4/20/15 Today's Inquiries

I apologize for the 6 day absence. The Hillbilly days festival meant work was busier than usual.


The Links:

Simon Johnson looks st Elizabeth Warren's proposed fixes for the financial sector. Now, she's mostly goeen headlines for arguing more bankers need to face criminal prosecution (skin in the game, eh?) but there are some other ideas she's floated which bear examination. She pushing these ideas now because she is trying to get Hillary to commit to a more progressive agenda.

Senator Warren puts forward two main sets of proposals. The first is to more strongly discourage the deception of customers. This is hard to argue against. Some parts of the financial sector are well-run, providing essential services at reasonable prices and with sound ethics throughout. Other parts of finance have drifted, frankly, into deceiving people – on fees, on risks, on terms and conditions – as a primary source of profits. We don’t allow this kind of cheating in the non-financial sector and we shouldn't allow it in finance either...

The second proposal is to end the greatest cheat of all – the implicit subsidies received by the largest financial institutions, structured so as to encourage excessive and irresponsible risk-taking. These consequences of these subsidies have already caused massive macroeconomic damage – this is why our crisis in 2008-09 was so severe and the recovery so slow. Yet we have made painfully little progress towards really ending the problems associated with some very large financial firms – and their debts – being viewed by markets and policymakers as being too big to fail.

The American public isn't supportive of redistribution. File under "our republican future."

Redistribution can mean less government not more. I find this line of reasoning clever and useful for online troll battles.

...the situation is less paradoxical when we consider the possibility that government policies are largely responsible for growing inequality. This is most obvious is with the bailout of the financial industry in 2008. Without the help of the TARP and the Fed, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and most of the other Wall Street behemoths would be out of business. This would have drastically reduced the wealth and income of many of the richest people in the country. 

The government has also redistributed income upward by supporting an over-valued dollar that has eliminated millions of manufacturing jobs and put downward pressure on the wages of non-college educated workers more generally. In addition, a Federal Reserve Board policy that raises interest rates to keep people from getting jobs any time the labor market gets tight enough to support wage growth has also had the effect of reducing the wages of most workers. 

Also our trade policy of selective protectionism, which exposes manufacturing workers to competition with the lowest paid workers in the world, while largely protecting doctors, lawyers, and other highly paid professionals (who comprise much of the one percent), has the effect of redistributing income upward. Similarly, our policy of patent protection redistributes hundreds of billions of dollars a year from ordinary workers to drug companies and other beneficiaries of these government-granted monopolies.

Locke's theory of just expropriation. So land rightfully belongs to those who would improve it? Okay, now let's apply that to California.

Cheap coal is a lie.

Tyler Cowen has 3 laws.

Should we tax University Endowments? Perhaps putting that money toward lower tuition? Link does to .pdf.

How does Scott Walker fix Wisconsin's job problems? He cuts university budgets which means the U of W is cutting 400 positions.

The War on Poverty turns 50. By and large, if we look at both absolute poverty numbers and at standards of living, it's been a mild success.

Poverty shrinks childrens' brains. I'm not surprised given, for example, the role of language in brain development at a very young age. Of course we have to be careful because size is not the only important determinant factor.

Neuroscientists who studied the brain scans of nearly
1,100 children and young adults nationwide from ages 3 to 20 found that the surface area of the cerebral cortex was linked to family income. They discovered that the brains of children in families that earned less than $25,000 a year had surface areas 6 percent smaller than those whose families earned $150,000 or more. The poor children also scored lower on average on a battery of cognitive tests.

The Missouri national guard call Ferguson protesters enemy forces. Well when all you have is a hammer...

Where do the GOP warmonger candidates fall on the invade Iran spectrum?
Greeted as liberators <-----> Shoes thrown at president. 

Malaria is going to kill us all.

Be careful saying "The Myth about Women in Science" is Solved. I do get the impression that arguments about women in science tend to ignore biological science and medicine where women have a much larger representation than in engineering and computer science.

Here's a linguistic analysis of the recommendation letters written for men and women in biology and chemistry.

Results revealed more similarities than differences in letters written for male and female candidates. However, recommenders used significantly more standout adjectives to describe male as compared to female candidates. Letters containing more standout words also included more ability words and fewer grindstone words. Research is needed to explore how differences in language use affect perceivers’ evaluations of female candidates.

What happens when you give drug dealers and criminals free psychotherapy and $200 cash?

Life imitates XKCD.

Some further analysis will follow, but for now here is the list in [part] (UPDATE: now in alpha-order):

(barely) not statistically significant (p=0.052)
a barely detectable statistically significant difference (p=0.073)
a borderline significant trend (p=0.09)
a certain trend toward significance (p=0.08)
a clear tendency to significance (p=0.052)
a clear trend (p<0 .09="" p="">

Here is the XKCD for reference: