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Per capita income would be higher than Connecticut's and is 75 percent higher than the US average.
Friday, April 15, 2011
If DC were a state
Per capita income would be higher than Connecticut's and is 75 percent higher than the US average.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Nimby
The neighborhood of Burleith is up in arms against neighboring Georgetown University’s campus plan. The main concern appears to be the fact that GU students are using the homes in the neighborhood as housing and the university isn’t doing enough to expand housing options on campus. Meanwhile, nearby American University’s plan to build additional housing on its parking lot isn’t sitting well with its neighbors:
Many neighbors are worried about possible traffic and safety problems on Nebraska and New Mexico Avenues, as well as the proposed East Campus on the current Nebraska Parking Lot, which borders the Westover Place townhouses.
“I don’t think you’d have as many people here tonight if you didn’t plan to build dorms on the East Campus,” ANC 3D01 Commissioner Kent Slowinski said ...
These issues are familiar ones to urban universities and they all have its own flavors. George Washington University faced a similar issue with its Foggy Bottom and West End neighbors and ended up buying the (in)famous Watergate Howard Johnson and converting it into a dorm. It’s current expansion includes merging with the former Mount Vernon College and while its relationships with the neighbors in the tony Foxhall Road area have not been acrimonious so far, its hard to say what the future holds as private universities continue expanding enrollment to attract students.
It is interesting that Burleith neighbors chose to oppose GU rather than to use moral suasion to prevent landlords from renting to GU students. It seems like private interests would regulate the behavior of landlords in that renting short-term to students would lower overall property values and that they would be better off living in the homes or renting to more ‘stable’ types. Is this evidence of market failure in the sense that capital appreciation does not equal the rents accrued, or is this evidence of short-term view on the part of landlords who prefer income now than later?
Many neighbors are worried about possible traffic and safety problems on Nebraska and New Mexico Avenues, as well as the proposed East Campus on the current Nebraska Parking Lot, which borders the Westover Place townhouses.
“I don’t think you’d have as many people here tonight if you didn’t plan to build dorms on the East Campus,” ANC 3D01 Commissioner Kent Slowinski said ...
These issues are familiar ones to urban universities and they all have its own flavors. George Washington University faced a similar issue with its Foggy Bottom and West End neighbors and ended up buying the (in)famous Watergate Howard Johnson and converting it into a dorm. It’s current expansion includes merging with the former Mount Vernon College and while its relationships with the neighbors in the tony Foxhall Road area have not been acrimonious so far, its hard to say what the future holds as private universities continue expanding enrollment to attract students.
It is interesting that Burleith neighbors chose to oppose GU rather than to use moral suasion to prevent landlords from renting to GU students. It seems like private interests would regulate the behavior of landlords in that renting short-term to students would lower overall property values and that they would be better off living in the homes or renting to more ‘stable’ types. Is this evidence of market failure in the sense that capital appreciation does not equal the rents accrued, or is this evidence of short-term view on the part of landlords who prefer income now than later?
Privacy vs security
K1’s grade had their first encounter with cyber-bullying which goes without saying that all the kids and some parents (including me) are in a tizzy about it. The incident happened as a name-calling post via Google Buzz. Privacy advocates have won in the sense that the cyber bully was able to get away with it since Gmail is as anonymous as you can get (without a court order at any rate). Since all the kids have one other as their contacts on their Gmail accounts, a single person (already with an account) can create an anonymous e-mail and reach all the kids in one post via Buzz.
There is a sense that with advances in technology privacy advocates are fighting a losing battle - but as this case shows, this ain’t so. And the trade off that is depicted here is perhaps a false dichotomy between privacy and security, but what if everyone knew more about you. Would you feel safer? If e-mails could not be anonymous we would all worry less about cyber-bullies.
If my credit card company could somehow track my whereabouts and link the location with some physical characteristic about me then I would worry less about fraudulent charges. If I were home alone and had not moved in more than 10 hours someone could be sent to check up on me at whatever location I happened to be. Yes, there is good privacy and bad privacy but perhaps we need to give up on the idea that having privacy is always good.
There is a sense that with advances in technology privacy advocates are fighting a losing battle - but as this case shows, this ain’t so. And the trade off that is depicted here is perhaps a false dichotomy between privacy and security, but what if everyone knew more about you. Would you feel safer? If e-mails could not be anonymous we would all worry less about cyber-bullies.
If my credit card company could somehow track my whereabouts and link the location with some physical characteristic about me then I would worry less about fraudulent charges. If I were home alone and had not moved in more than 10 hours someone could be sent to check up on me at whatever location I happened to be. Yes, there is good privacy and bad privacy but perhaps we need to give up on the idea that having privacy is always good.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Reading the Blue Sweater
Jacqueline Novogratz’s The Blue Sweater was a moving memoir of her time in Rwanda and I enjoyed this book very much as such. Others seem to want to portray it as a testimony as to why aid does not work even though her reflections on what works and what doesn’t (in my reading) is not really central to her book. This is one of many observations (for instance, Bill Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden) that simply handing out money does not really put into place a mechanism for sustaining income generation by the people targeted by aid-heads. Yet, it is far from clear to me that giving them a stake in a project via lending versus grants is a better recipe for success and my sense is that the successes tend to be highlighted more often than the failures. The catchword of the day for these anti-aiders is of course, micro-lending.
My view is that if micro-lending were such a powerful tool for lifting the poor out of poverty, then life in Bangladesh should have improved by leaps and bounds. For instance, in 1980, Bangladesh was ranked in the bottom 11 percent in the Human Development Index (out of 95 countries), while in 2010, it had improved it’s position to 24 percent (out of 169 countries). It’s score went from 0.26 to 0.47. (11 and 24 percent of the countries in 1980 and 2010 had lower scores respectively.) Assuming that all of this change was a result of micro-lending, then one might be able to say that the quality of life in Bangladesh has almost doubled in 30 years as a result of micro-lending. This is close to a growth rate of 2 percent per year continuously compounded. (0.47/0.26 approx 1.02^30) When measuring the quality of life, starting from a low base has the advantage that there is more to gain (since a developed country with already a high HDI would not change by much).
How does this change compare to other countries where micro-lending might not have been as prevalent? (Prevalence in Bangladesh is assumed to be higher and is asserted rather than from any documented evidence only because it is considered the birthplace of micro-lending, Grameen bank, etc.) Nepal in 1980 moved from 0.21 to 0.43 in 2010, and Benin from 0.26 to 0.43. In light of this then the gains made in Bangladesh do not seem as impressive.
It is not clear to me that aid is dead, nor should it be. Novogratz points to all the aid projects like basket weaving where women are paid and trained to make baskets but no market exists for baskets. This is a dead aiders example of a project that does not sustain income generation. Once the project is completed, i.e. when the people are trained to make baskets, the aid agency chalks this up as a success and moves on to other projects. One of the quotes from the book that MR makes in the above link is the following:
Philanthropy can appeal to people who want to be loved more than they want to make a difference.
For MR, which champions markets in everything, it is noteworthy that the market in question here is not baskets (or pots, or whatever the project at hand is), but is love, or a more technical term, the warm of glow of giving. So perhaps Africa has a comparative advantage in not for “mercenaries, missionaries and misfits” (as Novogratz says) but as an outlet for “warm-glow” products. Aid is not aid if philantropists are buying “warm-glow” units. After all is this any different from monthly subscriptions that sponsor a child in a third world country?
My view is that if micro-lending were such a powerful tool for lifting the poor out of poverty, then life in Bangladesh should have improved by leaps and bounds. For instance, in 1980, Bangladesh was ranked in the bottom 11 percent in the Human Development Index (out of 95 countries), while in 2010, it had improved it’s position to 24 percent (out of 169 countries). It’s score went from 0.26 to 0.47. (11 and 24 percent of the countries in 1980 and 2010 had lower scores respectively.) Assuming that all of this change was a result of micro-lending, then one might be able to say that the quality of life in Bangladesh has almost doubled in 30 years as a result of micro-lending. This is close to a growth rate of 2 percent per year continuously compounded. (0.47/0.26 approx 1.02^30) When measuring the quality of life, starting from a low base has the advantage that there is more to gain (since a developed country with already a high HDI would not change by much).
How does this change compare to other countries where micro-lending might not have been as prevalent? (Prevalence in Bangladesh is assumed to be higher and is asserted rather than from any documented evidence only because it is considered the birthplace of micro-lending, Grameen bank, etc.) Nepal in 1980 moved from 0.21 to 0.43 in 2010, and Benin from 0.26 to 0.43. In light of this then the gains made in Bangladesh do not seem as impressive.
It is not clear to me that aid is dead, nor should it be. Novogratz points to all the aid projects like basket weaving where women are paid and trained to make baskets but no market exists for baskets. This is a dead aiders example of a project that does not sustain income generation. Once the project is completed, i.e. when the people are trained to make baskets, the aid agency chalks this up as a success and moves on to other projects. One of the quotes from the book that MR makes in the above link is the following:
Philanthropy can appeal to people who want to be loved more than they want to make a difference.
For MR, which champions markets in everything, it is noteworthy that the market in question here is not baskets (or pots, or whatever the project at hand is), but is love, or a more technical term, the warm of glow of giving. So perhaps Africa has a comparative advantage in not for “mercenaries, missionaries and misfits” (as Novogratz says) but as an outlet for “warm-glow” products. Aid is not aid if philantropists are buying “warm-glow” units. After all is this any different from monthly subscriptions that sponsor a child in a third world country?
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Multiple comparisons
Wikipedia describes this problem as the following:
In statistics, the multiple comparisons or multiple testing problem occurs when one considers a set of statistical inferences simultaneously.[1] Errors in inference, including confidence intervals that fail to include their corresponding population parameters or hypothesis tests that incorrectly reject the null hypothesis are more likely to occur when one considers the set as a whole. Several statistical techniques have been developed to prevent this from happening, allowing significance levels for single and multiple comparisons to be directly compared. These techniques generally require a stronger level of evidence to be observed in order for an individual comparison to be deemed "significant", so as to compensate for the number of inferences being made.
Some examples (again from Wikipedia):
The question I have is the following: What if I refuse to test for some of the additional attributes/symptoms or hypotheses? Does this make the multiple comparison problem go away? If I ignore the fact that there are possibly other hypotheses out there which I do not specifically test for does this make my results more valid in the sense that I do not have to adjust for the confidence interval or level of significance? What if all studies did this - just focus on the hypothesis of interest and ignore all other testable hypothesis within their model or experiment?
In statistics, the multiple comparisons or multiple testing problem occurs when one considers a set of statistical inferences simultaneously.[1] Errors in inference, including confidence intervals that fail to include their corresponding population parameters or hypothesis tests that incorrectly reject the null hypothesis are more likely to occur when one considers the set as a whole. Several statistical techniques have been developed to prevent this from happening, allowing significance levels for single and multiple comparisons to be directly compared. These techniques generally require a stronger level of evidence to be observed in order for an individual comparison to be deemed "significant", so as to compensate for the number of inferences being made.
Some examples (again from Wikipedia):
- Suppose the treatment is a new way of teaching writing to students, and the control is the standard way of teaching writing. Students in the two groups can be compared in terms of grammar, spelling, organization, content, and so on. As more attributes are compared, it becomes more likely that the treatment and control groups will appear to differ on at least one attribute.
- Suppose we consider the efficacy of a drug in terms of the reduction of any one of a number of disease symptoms. As more symptoms are considered, it becomes more likely that the drug will appear to be an improvement over existing drugs in terms of at least one symptom.
- Suppose we consider the safety of a drug in terms of the occurrences of different types of side effects. As more types of side effects are considered, it becomes more likely that the new drug will appear to be less safe than existing drugs in terms of at least one side effect.
The question I have is the following: What if I refuse to test for some of the additional attributes/symptoms or hypotheses? Does this make the multiple comparison problem go away? If I ignore the fact that there are possibly other hypotheses out there which I do not specifically test for does this make my results more valid in the sense that I do not have to adjust for the confidence interval or level of significance? What if all studies did this - just focus on the hypothesis of interest and ignore all other testable hypothesis within their model or experiment?
Do recessions begin with layoffs?
According to Robert Hall (Restat, 2005), Employment Efficiency and Sticky Wages: Evidence from Flows in the Labor Market:
... recessions do not begin with a burst of layoffs. Unemployment rises because jobs are hard to find, not because an unusual number of people are thrown into unemployment.
What does the data say? From FRED, the monthly total layoffs and discharges show that the current recession did not begin with layoffs:
This assumes among other things that the NBER dating committee correctly pinpointed the date of the recession. Could this also be a result of seasonal adjustment? The following is unadjusted totals:
And unadjusted rates:
The plots show that layoffs occur regularly with clear cycles. Layoffs can be higher or lower in or out of recessions.
Unconvinced is Shigeru Fujita. The following is Figure 4 of his paper, and one would expect that in order to say that Hall is incorrect, the job loss rate should show a spike just prior to the beginning of the recession and furthermore this spike should be higher than all the job loss rates prior to the recession (from the trough of the previous recession).
Perhaps this is too much to ask of the data, and as much as I hate to admit it, perhaps Hall is right. I began this post thinking I could prove him wrong.
... recessions do not begin with a burst of layoffs. Unemployment rises because jobs are hard to find, not because an unusual number of people are thrown into unemployment.
What does the data say? From FRED, the monthly total layoffs and discharges show that the current recession did not begin with layoffs:
This assumes among other things that the NBER dating committee correctly pinpointed the date of the recession. Could this also be a result of seasonal adjustment? The following is unadjusted totals:
And unadjusted rates:
The plots show that layoffs occur regularly with clear cycles. Layoffs can be higher or lower in or out of recessions.
Unconvinced is Shigeru Fujita. The following is Figure 4 of his paper, and one would expect that in order to say that Hall is incorrect, the job loss rate should show a spike just prior to the beginning of the recession and furthermore this spike should be higher than all the job loss rates prior to the recession (from the trough of the previous recession).
Perhaps this is too much to ask of the data, and as much as I hate to admit it, perhaps Hall is right. I began this post thinking I could prove him wrong.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
What makes a book a children's book
What makes a book a children's book (as opposed to a young adult book)? I've been reading Bridge to Terabitha, Wrinkle in Time, Whale Rider, Tuck Everlasting, Lois Lowry (The Giver, Gathering Blue, The Messenger and Number the Stars) and Philip Pullman. Length and language are certainly two criteria although I did not discern any dumbing down of the language in any of these books. It's hard to argue that Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy (running almost 1000 pages in total) or even Harry Potter (which I have yet to get to) have been shortened for children. In fact the themes that Philip Pullman deals with – the original sin, the church and theology are not what can be considered topics that children think about and in the degree of violence in his books were almost too much (for me). And even though I don't consider myself religious, the anti-Church message was a little over the top. In fact, none of the afore mentioned books deal with what I would consider children's themes e.g. horses, pets, fairies, or anything in this vein. These books have the common thread that the main characters in the books are children – but Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game also have children as the main characters but is not considered a children's book. Is it all marketing? Jenny Downham's Before I Die is definitely a young adult book since it contains sex – and includes the incredible feat of a first person narrative who dies at the end. But what about the Twilight series – is it merely because the characters are young adults versus for instance Ann Rice's Vampire series? Again, is it all in marketing?
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