A review of what is in Tim Urban's book on politics, and what very conspicuously isn't.
Category: policy and economics
A few thoughts on how finance improves and why it sometimes sucks.
People hate the financial industry and are confident they know how to fix it, in proportion with how ignorant they are of the basic facts about it. This post will at least help with the latter.
Andrew Yang wants to bring Universal Basic Income to America, and he's running for president to do so. After hearing from him directly, I weakly support UBI but strongly endorse Yang 2020.
Antinatalism isn't just bad philosophy, it's partly based on bad economics. I argue that having kids isn't just good for the kids, it makes the whole world better off.
Is WalMart helping poor people or is welfare helping WalMart? Part 1 of a series on ways to understand the minimum wage.
I like arguments for capitalism, but not when they're based on flimsy numbers. And if the numbers are flimsy, I may need to invent my own macroeconomic indicator to improve them.
"Of all the corrupters of moral sentiments, therefore, faction and fanaticism have always been by far the greatest." - Adam Smith
Putanumonit's birthday week continues, this is the second of my year 1 review posts. Smart students, stupid charts I stand behind everything I wrote in I Smell a Chart, at least until someone shares it with FiveThirtyEight's Leah Libresco who will politely explain why I'm an idiot. My post focused on the abuses of data and statistics in … Continue reading Year 1 Redux – Trump
Finding common ground on EpiPens, and establishing the Good Drug Administration.
How come women make 79 cents on the dollar? Here are two prominent explanations that are clearly wrong, and two uncommon explanations that are possibly true.
In the 17th century, John Locke described an immutable law of nature regarding the prices of goods. So why do we keep raging against it in vain to this day?
The rich are just like us, except they have more money. Should we try and grab some?
No table of income distribution tells the whole story, so I had to make up one.
Measuring economic inequality and its consequences is hard, so why bother when you can just pick numbers that fit your preferred narrative?
A research project is going to help the world's poorest people and test a revolutionary approach to solving poverty, so you and I are going to donate a bunch of money to make it a success.
Applying the central limit theorem to figure out who votes for Trump and Bernie.
An evil spell is making everybody you know ignorant, hateful and irrational. Can you break it?
I analyze a statistics chart that manages to conclude the opposite of what the data says by making every possible error.
PUTANUMONIT 