Justin Rowlatt at The BBC celebrates the 50th birthday of IR8, a strain of rice developed by the IRRI in the Philippines that more than doubled rice productivity. It is thought that IR8 saved many millions of lives and transformed…
Blog Archives
Millionaire Superheroes: the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)
Posted in Development, Millionaire Superheroes
Economic fundamentals models predicted Trump’s win
Most people didn’t predict Trump’s win. I didn’t, the Polls didn’t, the financial markets didn’t (stocks, foreign exchange, etc.), the betting markets didn’t, and most experts didn’t. However, there is a group that did predict a trump win using statistics…
Posted in Public Finance
Anyone who is a true advocate for the middle class must accept a little class warfare
The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote a position paper arguing that Americans are saving a lot more for retirement than a Pew study showed. The AEI objected to the sort of media reports about the Pew study saying,…
Posted in Inequality, Middle class
The State of The USA is mmutilitarian
The State of The USA is an organization that receives federal funding with the mission to measure “the nation’s progress… with the best quality measures and data on the most important issues facing the country” by creating a “Key National…
Posted in Medianism
The State of the USA is… Unclear
Jon Gertner wrote a great article about the history of GDP and other social welfare indicators on the New York Times. The occasion for the article was a new “challenge to the G.D.P. …known as State of the USA” which was…
Posted in Medianism
History of GDP
In 2010, Jon Gertner at the NYT published an excellent history of the idea of GDP and its deficiencies. One paragraph mentions that median income is better than GDP, but the article focuses more on a “willfully obscure” initiative called…
Posted in MELI & Econ Stats
Rising house sizes are NOT an accurate measure of wellbeing
AEI employees, James Pethokoukis and Mark J. Perry, both wrote separate arguments that Americans are “substantially better off” now than in the 1970s because, as Pethokoukis titles his essay, “The median US home is 61% larger than 40 years ago.”…
Posted in Medianism
Medianism 