New School Economic Review

What HIV Epidemic?? Hans Rosling’s back

by Benjamin on August 30, 2009

In June, Hans Rosling (raved about earlier) gave a talk at the US State department explaining that the mindset about developing and developed countries is wrong, and the idea of an African HIV epidemic is wrong… He has a dataset, and if our mindset does not coincide with the dataset, then one of them must be wrong… The talk encompasses historical comparrisons of the US and China, an overview of world incomes and a discussion of the HIV ‘epidemic’  in Africa… Which according to Rosling is not an epidemic, but rather is a

Special situation probably of concurrent secxual partnerships among part of the heterosexual population in some countries or some parts of countries, in South East Africa. Don’t make it Africa, don’t make it a race issue. Make it a local issue.

Below is the State Department talk, but a documentary entitled “Rosling’s World” just aired on Swedish Television (in Swedish with English Subtitles), which will be free to watch until 15 September. I’m off to watch it now.

All in all, this is well worth watching, and I am sure it will provoke some responses.

“We are not one-dimensional machines”

by Jeanne aka JStor on August 28, 2009

Folks, I’ve hit the snob/pretentious newspaper trifecta: Three friends have written editorial/letter/op-ed in the NYT/FT/WSJ, respectively. I have decided that this collision of time and space was worthy of a post. There posts, in order of date:

• NYT Editorial: About Your 401K sounds like a favorite professor/mentor of mine. It’s unsigned, but a number of us thinks it’s her, and that’s good enough for me.
• While this is not written by anyone I know, (and after reading it, I have decided that I wouldn’t care to know him) read: Magic and the Myth of the Rational Market. Then read the scathing response from my (other) mentor, oldest friend, and dearest drinking buddy: We are Not One-Dimensional Machines YOU GO GARY! One small comment: I’ve been reading A LOT of Philip K. Dick and there are some machines out there that aren’t exactly one-dimensional either.
• This last one isn’t econ-related but it was in the Wall Street Journal so I am sticking it in here, cause otherwise it wouldn’t be a trifecta: Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard. I’m not sure if I completely agree with him but I’ll have to ponder this some more, possibly over that beer I now need as I consider my sad small contribution to life. TGIF!

BTW, Have you picked up the latest Adbusters yet? You need to and look for a certain article by a certain blogger from this blog (not me, the other one).

Thought Control in Economics

by Jeanne aka JStor on August 27, 2009

That’s what the new issue of Adbusters is called. I’d encourage everyone to pick it up . . . . Look carefully at the Post-Autistic pieces please. :)

Thou hast angered the Economy

by Benjamin on August 26, 2009

Back in March the boys at South Park wrote an episode on the economy which is just fantastic. “You have brought the economy’s vengeance upon yourself!” Announces the father, and ye must repent, by spending less!

In that we have the Paradox of Thrift, and so enter the son, ‘a young jew’, preaching that we must spend more, not less. The economy is not some vengeful omnipotent being but is based on faith:

The full episode is great fun, and you can watch it (legally) in installments here [1, 2, 3]. But one last thing has to be mentioned. In dealing with the credit crunch, Stan – another boy – tries to return a blender bought on credit, eventually ending up at the US Treasury who owns the bad debt. The Treasury agrees to refund him, and goes off to value the blender… This is beautiful:

It reminds me of the Treasury spokes-person, who on the 23 September 2008 explained where they had gotten the $700 billion initial bail-out figure from: “It’s not based on any particular data point, we just wanted to choose a really large number.” Lovely.

Funny Statisticians ?

by Benjamin on August 25, 2009

ASA T-Shirt's

The last place in the world I expected a novelty T-shirt store was the American Statistical Associations website, but they have one, [check the other categories too] and they’re pretty good! My favourite was a list of why you should be a statistician… Why it is in descending order, I do not know?

10 Reasons to Be a Statistician.
10. Deviation is considered normal
9. You feel complete and sufficient
8. You always wanted to learn the entire Greek alphabet anyway
7. You can legally comment on someone’s posterior distribution
6. You may not be normal but you are transformable
5. You never have to say you are certain
4. You are honestly significantly different
3. You never have to be right – only close

Confidence in...tervals

2. Estimating parameters is easier than dealing with real life
1. Statisticians are normal, everyone else is skewed

Admittedly some of them are just a bit … well… weird? For example this one with cows on it “features a humorous cartoon on the evolution of Statistics”… sure…

... humorous?

Yeah, yeah... du du du du du du du du

Grad School vs. Unemployment Benefits

by Benjamin on August 24, 2009

Continuing the rational insanity that is graduate school choice and education over work, as discussed previously, PhDcomics.com offers a sobering comparison…

Clean water for everyone? Could it be that simple?

by Benjamin on August 19, 2009

800m people cannot access clean water, 1.4m children die from Diarrhoea every year due to unclean water and sanitation, The UN has its own water section and WaterAid is dedicated to the issue, as is a chunk of the MDG’s… But for at least two years now a product’s been around which can sterilise water on demand, and it is being bought by… campers and soldiers. Watch the below and explain to me how that can be used to solve the problems it was meant to solve:

Mathematical modelling is dead… well, undead :)

by Benjamin on August 18, 2009

Ok… Mathematical modeling has now gone to a stage where there is no return to dignity for any of us. In what some might call a brave new frontier, a brand new research area, or prudent planning for a potential black swan of infectious diseases, mathematicians, statisticians and medical faculty members at Carleton University and Ottawa University have built a mathematical model exploring what would happen if a zombie infection should break out.

That is zombie as in night of the living dead, 28 days later, Shawn of the dead, “must eat Brain… Brain…” Zombies. Here’s the abstract:

Yes really... Zombies

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.

Not only is this published as a chapter [download here!] in the new book Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress (2009), but they develop a proper formal mathematical model to explore the equilibrium (!) properties of the system… Solving a couple of Jacobians they find that … “When Z = 0, we have the disease-free equilibrium… These equilibrium points show that, regardless of their stability, human-zombie coexistence is impossible”… what a shame (Munz et al. 2009: 136-7).

It’s worth a look over, maybe someone can come up with a criticism or a review of the New School Economic Review, I mean… This is stuff that people need to know.

A lot of talk of change… where’s the action?

by Benjamin on August 16, 2009

How bad are things when economists are writing the Queen of Britain first to explain why they were wrong, and now to say that the economists who admitted they were wrong, were also wrong… The queen herself asked questions of the profession and its failure to see the crisis coming as far back as July 2008, and what did ‘we’ have to offer as an answer?

Everyone seemed to be doing their own job properly on its own merit. And according to standard measures of success, they were often doing it well. The failure was to see how collectively this added up to a series of interconnected imbalances over which no single authority had jurisdiction. This, combined with the psychology of herding and the mantra of financial and policy gurus, lead to a dangerous recipe. Individual risks may rightly have been viewed as small, but the risk to the system as a whole was vast.

For anyone whose even opened one of the Minsky books or even a bit of Taleb this will be familiar territory – even the description of the market. But lets leave that aside. The retort from a new group of economist is that the education of economists, on all educational levels, is insufficient, as it lacks institutional, historical and sociological context. So far so good. What can we do to help the situation:

Models and techniques are important. But given the complexity of the global economy, what is needed is a broader range of models and techniques governed by a far greater respect for substance, and much more attention to historical, institutional, psychological and other highly relevant factors.

Skidelsky himself wrote something similar, and very interesting in the FT a couple of days ago [cached by google here], but here’s an obvious question… What action is taken beyond talk??? The latest instalment of the American Economic Review seems to almost not have noticed any change, and frankly why should it? There’s a year long back-log and it doesn’t look like a revolution is about to happen wit hthe foundations of the discipline. Especially when the ‘official’ reply from the discipline seems unable to step aside from models which cannot include a crisis in its analysis (cf. Robert Lucas’s reply) and the ‘dissenters’ who want do not want to change the discipline but would like a ‘broader range’ of models… It’s a long road ahead I fear.

Money doesn’t always equal more staff in NY Uni’s

by Benjamin on August 13, 2009

Where the financial world was six months ago, university finances seem to lie every day of the year: On the brink of bancrupcy. Universities appear to be relying more and more on adjunct teaching, avoiding tenure contracts and cutting back on costs to maximize profits. But are staff-student ratios really so bad? Are the finances of the NY private universities in free-fall. And are the two related? I’ve done a quick survey of 30 private NY universities which suggest the schools can’t rely on just the interest payments from their endowments, but few, if any of them, are as poor as they’d like us to think – and that might not matter too much for the staff to graduate student ratios anyway…

Cornell: Lots of money but poor staff to student ratio... All Quill and Daggers?

A good 7 universities in the state have more than a Billion dollars in their endowment (topped by Columbia at $5.7bn), and another 6 have more than half a billion.  Of course the endowment is only as good as its return, and while many a cunning money manager can get 10% and more from a university fund, lets make the crude assumption that the universities withdraw an average 5% per year (5.4% in 1999 apparently). While the top 4 (Rockefeller U., NYU, Cornel & Columbia) withdraw more than $100m each, the bottom 4 (Nazareth C., Manhattan C., St. Bonaventure & Marist C.) cannot even make $10m together, while the New School collects $12.5m, placing 19 out of 30.

New School of little money and good staff ratios...

What really matters is how much money the school can withdraw per student thougg: Lets assume that we are only interested in graduate students, as undergrads tend to pay their way: Then the picture takes a serious twist. Hamilton College (10th in endowments) come out top with an average return of $212,842 per staff and graduate student ! Colgate is second with $96,000 followed by Union C., Skidmore C., and Rockefeller U. all earning more than $50,000 per year per staff & graduate student. Rockefeller is the only top endowment school to remain in the top, with Columbia is pushed into 14th ($14,450), Cornell is sitting pretty at 8th ($25,856) and NYU is relegated to the bottom half of the table, in 17th place with only $4,855 per student and graduate student. The New School finds itself languishing around 22nd with just above $2,000.

Does money and average earnings translate into more staff members per graduate student then? For the top three ratios:  Yes.  The highest Academic-Staff-to-Graduate-Student ratio are found at Skidmore C. with 4.22 staff members for every graduate student, and Skidmore is 5th on the withdrawals per staff & graduate student. 2nd and 3rd are Rockefeller U. (2.45) and St. Lawrence U. (1.42) who were 4th and 6th in withdrawing money per staff-student, but then the picture gets a bit weird (possibly because the 1-3 in the withdrawal category had incomplete data on staff-student ratios).  Cornell, with all its money and pay-outs is third from the bottom of the list, with a paltry 0.22 staff members per graduate student. Columbia is 19th (0.23), and NYU is found on 10th (0.36) just one spot below The New School with 0.51 staff per graduate student… So the extreme earners - I’d say $100,000 per annum per staff & student is extreme - have the highest staff-student ratio’s. But Cornell, Columbia and Renselar Poly Tech, earning between $14k-$25k thus ranking high in money have plummeted to the bottom six of the staff-student ratio table? In return, the bottom earners, and lowest endowment holders, Marist C. have joined Long Island U., The New School, St. Bonaventure and Yeshiva in climbing right up the ranking to high staff-student ratios… Money isn’t everything in the New York University system it seems – But I’m sure it helps.

Summary tables of my survey outcomes and a link to the full data-set is below if you click and Continue Reading…