It is actually surprisingly hard to get good data for econ while there are a number of usable free data sets the best ones are all restricted and partial redacted due to privacy concerns.
EG the census has tonnes of amazing cross sectional data on everyone but iirc the data has a known bias (entries which can be identified are removed which means that the income spectrum has a cut off). And you still need to get access to the data set specifically.
Similarly Sweeden collects to tonnes of great data on like everything. But you can only get access if you're a Sweede. Which means that any study that is produced cannot be reviewed in that way by anyone from the rest of the world.
Statistics Canada will run analyses for you, on non-censored data sets of census data. But you have to pay a pretty penny, and you only get the results.
In a pattern that is fairly standard across sciences, R&R compiled a database of public debt and then kept it private for a few years to mine a lot of papers out of it.
While I empathize with the motivation, I question that very pattern as well. If research was published as a package of data, code, and paper; lots of researchers could get to mining it much quicker. Fewer exclusive results for the R&R's of this world? Sure. But they'd get a ton of citations to their original data release which is hopefully worth something in itself.
In a pattern that is fairly standard across sciences, R&R compiled a database of public debt and then kept it private for a few years to mine a lot of papers out of it.
While I empathize with the motivation, I question that very pattern as well. If research was published as a package of data, code, and paper; lots of researchers could get to mining it much quicker. Fewer exclusive results for the R&R's of this world? Sure. But they'd get a ton of citations to their original data release which is hopefully worth something in itself.
only if grant and tenure committees hold that view, which they don't. Exclusivity of results is what gives you the ingenuity that makes job market papers sparkle so.
That's my point. The current system we've built up to do research is only so-so at producing good science. Don't even get me started about all the crap papers that are produced just to have a publication record. No one will ever read that stuff.
Either have lower tier professors do replication studies or additional teaching for a living.
It would be fantastic if that were the case if low tier academics could just do replication. But I don't think it's a reasonable goal. No one wants to do replication studies and no one wants academics that don't produce.
There would have to be a pretty big paradigm shift in how we fund academic departments. And we would have to be content with both less big science and less of the small yet still important refinements that are produced. That or we would have to have a radical increase in funding.
While the small studies are often thought of as not productive this isn't really the case. While it is true that they will be read less than big discoveries it is also true that those big discoveries likely have some small refinements to thank for either the idea or for ruling out others. And then those small studies suddenly become very important. Would Krugman have started new trade theory had there not been the Large amount of work on H-O? Would he have been able to make it work without examinations of CES utility and how it produces prefernces for diversity? Some of these things are otherwise unremarkable if it were not for a simple tweak to the production function which makes them all come together to produce a Nobel winning paper
As an example from my own experience I feel like I am doing some pretty big work in my field. But that work would not be possible without a host of otherwise unimportant papers that no one outside of my field has read or cares about and half the people in the field probably don't care about either.
What ends up happening is that most people end up reading those things that are most pertinent to their own research and interests. That is ok, we don't know what foundational work will be important until someone writes the big paper based on it
I understand why the system is how is it is. However, let's design Science! from scratch here for a second. This is what I would consider ideal.
Researcher writes paper based on data X and method Y. He then has to package data X and method Y into a script that is submitted along with the paper to peer reviewers. Each reviewer checks X, checks Y, and then runs Y on X; along with reading the paper and making sure it all matches.
As far as I am concerned the fact that data and code aren't an integral part of scientific articles is a major weakness to how we currently do it.
Who's... who's going to check that my script is right? I've written thousands of lines of code for my research; who's going to examine it line for line and debug it?
It would be fantastic if that were the case if low tier academics could just do replication. But I don't think it's a reasonable goal. No one wants to do replication studies and no one wants academics that don't produce.
Replication studies are like software testing. Essential, but nobody actually wants to do it.
Also, how would a lower-tier academic advance to a higher-tier then? What would their grad students do? Science is an industry that's based on ideas; it's hard to imagine a scientist whose job is just to reproduce previous results, rather than actually contributing to the breadth of ideas. Not impossible, but it'd induce all sorts of horrible cultural effects.
I understand why the system is how is it is. However, let's design Science! from scratch here for a second. This is what I would consider ideal.
Researcher writes paper based on data X and method Y. He then has to package data X and method Y into a script that is submitted along with the paper to peer reviewers. Each reviewer checks X, checks Y, and then runs Y on X; along with reading the paper and making sure it all matches.
As far as I am concerned the fact that data and code aren't an integral part of scientific articles is a major weakness to how we currently do it.
Who's... who's going to check that my script is right? I've written thousands of lines of code for my research; who's going to examine it line for line and debug it?
the individual who suspects you of malevolence, naturally
Statistics Canada will run analyses for you, on non-censored data sets of census data. But you have to pay a pretty penny, and you only get the results.
It was a fairly enraging moment when the recent government here in Canada made the census voluntary instead of mandatory, creating a rift where the new data can no longer be coralated with the old.
Man, you guys are gonna be as bad as us if ya'll keep letting this kind of thing happen. C'mon Canada, did you really look at your southern neighbor and go "Yeah... That's the way a country should be run."
Man, you guys are gonna be as bad as us if ya'll keep letting this kind of thing happen. C'mon Canada, did you really look at your southern neighbor and go "Yeah... That's the way a country should be run."
Our Conservatives did. They are literally consulting with your right-wingers.
Man, you guys are gonna be as bad as us if ya'll keep letting this kind of thing happen. C'mon Canada, did you really look at your southern neighbor and go "Yeah... That's the way a country should be run."
Our Conservatives did. They are literally consulting with your right-wingers.
They're being bought by the same people. Hence, you have the similarity.
Steam and CFN: Enexemander
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
Because people often manipulate entered values badly. Stapel got caught when his entered values had repeated entries. And Benford's law and other tests of the amount of noise that should exist have caught fraudulent researchers before. All this just raises the difficulty of misconduct.
Yeah the thing people often forget is that actually making up stuff that stands up to testing is really hard. Stapel managed to avoid being caught not because his work was hard to prove fraudulent but because he is a very convincing liar. It's far easier to just convince people through words than to make up data that is convincing.
Because people often manipulate entered values badly. Stapel got caught when his entered values had repeated entries. And Benford's law and other tests of the amount of noise that should exist have caught fraudulent researchers before. All this just raises the difficulty of misconduct.
Yeah the thing people often forget is that actually making up stuff that stands up to testing is really hard. Stapel managed to avoid being caught not because his work was hard to prove fraudulent but because he is a very convincing liar. It's far easier to just convince people through words than to make up data that is convincing.
Yeah. I mean, we go to conferences, and people present figures, and nobody really questions them, unless something's really counter-intuitive. Even then though, you usually just ask a question or two and let it drop if you get a semi-reasonable answer, because nobody really wants to be the dick who starts a public kerfuffle like this when you don't have any real proof. (Well. Most people won't.)
Even when you read a paper, you typically only see end results. Even with pages of supplementary data, it's very difficult to gather enough evidence to clearly demonstrate incorrectness. When I try to replicate, there's also hard to overcome the possibility that maybe you screwed it up, or that there's some sort of implementation-specific randomness (like, slightly different float precision on different OSes or whatever). It takes a lot of confidence to come out and say you've definitively caught someone's mistake (or fraud, or whatnot), because it's also such a huge accusation. If it wasn't for the fact that it was a really obvious spreadsheet error, it's hard to imagine a grad student at Amherst coming out and publicly outing a pair of renowned Harvard profs.
Because people often manipulate entered values badly. Stapel got caught when his entered values had repeated entries. And Benford's law and other tests of the amount of noise that should exist have caught fraudulent researchers before. All this just raises the difficulty of misconduct.
Yeah the thing people often forget is that actually making up stuff that stands up to testing is really hard. Stapel managed to avoid being caught not because his work was hard to prove fraudulent but because he is a very convincing liar. It's far easier to just convince people through words than to make up data that is convincing.
Yeah. I mean, we go to conferences, and people present figures, and nobody really questions them, unless something's really counter-intuitive. Even then though, you usually just ask a question or two and let it drop if you get a semi-reasonable answer, because nobody really wants to be the dick who starts a public kerfuffle like this when you don't have any real proof. (Well. Most people won't.)
Even when you read a paper, you typically only see end results. Even with pages of supplementary data, it's very difficult to gather enough evidence to clearly demonstrate incorrectness. When I try to replicate, there's also hard to overcome the possibility that maybe you screwed it up, or that there's some sort of implementation-specific randomness (like, slightly different float precision on different OSes or whatever). It takes a lot of confidence to come out and say you've definitively caught someone's mistake (or fraud, or whatnot), because it's also such a huge accusation. If it wasn't for the fact that it was a really obvious spreadsheet error, it's hard to imagine a grad student at Amherst coming out and publicly outing a pair of renowned Harvard profs.
There was more to it than the spreadsheet error, which really was the minor point. The bigger sticking point was the out and out cherry picking they engaged in.
Because people often manipulate entered values badly. Stapel got caught when his entered values had repeated entries. And Benford's law and other tests of the amount of noise that should exist have caught fraudulent researchers before. All this just raises the difficulty of misconduct.
Yeah the thing people often forget is that actually making up stuff that stands up to testing is really hard. Stapel managed to avoid being caught not because his work was hard to prove fraudulent but because he is a very convincing liar. It's far easier to just convince people through words than to make up data that is convincing.
Yeah. I mean, we go to conferences, and people present figures, and nobody really questions them, unless something's really counter-intuitive. Even then though, you usually just ask a question or two and let it drop if you get a semi-reasonable answer, because nobody really wants to be the dick who starts a public kerfuffle like this when you don't have any real proof. (Well. Most people won't.)
Even when you read a paper, you typically only see end results. Even with pages of supplementary data, it's very difficult to gather enough evidence to clearly demonstrate incorrectness. When I try to replicate, there's also hard to overcome the possibility that maybe you screwed it up, or that there's some sort of implementation-specific randomness (like, slightly different float precision on different OSes or whatever). It takes a lot of confidence to come out and say you've definitively caught someone's mistake (or fraud, or whatnot), because it's also such a huge accusation. If it wasn't for the fact that it was a really obvious spreadsheet error, it's hard to imagine a grad student at Amherst coming out and publicly outing a pair of renowned Harvard profs.
There was more to it than the spreadsheet error, which really was the minor point. The bigger sticking point was the out and out cherry picking they engaged in.
as we all know, there is a problem with unemployment in this country and our government seems to want to do nothing about it
well, no more! One brave representative from the great state of South Carolina has decided he's had enough.......................................................................................................................with the reporting of the unemployment number
WASHINGTON -- A group of Republicans are cooking up legislation that could give President Barack Obama an unintentional assist with disagreeable unemployment numbers -- by eliminating the key economic statistic altogether.
The bill, introduced last week by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), would bar the U.S. Census Bureau from conducting nearly all surveys except for a decennial population count. Such a step that would end the government's ability to provide reliable estimates of the employment rate. Indeed, the government would not be able to produce any of the major economic indices that move markets every month, said multiple statistics experts, who were aghast at the proposal.
The Krugman has a good piece on the seductive appeal of austerity. Simply put, it's one part morality play, one part alignment of interests, shake vigorously, and serve. Which is why the demolishing of the R&R paper was so important.
Coates has a good piece on how predatory practices and redlining destroyed black wealth.
This is horrifying. Its honestly so bad that I'm not even sure what you can do with the knowledge.
Buying on contract meant that you made a down-payment to a speculator. The speculator kept the deed and only turned it over to you after you'd paid the full value of the house -- a value determined by the speculator. In the meantime, you were responsible for monthly payments, keeping the house up, and taking care of any problems springing from inspection. If you missed one payment, the speculator could move to evict you and keep all the payments you'd made. Building up equity was impossible, unless -- through some Herculean effort -- you managed to pay off the entire contract. Very few people did this. The system was set up to keep them from doing it, and allow speculators to get rich through a cycle of evicting and flipping.
I spent some time talking to a 90-year-old man who'd come up from Mississippi. His family had been reduced to sharecropping after the county government took their land. "In Mississippi, there was no law," he told me. There was no law in Chicago either. The gentleman purchased his home for $26,000. He later found out that the deed-holder had purchased the same home -- only weeks before -- for $9,000.
I dont understand whats so horrifying about this. People buy houses then sell them for twice their worth all the time, and thats hardly restricted to blacks. If i take a mortgage out for a 150k home, by the time im done paying it off, im paying at lest 250k. Whats described in this article is equivilent to a lease, or a rent to own plan. Did the concept of equity in home ownership even exist in the 1950's for whites or blacks?
Handily the list provided in the article says nothing about what they charged white people for the same properties. It's pretty damn easy to write an inflamitory article if you offer no information about just how this was racist. The sellers of the property could have just been greedy bastards, not racist.
and even if they charged them more then what was 'fair'...yes, racism exists, and it existed a lot more back then then it does now. Dwelling on the past is not going to help anything today.
I have no problem with people pointing out the assholes that are true racists that are being racist NOW because now is the measuring stick we should be looking at to evaluate a society, not THEN. especially when there is such a large gap between the two.
Coates has a good piece on how predatory practices and redlining destroyed black wealth.
This is horrifying. Its honestly so bad that I'm not even sure what you can do with the knowledge.
Buying on contract meant that you made a down-payment to a speculator. The speculator kept the deed and only turned it over to you after you'd paid the full value of the house -- a value determined by the speculator. In the meantime, you were responsible for monthly payments, keeping the house up, and taking care of any problems springing from inspection. If you missed one payment, the speculator could move to evict you and keep all the payments you'd made. Building up equity was impossible, unless -- through some Herculean effort -- you managed to pay off the entire contract. Very few people did this. The system was set up to keep them from doing it, and allow speculators to get rich through a cycle of evicting and flipping.
I spent some time talking to a 90-year-old man who'd come up from Mississippi. His family had been reduced to sharecropping after the county government took their land. "In Mississippi, there was no law," he told me. There was no law in Chicago either. The gentleman purchased his home for $26,000. He later found out that the deed-holder had purchased the same home -- only weeks before -- for $9,000.
I dont understand whats so horrifying about this. People buy houses then sell them for twice their worth all the time, and thats hardly restricted to blacks. If i take a mortgage out for a 150k home, by the time im done paying it off, im paying at lest 250k. Whats described in this article is equivilent to a lease, or a rent to own plan. Did the concept of equity in home ownership even exist in the 1950's for whites or blacks?
Handily the list provided in the article says nothing about what they charged white people for the same properties. It's pretty damn easy to write an inflamitory article if you offer no information about just how this was racist. The sellers of the property could have just been greedy bastards, not racist.
and even if they charged them more then what was 'fair'...yes, racism exists, and it existed a lot more back then then it does now. Dwelling on the past is not going to help anything today.
I have no problem with people pointing out the assholes that are true racists that are being racist NOW because now is the measuring stick we should be looking at to evaluate a society, not THEN. especially when there is such a large gap between the two.
Coates is trying to explain why things are they way they are now. Why are blacks so much poorer than whites? Well, there's part of your answer right there.
I guarantee you that whites had access to actual mortgages (and the article even says as much). The implication is that contracting is the only method that blacks had to acquire property (at least in certain areas of Chicago), and it is further implied that means were found to evict them before they actually get to the "own" part of "rent-to-own". Blacks are poorer NOW because they don't have the benefit of accumulated wealth being passed down from the previous generation. Because it was effectively stolen from them. Legally.
Coates has a good piece on how predatory practices and redlining destroyed black wealth.
This is horrifying. Its honestly so bad that I'm not even sure what you can do with the knowledge.
Buying on contract meant that you made a down-payment to a speculator. The speculator kept the deed and only turned it over to you after you'd paid the full value of the house -- a value determined by the speculator. In the meantime, you were responsible for monthly payments, keeping the house up, and taking care of any problems springing from inspection. If you missed one payment, the speculator could move to evict you and keep all the payments you'd made. Building up equity was impossible, unless -- through some Herculean effort -- you managed to pay off the entire contract. Very few people did this. The system was set up to keep them from doing it, and allow speculators to get rich through a cycle of evicting and flipping.
I spent some time talking to a 90-year-old man who'd come up from Mississippi. His family had been reduced to sharecropping after the county government took their land. "In Mississippi, there was no law," he told me. There was no law in Chicago either. The gentleman purchased his home for $26,000. He later found out that the deed-holder had purchased the same home -- only weeks before -- for $9,000.
I dont understand whats so horrifying about this. People buy houses then sell them for twice their worth all the time, and thats hardly restricted to blacks. If i take a mortgage out for a 150k home, by the time im done paying it off, im paying at lest 250k. Whats described in this article is equivilent to a lease, or a rent to own plan. Did the concept of equity in home ownership even exist in the 1950's for whites or blacks?
Handily the list provided in the article says nothing about what they charged white people for the same properties. It's pretty damn easy to write an inflamitory article if you offer no information about just how this was racist. The sellers of the property could have just been greedy bastards, not racist.
and even if they charged them more then what was 'fair'...yes, racism exists, and it existed a lot more back then then it does now. Dwelling on the past is not going to help anything today.
I have no problem with people pointing out the assholes that are true racists that are being racist NOW because now is the measuring stick we should be looking at to evaluate a society, not THEN. especially when there is such a large gap between the two.
First off, there's a vast difference between a mortgage, where the money you pay into it allows you to develop equity in the property, and the contract system, which was explicitly designed to disallow the accrual of equity. If you did not pay off the contract (and they were usually designed to make sure you wouldn't), then you lost all that money you had paid in. It was an abusive scam.
Now, why would anyone choose that option? Because it was the only one there was. Banks refused to give loans for properties in black neighborhoods - the term "redline" comes from the red lines that banks would draw on maps to demarcate such neighborhoods - and sellers would not sell to blacks in other communities. The only options they had were buy on contract or give up on home ownership.
Coates has a good piece on how predatory practices and redlining destroyed black wealth.
This is horrifying. Its honestly so bad that I'm not even sure what you can do with the knowledge.
Well, the biggest points I took away are that the black community has a legitimate argument for reparations, that we need to stop looking at minority poverty as a moral failing, and that we need to stop treating racism in the US as a distinctly Southern issue.
Coates has a good piece on how predatory practices and redlining destroyed black wealth.
This is horrifying. Its honestly so bad that I'm not even sure what you can do with the knowledge.
Buying on contract meant that you made a down-payment to a speculator. The speculator kept the deed and only turned it over to you after you'd paid the full value of the house -- a value determined by the speculator. In the meantime, you were responsible for monthly payments, keeping the house up, and taking care of any problems springing from inspection. If you missed one payment, the speculator could move to evict you and keep all the payments you'd made. Building up equity was impossible, unless -- through some Herculean effort -- you managed to pay off the entire contract. Very few people did this. The system was set up to keep them from doing it, and allow speculators to get rich through a cycle of evicting and flipping.
I spent some time talking to a 90-year-old man who'd come up from Mississippi. His family had been reduced to sharecropping after the county government took their land. "In Mississippi, there was no law," he told me. There was no law in Chicago either. The gentleman purchased his home for $26,000. He later found out that the deed-holder had purchased the same home -- only weeks before -- for $9,000.
I dont understand whats so horrifying about this. People buy houses then sell them for twice their worth all the time, and thats hardly restricted to blacks. If i take a mortgage out for a 150k home, by the time im done paying it off, im paying at lest 250k. Whats described in this article is equivilent to a lease, or a rent to own plan. Did the concept of equity in home ownership even exist in the 1950's for whites or blacks?
Handily the list provided in the article says nothing about what they charged white people for the same properties. It's pretty damn easy to write an inflamitory article if you offer no information about just how this was racist. The sellers of the property could have just been greedy bastards, not racist.
and even if they charged them more then what was 'fair'...yes, racism exists, and it existed a lot more back then then it does now. Dwelling on the past is not going to help anything today.
I have no problem with people pointing out the assholes that are true racists that are being racist NOW because now is the measuring stick we should be looking at to evaluate a society, not THEN. especially when there is such a large gap between the two.
Coates is trying to explain why things are they way they are now. Why are blacks so much poorer than whites? Well, there's part of your answer right there.
I guarantee you that whites had access to actual mortgages (and the article even says as much). The implication is that contracting is the only method that blacks had to acquire property (at least in certain areas of Chicago), and it is further implied that means were found to evict them before they actually get to the "own" part of "rent-to-own". Blacks are poorer NOW because they don't have the benefit of accumulated wealth being passed down from the previous generation. Because it was effectively stolen from them. Legally.
Which is another way of saying that our society now is even more unfair than we thought. And that is the problem.
Gambling was in fact going on in this establishment! Bunch of e-mails show Moody's/S&P were well aware what they were doing in the lead up to the financial crisis was fraudulent and would blow up in all of our faces.
What was done to fix it? Nothing! Can we make Senator Warren AG?
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Surprised no one around here has posted much about the China 'bubble' that's been so big lately. It ties into the ratings agency model being fundamentally broken because one of Chinas largest problems (allegedly) is the inability of local governance to have their bonds rated for market, and being reliant upon central planning from Beijing.
Also, I'd be interested to hear opinions about how much Germany is will to concede in order to keep the UK in the Euro and avoid losing its minority 'filibuster' with regards to policy. I just read a long article about the China lobbied "wine tax" southern bloc countries are screaming bloody murder over, and Germany being caught in the middle.
there are similarities to the benefits that certain EU bonds enjoyed due to their regulatory status
the ratings-agency model of risk management is probably fundamentally broken, but I'm not sure how to replace it.
It's not broken so much as it's too easy to game the system. Building a Chinese wall around rating organizations and enforcing it would go a long way in fixing things.
there are similarities to the benefits that certain EU bonds enjoyed due to their regulatory status
the ratings-agency model of risk management is probably fundamentally broken, but I'm not sure how to replace it.
It's not broken so much as it's too easy to game the system. Building a Chinese wall around rating organizations and enforcing it would go a long way in fixing things.
There are three parties here that are related to the problem: the companies being rated, the ratings agency, and the regulators that make the resulting ratings requirements for whatever, particularly capital requirements.
that's why you have an issuer-pays model: the rating is needed not so much because there's an investor who is outsourcing the task of assessing the product, but because the regulatory agency wants there to be a minimal rating. the regulator is, in effect, the main subscriber. the move toward ratings agencies coincides with the move toward trying to engineer financial regulation through imposing complicated asset quality requirements. you cannot construct any arms-length separation between the company and the ratings agency unless you also find a way to identify someone else who will actually pay the subscription fees to the raters
ronya on
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
there are similarities to the benefits that certain EU bonds enjoyed due to their regulatory status
the ratings-agency model of risk management is probably fundamentally broken, but I'm not sure how to replace it.
It's not broken so much as it's too easy to game the system. Building a Chinese wall around rating organizations and enforcing it would go a long way in fixing things.
There are three parties here that are related to the problem: the companies being rated, the ratings agency, and the regulators that make the resulting ratings requirements for whatever, particularly capital requirements.
that's why you have an issuer-pays model: the rating is needed not so much because there's an investor who is outsourcing the task of assessing the product, but because the regulatory agency wants there to be a minimal rating. the regulator is, in effect, the main subscriber. the move toward ratings agencies coincides with the move toward trying to engineer financial regulation through imposing complicated asset quality requirements. you cannot construct any arms-length separation between the company and the ratings agency unless you also find a way to identify someone else who will actually pay the subscription fees to the raters
Can we make issuer pays a non voluntary flat fee tax that is remitted from the government to the rating agencies?
Larry Summers withdrew his name from consideration to be the next Fed Chair. There was a lot of Democratic opposition in the Senate (led by Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren), so if he could have been confirmed was an open question anyway. This should open things up for Janet Yellen to become the first chairwoman of the Fed.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
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EG the census has tonnes of amazing cross sectional data on everyone but iirc the data has a known bias (entries which can be identified are removed which means that the income spectrum has a cut off). And you still need to get access to the data set specifically.
Similarly Sweeden collects to tonnes of great data on like everything. But you can only get access if you're a Sweede. Which means that any study that is produced cannot be reviewed in that way by anyone from the rest of the world.
While I empathize with the motivation, I question that very pattern as well. If research was published as a package of data, code, and paper; lots of researchers could get to mining it much quicker. Fewer exclusive results for the R&R's of this world? Sure. But they'd get a ton of citations to their original data release which is hopefully worth something in itself.
only if grant and tenure committees hold that view, which they don't. Exclusivity of results is what gives you the ingenuity that makes job market papers sparkle so.
Either have lower tier professors do replication studies or additional teaching for a living.
There would have to be a pretty big paradigm shift in how we fund academic departments. And we would have to be content with both less big science and less of the small yet still important refinements that are produced. That or we would have to have a radical increase in funding.
While the small studies are often thought of as not productive this isn't really the case. While it is true that they will be read less than big discoveries it is also true that those big discoveries likely have some small refinements to thank for either the idea or for ruling out others. And then those small studies suddenly become very important. Would Krugman have started new trade theory had there not been the Large amount of work on H-O? Would he have been able to make it work without examinations of CES utility and how it produces prefernces for diversity? Some of these things are otherwise unremarkable if it were not for a simple tweak to the production function which makes them all come together to produce a Nobel winning paper
As an example from my own experience I feel like I am doing some pretty big work in my field. But that work would not be possible without a host of otherwise unimportant papers that no one outside of my field has read or cares about and half the people in the field probably don't care about either.
What ends up happening is that most people end up reading those things that are most pertinent to their own research and interests. That is ok, we don't know what foundational work will be important until someone writes the big paper based on it
Who's... who's going to check that my script is right? I've written thousands of lines of code for my research; who's going to examine it line for line and debug it?
Replication studies are like software testing. Essential, but nobody actually wants to do it.
Also, how would a lower-tier academic advance to a higher-tier then? What would their grad students do? Science is an industry that's based on ideas; it's hard to imagine a scientist whose job is just to reproduce previous results, rather than actually contributing to the breadth of ideas. Not impossible, but it'd induce all sorts of horrible cultural effects.
the individual who suspects you of malevolence, naturally
(or a grad student seeking to adapt your code)
It was a fairly enraging moment when the recent government here in Canada made the census voluntary instead of mandatory, creating a rift where the new data can no longer be coralated with the old.
MWO: Adamski
Of course they did. These are Conservatives. They are basically Republicans-in-Canada. And they hate government and accurate data.
You have to understand, the 5 complaints they received over 10 years totally outweighed the petition people signed to keep things as it was.
MWO: Adamski
Our Conservatives did. They are literally consulting with your right-wingers.
They're being bought by the same people. Hence, you have the similarity.
Yeah the thing people often forget is that actually making up stuff that stands up to testing is really hard. Stapel managed to avoid being caught not because his work was hard to prove fraudulent but because he is a very convincing liar. It's far easier to just convince people through words than to make up data that is convincing.
Yeah. I mean, we go to conferences, and people present figures, and nobody really questions them, unless something's really counter-intuitive. Even then though, you usually just ask a question or two and let it drop if you get a semi-reasonable answer, because nobody really wants to be the dick who starts a public kerfuffle like this when you don't have any real proof. (Well. Most people won't.)
Even when you read a paper, you typically only see end results. Even with pages of supplementary data, it's very difficult to gather enough evidence to clearly demonstrate incorrectness. When I try to replicate, there's also hard to overcome the possibility that maybe you screwed it up, or that there's some sort of implementation-specific randomness (like, slightly different float precision on different OSes or whatever). It takes a lot of confidence to come out and say you've definitively caught someone's mistake (or fraud, or whatnot), because it's also such a huge accusation. If it wasn't for the fact that it was a really obvious spreadsheet error, it's hard to imagine a grad student at Amherst coming out and publicly outing a pair of renowned Harvard profs.
There was more to it than the spreadsheet error, which really was the minor point. The bigger sticking point was the out and out cherry picking they engaged in.
And the poor method
as we all know, there is a problem with unemployment in this country and our government seems to want to do nothing about it
well, no more! One brave representative from the great state of South Carolina has decided he's had enough.......................................................................................................................with the reporting of the unemployment number
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
It's how they treat rising sea waters (literally, in North Carolina), so this is not a surprise.
This is horrifying. Its honestly so bad that I'm not even sure what you can do with the knowledge.
I dont understand whats so horrifying about this. People buy houses then sell them for twice their worth all the time, and thats hardly restricted to blacks. If i take a mortgage out for a 150k home, by the time im done paying it off, im paying at lest 250k. Whats described in this article is equivilent to a lease, or a rent to own plan. Did the concept of equity in home ownership even exist in the 1950's for whites or blacks?
Handily the list provided in the article says nothing about what they charged white people for the same properties. It's pretty damn easy to write an inflamitory article if you offer no information about just how this was racist. The sellers of the property could have just been greedy bastards, not racist.
and even if they charged them more then what was 'fair'...yes, racism exists, and it existed a lot more back then then it does now. Dwelling on the past is not going to help anything today.
I have no problem with people pointing out the assholes that are true racists that are being racist NOW because now is the measuring stick we should be looking at to evaluate a society, not THEN. especially when there is such a large gap between the two.
Coates is trying to explain why things are they way they are now. Why are blacks so much poorer than whites? Well, there's part of your answer right there.
I guarantee you that whites had access to actual mortgages (and the article even says as much). The implication is that contracting is the only method that blacks had to acquire property (at least in certain areas of Chicago), and it is further implied that means were found to evict them before they actually get to the "own" part of "rent-to-own". Blacks are poorer NOW because they don't have the benefit of accumulated wealth being passed down from the previous generation. Because it was effectively stolen from them. Legally.
First off, there's a vast difference between a mortgage, where the money you pay into it allows you to develop equity in the property, and the contract system, which was explicitly designed to disallow the accrual of equity. If you did not pay off the contract (and they were usually designed to make sure you wouldn't), then you lost all that money you had paid in. It was an abusive scam.
Now, why would anyone choose that option? Because it was the only one there was. Banks refused to give loans for properties in black neighborhoods - the term "redline" comes from the red lines that banks would draw on maps to demarcate such neighborhoods - and sellers would not sell to blacks in other communities. The only options they had were buy on contract or give up on home ownership.
Well, the biggest points I took away are that the black community has a legitimate argument for reparations, that we need to stop looking at minority poverty as a moral failing, and that we need to stop treating racism in the US as a distinctly Southern issue.
Which is another way of saying that our society now is even more unfair than we thought. And that is the problem.
What was done to fix it? Nothing! Can we make Senator Warren AG?
the ratings-agency model of risk management is probably fundamentally broken, but I'm not sure how to replace it.
It's not broken so much as it's too easy to game the system. Building a Chinese wall around rating organizations and enforcing it would go a long way in fixing things.
There are three parties here that are related to the problem: the companies being rated, the ratings agency, and the regulators that make the resulting ratings requirements for whatever, particularly capital requirements.
that's why you have an issuer-pays model: the rating is needed not so much because there's an investor who is outsourcing the task of assessing the product, but because the regulatory agency wants there to be a minimal rating. the regulator is, in effect, the main subscriber. the move toward ratings agencies coincides with the move toward trying to engineer financial regulation through imposing complicated asset quality requirements. you cannot construct any arms-length separation between the company and the ratings agency unless you also find a way to identify someone else who will actually pay the subscription fees to the raters
Can we make issuer pays a non voluntary flat fee tax that is remitted from the government to the rating agencies?
Larry Summers withdrew his name from consideration to be the next Fed Chair. There was a lot of Democratic opposition in the Senate (led by Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren), so if he could have been confirmed was an open question anyway. This should open things up for Janet Yellen to become the first chairwoman of the Fed.
For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, Yellen is perceived as more inflationary than Summers.