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A Brief Note on Epistemology and Economics
So, tonight I was a guest at a local book club. The book club was reading Hans-Hermann Hoppe's "Economic Science and the Austrian Method" - a short book about epistemology and economics. It was a fun discussion, and I'm glad that I was invited to join them. And, it also gave me something to blog about. So, I'm going to give a brief argument derived ( Read more... ) -
An Interesting Difference in Attitudes
Now that I'm caught up with grading, I'm doing some more "fun stuff" here at work - like skimming party platforms.
A while ago, one of my friends wrote a post suggesting that the language used by Democrats toward Republicans was a bit nastier than that used by Republicans toward Democrats - in particular, it is far more "personal". While I thought ( ( Read more... ) -
A Problem with "Hurricane Stimulus" Arguments
Inevitably, when a disaster strikes someone in the media pulls out the typical drivel about "Well, hundreds or thousands of people died, but at least this will stimulate the economy."*
The problem is that the sentence should have ended after "died". The last part is just not true.
( The problem is confusing activity with wealth. ) -
A Philosophy of Voting (or "Why I'm Voting for Gary Johnson")
Over the past several years (5 or 10), my philosophy of voting has changed remarkably. For a while I was a conscientious non-voter. I bought into the argument proposed by some libertarians that voting, in itself, indicates agreement with the system, and, therefore, is an act of aggression against other people since the system is inherently filled ( Read more... ) -
Shapley, Roth, Matching and Markets
Today, the Nobel Prize in Economics went to Shapley and Roth for their work in matching methods.
( What it is, why it matters and doesn't. ) -
Likert Scales are Ordinal
One of my pet peeves since I've started teaching: there's a strong tendency for academia to treat Likert (pronounced "lick-ert", I just found out) scales as interval when they are ordinal. This leads people to do stupid things with them, reaching invalid conclusions.
( Statistical griping ) -
Thoughts on Tonight's Debate
Disclaimer: I identify as a "libertarian" - which I supposed probably makes my commentary biased. But, it makes it biased against both candidates that were allowed to debate, so I suppose I'm at least "balancedly biased".
( A few thoughts... )