Arnold Kling

I use the fantastic Inoreader that is better than Google Reader was. I follow things that post maybe once or twice a week or once a month. For things with new information every day, like Hacker News, I check the website. A few of the things that I follow that may be a bit different for people are : Arnold Kling - a PhD economist who worked in technology and is genuinely different. https://arnoldkling.substack.com/ Noah Smith - a PhD economist who writes about economics and the world https://www.noahpinion.blog/ Roger Pielke Jnr - a guy with a PhD who writes about climate and energy and was excommunicated by the climate priesthood. https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/ Andrew Sullivan - a conservative, gay, HIV positive, Catholic writer who campaigned for gay marriage. https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/

The best I know of: http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/?s=covid https://www.arnoldkling.com/ . https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=covid https://marginalrevolution.com/about Those are two blogs that I think everyone should subscribe to. arnoldkling.com is particularly interesting because it seems to have unusually high quality in the comments section.

A recent defense of the Bayesian approach: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-continued-defense-of-non-frequenti… (and Kling's response: https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/what-is-probability) Likelihood statistics is another approach that combines the classical and Bayesian approaches. Its main benefit is that it does not rely on prior probabilities about an event. Instead, you can use MLE (maximum likelihood estimation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_likelihood_estimation) to estimate your parameter, with certain guarantees based on which estimator you choose for the parameter and how you calculate it. The downside of this approach is that it requires a strong assumption: that you know the distribution of outcomes in advance. Side note: the only time you'll know the population parameter is if you set it yourself (i.e., in a simulation). edit: Title should also probably be changed to the article's title ("How I Teach Statistics")

Preschool appears to have little if any benefit as measured by school achievement or teacher assessments of school readiness by first grade teacher http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/research/pri/VPKthrough3rd_final_withcov… A Randomized Control Trial of a Statewide Voluntary Prekindergarten Program on Children’s Skills and Behaviors through Third Grade >The third question we addressed involved the sustainability of effects on achievement and behavior beyond kindergarten entry. Children in both groups were followed and reassessed in the spring every year with over 90% of the initial sample located tested on each wave. By the end of kindergarten, the control children had caught up to the TN‐VPK [preschool] children and there were no longer significant differences between them on any achievement measures. The same result was obtained at the end of first grade using both composite achievement measures. In second grade, however, the groups began to diverge with the TN‐VPK children scoring lower than the control children on most of the measures. The differences were significant on both achievement composite measures and on the math subtests. >First grade teachers rated the TN‐VPK children as less well prepared for school, having poorer work skills in the classrooms, and feeling more negative about school. It is notable that these ratings preceded the downward achievement trend we found for VPK children in second and third grade. Further commentary and…

That the South Korean school system would do this is discouraging, no question. But I am also discouraged by how, when reading academic scientists and academic journals (_Nature_ in this case), it seems considerably easier to find concern about unscientific nonsense beloved of the right than about unscientific nonsense beloved of the left. E.g., individual genetic heritability is even more fundamental and even more loudly supported by obvious evidence than evolution by natural selection. Yet not only is this sometimes slighted in the high school curriculum, one can find academic work from prestigious institutions that pretends heritability does not exist (or is at least, for some unexplained reason, absolutely negligible). See, e.g., Chan and Boliver "The Grandparents Effect in Social Mobility", http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sfos0006/papers/asronline.pdf (HT http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/a-grandparent-effect/). It is not easy (for this reader with a BS in Biology) to see why it's scientifically OK to assume that heritability is negligible at the level of detail considered by Chan and Boliver ("if mobility follows a first-order Markovian process"; "well-connected grandparents could also use their social contacts to help grandchildren with job searches"; citations into a more than a decade of research on multigenerational issues, e.g. the cite to Bengtson). It's easy to see how this taboo can help produce useful political soundbites, and why the BBC would take it and run with it…

I agree: a "state of nature" leads to lives that are "nasty, brutish and short." How do we find legislators who are good stewards for the public trust and welfare. We subject public companies to transparency regulations, perhaps legislator would benefit from more transparency. I am not sure where to draw the line to prevent mob rule or other undesirable outcomes, but legislators manage enormous budgets. Arnold Kling looks at ways to reorganize to create tighter accountability in https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-unbalance-of-power

Arnold Kling: The New Commanding Heights are education and health care, which are rapidly expanding sectors where credentials and regulation are important sources of rents. http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/klassic-klingisms/ In Marxian economics, the "commanding heights of the economy" are certain strategically important economic sectors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commanding_heights_of_the_economy

Fixing the Schools has been a massive political issue for decades. Huge amounts of money have been spent and all kinds of strategies have been tried. When you look at the long-term trends, though, you see only the standard, persistent performance gaps associated with demographic factors. The money and changes in education policy barely show up as blips. If there were an obvious way to change things, things would have changed by now. https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-null-hypothesis-in-education-rest…

Moral Dyad theory I think helps give insight to this behavior: https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-moral-dyad-and-health-care-poli…

> Money is a complete fiction now It always has been: http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/steven-pinker-on-money-as-a-consensual… https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/money-as-a-social-construct-…

I have yet to read it myself :) Dr. Kling is using the book as a template/metaphor more than as a specific proscriptive. But I've seen this myself in the wind as various crises have held forth since 1973 ( when I was first old enough to ask questions about what was going on ). http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/vickies-and-thetes/ http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/experts-surveyed-on-the-future-of-work…

There is now a vocal “net neutrality” chorus that will fight any form of price discrimination in wireless services, including fighting zero-rated apps. I think that they are misguided and represent no actual consumers. However, the FCC will do everything to make them seem important, because that in turn justifies having the FCC do more regulatory meddling.[1] And this how the comments will be used: mined to support yet another power grab. Later, do you really think that a regulatory body will side with you in the long term over organized interests and large corporations? [1] http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/data-price-discrimination/

When I cite such things, it's because "all models are wrong, but mine are useful" :) And yeah I think big five is useful in the above context, and also for things like this: https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/keeping-up-with-the-fits-114 "Empirically, men and women to tend to differ on the trait that personality psychology calls agreeableness. More women show up as high in agreeableness than men. [As an aside, I once wrote Nassim Taleb and the Disagreeables. Nassim Taleb’s latest book heaps praise on the trait that personality psychologists call low agreeableness. . . I am pretty far out on the disagreeable end of the spectrum myself, but Taleb makes me look like a goody two-shoes. Taleb came across the essay and tweeted this response: There is this BS in this "disagreebleness" scale used by psychologists, unconditional of domain. Like most psych categorizations, BS. Many are socially gentle but intellectually rigorous & no-nonsense: others nasty in person but appear gentle in public . BS! I rest my case.]"

While there was some pre-production, I disagree that vaccine supply is the only binding constraint we have going on. And the lack of sane regulatory approvals and sane distribution setups has been heartrending. If you look at https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distri… and scroll down to "U.S. Vaccination Campaign" you will see that in the US 74.5% of the vaccine doses that have been delivered have actually been used. This could happen for a combination of two reasons, as far as I can see: either delivery is ramping up so fast that most of the delivered doses were delivered very recently, or because people are doing a terrible job of using doses that get delivered. My impression is that the latter is a larger factor than the former, so far, based on the wide variation by state in the "Supply used" column. West Virginia has used ~96% of their supply. D.C. and Rhode Island have used only 60% (and it's not like their populations are larger or more spread out than West Virginia's!). And I should note that I can imagine various poverty-and-social-whatever issues D.C. might be facing, but they don't obviously apply to Rhode Island in the same way. Things like http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/virus-update-3/ item 3 are pretty common: crazy vaccine-distribution setups meaning people who want vaccines can't get signed up to get them, while vaccines are getting thrown out due to spoilage. Things like…

Power hungry certainly, but if they were really greedy they could satisfy that far more easily in private industry for the same amount of talent and work. As for morality, well, I think there are two factors at play there. Powerful people tend to become less moral in their treatment of people below them, but that isn't the same as being willing to compromise their ideals. Also, people seem to have a finite desire to be moral, and you can find studies about people being less likely to hold doors for others if they've recently donated to charity, for instance.[1] So if this hypothetical Republican leader feels that his political work is Defending Civilization from Barbarity[2] I imagine that they'd feel more free to be amoral in other aspects of their life. But that doesn't mean they'd be willing to sell out their cause itself! [1] Different people can have very different base desires here, and habit is also a force to consider. [2] See second to last paragraph in this very good post: http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/being-uncharitable-to-those-who-disagr…

I think you're putting too much weight into Picketty's fairly contentious conclusions. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/99455/how_differ… https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/06/unpersuaded.html https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/capital-punishment http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/krugman-reviews-picketty/ (for some starters, if you somehow have not seen how it is not the Bible that some people want it to be?). Also it is hard to compare Europe's norms which country-by-country are generally featuring a lot more ethnic-cohesion and have social spending heavily subsidized by America's military (not to mention much more density for things like trains) I say this as someone who wishes there were more dense, EU-style cities in America. Mobility is certainly not dead in America, and the middle class is shrinking because more people are moving up and making more money overall: http://www.aei.org/publication/yes-the-us-middle-class-is-shrinking-bu… I think anyone trying to say "you don't know how shitty you have it!" is akin to saying "you vote against your own interests" which is really saying "I think I know better than you" -- which is trash. The fact of the matter is a lot of people prefer US-style suburban living. America certainly has its share or problems, reliable/trustable Governance being a big…