andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2010 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: In a post about “rich whiners,” Matthew Yglesias argues that what richies really want is respect. Yglesias writes : I think rich businessmen would be happier if we could go back to 1950s-style, more egalitarian distribution of pre-tax income. The richest people around would still be the richest people around, and as the richest people around they would live in the nicest houses and drive the nicest cars and send their kids to the best schools and in other respects capture the vast majority of the concrete gains of being rich. But they’d also have a much better chance of gaining the kind of respect as civic and national leaders that they crave. They want to be seen as the “job creators” and the heroes of the economy, not the greedy exploiters of the masses. But in order to have heroes of the economy, you need a broadly happy story about the economy—one where living standards are rising across the board and prosperity is broadly shared. This is an appealing argument but I’m skept
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1 In a post about “rich whiners,” Matthew Yglesias argues that what richies really want is respect. [sent-1, score-0.108]
2 Yglesias writes : I think rich businessmen would be happier if we could go back to 1950s-style, more egalitarian distribution of pre-tax income. [sent-2, score-0.511]
3 The richest people around would still be the richest people around, and as the richest people around they would live in the nicest houses and drive the nicest cars and send their kids to the best schools and in other respects capture the vast majority of the concrete gains of being rich. [sent-3, score-1.807]
4 But they’d also have a much better chance of gaining the kind of respect as civic and national leaders that they crave. [sent-4, score-0.477]
5 They want to be seen as the “job creators” and the heroes of the economy, not the greedy exploiters of the masses. [sent-5, score-0.444]
6 But in order to have heroes of the economy, you need a broadly happy story about the economy—one where living standards are rising across the board and prosperity is broadly shared. [sent-6, score-0.88]
7 My impression is that, back in the 1950s, the culture heroes included sports starts, authors, broadcast and movie stars, etc. [sent-8, score-0.515]
8 Some politicians and union leaders too, and various others. [sent-9, score-0.283]
9 But nowadays, lots of rich people are heroes of one sort or another: Steve Jobs, those guys at Google, various gossip about tech billionaires, Donald Trump. [sent-10, score-0.946]
10 Even the supervillians at Goldman Sachs get some respect—it’s kinda cool to be a supervillian. [sent-11, score-0.181]
11 And it’s not just cos these rich guys have done cool things like Google maps. [sent-14, score-0.599]
12 Warren Buffett is a hero too, mostly from doing a very good job at accumulating money. [sent-15, score-0.339]
13 In contrast, I have the sense that the 1950s was a great time to get respect for local rich guys: the owner of the local factory, the proprietor of the local newspaper, etc. [sent-18, score-0.958]
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same-blog 1 0.99999982 2010 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-06-Would today’s captains of industry be happier in a 1950s-style world?
Introduction: In a post about “rich whiners,” Matthew Yglesias argues that what richies really want is respect. Yglesias writes : I think rich businessmen would be happier if we could go back to 1950s-style, more egalitarian distribution of pre-tax income. The richest people around would still be the richest people around, and as the richest people around they would live in the nicest houses and drive the nicest cars and send their kids to the best schools and in other respects capture the vast majority of the concrete gains of being rich. But they’d also have a much better chance of gaining the kind of respect as civic and national leaders that they crave. They want to be seen as the “job creators” and the heroes of the economy, not the greedy exploiters of the masses. But in order to have heroes of the economy, you need a broadly happy story about the economy—one where living standards are rising across the board and prosperity is broadly shared. This is an appealing argument but I’m skept
Introduction: Charles Murray wrote a much-discussed new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” David Frum quotes Murray as writing, in an echo of now-forgotten TV personality Tucker Carlson , that the top 5% of incomes “tends to be liberal—right? There’s no getting around it. Every way of answering this question produces a yes.” [I’ve interjected a “perhaps” into the title of this blog post to indicate that I don’t have the exact Murray quote here so I’m relying on David Frum’s interpretation.] Frum does me the favor of citing Red State Blue State as evidence, and I’d like to back this up with some graphs. Frum writes: Say “top 5%” to Murray, and his imagination conjures up everything he dislikes: coastal liberals listening to NPR in their Lexus hybrid SUVs. He sees that image so intensely that no mere number can force him to remember that the top 5% also includes the evangelical Christian assistant coach of a state university football team. . . . To put it i
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
Introduction: Matthew Yglesias noticed something interesting in a political story today that reminds me of one of our arguments in Red State, Blue State. I have the feeling that most readers of this blog are less fascinated than I am by U.S. politics, so I’ll put the rest below the fold. Yglesias quotes a Washington Post article on Blanche Lincoln returning to the U.S. Senate after surviving a primary challenge from a candidate supported by organized labor: Lincoln was embraced by her colleagues . . . Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) held up two fists and said of her primary campaign: “Fighting Wall Street with one hand, unions with the other.” Yglesias points out a fundamental asymmetry here: Schumer, who’s become something of a national leader among Senate Democrats, celebrates this ideal [of governing in a manner that's equidistant from rival interest groups], but there’s not a single member of the Republican Party–much less a leader–who’d say anything remotely similar. Schumer is basi
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Introduction: From the exit polls: This is all pretty obvious but it seemed worth posting because some people still don’t seem to get it. For example, Jay Cost, writing in the Weekly Standard: The Democratic party now dominates the Upper East Side of Manhattan, as well as the wealthiest neighborhoods in the most powerful cities. And yet Republicans are still effectively castigated as the party of the rich. They are not — at least not any more than the Democratic party is. Arguably, both the Democrats and the Republicans are “the party of the rich.” But Republicans more so than Democrats (see above graph, also consider the debates over the estate tax and upper-income tax rates). Cost writes: Sure, the GOP favors tax rate reductions to generate economic growth, but the Democratic party has proven itself ready, willing, and able to dole out benefits to the well-heeled rent-seekers who swarm Washington, D.C. looking for favors from Uncle Sam. But he’s missing the point. The par
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Introduction: In a post about “rich whiners,” Matthew Yglesias argues that what richies really want is respect. Yglesias writes : I think rich businessmen would be happier if we could go back to 1950s-style, more egalitarian distribution of pre-tax income. The richest people around would still be the richest people around, and as the richest people around they would live in the nicest houses and drive the nicest cars and send their kids to the best schools and in other respects capture the vast majority of the concrete gains of being rich. But they’d also have a much better chance of gaining the kind of respect as civic and national leaders that they crave. They want to be seen as the “job creators” and the heroes of the economy, not the greedy exploiters of the masses. But in order to have heroes of the economy, you need a broadly happy story about the economy—one where living standards are rising across the board and prosperity is broadly shared. This is an appealing argument but I’m skept
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Introduction: By “free energy” I don’t mean perpetual motion machines, cars that run on water and get 200 mpg, or the latest cold-fusion hype. No, I’m referring to the term from physics. The free energy of a system is, roughly, the amount of energy that can be directly extracted from it. For example, a rock at room temperature is just full of energy—not just the energy locked in its nuclei, but basic thermal energy—but at room temperature you can’t extract any of it. To the physicists in the audience: Yes, I realize that free energy has a technical meaning in statistical mechanics and that my above definition is sloppy. Please bear with me. And, to the non-physicists: feel free to head to Wikipedia or a physics textbook for a more careful treatment. I was thinking about free energy the other day when hearing someone on the radio say something about China bailing out the E.U. I did a double-take. Huh? The E.U. is rich, China’s not so rich. How can a middle-income country bail out a
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Introduction: A year or so ago I discussed the reasoning of zillionaire financier Peter Thiel, who seems to believe his own hype and, worse, seems to be able to convince reporters of his infallibility as well. Apparently he “possesses a preternatural ability to spot patterns that others miss.” More recently, Felix Salmon commented on Thiel’s financial misadventures: Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital, ain’t doing so well. Its assets under management are down 90% from their peak, and total returns from the high point are -65%. Thiel is smart, successful, rich, well-connected, and on top of all that his calls have actually been right . . . None of that, clearly, was enough for Clarium to make money on its trades: the fund was undone by volatility and weakness in risk management. There are a few lessons to learn here. Firstly, just because someone is a Silicon Valley gazillionaire, or any kind of successful entrepreneur for that matter, doesn’t mean they should be trusted with oth
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Introduction: Shalizi delivers a slow, drawn-out illustration of the point that economic efficiency is all about who’s got the $, which isn’t always related to what we would usually call “efficiency” in other settings. (His point is related to my argument that the phrase “willingness to pay” should generally be replaced by “ability to pay.”) The basic story is simple: Good guy needs a turkey, bad guy wants a turkey. Bad guy is willing and able to pay more for the turkey than good guy can afford, hence good guy starves to death. The counterargument is that a market in turkeys will motivate producers to breed more turkeys, ultimately saturating the bad guys’ desires and leaving surplus turkeys for the good guys at a reasonable price. I’m sure there’s a counter-counterargument too, but I don’t want to go there. But what really amused me about Cosma’s essay was how he scrambled the usual cultural/political associations. (I assume he did this on purpose.) In the standard version of t
Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to this article by Matt Ridley that manages to push all my buttons. Ridley writes: Drawing a direct analogy with the effect of vouchers in the education system, Messrs. Seeman and Luciani suggest “healthy-living vouchers” that could be redeemed from different (certified) places–gyms, diet classes, vegetable sellers and more. Education vouchers, they point out, are generally disliked by rich whites as being bad for poor blacks–and generally liked by poor blacks. Three things here. First, I’m sick and tired of all the rich-white bashing. I mean, what’s the deal? Matt Ridley is a rich white, I’m a rich white, so are lots and lots of the readers of the Wall Street Journal. If you got a problem with rich whites, maybe you should start writing for a publication associated with a different income stratum and a different ethnic group. Second, the rich-white thing seems so selective. Does Ridley bash rich whites who want to lower taxes? Rich whites who w
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Introduction: In a post about “rich whiners,” Matthew Yglesias argues that what richies really want is respect. Yglesias writes : I think rich businessmen would be happier if we could go back to 1950s-style, more egalitarian distribution of pre-tax income. The richest people around would still be the richest people around, and as the richest people around they would live in the nicest houses and drive the nicest cars and send their kids to the best schools and in other respects capture the vast majority of the concrete gains of being rich. But they’d also have a much better chance of gaining the kind of respect as civic and national leaders that they crave. They want to be seen as the “job creators” and the heroes of the economy, not the greedy exploiters of the masses. But in order to have heroes of the economy, you need a broadly happy story about the economy—one where living standards are rising across the board and prosperity is broadly shared. This is an appealing argument but I’m skept
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Introduction: I recently read a bizarre article by Janet Malcolm on a murder trial in NYC. What threw me about the article was that the story was utterly commonplace (by the standards of today’s headlines): divorced mom kills ex-husband in a custody dispute over their four-year-old daughter. The only interesting features were (a) the wife was a doctor and the husband were a dentist, the sort of people you’d expect to sue rather than slay, and (b) the wife hired a hitman from within the insular immigrant community that she (and her husband) belonged to. But, really, neither of these was much of a twist. To add to the non-storyness of it all, there were no other suspects, the evidence against the wife and the hitman was overwhelming, and even the high-paid defense lawyers didn’t seem to be making much of an effort to convince anyone of their client’s innocents. (One of the closing arguments was that one aspect of the wife’s story was so ridiculous that it had to be true. In the lawyer’s wo
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Introduction: The title of this post by Sanjay Srivastava illustrates an annoying misconception that’s crept into the (otherwise delightful) recent publicity related to my article with Hal Stern, he difference between “significant” and “not significant” is not itself statistically significant. When people bring this up, they keep referring to the difference between p=0.05 and p=0.06, making the familiar (and correct) point about the arbitrariness of the conventional p-value threshold of 0.05. And, sure, I agree with this, but everybody knows that already. The point Hal and I were making was that even apparently large differences in p-values are not statistically significant. For example, if you have one study with z=2.5 (almost significant at the 1% level!) and another with z=1 (not statistically significant at all, only 1 se from zero!), then their difference has a z of about 1 (again, not statistically significant at all). So it’s not just a comparison of 0.05 vs. 0.06, even a differenc
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Introduction: A friend asks the above question and writes: This article left me thinking – how could the IRS not notice that this guy didn’t file taxes for several years? Don’t they run checks and notice if you miss a year? If I write a check our of order, there’s an asterisk next to the check number in my next bank statement showing that there was a gap in the sequence. If you ran the IRS, wouldn’t you do this: SSNs are issued sequentially. Once a SSN reaches 18, expect it to file a return. If it doesn’t, mail out a postage paid letter asking why not with check boxes such as Student, Unemployed, etc. Follow up at reasonable intervals. Eventually every SSN should be filing a return, or have an international address. Yes this is intrusive, but my goal is only to maximize tax revenue. Surely people who do this for a living could come up with something more elegant. My response: I dunno, maybe some confidentiality rules? The other thing is that I’m guessing that IRS gets lots of pushback w
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