All pandemics come to an end. All pandemics feel endless at their peak, but then they end just as suddenly as they began. Today we can see yesterday’s Covid case count (which is the first one that should be normal…
Blog Archives
The age of evidence
I am teaching statistics this semester and one of the striking things about a lot of statistics is how new it is. The standard deviation was introduced in 1892. The t-distribution was published in 1908. The term “central tendency” dates…
Posted in Health, statistics
Why we have Extra Life today.
In the 1850s, upper royalty in England were living almost 70% longer than commoners. This graph shows average life expectancy for “ducal” families. These were the highest rank of nobility, the dukes, just below the King’s nuclear family in the…
Median inflation (or other trimmed means) work best because of high variation in price changes
The standard inflation indexes track the average change in prices and one of the problems with using any average that is disproportionately influenced by outliers that are highly volatile due to market forces that have nothing to do with monetary…
Posted in Macro
Why Netflix doesn’t care if you “illegally” share your account with friends
In Michael Heller and James Salzman’s book, Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives, they say that streaming video companies like HBO Max do not care that people get one account and share it with friends. This…
Posted in Managerial Micro
Looking to buy cheap land? Here is the cheapest in the USA.
Check out this map of land values across the USA. The wealthy landowners with the most acreage tend to buy in areas with cheap land. Almost half of the cheap land in northern Maine is owned by just a few…
Posted in Public Finance, Real Estate
Why being a minority sucks: Power in numbers.
Suppose that there is a population of eleven people on an island and they are all equally racist. There are ten whites who hate blacks and one black who hates whites. If they all express their racism by hurling stones at the…
Posted in Medianism
Medianism 