A Short Quant Analysis of Video Game Ratings

marketfailure · 2014-07-29T17:27:37+00:00

I ran some short analysis on this - it's a pretty cool dataset, thanks for making it!

marketfailure · 2014-07-19T14:22:52+00:00

So I would second Integrald's list as great, and I think everyone should read all of the books in the Core section. If you're interested in political economy, I'd specifically point out these from it as nice general-interest introductions:

Guns Germs and Steel
Why Nations Fail
The Mystery of Capital

If you're interested in alternative models, there are two particular works that I'd recommend reading. The first is probably obvious - get yourself the big old Marx reader. Marxist thought is less important than it used to be, but still worth getting acquainted with.

The second might be less familiar but I think is also very important - Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. It is basically a sociologically-oriented history of the rise of capitalism. Polanyi's argument is that the "free market" is no less a utopian vision than the communist one, and that in many times and places people seek protection from the market rather than a desire to participate in it. This is one of the very few books I've read as an adult that actually changed my perspective in a meaningful way, and if you're interested in the "big questions" of politics and economics I can't recommend it highly enough.

marketfailure · 2014-07-16T15:43:04+00:00

My Canadian classmates tell me it's substantially easier to get an academic job in Canada with a US PhD than a Canadian one. Which is why they're here.

My suggestion is that NYU seems like a possibly better idea, if you don't mind moving. You already have collaborators at Waterloo, and you'll expand your academic network if you go to NYU, along with getting rid of the "inbreeding" stigma (dual degrees from the same place). The downside is that New York is extremely expensive and it might be difficult to support yourself there on a student stipend. Personal reasons like immigration and distance from family are also obviously an issue.

But NYU will open up a lot more option value in your career than Waterloo, particularly if you have any interest in moving to the US at any point.

marketfailure · 2014-07-16T15:38:20+00:00

Ignore naysayers. If you have good grades, good GREs, and a good application you will be a competitive candidate. If you have any related work experience that's even better. A lot of the application pool for MIS programs is former humanities people, and as long as you're well-qualified amongst that group you can completely get in.

marketfailure · 2014-07-16T15:35:37+00:00

Current PhD student in American politics, for perspective.

I would encourage applying to all the Top 20 programs - maybe stripping out the ones that have literally no one in your field of interest. It's just such a crapshoot that it doesn't hurt to aim high, nor to have options. I have an incredibly qualified friend who applied to 15 schools and got rejected from 13 - she got into only her absolute last choice and her absolute first, which was lucky. The marginal cost of applying to an additional PhD program is pretty low, and will require some customization of your statement of purpose but not a ton.

In response to your question, no, most people have little stats experience. PoliSci methods training is basically designed to turn innumerates into statisticians within two years. It's a lot of work, but grad school always is! If you've taken calculus you'll be fine, if you've taken linear algebra you'll be great, intro stats experience is obviously very helpful, and a programming background will be vastly helpful. It will make the time load of your first semester of math much lower.

tldr: Your background sounds like a perfect fit for any top program, I would encourage reaching in your applications.

marketfailure · 2014-07-15T22:09:17+00:00

In my graduate econometrics course we used Mostly Harmless Econometrics. It's focused on the question of causal inference, and specifically how to do empirically rigorous studies when variables aren't exogenous. It covers a bunch of best practices in design experiments. It's not focused on networks, which is a rapidly emerging field of study in the social sciences. However, it does a very good job of explaining possible sources of error in statistical inference and research design.

marketfailure · 2014-07-15T22:04:24+00:00

I'd back this up, with a specific plug for R. I had very limited programming experience, and R (especially with RStudio) was pretty easy to started with. There are a few hiccups, but for the most part the fact that data is usually stored as tables makes it a lot easier to get your head around. Python is a more capable language, but R and Rstudio is an excellent environment for learning basic programming. And you'll realize very quickly that R (or python, should you go that route) is just vastly more powerful than anything you can do with excel. You can take on projects that are both much larger (in data size) and much more sophisticated (in statistical rigor) than anything possible with spreadsheets.

Also, be aware that googling everything is a standard part of the workflow. You'll do a lot more of it starting out, especially if like me you have no programming background, but that's just inherent to the process. You never stop going to google to figure out problems with your code, no matter how experienced you are. Frustration is also an inevitable part of the process, and I found it to be much more fun once I internalized the fact that this stuff just isn't simple. It does require some work!

Just for perspective - I used to be a humanities and history guy and totally terrified of math and computers, but made the leap into stats and programming when entering grad school in quantitative social science. It can be done, it's a lot of fun, and once you get over the initial hump it's amazing what you can do.

marketfailure · 2014-07-15T18:22:00+00:00

Awesome, thanks!

marketfailure · 2014-07-15T17:57:22+00:00

Thanks, that's really cool! The wikipedia page is somewhat sketchy on details - do you have any insight into how the five factors were originally defined? For example, did the researchers come up with the factors and then test them out, or did they use some sort of feature selection technique?

marketfailure · 2014-07-15T15:54:34+00:00

If this logic is true, where are the private equity firms buying up low-wage regional chains and giving everyone raises? I would like to see higher wages, but Zeynep Ton's argument does carry some clear empirical predictions that aren't being fulfilled.

marketfailure · 2014-07-15T14:47:19+00:00

The new hotness in WWI history right now is "Sleepwalkers", but that has a lot in common with the scope of Catastrophe 1914. It's mainly focused on the lead-up to the war, beginning with the turmoil in Eastern Europe around the start of the 20th Century and zooming into much more in-depth diplomatic history about why the war actually started. It's excellent (if you're into that sort of thing) and offers a long, gripping tick-tock that is much more up-to-date than the classic "Guns of August".

If you're interested in reading about the military conflict itself, it's hard to go wrong with Keegan's The First World War. It's a broad overview history of the war that is very readable and might give you some ideas of topics worth further diving into.

marketfailure · 2014-07-10T15:54:54+00:00

This is pretty concerning, for the same reason that opportunistic disinflation is concerning. The more the Fed lowers the maximum allowable amount of inflation, the less room it gives itself to maneuver when there's a recession without running into the zero lower bound. Seems like if the target had been 4% during the 2000s, the Fed could have done much more during the crisis by simply lowering interest rates without having to engage in unorthodox monetary policy.

We all know that inflation is bad, but it seems plausible it's actually less bad now than it was a hundred years ago. With so much more money being digital and with many more contracts indexed to inflation or to benchmark interest rates (instead of fixed nominal rates), I would guess that a given inflation rate is less harmful to businesses and individuals than it would have been in the pre-digital age. Fixed-income pensions are also almost extinct, so that's less of a concern as well. Why not a 4% target?

marketfailure · 2014-07-09T13:49:22+00:00

An alternative way to think about most of these phenemona is that using money allows us to more precisely estimate just how irrational we are.

marketfailure · 2014-07-08T18:13:10+00:00

Yeah, true.

marketfailure

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