A public service announcement about grad school (via Brad, I think).

"If you throw money at an effect and it doesn't get larger, that means it's not real."
-- Wolfgang Panofsky

Shock: free medical care doesn't improve health outcomes even in developing nations. Har. I got yer universal health care right here, bub.

Quoth the Glib One:
"Here's how I see it: the opponents of a strong stimulus plan don't really have an alternative to offer. They don't even have a really coherent critique . . . if you believe that a surge in private spending would raise employment -- and even the critics agree on that -- it's very hard to explain why a surge of public spending ( Read more... )

Nobody expects the Lebanese Inquisition! Part of me wants to join Nassim Taleb in screaming from the rooftops that it should be a felony to use Value at Risk when managing other people's money, and that everyone promoting such snake oil ought to be publicly disgraced. Another part of me then snidely remarks that if we're going to do that every time ( Read more... )

Question: What can we say about the magnitude of the positive externality to government subsidization of schooling?

Answer: That it's indistinguishable from zeroThe piece is short, but for those who have a hard time with the econ jargon here's the gist: if you compare amount of schooling with individual earnings across a lifetime and control for ( Read more... )

Andrew Gelman is one of a rare breed -- someone who's an honest-to-god empiricist about political subjects. He has a new book out that engages in some non-partisan, data-rich mythbusting about the intersection of demography and politics in the USA, and if there's any justice every political pundit in the country ought to be forced to read it. He ( Read more... )

I just had to pick my jaw up off the floor upon reading this post by Dave Rutledge at Caltech, whose main area of research is fuel reserves and climate change. It's a bit dense, but I'll distill the point that blew my mind. If you're like me, you've been following the debates about climate change with just enough interest to have developed an acute ( Read more... )

It's well known that a diet high in saturated fat increases your blood cholesterol count, which causes atherosclerosis and consequently heart disease, and that drugs such as statins significantly decrease the risk of death stemming from coronary heart disease via effects on cholesterol levels. What's much less well known that everything in the ( Read more... )

I remember having my tonsils and adenoids removed when I was a little kid -- what I specifically remember most vividly is the subsequent 24 hours of unbearable postoperative pain, which to a five-year-old kid may as well be an eternity. What I don't remember at all is having more than a couple of throat infections prior to that, and I know that I ( Read more... )