More...
Last weekend, I went to Cape Breton to give a talk at a TEDx event. In case you don’t know, Cape Breton is wayyyy on the eastern part of Nova Scotia, and isn’t particularly flush with convenient flights into the area. So my weekend looked something like this:
This observation is actually kind of [...]
Tags: Books · Economic Growth · Fun With Data · Policy
If you haven’t already, you can read my correlation does not imply causation, uh, rant here. The general idea is that, just because you see that events A and B go together, you cannot conclude that event A causes event B. You can only conclude this if you rule out two other possibilities, [...]
Tags: Fun With Data · Just For Fun
If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know that the correlation does not imply causation thing really gets me into a tizzy. What you probably don’t know is that this issue is not my only pet peeve with a lot of empirical research. (Shocking, I know.) Let me start by [...]
Tags: Fun With Data · Fun With Math
A friend of mine sent me the following chart with a request for explanation:
Note to chart makers: if your charts require explanation, you’re doing it wrong.
In case you’re curious, the problem here is generally one of consistency. First, the bars themselves aren’t even all representing comparable entities- the last bar is presumably a “total” [...]
Tags: Fun With Data · Graphic Content
It’s been floating around the econ blogosphere today that The Brookings Institution has decided to make all of its research publicly available for free. (In case you aren’t familiar, Brookings is a DC-based nonprofit research organization, i.e. think tank. Here is some more explanation, complete with a cartoon.) I am psyched about [...]
Tags: Econ 101 · Fun With Data
