andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1854 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: David Jinkins writes : The objective of this paper is to measure the relative importance of conspicous consumption to Americans and Chinese. To this end, I estimate the parameters of a utility function borrowed from recent theoretical work using American and Chinese data. The main parameter of interest governs the amount that individuals care about peer group beliefs regarding their welfare. Using survey data on the visibility of different good categories along with household budget surveys, I find that Chinese consumers care twice as much as American consumers about the beliefs of their peer group. I came across this draft research manuscript by following the links back after Jinkins commented on our blog. The framing of the paper is a bit more foundation-y and a bit less statistic-y than I’d prefer, but I guess that’s just the way they do things in economics, compared to statistics or (some) political science. In any case, I wanted to point you to this paper, partly to let y
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1 David Jinkins writes : The objective of this paper is to measure the relative importance of conspicous consumption to Americans and Chinese. [sent-1, score-0.584]
2 To this end, I estimate the parameters of a utility function borrowed from recent theoretical work using American and Chinese data. [sent-2, score-0.575]
3 The main parameter of interest governs the amount that individuals care about peer group beliefs regarding their welfare. [sent-3, score-0.957]
4 Using survey data on the visibility of different good categories along with household budget surveys, I find that Chinese consumers care twice as much as American consumers about the beliefs of their peer group. [sent-4, score-1.716]
5 I came across this draft research manuscript by following the links back after Jinkins commented on our blog. [sent-5, score-0.534]
6 The framing of the paper is a bit more foundation-y and a bit less statistic-y than I’d prefer, but I guess that’s just the way they do things in economics, compared to statistics or (some) political science. [sent-6, score-0.577]
7 In any case, I wanted to point you to this paper, partly to let you know that I do read the blog comments and even sometimes follow the links, and also because it’s unusually well-written, not just in its first paragraph but all the way through. [sent-7, score-0.495]
8 He’s got to work a bit on his presentation of results—I see some ugly tables there—but I think that’s much easier to learn than it is to learn how to write. [sent-8, score-0.803]
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same-blog 1 1.0 1854 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-13-A Structural Comparison of Conspicuous Consumption in China and the United States
Introduction: David Jinkins writes : The objective of this paper is to measure the relative importance of conspicous consumption to Americans and Chinese. To this end, I estimate the parameters of a utility function borrowed from recent theoretical work using American and Chinese data. The main parameter of interest governs the amount that individuals care about peer group beliefs regarding their welfare. Using survey data on the visibility of different good categories along with household budget surveys, I find that Chinese consumers care twice as much as American consumers about the beliefs of their peer group. I came across this draft research manuscript by following the links back after Jinkins commented on our blog. The framing of the paper is a bit more foundation-y and a bit less statistic-y than I’d prefer, but I guess that’s just the way they do things in economics, compared to statistics or (some) political science. In any case, I wanted to point you to this paper, partly to let y
Introduction: Mike Spagat points to this interview , which, he writes, covers themes that are discussed on the blog such as wrong ideas that don’t die, peer review and the statistics of conflict deaths. I agree. It’s good stuff. Here are some of the things that Spagat says (he’s being interviewed by Joel Wing): In fact, the standard excess-deaths concept leads to an interesting conundrum when combined with an interesting fact exposed in the next-to-latest Human Security Report ; in most countries child mortality rates decline during armed conflict (chapter 6). So if you believe the usual excess-death causality story then you’re forced to conclude that many conflicts actually save the lives of many children. Of course, the idea of wars savings lives is pretty hard to swallow. A much more sensible understanding is that there are a variety of factors that determine child deaths and that in many cases the factors that save the lives of children are stronger than the negative effects that confli
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Introduction: Some clarification on the Bayes-in-China issue raised last week : 1. We heard that the Chinese publisher cited the following pages that might contain politically objectionable materials: 3, 5, 21, 73, 112, 201. 2. It appears that, as some commenters suggested, the objection was to some of the applications, not to the Bayesian methods. 3. Our book is not censored in China. In fact, as some commenters mentioned, it is possible to buy it there, and it is also available in university libraries there. The edition of the book which was canceled was intended to be a low-cost reprint of the book. The original book is still available. I used the phrase “Banned in China” as a joke and I apologize if it was misinterpreted. 4. I have no quarrel with the Chinese government or with any Chinese publishers. They can publish whatever books they would like. I found this episode amusing only because I do not think my book on regression and multilevel models has any strong political co
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Introduction: David Backus writes: This is from my area of work, macroeconomics. The suggestion here is that the economy is growing slowly because consumers aren’t spending money. But how do we know it’s not the reverse: that consumers are spending less because the economy isn’t doing well. As a teacher, I can tell you that it’s almost impossible to get students to understand that the first statement isn’t obviously true. What I’d call the demand-side story (more spending leads to more output) is everywhere, including this piece, from the usually reliable David Leonhardt. This whole situation reminds me of the story of the village whose inhabitants support themselves by taking in each others’ laundry. I guess we’re rich enough in the U.S. that we can stay afloat for a few decades just buying things from each other? Regarding the causal question, I’d like to move away from the idea of “Does A causes B or does B cause A” and toward a more intervention-based framework (Rubin’s model for
Introduction: Dean Eckles writes: Thought you might be interested in an example that touches on a couple recurring topics: 1. The difference between a statistically significant finding and one that is non-significant need not be itself statistically significant (thus highlighting the problems of using NHST to declare whether an effect exists or not). 2. Continued issues with the credibility of high profile studies of “social contagion”, especially by Christakis and Fowler . A new paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior produces observational estimates of peer effects in sexual behavior and same-sex attraction. In the text, the authors (who include C&F;) make repeated comparisons of the results for peer effects in sexual intercourse and those for peer effects in same-sex attraction. However, the 95% CI for the later actually includes the point estimate for the former! This is most clear in Figure 2, as highlighted by Real Clear Science’s blog post about the study. (Now because there is som
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same-blog 1 0.95229542 1854 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-13-A Structural Comparison of Conspicuous Consumption in China and the United States
Introduction: David Jinkins writes : The objective of this paper is to measure the relative importance of conspicous consumption to Americans and Chinese. To this end, I estimate the parameters of a utility function borrowed from recent theoretical work using American and Chinese data. The main parameter of interest governs the amount that individuals care about peer group beliefs regarding their welfare. Using survey data on the visibility of different good categories along with household budget surveys, I find that Chinese consumers care twice as much as American consumers about the beliefs of their peer group. I came across this draft research manuscript by following the links back after Jinkins commented on our blog. The framing of the paper is a bit more foundation-y and a bit less statistic-y than I’d prefer, but I guess that’s just the way they do things in economics, compared to statistics or (some) political science. In any case, I wanted to point you to this paper, partly to let y
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1 0.97520983 999 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-09-I was at a meeting a couple months ago . . .
Introduction: . . . and I decided to amuse myself by writing down all the management-speak words I heard: “grappling” “early prototypes” “technology platform” “building block” “machine learning” “your team” “workspace” “tagging” “data exhaust” “monitoring a particular population” “collective intelligence” “communities of practice” “hackathon” “human resources . . . technologies” Any one or two or three of these phrases might be fine, but put them all together and what you have is a festival of jargon. A hackathon, indeed.
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Introduction: A couple months ago, in discussing Charles Murray’s argument that America’s social leaders should “preach what they practice” (Murray argues that they—we!—tend to lead good lives of hard work and moderation but are all too tolerant of antisocial and unproductive behavior among the lower classes), I wrote : Murray does not consider the case of Joe Paterno, but in many ways the Penn State football coach fits his story well. Paterno was said to live an exemplary personal and professional life, combining traditional morality with football success—but, by his actions, he showed little concern about the morality of his players and coaches. At a professional level, Paterno rose higher and higher, and in his personal life he was a responsible adult. But he had an increasing disconnect with the real world, to the extent that horrible crimes were occurring nearby (in the physical and social senses) but he was completely insulated from the consequences for many years. Paterno’s story is s
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Introduction: After blogging on quirky software pioneer Richard Stallman , I thought it appropriate to write something about recently deceased quirky software pioneer John McCarthy, who, with the exception of being bearded, seems like he was the personal and political opposite of Stallman. Here’s a page I found of Stallman McCarthy quotes (compiled by Neil Craig). It’s a mixture of the reasonable and the unreasonable (ok, I suppose the same could be said of this blog!). I wonder if he and Stallman ever met and, if so, whether they had an extended conversation. It would be like matter and anti-matter! P.S. I flipped through McCarthy’s pages and found one of my pet peeves. See item 3 here , which sounds so plausible but is in fact not true (at least, not according to the National Election Study). As McCarthy’s Stanford colleague Mo Fiorina can tell you, otherwise well-informed people believe all sorts of things about polarization that aren’t so. Labeling groups of Americans as “
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Introduction: Kaiser nails it . The offending article , by John Tierney, somehow ended up in the Science section rather than the Opinion section. As an opinion piece (or, for that matter, a blog), Tierney’s article would be nothing special. But I agree with Kaiser that it doesn’t work as a newspaper article. As Kaiser notes, this story involves a bunch of statistical and empirical claims that are not well resolved by P.R. and rhetoric.
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Introduction: After hearing a few times about the divorce predictions of researchers John Gottman and James Murray (work that was featured in Blink with a claim that they could predict with 83 percent accuracy whether a couple would be divorced–after meeting with them for 15 minutes) and feeling some skepticism , I decided to do the Lord’s work and amend Gottman’s wikipedia entry, which had a paragraph saying: Gottman found his methodology predicts with 90% accuracy which newlywed couples will remain married and which will divorce four to six years later. It is also 81% percent accurate in predicting which marriages will survive after seven to nine years. I added the following: Gottman’s claim of 81% or 90% accuracy is misleading, however, because the accuracy is measured only after fitting a model to his data. There is no evidence that he can predict the outcome of a marriage with high accuracy in advance. As Laurie Abraham writes, “For the 1998 study, which focused on videotapes of 57
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