Paul Krugman says that transportation technology and free-trade policies caused globalization: …In the mid-1980s, world trade had recovered from the disruptions and protectionism of the interwar period, but exports as a share of world G.D.P. were still back only to…
Yearly Archives: 2022
Introduction to Factfulness by Hans Rosling
Below is an excerpt of the Introduction of Factfulness by Hans Rosling that is posted for free use by the publisher, McMillan. Before reading the introduction, please take the test it is based. The test website interface is a bit…
Posted in Development, Globalization & International
Steve Jobs got a small part of the Giant Turnip at Apple and a large part at Pixar
Updated January 20, 2024 When Apple’s founder Steve Jobs died in 2011, Matt Yglesias said that he was a net-worth failure compared to other computer executives of his era like Michael Dell and Bill Gates: The rivalry between Steve Jobs…
Posted in Labor, Managerial Micro
The Just Deserts of Capitalism and the Giant Turnip
Updated January 18, 2024 ≈35 minutes to read. Why do some people earn more money than others? The overly simplistic answer from neoclassical economics is that people earn what they produce. If a doctor earns four times as much as…
Posted in Inequality, Labor
The end of the pandemic is in sight
All pandemics come to an end. All pandemics feel endless at their peak, but then they end just as suddenly as they began. Today the Covid case count is finally clearly down. So Omicron has probably peaked in the USA…
Posted in Health
The age of evidence
One of the striking things about statistics as a discipline is how new it is. The standard deviation was introduced in 1892. The t-distribution was published in 1908. The term “central tendency” dates from the late 1920s. The randomized controlled…
Posted in Health, statistics
Why we have Extra Life today.
In the 1850s, the royal classes in England were living almost 70% longer than commoners. This graph shows average life expectancy for the highest nobility, the dukes (and their “ducal” families), who ranked just below the King’s family in the…
Medianism 