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…
Blog Archives
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…
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.
About one-quarter of Americans’ assets are real estate and this map of land values across the USA shows where the most valuable real estate is located: You can make out the outlines of Iowa which has higher rural land value…
Posted in Public Finance, Real Estate
Medianism 