Hats off to some intrepid commentators
We are going through unprecedented troubled times and the way ahead looks very uncertain. The whole world could be participating in the ‘lost decade’ that Japan experienced previously.
But this article is not about doom and gloom! It is about recognising the commitment to open and honest reporting being undertaken by (at least) these three individuals. Three commentators that this author follows in admiration and awe.
Learning from Dogs has nothing like the following of James Kwak, Yves Smith and Karl Denninger but the LfD authors do have an inkling of the work involved in writing not one but often several articles each day. It is a huge commitment.
First James Kwak of Baseline Scenario. Simon Johnson is, perhaps, the more well-known of this duo that comprise Baseline Scenario but it is James that puts in the leg-work. Here’s a taste of a recent article from James:
Radio Stories
I spend a lot of time in the car driving to and from school, so I end up listening to a lot of podcasts (mainly This American Life, Radio Lab, Fresh Air, and Planet Money). I was catching up recently and wanted to point out a few highlights.
Last week on Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Scott Patterson, author of The Quants, and Ed Thorp, mathematician, inventor of blackjack card counting (or, at least, the first person to publish his methods), and, according to the book, also the inventor of the market-neutral hedge fund.
Large chunk snipped ……
I finally got around to listening to Planet Money’s interview with Russ Roberts from December. Russ Roberts and I are pretty sure to disagree on almost any actual policy question. But what I liked about his interview was that he basically admitted that policy questions cannot be settled by looking at the empirical studies. On whether the minimum wage increases or decreases employment for example, he says that he can poke holes in the studies whose conclusions he doesn’t agree with, but other people can poke holes in the studies he agrees with. In Roberts’s view, people’s policy positions are determined by their prior normative commitments.
I don’t completely agree. I don’t think that these questions, like the one about the minimum wage, are inherently unanswerable in the sense that the answer does not exist. But I agree that empirical studies are unlikely to get to the truth, particularly on a politically charged question, because there are so many ways to fudge an empirical study. As one of my professors said, there are a million ways you can screw up a study, and only one way to do it right. But I agree with the general sentiment. We are living in an age of numbers, where people think that statistics can answer any question. Statistics can answer any question, but they can answer it in multiple ways depending on who is sitting at the keyboard.
By James Kwak
