful comment of the entire seminar! [sent-3, score-0.149]
3 Now that we have n=2 [see the first part of the title of this blog entry], I’m wondering . [sent-4, score-0.045]
4 maybe this sort of thing is more common than Levitt and I had realized. [sent-7, score-0.065]
5 Levitt also writes: The one thing that puzzles me [Levitt] is why in the world would he want to be on the Board of the Federal Reserve? [sent-10, score-0.136]
6 One thing economists just don’t understand are people’s preferences. [sent-11, score-0.15]
7 just as Levitt can’t understand Diamond’s preferences, I find it extremely difficult to understand that Levitt is puzzled by Diamond’s desire to serve on the Federal Reserve, It’s obvious, no? [sent-15, score-0.412]
8 Diamond has expertise on macroeconomics and, I assume, some strong and well-informed opinions on monetary policy; the Federal Reserve determines much of monetary policy; and by being on the board, Diamond would have a chance to influence that policy. [sent-16, score-0.574]
9 Now that I’ve explained Diamond to Levitt, perhaps someone can explain Levitt to me. [sent-18, score-0.102]
10 Someone suggested to me that Levitt’s puzzlement above is due to his (Levitt’s) disdain for macro, which is basically all the Fed does. [sent-24, score-0.406]
11 But I don’t think that’s quite right: Levitt liked macro when his colleague Casey Mulligan was arguing (in October, 2008! [sent-25, score-0.3]
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Introduction: Steven Levitt writes :. Diamond often would fall asleep in seminars, often for large chunks of time. What was amazing, however, is that he would open his eyes and then make by far the most insightful comment of the entire seminar! Now that we have n=2 [see the first part of the title of this blog entry], I’m wondering . . . maybe this sort of thing is more common than Levitt and I had realized. P.S. Levitt also writes: The one thing that puzzles me [Levitt] is why in the world would he want to be on the Board of the Federal Reserve? One thing economists just don’t understand are people’s preferences. To get meta here for a moment . . . just as Levitt can’t understand Diamond’s preferences, I find it extremely difficult to understand that Levitt is puzzled by Diamond’s desire to serve on the Federal Reserve, It’s obvious, no? Diamond has expertise on macroeconomics and, I assume, some strong and well-informed opinions on monetary policy; the Federal Reserve determ
Introduction: In the interview we discussed a couple months ago, Steven Levitt said: I [Levitt] voted for Obama [in 2008] because I wanted to tell my grandchildren that I voted for Obama. And I thought that he would be the greatest president in history. This surprised me. I’d assumed Levitt was a McCain supporter! Why? Because in October, 2008, he wrote that he “loved” the claim by conservative University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan that “the current unemployment rate of 6.1 percent is not alarming.” I’d read that at the time, perhaps incorrectly, as Mulligan making an election-season pitch that the economy was doing just fine (Mulligan: “if you are not employed by the financial industry (94 percent of you are not), don’t worry”) hence implicitly an argument for a Republican vote in that year (given the usual rules of retrospective voting that the incumbent party gets punished by a poor economy). And I correspondingly (and, it seems, incorrectly) read Levitt’s endorsement of Mu
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Introduction: A friend/colleague sent me some comments on my recent article with Kaiser Fung on Freakonomics. My friend gave several reasons why he thought we were unfair to Levitt. I’ll give my reply (my friend preferred that I not quote his email, but you can get a general sense of the questions from my answers). But first let me point you to my original post, Freakonomics 2: What went wrong? , from a couple years ago, in which I raised many of the points that ultimately went into our article. And here’s my recent note. (I numbered my points, but the email I was replying to was not numbered. This is not a point-by-point rebuttal to anything but rather just a series of remarks.) 1. Both Kaiser and I are big fans of Freakonomics. It’s only because Levitt can (and has) done better, that we’re sad when he doesn’t live up to his own high standards. If we didn’t convey this sense of respect in our American Scientist article, that is our failing. 2. I think it was at best tacky and
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Introduction: Responding to journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s negative review of Freakonomics 2 in the New Yorker, Stephen Dubner writes , that, although they do not have any training in climate science, it’s also the case that: Neither of us [Levitt and Dubner] were Ku Klux Klan members either, or sumo wrestlers or Realtors or abortion providers or schoolteachers or even pimps. And yet somehow we managed to write about all that without any horse dung (well, not much at least) flying our way. But Levitt is a schoolteacher (at the University of Chicago)! And, of course, you don’t have to be a sumo wrestler to be (some kind of an) expert on sumo wrestling, nor do you have to teach in the K-12 system to be an expert in education, nor do you have to provide abortions to be an expert on abortion, etc. And Levitt has had quite a bit of horse dung thrown at him for the abortion research. The connection is that abortion and climate change matter to a lot of people, while sumo wrestling and pimps and
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Introduction: A few years ago I noted the following quote from applied microeconomist Steven Levitt: Is it surprising that scientists would try to keep work that disagrees with their findings out of journals? When I told my father that I [Levitt] was sending my work saying car seats are not that effective to medical journals, he laughed and said they would never publish it because of the result, no matter how well done the analysis was. (As is so often the case, he was right, and I eventually published it in an economics journal.) Within the field of economics, academics work behind the scenes constantly trying to undermine each other. I’ve seen economists do far worse things than pulling tricks in figures. When economists get mixed up in public policy, things get messier. At the time, I expressed dismay about Levitt’s air of (as I read it) amused, world-weary tolerance of scientists behaving against the interest of science. But I took his story about the car seats at face value. But no
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Introduction: Steven Levitt writes :. Diamond often would fall asleep in seminars, often for large chunks of time. What was amazing, however, is that he would open his eyes and then make by far the most insightful comment of the entire seminar! Now that we have n=2 [see the first part of the title of this blog entry], I’m wondering . . . maybe this sort of thing is more common than Levitt and I had realized. P.S. Levitt also writes: The one thing that puzzles me [Levitt] is why in the world would he want to be on the Board of the Federal Reserve? One thing economists just don’t understand are people’s preferences. To get meta here for a moment . . . just as Levitt can’t understand Diamond’s preferences, I find it extremely difficult to understand that Levitt is puzzled by Diamond’s desire to serve on the Federal Reserve, It’s obvious, no? Diamond has expertise on macroeconomics and, I assume, some strong and well-informed opinions on monetary policy; the Federal Reserve determ
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Introduction: After seeing this graph : I have the following message for Sharad: Rotate the graph 90 degrees so you can see the words. Also you can ditch the lines. Then what you have is a dotplot, following the principles of Cleveland (1985). You can lay out a few on one page to see some interactions with demographics. The real challenge here . . . . . . is to automate this sort of advice. Or maybe we just need a really nice dotplot() function and enough examples, and people will start doing it? P.S. Often a lineplot is better. See here for a discussion of another Sharad example.
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Introduction: Steven Levitt writes :. Diamond often would fall asleep in seminars, often for large chunks of time. What was amazing, however, is that he would open his eyes and then make by far the most insightful comment of the entire seminar! Now that we have n=2 [see the first part of the title of this blog entry], I’m wondering . . . maybe this sort of thing is more common than Levitt and I had realized. P.S. Levitt also writes: The one thing that puzzles me [Levitt] is why in the world would he want to be on the Board of the Federal Reserve? One thing economists just don’t understand are people’s preferences. To get meta here for a moment . . . just as Levitt can’t understand Diamond’s preferences, I find it extremely difficult to understand that Levitt is puzzled by Diamond’s desire to serve on the Federal Reserve, It’s obvious, no? Diamond has expertise on macroeconomics and, I assume, some strong and well-informed opinions on monetary policy; the Federal Reserve determ
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