I begin today expanding upon my previous analysis of Nate Silver’s distinction between “Riverians” and “Village People.” Silver says that River People possess the following two “clusters of attributes”[1]: COGNITIVE CLUSTER PERSONALITY CLUSTER Analytical Competitive Abstract Critical Decoupling Independent-minded (contrarian) Risk-tolerant “Analytical” – Nate says this is “to resolve something complex…
Category: Economics
Economics
Everything Is Predictable? More Blunt Observations
May 22, 2024 I suspect we all doubt ourselves from time to time. Unless we are sociopaths, we have to believe, at certain points, that maybe we’ve gotten something big wrong. I also suspect that’s how we have evolved to learn and therefore survive. But if we are lucky, sometimes…
Economics
Robert Rubin’s Russian Roulette: “The Yellow Pad: Making Better Decisions in an Uncertain World”
February 5, 2024 The ignorance of even the best-informed investor about the more remote future is much greater than his knowledge, and he cannot but be influenced to a degree which would seem wildly disproportionate to anyone who really knew the future, and be forced to seek a clue mainly…
Economics
Artisanal Dark Ages
November 2, 2023 In 1908, John Laing Leal, a physician, was working for the Jersey City, NJ water supply. His father had suffered from amoebic dysentery as a result of service in the Civil War and consumption of infected water. Leal had previously held various posts in public health, and…
Algorithms
The Economics Profession: Still Mostly in Thrall to the Cult of Prediction (with honorable exceptions)
July 25, 2023 A week or so ago, the economist Paul Krugman put out a subscribers-only opinion piece entitled “Camps of economists fought grand theoretical battles, and all lost.” To his credit, he numbers himself among those who “lost” in these battles, which were over the likelihood of serious inflation…
Algorithms
“The Data Delusion” vs. Rigorous Imagination
July 20, 2023 Jill LePore is a Harvard historian whose wide-ranging scholarship has embraced the broad sweep of American history (These Truths), Native American-colonial conflict (The Name of War), superheroes (The Secret History of Wonder Woman), and even the Beatles (introduction to Paul McCartney’s 1964: Eyes of the Storm). In her…