Utopia, you are standing in it!

Summary: Paul Krugman made a remarkable admission for a political columnist in America, one that points the way to a path for the reform of America. He took a step towards seeing that there is no “reality-based party” in America.

“… first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
— Matthew 7:5.

Today both Left and Right routinely “create their own reality”. The Right invented and perfected this methodology to mobilize their followers (via engines of disinformation such as Fox News and the Washington Times). The Left has copied them, making this the primary tactic for their crusades. The most obvious example is the fight against climate change, where the Left has liberated themselves from dependence on the consensus of climate scientists (as expressed through the IPCC and major climate agencies). Unusual weather (no matter…

I will offer some thoughts on the FSR itself tomorrow, but I had few quick reactions to the comments made at the press conference this morning about the MediaWorks OCR leak and related issues.

I had heard that the Reserve Bank had been considering backtracking on the discontinuation of lock-ups, and had in fact been consulting selected journalists on the conditions on which media lock-ups might be reinstated.  That was confirmed by the Governor this morning.

Frankly, they seem all over the place.  Less than a month ago, they announced the discontinuation of lock-ups.  I thought that was the right decision at the time (and had called for it earlier).  Presumably the Bank  had carefully considered the various options open to it then, and decided on balance that (a) consultation with affected parties was not required, and (b) that it was not appropriate to continue with lock-ups.  One wonders what has changed…

I just discovered an Economist article from last year showing that, once again, which college you go to is a lot less important than what you do at college. Using NCES data, PayScale estimated return on investment for students from selective and non-selective colleges. Then, they separated STEM majors from arts/humanities. Each dot represents a college major and its estimated rate of return:

Some obvious points:

• In the world of STEM, it really doesn’t matter where you go to school.
• High prestige arts majors do worse, probably because they go into low paying careers, like being a professional painter (e.g., a Yale drama grad will actually try Broadway, while others may not get that far).
• A fair number of arts/humanities majors have *negative* rates of return.
• None of the STEM majors have a negative rate of return.
• The big message – college matters less than major.

There is also a…

Image AWO Saarland via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

by Irene Boeckmann, Joya Misra & Michelle Budig

Mothers earn less than fathers and childless men on average, but also less than women without children at home. Part of these earnings difference can be explained by the work experience mothers might lose due to employment interruptions or part-time work while caring for their families.

Even after taking differences in education, labor market experience, job characteristics, work hours, and marital status, mothers still earn significantly less than women without care responsibilities.

Indeed, in a study we recently published, we find that U.S. mothers pay an earnings penalty of 8% per child.

This video is getting plenty of coverage – and despite its length, it is worth watching. The humour helps, of course. You certainly won’t be bored if you commit the 20 minutes required to watch the video right through.

Oliver warns about the way journalists often misrepresent the science. Further, he is warning that often the science itself is suspect – or even no good.

It’s a warning we should all take on board. If we are interested in understanding something, and not just cherry-picking to confirm an existing ideological bias, then we have to approach what we read in the media about science critically and thoughtfully. Not accepting things at face value. Nor interpreting a journalist attempt at a false balance as somehow authenticating an article.

Hell, all good working scientists know that we should approach the peer-reviewed scientific literature itself in the same critical way. So we should hardly be…

What do left-wing firebrand Congressman Alan Grayson, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, Obama’s top trade negotiator Michael Froman, liberal financier Donald Sussman, and big-money Democratic donor Tom Steyer. all have in common?

The answer is that they all engage in tax avoidance and tax planning by utilizing tax havens. Like many other Democrats (and Democrat donors), they understand it would be very foolish to deliberately pay more tax than is required.

Yet they all want the rest of us to pay higher taxes!

And now we can add Secretary of State John Kerry to our list of tax haven hypocrites.

Here’s some of what we know from, the Daily Caller‘s exposé.

Secretary of State John Kerry and his wife Teresa Heinz have invested millions of U.S. dollars through family trusts in at least 11 offshore tax havens, according to The Daily Caller News…

Over-run by these things, faced with thousand of furious neighbours demanding an end to the onslaught, and spiralling power costs, Poland has mounted an enormous about face: where wind power was the flavour of the month for a year or two, it’s about to be targeted with an outright ban.

WARNING: in following this piece you’ll need to turn your volume down – the howling from the wind industry’s parasites and the eco-fascist cheer squad, Greenpeace soon becomes deafening.

Poland’s New Right-Wing Rulers Want To Effectively Ban Wind Power
Fastcoexist
Charlie Sorrel
21 April 2016

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable”, famously remarked John Kenneth Galbraith. “Professional” fortune tellers and clairvoyant have accompanied mankind, receiving great respect, throughout the ages. Therefore, one can say, it was only a matter of time also for a “professional” economic soothsaying to emerge, especially in the shadow of a galloping American Capitalism.
In 1899, an astrologer Evangeline Adams moved her business from Boston to New York, a city full of her most lucrative and reliable clients: investors in securities and businessmen. Over the next thirty years, many New Yorkers sought Adams’s advice on market trends, anxious for any insight that might help them evade the ravages of economic turbulence. Even in her own time, many regarded Adams as a fraud and scam artist, but that did not stop her to assert she predicted the stock market crash of 1929.
Fortune Tellers: The Story of America’s…

Today is Mother’s Day in the United States, and that means flowers and cards for mom. Or if you’re my mom it means a data viz project!

Mother’s Day actually has a pretty interesting history. Its original founder boycotted the event and never had kids of her own. Curious about where it all came from? Read on!

Google Ngram Viewer scans books and magazines for the phrase you enter and depicts its prevalence over time.

Want more data visualization? Check out my other posts at: https://vizthis.wordpress.com/

No, that isn’t a statistic from South Korea or China.  It is New Zealand in 1963.

My in-laws live in Waihi and whenever we are up there I point out to the children the old television factory, just off the main road, and give them a little reminder about the bad old days when New Zealand destroyed value by manufacturing and assembling television sets.  Somehow I must have been under the impression that there was just one television manufacturing factory in New Zealand.

But browsing in a second-hand bookshop the other day, I stumbled on Electric Household Durable Goods: Economic Aspects of their Manufacture in New Zealand, an NZIER Research Paper published in 1965.  There is 15o pages of analysis, statistics and discussion –  not everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it fascinating.

It doesn’t just have information on manufacturing.  There is an interesting reminder of just how many…