Category Archives: Clippings

Of ignorance and knowledge

Shamelessly copied from Obsidian Wings: What Do You Mean ‘We’, White Man? Robert Samuelson has an infuriating op-ed in today’s Washington Post. It’s called “Humbled By Our Ignorance”: “It’s the end of an era. We know that 2008, much like … Continue reading

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Brad DeLong on Keynes and terminology

But Keynes Is Saved by Walras’s Law Tyler Cowen writes: Keynes’s General Theory, chapter six: in part ii the bombshell comes, unannounced. Keynes decides that he will declare savings to be a “mere residual.” Consumption and investment alone will determine … Continue reading

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Dani Rodrik in Ethiopia

Dani Rodrik writes: Self-discovery in practice It is remarkable to see something in theory work so well in practice. Ricardo Hausmann and I wrote a paper several years ago called “Economic Development as Self-Discovery,” where the idea was that entrepreneurship … Continue reading

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Excel’s faulty statistics: a bibliography

McCullough, B.D. (2002). Proceedings of the 2001 Joint Statistical Meeting [CD-ROM]: Does Microsoft fix errors in Excel? Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association. McCullough, B.D. (1999). Assessing the reliability of statistical software: Part II. The American Statistician, 53(2), 149-159. McCullough, B.D. … Continue reading

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Behavioral finance marches on

Quant. Shop Offers Heady Long/Short Hedge Fund December 17, 2008 | Source: FINalternatives Santa Monica, Calif-based MarketPsy has launched a quantitative hedge fund that incorporates psychology into its trading strategy. So far, the firm’s Long-Short Fund has outperformed its discretionary … Continue reading

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For those in need of geocoding data

There is a publicly available geocoding dataset of all U.S. ZIP codes. The data file was originally released as a part of the 2000 census on the Gazetteer website. The data fields are: ZIP code State (abbreviation) Latitude Longitude City … Continue reading

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To read when time permits

Soviet Defectors by Vladislav Krasnov (Available on Google Books) An excerpt:

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Nathan Myhrvold in Shanghai

Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, now running Intellectual Ventures (which describes itself as “the invention company”), guest-blogs on Freakonomics. Here’s an excerpt: The infrastructure is all new, from the airport to the expressway leading into the … Continue reading

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Are we in a liquidity trap yet?

Paul Krugman writes: Bernanke’s problem, and ours. This picture shows the target Fed funds rate, the usual tool of monetary policy; the 10-year Treasury rate; and two rates that actually matter to the private sector, the mortgage rate and the … Continue reading

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Economics of spam

As seen on Freakonomics: Since last Wednesday, the torrent of junk e-mail coursing through the internet has been slowed dramatically, with 40 percent or more of it cut off at the source. The source of all that spam? San Jose, … Continue reading

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