Most surprising fact about DC

Police Chief Cathy Lanier:


"After becoming pregnant at age 14, I dropped out of high school."

What the Oregon health study shows or doesn't show

Some thoughts about the Oregon Health Study - which is being dissed by MR here and here.

First off the comparison of this study to Reinhart and Rogoff is way off base. Reinhart and Rogoff were recalcitrant in sharing their data. Had they been more forthcoming in the first place it is possible that someone would have pointed out the Excel error much earlier. Instead they left all the researchers puzzled over their attempts to replicate their findings. This is NOTHING like Reinhart Rogoff.

What if they had found positive effects? Then I think the debate would have shifted to size effects and whether the results were meaningful in any sense. The critics are leaping to the "no result" finding as a way to justify their opposition. They would probably have leaped to a positive result by pointing out the lack of meaningful results regardless.

RCTs are pretty useless in this debate. Think of their outcomes - blood pressure, hypertension and cholesterol levels. How can having insurance by itself promote better outcomes? To actually change these outcomes, insurance holders have to actually change their behavior. There is a lot of behavioral economics evidence out there to argue against anyone actually doing anything about this regardless of health insurance status.

This is an example of RCTs taking away the analysts' ability to think straight. Retrospection would have predicted the null effect. The low income population makes them even more constrained in their ability to affect lifestyle changes that would positively affected the outcome measures. I have some doubt as to whether even a high income population would have been able to affect the lifestyle changes necessary to have a detectable effect.

This is an example of RCT measuring the wrong outcome. We only measure what we can see or even worse - what is easiest to measure. By some kind of fluke these are the outcomes that are hardest to change. I have to change my diet, my exercise regimen, my sleep habits, and so forth. If this is hard for a middle class person how much harder would it be for a low income group?

Effects of the recession on health? Is it possible that the stress of the recession and the job market is driving the results in both treatment and control?

This randomized study should have been titled something like "How much do people take their doctors' advice in changing their lifestyles? An analysis of low income population using Medicaid lotteries" or something similar. Would the findings have made any headlines then?

Alternatively, if the study participants were given medications to treat their hypertension, cholesterol, etc. then the study would have been about the efficacy of drugs on the low income population. Or perhaps prescription drug compliance among the low income population.

The comeback "You still buy health insurance don't you?" is a reasonable response contrary to what Tyler Cowen thinks. And this returns to the possibility that the benefits of ACA and expansion of Medicaid was oversold. Why do we buy health insurance - surely not to become healthier. We buy insurance to preserve the status quo, i.e. I don't want my health to get worse and if it gets worse then at least I can do something about it. I have health insurance and I can go to the doctor. And when we think about health we generally don't think in terms of cholesterol or blood pressure. We think of actual illnesses, pain, discomfort, etc. and again evidence from behavioral economics may be useful here.

What is going here I think is that possibly and perhaps in fact, very likely that supporters of ACA felt they had to justify the expansion of Medicaid by some evidence based reason and like their opponents who will grab at anything they can to fight against it they fell onto the belief that health insurance improves overall health - not specific illnesses, but overall health because it was easier to measure in an RCT.

Instead of making arguments for ACA on grounds of equity and perhaps even a right to adequate care and a right not to impose the costs of emergency room visits on others, etc. they have backed themselves into a corner with this null finding.

Even criminals need an education

From WaPo:

The words on his robbery note were spelled incorrectly, authorities said, and he was unable to articulate his demands. So the confused teller at the downtown Washington bank turned the man away, saying she couldn’t help.

The FBI says the man didn’t fare much better at a second bank three blocks away. There, authorities said, it took the teller a few moments to realize that the man standing at her window April 1 was not a customer.

...

Authorities say that most bank robbers use notes, not guns, but the wording must be clear to be understood. Court documents say the note handed over at the SunTrust simply read, “100s 50s 20s 10s.”

“The teller was confused,” the FBI agent wrote in the affidavit, noting that the teller understood the man to say “money” but nothing else. She handed the note back, and the FBI says he wrote, “all mona.” The teller sent him away. It was only after he left, authorities said, that a customer who was in earshot told her that the man was trying to rob the bank.

The teller at the Bank of America seemed to understand what was happening a bit quicker, although the FBI said she, too, was at first confused by the note reading “all mona.”

Coursera certificates

At some time Coursera used to call them certificates but now they have changed them to “statement of accomplishment”. But whatever they are calling them I find them to be incredibly distracting. Unfortunately I seem to be unable to rise above them (as others can) and work on my own pace (in "archive" mode) and say “Begone with you Coursera certificate”.

I’m feeling some angst about this because I have hit a slew of courses that seem intent on using quizzes and homeworks not to teach but to test. These are the courses that only give you one attempt at getting the answers and this one attempt is the only one that counts as credit toward the certificate. A lot of times it also tests facts and recall rather than interpretationThis is of course the typical traditional college approach. While this doesn’t prevent me from multiple attempts it feels as though my efforts are diluted.

Irrational? You bet. So I try to say to myself, "the statement of accomplishment is meaningless". (And if one reads the fine print that comes with the statement it is readily apparent how meaningless it is.) Part of me wants to protest against these courses. Is unenrolling a better form of protest or a remaining a non participant until the course goes into archive?

Most interesting sentence today on Japanese electronics firms

From the BBC:

Sony makes far more money today out of selling life insurance than it does out of making electronics. Panasonic and Sharp have less to fall back on.

From the above link:

Japan's electronic giants once ruled the world. Sony, Panasonic, Sharp were household names. Now those same companies are in deep trouble, losing billions of dollars a year.

...

According to Tokyo-based economist Gerhard Fasol, the Japanese giants were overtaken by the digital revolution.

The Japanese giants, he says, actually built their empires on making complex electrical machines - colour televisions, radios, cassette players, refrigerators, washing machines.

Yes, they contained electronic components, but they were basically mechanical devices.

But then came the digital revolution, and the world changed.

...

"So it's hard to become rich today on the scale of a Panasonic just by manufacturing - you have to do a lot more."

Wimpy models or wimpy DC?

The lack of snow yesterday was probably the biggest bust of winter weather forecasting this season (emphasis mine):

They shut down the schools and the government for what turned out in much of the area to be light rain and a bit of a breeze.

But when “they” — beleaguered bureaucrats, politicians and educators — made that choice in the small of the night, all the experts were telling them that a big storm with an even bigger name was bearing down on the Washington region, preparing to snarl roads, snuff out power and cause all manner of chaos.
...
“We made our decisions based on, unfortunately, faulty weather predictions,” said Pedro Ribeiro, spokesman for D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D). “You can’t really blame the government officials for using the data the scientists gave them.”

Ribiero said media forecasts “did tend to hype it up a little bit, but what we look at is the data. We have to take that as valid.”

Those forecasts were plain wrong. “This was the biggest bust in the history of the Capital Weather Gang,” said The Washington Post’s chief meteorologist, Jason Samenow. He said the major mistake was to accept computer models that said the amount of moisture in the storm would make up for the warmth of the air below.

Every forecaster in town overestimated the storm; at 3 a.m., the Weather Service still predicted eight to 10 inches of snow for the District.

Have we placed too much reliance on models? Or is there some hubris in the weather forecasting community now that 1-3 day forecasts have gotten more accurate than in the past?

Or perhaps there is another reason:

But Bowers, who has worked for the system for three decades, said he might have reached a different conclusion years ago. In the 1980s, Montgomery never shut down, he said. Bowers remembers a convoy of plow trucks heading up Interstate 270 to clear a path for buses to pick up sixth-graders who had been stranded at an outdoor education camp for a week.

“We’ve gotten wimpier,” he said.

Working from home boosts productivity?

Here’s an argument from the Economist which suggests that productivity increases by letting employees work from home (emphasis mine):

But tethering the Yahoos to their stalls in the company’s offices does not seem like the right way to go about boosting their output. Plenty of evidence suggests that letting employees work from home is good for productivity.

The premises seem to be:
1. Letting employees work from home boost productivity
2. If one worker works from and productivity increases then as more workers work from then productivity will increase more
Conclusion: All workers should work from home.

More coverage here - my read is that while working from can have productivity gains these gains are not monotonic. At some point there will be negative returns and Yahoo may have gone well past those gains into negative territory. The reason for the ban is perhaps to have a clean slate. Let’s start all over and then begin doling out work from home perks as time progresses. After all if the Economist is correct, Yahoo should be swimming in profits.