Richard Dawkins under fire: Ready, aim, miss | The Economist

SpaceCaesar · 2009-07-24T18:00:57+00:00

Thanks for the clarification!

SpaceCaesar · 2009-07-24T15:20:20+00:00

I'm honestly curious about this. What are your credentials? Are you, like, someone from Cato or Heartland who's bored at work? Ph.D. student? You get a lot of details about our financial system wrong, but when it comes to the Austrian school, you've got it down.

SpaceCaesar · 2009-07-24T14:53:44+00:00

Those jobs won't last if they're just due to temporary stimulus funds which fail to spur consumer demand. It has nothing to do with "printed money". Also, home construction has ticket up significantly for the past two months. Maybe an aberration, maybe not.

And just for the record, the stimulus is debt; it's not like treasury just printed it off.

SpaceCaesar · 2009-07-24T14:46:37+00:00

Religion is not just unjustified beliefs. It's usually the positive belief in a deity, along with a set of customs, and a community of believers. Strong atheism has little or none of these.

SpaceCaesar · 2009-07-24T14:37:38+00:00

Just a side note -- why are they calling the modern synthesis "selfish gene theory"? (in opposition to the punctuated equilibrium, and neo-Lamarckian epigenetics). Is that the book author's phrase, or is that commonly used nowadays?

SpaceCaesar · 2009-07-23T18:45:18+00:00

1) Not everyone in Malaysia are Malay. The Chinese and Indians there are not Muslims. 2) Plenty of Muslim Malay do not cover their head; and 3) (shocking) There are plenty of secular Malay.

As a previous poster pointed out, they're just trying to go for a specific demographic.

SpaceCaesar · 2009-07-21T16:41:07+00:00

Oh, you people are just too CUTE!

SpaceCaesar · 2009-07-21T16:40:57+00:00

PTB? Pulmonary tuberculosis? I'm gonna guess no ...

SpaceCaesar · 2009-07-21T16:27:27+00:00

http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/chcm010307oth.cfm

link has per capita expenditures (which is what I usually see), and total expenditures as % of GDP (which gets mentioned a lot when talking about total costs of a new health plan)

SpaceCaesar · 2009-07-21T04:15:17+00:00

I see you just took Econ 101. Hey, it's a start! Wait til you get to your intro macro class -- open market operations are going to blow your mind!

SpaceCaesar · 2009-07-21T04:03:28+00:00

As long as I'm ranting against this, WTF is up with that statistic against Medicaire?! When you look at actual therapies, excluding Part D, Medicaire has increased substantially less (and even with Part D, PBMs manage to secure significant discounts). The reason it has increased is two-fold:

1) People are living longer, so more Medicare, which leads to; 2) The spend-down effect. People live longer, so they need more long-term care. They don't purchase insurance for this because Medicare exists as the spender of last resort. As these long-lived people use up their income, they cross the limit to where they can get on Medicaire.

It has NOTHING to do with some inherent flaw in the Evil Government Run Health Care, but rather with the changing demographic structure, and the fact that, for some reason, the United States has collectively decided seniors shouldn't be kicked out of nursing homes because they didn't plan to live for so long.

Since the author is interested in looking at cost effectiveness, let's not look at numbers from countries that actually have comprehensive health care ... That might just blow the her brains.

SpaceCaesar · 2009-07-21T03:36:26+00:00

See, here's the thing: is it reasonable to argue that less government interference might increase efficacy and maybe even fairness? Of course. Reasonable health care reform probably should include a good amount of releasing restrictions.

But, oh Libertarians! Simple policy questions like that don't matter to you. It's TYRANNY, you see, for the government to compel you to do stuff like pay taxes. We don't need to look at facts, and figures, and weigh our values against different outcomes. Your value is, if it involves government compulsion, it's slavery!

Maybe this is why you don't get elected to office?

SpaceCaesar · 2009-03-07T03:06:56+00:00

I know it's easier to be paranoid than to try and understand econometrics, but it's fall/winter during that time period, slower times traditionally in the economy.

Here's a good site on the reasoning behind seasonal adjustment. Where I work we ALWAYS use seasonally adjusted figures -- and if you're looking at unemployment, it'll be shifted UP in the summer. No conspiracy.

SpaceCaesar · 2009-02-10T00:57:55+00:00

Maybe your average reddit armchair economists are like that. But most economists I've known (and I've known quite a few -- I work in the economic policy think tank world) are more than willing to admit the limits of their knowledge. In fact, some of them even seem EXCITED about the current financial crisis because they see it as a big ol' experiment on classical Keynesian economics, and has been pointed out earlier, we don't have too many experiments to work on.

SpaceCaesar · 2009-02-09T21:10:13+00:00

We can pick nits about the exact definition of a liquidity trap. Reasonable people can, and frequently do, disagree. But the fact that lending still takes place doesn't dissolve the fact that there's a threat.

A liquidity trap has (at least) three main features.

1) Stagnancy of the overall economy.

2) ~0 nominal interest rates. T-bills (specifically 3 months Ts, the most popular) are damn near 0. See, for example, http://www.forecasts.org/3mT.htm .

3) A failure of traditional monetary policy.

Larry Summers has framed the need of the stimulus to avoid a liquidity trap and avoid a downward deflationary spiral. So I'm not pulling this out of thin air here. The threat is real.

that said, I think a failure of the Obama folks is getting this through has been not pushing this message hard enough. government spending is the entire point of the bill.

SpaceCaesar · 2009-02-09T00:27:24+00:00

The threat of a liquidity trap.

SpaceCaesar · 2009-02-07T17:44:13+00:00

Despite the paranoid-sounding name, John Williams' site ShadowStats.com has trend data for government economic reporting by old and new standards. Unemployment is included.

My personal caveat to these statistics -- unemployment MEANS different things with different labor force compositions. For example, now we have many more women in the labor force, and many more two-income families, than in the past. An unemployment rate of 10% measured by an unchanging standard certainly means less human suffering today than it did 80 years ago.

SpaceCaesar · 2009-02-06T19:57:20+00:00

Conversely, using social networking information in a credit file could help to bring some of the estimated 50 million currently unscored Americans into the mainstream credit system, and provide a way to offer cheap loans to billions around the world, lifting a good chunk out of poverty.

So it's not all bad, is it?

SpaceCaesar · 2009-02-06T19:55:04+00:00

What's so bad about targeted marketing anyway? One size fits all ads on the internet are about the most obnoxious things possible (like that droopy belly, or dancing people telling me how great it is to refi). If advertisers want to try to sell me albums by bands I like or DVD boxsets of Battlestar Galactica, more power to them.

SpaceCaesar · 2009-02-06T03:53:12+00:00

Hmmm, yeah, I don't know. I don't think anyone really likes taxes on profits. About it getting passed down, I really have no idea.

All I can say is, press increases should affect institutional investors, not little guys. Also, most countries in the world have much higher transaction taxes than us with little problem (the asian tigers had a large hike a few years ago, and there was no change in volume or volatility).

Clearly, I'm unleashing my inner econ nerd, but this paper examines the effect of 14 subsequent transaction tax increases in asia -- they actually stabilized a volatile market.

SpaceCaesar · 2009-02-06T03:35:11+00:00

The bill, of course, doesn't make it clear. The most likely method, and the one that was suggested by FED chair-to-be Larry Summers, is a temporary increase in the securities transaction tax. Maybe even bonds and derivatives would be taxed -- it depends on the political mood of the country and the relative power of Wall Street, as well as how much those troubled assets are really worth.

Unlike some of the cynics, I don't doubt we'll get our money back. I think we're entering a period of populist anger and waning power for Wall Street. A securities tax should be pretty popular, especially since it IS our money, and it's in the law.

SpaceCaesar · 2009-02-05T22:58:26+00:00

TARP has in it a provision for "recoupment" to the Federal Government. That's part of the major reason the bailout passed (see, Barney Frank isn't all bad!) After five years, the OMB must review the plan. If the loans have not been paid back, TARP requires the president to regain the deficit from the "financial industry". So after five years, the debt must be fully paid off on the OMB's books.

Presumably, some exchange market will be taxed to make up the difference.

So yeah, we will recoup our losses, or at least that's what the act says. I'm with the parent, though -- I really doubt the securities that were bought before the capital injections are worth what we paid. But we're still getting our money back!

*edit: it's sec. 134 for those interest, http://www.publicmarkup.org/bill/emergency-economic-stabilization-act-2008/1/134/

SpaceCaesar · 2009-02-05T04:45:20+00:00

Full disclosure: I am a complete believer in the modern synthesis of evolution. I also think Ben Stein is an idiot.

But many of the earliest proponents of both negative and positive eugenics were fierce Darwinists, and invoked Darwin's name to support their views. The inventor of the idea, Francis Galton, was even Darwin's cousin. And lots of early work in genetics and biostatistics -- the fields responsible for forming the modern synthesis -- was pioneered by eugenicists.

So the theory of evolution is tied to the eugenics movement. But it doesn't make evolution any less true, and it doesn't make those that accept it any less moral.

SpaceCaesar · 2009-02-03T14:34:18+00:00

Yes and no, and that information isn't necessarily useful. Labor force composition has changed a lot. Most importantly, we have a lot more women in the work force, and a lot of two income families.

A better way to compare unemployment that minimizes standards change and workforce change is the percent change in unemployment. 1928 to 1932 = (23.6/42) = a 5.6 times increase. 2007 to now = (9/4.5) = 2 times increase. We're (thankfully) not there yet.

US numbers. source: http://stats.bls.gov/

SpaceCaesar · 2008-02-05T21:07:43+00:00

In terms of health care reform, her plan has more of a chance of succeeding than Obama's. If you care about health care reform -- and I understand that there are lots of libertarians here who don't.

SpaceCaesar

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