Economists...the truth might not be beautiful

I once heard a professor at my faculty say that computer simulations are not economics. That's at the very least naive. Take away numerical solutions from physicists and we probably wouldn't have cellphones. Economists strongly prefer beautiful math over more insightful potentially less beautiful things, and that is hurting the field as a science.

... the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth ...

How did economists get it so wrong? @NYT

Total eclipse flow chart

See the flowchart here.

Alternating between crooning and belt singing is very important...

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How fair is that some are smarter?

How willing people are to give to others depends on what they like and what they believe. There's (between-individual and between-group) differences in what is considered (believed) to be fair...

...Turning to the effects of the belief variables, our results showed that these too vary significantly across countries. Believing that coming from a wealthy family is important to get ahead in some countries had basically no effect while in others it involved an over 20 percentage point increase in the probability of supporting redistribution. The effect of believing effort to be an important income determinant varied from being statistically non-discernible from zero to decreasing the probability of supporting redistribution with around 15 percentage points. With respect to believing intelligence/skills to be rewarded the results were mixed, with both negative and positive but in most cases statistically insignificant effects.

Isakssona and Lindskog. Preferences for redistribution- A country comparison of fairness judgements. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

we are the wwworld

we are the wwworld, originally uploaded by 9 0 0 0.

5,113,758,962 humans don't give a shit about comments, profiles or your favorite song of Morrissey ... Congrats b#tch, you are the minority!

illustration + text by 9000

{entrevista con 9000 - in Spanish}

Animatronics by Banksy

Here's a small (self-made) video from the animatronics at the Banksy vs Bristol Museum exhibition. Most of them were already shown at the Pet Shop project in NYC (see coverage by the wooster collective).

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Narcissism and Facebook

Not that it's a particularly surprising result, but at least it's been given scientific rigour now...

Narcissism predicted (a) higher levels of social activity in the online community facebook and (b) more self-promoting content in several aspects of the social networking Web pages facebook

here's the paper. Hat tip to the marginal revolution.

It's anarchy! (Amsterdam)

“The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual”

Bakunin

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pd: Now maybe that's because the US has ten times as many people, right?....

EDIT: See English coverage by NRC

No more googling for LaTeX

just draw it...get the code.

Parkway (holiday read)

Parkway is a novel about a group of youngsters devoted to the britpop scene in mid-90's (probably the only novel with a myspace). It takes place in London's Camden Town, of course, and the soundtrack features blur, oasis, pulp, suede and so on... The target readers, I suspect, are those like me: britpop moaners. Those who cling to a very short-lived and local scene that is well gone. The book reads very easily, and I doubt anyone without a particular interest in the scene or above 20 would find the teenage rage and romance any interesting. Nevertheless, it is a good guide to those lost tracks and can serve well as a handbook for britpop pilgrimage and worship... if you happen to be into it.

Here's the trailer for live forever, the documentary on britpop and cool britannia....

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Good old days I never lived.

9000

, originally uploaded by 9 0 0 0.

and June becomes July...

source

It`s warm outside

But I can hear the snow

Falling on my window

I had to go away

To somewhere deeper down

I know it`s my mistake

To take off out of this town

And June becomes July

This road`s on fire

And my train`s running slow

It rains against my window

I had to get away

To somewhere no-one knows

I know it`s my mistake

To take off now in this way

And June becomes July

The air is thin

When you`re above the clouds

I see them from my window

It`s strange to get away now

To somewhere no-one goes

I know it`s my mistake

But I don`t even know now

And June becomes July

And June becomes July

Banksy in Glasto?

Plain clothes drug dealers in operation.

Ketamin Parking

Is Banksy in Glastonbury? Maybe...Maybe not.

(via this)

Covers....

Robert Smith, and not these guys, should have made that cover...

Covers I particularly like....

I am very fond of Kate Nash's fluorescent adolescent, it brings good memories (original version by The Arctic Monkeys). Placebo's where is my mind is almost as good as the pixies' original. The wallflowers' I'm looking through you is good, respectful and different from the Beatles' original. The rolling stones' like a rolling stone is as good as you would expect, and has a great video - original version by Bob Dylan. Joe Cocker's with a little help of my friends - originally by the Beatles. And finally The Kooks' version of young folks, originally by Peter Bjorn and John.

Special mention to a cover I was just recently exposed to (by a french crowd): Nouvelle Vague's Guns of Brixton - originally by the clash.

Predictably Irrational

Economists usually assume that people are rational. This has a very specific formal meaning, but it basically means that people know exactly what they want, know everything there is to know about their options, and make choices in a way that maximizes their own happiness - whatever this may mean. People are assumed to be selfish and very good at computing and pondering their options. This framework can capture human behavior in some situations, but as everybody knows (including economists) is just far from what happens in the real world...most of the time. People deviate from rationality, but fortunately tend to do so in a systematic way (of course, we know that we make the same "mistakes" over and over...). Finding and modeling deviations from rationality is the business of behavioral economists (such as these).

In "Predictably Irrational" Dan Ariely explains how we deviate from rationality, and how it may be useful to somehow be aware of such deviations. Useful for us, in life, and useful for economists (and social scientists in general)! The book has 13 chapters, and explains how we fail to estimate pain, how context changes our decisions, why we like free things beyond reason, and how we may or may not adhere to social norms. How emotions mess up with our decisions, why we all love procrastination, and why we all cheat sometimes are also very appealing parts of the story. Experiments with human subjects are described nicely and intuitively, just like a story. The whole thing reads pretty fast, which I see as a plus here. If you want academic rigor or are too fastidious with written-like-prose science, then you can always go get the paper - all the references are there. It is a good book, good popular science, which is hard to achieve.

Here's Ariely's TED talks (1 and 2)....

Summer light

It's 7 PM, and people blissfully ride their bikes on the way to some daylight leisure, wearing sunglasses...
working hours were not invented in the tropics.

Good CPR

Good CPR is about tempo. You need to have the right rhythm while resuscitating someone - push the right number of times per minute. Ideal speed is hard to memorize without a song... Turns out, ironically, that this song has exactly the right tempo. Now you know what to sing next time you trying to bring someone back to life.

Hat tip to the last radiolab.

pd: this one also works but there's no irony... boring

Straight 8

Straight-8 is just not a combustion engine. It is also a film competition. Filmmakers are invited to request a Super 8 cartridge. They get it by post, shoot a 3 minutes film, and send the roll back. This means that there's no chance for editing - everything has to be shot in order, no re-takes, not even the chance to see a single frame before the competition develops the film and puts on the sound you submitted online. Needless to say you get to see your whole thing only if it turns out to be great. Restrictions (or obstructions) in film (art?) potentially create very good pieces. Less freedom can be good here.

Here's a winner dutch entry, as seen on the local future shorts screening this month....you can see some more here.

springlove - straight 8 three minute wonder
by straight8productions

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Good stuff.

Intelligence and conservatives

Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated. The evidence is based on 1254 community college students and 1600 foreign students seeking entry to United States' universities. At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, Vocabulary, and Analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education (e.g., gross enrollment at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels) and performance on mathematics and reading assessments from the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) project. They also correlate with components of the Failed States Index and several other measures of economic and political development of nations. Conservatism scores have higher correlations with economic and political measures than estimated IQ scores.

That's Lazar Stank's abstract, from the paper "Conservatism and cognitive ability", in a journal called Intelligence. No idea about the guy or the journal, but it caught my mind...of course. Hat tip to elchiflamicas. Here's the conclusion....

The purpose of this paper was to examine the evidence relevant to the hypothesis that low cognitive ability is associated with high conservatism. This hypothesis can be derived from the theory that sees political conservatism as motivated cognition (Jost et al., 2003) and from Wilson's (1973) dynamic theory of conservatism. Our evidence supports this hypothesis. Conservatism correlates negatively with measures of cognitive ability and educational achievement at both individual- and country levels of analysis. We cannot make any statements about the causality, however

High school memories - spanglish lesson edition

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watcha ducha seme tres cooncha
someones delinquente still a que de lucha
freaky disces equals san oray
O G freaks the beat the manyachees play

Google's economist

In Isaac Asimov's first Foundation Trilogy, there was a character who basically constructed mathematical models of society, and I thought this was a really exciting idea. When I went to college, I looked around for that subject. It turned out to be economics

That's Hal Varian, talking about Google and the math of AdWords on WIRED.