Sunday, November 27, 2016

Trumpistan vs. Clintonesia


See here or here:

"Yet, by drilling down to voter preference on county level, these two 'maritime' maps present a very different view - and in doing so, generate the map meme that captures the country's mood at this point in time. At that level, Trump won 85% (3,000,000 sq. mi) of the land area, leaving only 15% (530,000 sq. mi) of U.S. territory for Clinton. Despite the massive size advantage, Trumpistan is much less populated: home to only 46% of Americans (148 million), vs. 54% (174 million) in Clintonesia, which consists in large part of urban areas."









Sunday, October 9, 2016

Currently the most important webpage on the Internet


http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html


As of today:

Hillary Clinton has an 83% chance of winning the presidency.
Last updated Sunday, October 9 at 10:11 AM ET

CHANCE OF WINNING

83%

Hillary Clinton

17%

Donald J. Trump

    Tintin et le sport

    Après l'overdose de compétitions sportives internationales de cet été (et tous les effets externes négatifs générés, outre le nationalisme et le chauvinisme), quelle fraîcheur de relire le Journal de Tintin de ... 1943:


    On dit du sport beaucoup trop de bien et beaucoup trop de mal. On oublie trop souvent qu’il doit être un délassement pour l’esprit en même temps qu’un soin légitime donné au corps, au même titre qu’un bon bain...
    La compétition sportive est le propre d’une infime minorité. Les champions ne sont pas des exemples que nous devrions imiter, mais bien des sortes d’agents de publicité du sport dans lequel ils sont spécialisés. Il y a des millions de gens qui pratiquent la bicyclette et il n’y a que quelques douzaines de spécialistes qui sont capables de disputer le Tour de France.
    Journal Tintin, 19 Décembre 1946, Tintin sports N°13
    PS: Quel plaisir que ces 45 kms de VTT en compagnie de mon club ce matin, même si ces mes jambes ont peiné à encaisser les 580 mètres de dénivelé...

    Tuesday, October 4, 2016

    Knowledge and clarity

    Seen on a door at the Redpath museum (McGill University, Montreal):



    By the way, if you happen to be in Montreal, do go and visit this wonderful museum. It is mostly a Natural History museum, and has reminded me of the Yale Peabody museum. The building alone is worth visiting, not to mention its collections:




    Saturday, October 1, 2016

    Death rates for middle-aged white (wo)men in the US

    From Andrew Gelman (this year's guest speaker at 3rd IAST-TSE conference in political economy/political science):

    In a much-discussed recent paper, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton reported “a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround.”


    Gelman then shows that:

    (i) part of this effect is due to a composition effect: the 45 to 54 year-old in the US have become on average 5 months older between 1999 and 2013, which explains part of the increase in mortality among this group in between the two dates;

    (ii) that the mortality within this group has increased between 1998 and 2005, but has remained roughly constant since;

    (iii) most importantly, that it is mainly the mortality of women that has increased, and not that of men!



    His conclusions:

    First, post-publication review is a wonderful thing. A blog commenter alerted me to the possibility of age-aggregation bias, Angus Deaton pointed me to the relevant CDC website, and I was able to dive into the data, perform some calculations, and make some graphs. The classical peer-review system is painfully inefficient: Once an article appears in a journal, I could submit a letter of correction, that letter would have to go through a review process and would be severely limited in length, then the original authors could reply, and so on. All at the speed of the U.S. mail circa 1775. Real-time feedback gets us there much faster.
    Second, when studying a time series, graph the whole thing, don’t just compare the beginning to the end. A simple comparison of 1999 to 2013 shows an increase in death rates at most ages. But the time series shows an increase since 2005 and then stasis—a much different picture.
    Third, break up the data. That post-2005 stasis turned out to mask an increase for women and a simultaneous decrease in death rates for men.
    Fourth, spot a potential bias, then estimate its size. The “pig in a python” image of the baby boom moving through the age distribution suggested that raw death rates in 10-year age bins might be biased. But by how much? To see, I first made an order-of-magnitude calculation and then followed Deaton’s suggestion and went to the raw data.
    Finally, science progresses by continual revision. Case and Deaton made a mistake by not adjusting their numbers for changes in age distribution—but had their paper never been published, we never would’ve been having this discussion. Meanwhile, their main finding holds up and is clearly worth further exploration, and researchers can also look into the diverging patterns since 2005 for men and women. While this is happening, I’m pretty sure some people will find major problems in my analysis. That’s how it goes, two steps forward and, if we’re lucky, only one step back.

    Monday, March 21, 2016

    Trump and rent seeking

    The best analysis I have read so far about Trump's economic worldview and what it would do to the US: (from Adam Davidson):



    In recent weeks, hearing Trump talk, I’ve realized that his economic worldview is entirely coherent. It makes sense. He is not just a rent-seeker himself; his whole worldview is based on a rent-seeking vision of the economy, in which there’s a fixed amount of wealth that can only be redistributed, never grow. It is a world­view that makes perfect sense for the son of a New York real estate tycoon who grew up to be one, too. Everything he has gotten — as he proudly brags — came from cutting deals. Accepting the notion of a zero-sum world, he set out to grab more than his share. And his policies would push the American economy to conform with that worldview.
    Many economists and political scientists now think that the United States economy has shifted, over the past few decades, toward one in which a higher proportion of the economy comes from so-called rents: Wall Street’s maneuvering through the regulatory process, ‘‘free-trade’’ deals whose thousands of pages of rules wind up proscribing winners and losers. The left, right and center of the economics profession all agree that reducing rent-seeking behavior, and improving overall growth, is essential if we want to ‘‘make America great again.’’
    But this descent into a rentier economy would only accelerate with a mentality like Trump’s in the White House. The native-born population of the United States is aging rapidly; without immigrants the nation would quickly face a disastrous level of debt. Middle-class workers may be struggling now in a changing economy, but a clampdown on global trade would only make that worse. Any health care reform that revolved around the president’s ability to ‘‘deal’’ would inherently be one more prone to corruption. In a rentier state, every ambitious person knows that the way to become rich and powerful is to grab the sources of wealth and hold onto them, by force if necessary. It’s no accident that, around the world, rentier states tend to be run by unelected dictators — the ultimate dealmakers in chief.

    Sunday, February 7, 2016

    Oser se passer d'une mutuelle

    Article très pertinent dans Le Monde

    Premier constat  : les soins de santé, en France, restent largement pris en charge par la Sécurité sociale. En 2014, la Sécu a remboursé 76,6 % des dépenses de santé, alors que les complémentaires en ont assumé 13,5 %. Les ménages en ont payé 8,5  % de leur poche. D’un point de vue macroéconomique, les mutuelles sont donc accessoires.

    Deuxième constat  : les complémentaires ont peu d’utilité en cas de maladie grave ou face à un traitement très coûteux, les soins engagés dans ce cadre étant pris en charge à 100 % par la Sécurité sociale.

    Autres constats: Les mutuelles couvrent très mal les dépenses mal prises en charge par la Sécurité Sociale (optique, soins dentaires,...) Seules 72% des primes versées sont reversées sous forme de remboursements de soins.

    Bref, si l'assurance hospitalisation semble bien justifiée (hors cas de maladies graves), les arguments en faveur de la souscription d'une assurance complémentaire semblent assez légers...

    Lawlessness at sea

    From The New York Times:

    Few places on the planet are as lawless as the high seas, where egregious crimes are routinely committed with impunity. Though the global economy is ever more dependent on a fleet of more than four million fishing and small cargo vessels and 100,000 large merchant ships that haul about 90 percent of the world’s goods, today’s maritime laws have hardly more teeth than they did centuries ago when history’s great empires first explored the oceans’ farthest reaches.
    Murders regularly occur offshore — thousands of seafarers, fishermen or sea migrants die under suspicious circumstances annually, maritime officials say — but culprits are rarely held accountable. No one is required to report violent crimes committed in international waters.
    Through debt or coercion, tens of thousands of workers, many of them children, are enslaved on boats every year, with only occasional interventions. On average, a large ship sinks every four days and between 2,000 and 6,000 seamen die annually, typically because of avoidable accidents linked to lax safety practices.
    Ships intentionally dump more engine oil and sludge into the oceans in the span of three years than that spilled in the Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez accidents combined, ocean researchers say, and emit huge amounts of certain air pollutants, far more than all the world’s cars. Commercial fishing, much of it illegal, has so efficiently plundered marine stocks that the world’s population of predatory fish has declined by two thirds.
    One main culprit:
    The modern flagging system, which allows ships to buy the right to fly the flag of a country as long as it promises to follow its laws, provides good cover for the unscrupulous.
    Usually, a ship may be stopped on the high seas only by a law enforcement or military vessel flying the same flag. The world’s navies, though, have been scaling down for decades. Most nations, including the Bahamas, whose flag the Dona Liberta flew, have no ships that regularly patrol beyond their national waters. (Some landlocked countries like Mongolia and Bolivia offer flags for cheaper costs.)
    When wrongdoing occurs, no single agency within a country or specific international organization typically has a sufficient stake in the matter to pursue it. The stowaways on the Dona Liberta, for example, were undocumented immigrants from Tanzania, living in South Africa and brought to shore in Liberia. The ship was owned by a Greek company incorporated in Liberia, crewed primarily by Filipinos, captained by an Italian, flagged to the Bahamas and passing through international waters. “Who leads such an investigation?” Mr. Young asked.

    Stowaways as collateral victims of tightened borders:
    More humane captains put stowaways to work before dropping them off at the next port. But in recent years, European immigration laws have tightened, terrorism fears have grown and port authorities around the world have responded by raising the penalties for ships arriving with people not listed on the manifest.









    Saturday, February 6, 2016

    Targeted transfers in the Big White Ghetto in the US

    I am not a big fan of National Review, but this article is worth reading. It describes the "Appalachian white ghetto", one of the poorest parts of the US:


    There are lots of diversions in the Big White Ghetto, the vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread–hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in eastern Kentucky (...)
    If the people here weren’t 98.5 percent white, we’d call it a reservation.

    The most interesting part of the article is the description of the use being made by locals of the "food stamp" (EBT) program:

    it turns out that the local economy runs on black-market soda the way Baghdad ran on contraband crude during the days of sanctions.
    It works like this: Once a month, the debit-card accounts of those receiving what we still call food stamps are credited with a few hundred dollars — about $500 for a family of four, on average — which are immediately converted into a unit of exchange, in this case cases of soda. On the day when accounts are credited, local establishments accepting EBT cards — and all across the Big White Ghetto, “We Accept Food Stamps” is the new E pluribus unum – are swamped with locals using their public benefits to buy cases and cases — reports put the number at 30 to 40 cases for some buyers — of soda. Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 50 cents on the dollar, in effect laundering those $500 in monthly benefits into $250 in cash — a considerably worse rate than your typical organized-crime money launderer offers — or else they go into the local black-market economy, where they can be used as currency in such ventures as the dealing of unauthorized prescription painkillers — by “pillbillies,” as they are known at the sympathetic establishments in Florida that do so much business with Kentucky and West Virginia that the relevant interstate bus service is nicknamed the “OxyContin Express.” A woman who is intimately familiar with the local drug economy suggests that the exchange rate between sexual favors and cases of pop — some dealers will accept either — is about 1:1, meaning that the value of a woman in the local prescription-drug economy is about $12.99 at Walmart prices. (...)
    It’s possible that a great many cans of soda used as currency go a long time without ever being cracked — in a town this small, those selling soda to EBT users and those buying it back at half price are bound to be some of the same people, the soda merely changing hands ceremonially to mark the real exchange of value, pillbilly wampum. 

    Direct cash transfers also have drawbacks:

    “The draw,” the monthly welfare checks that supplement dependents’ earnings in the black-market Pepsi economy, is poison. It’s a potent enough poison to catch the attention even of such people as those who write for the New York Times. Nicholas Kristof, visiting nearby Jackson, Ky., last year, was shocked by parents who were taking their children out of literacy classes because the possibility of improved academic performance would threaten $700-a-month Social Security disability benefits, which increasingly are paid out for nebulous afflictions such as loosely defined learning disorders.
     


    Friday, January 22, 2016

    Convincing empirical ... and theoretical work

    We are currently in the middle of the junior job market, and it is refreshing to read from Paul Krugman:
    solid empirical evidence, even of the complicated econometric sort, changes plenty of minds.
    I have a few quibbles. Surely some — perhaps all too many — economists are indeed locked into ideologically motivated beliefs. Consider the response of fresh-water macroeconomists to the utter failure of their predictions about inflation; who other than Narayana Kocherlakota has made the slightest concession to the people who got it right? I’m also skeptical about the persuasive power of complicated econometrics; my sense is that mind-changing empirical work almost always involves not much more than simple correlations, usually from natural experiments — that is, even multiple regression turns out, in practice, to be too complicated to persuade.
    On the other hand, I would argue that empirical work isn’t the only thing that can change minds: really clear analytical arguments can do it too, by letting economists see things that were in front of their noses but overlooked because they didn’t have a framework.
     OK, it is time to go back to a seminar room, hopefully for a convincing empirical &/or theoretical work ;-)