The Efficiency of Medicare: Real World vs Theory
Efficiency is generally thought of the relationship between inputs and outputs. Economic efficiency is defined by Paul Heyne here. “To economists, efficiency is a relationship between ends and means....
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See You at The Corporate Social Media Summit SF!
I don’t blog enough here about all the cool social data tools and services I use, but I frequently get a chance to demo my favorites on stage (and also blog about it at our Tweet House site.) I’ll be...
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A Little Perspective: Medicare Fraud vs Wall Street Bonuses, Profits
Found these numbers interesting. Medicare Fraud? $60 billion a year. Wall Street Profits? $13.5 billion. Bonuses? 19.9 billion.
View ArticleA New Way to Think About What “Millionaire” Means
If you cash in your million dollar winning lottery ticket in Virginia like this man did, you can take it in installments of $40K a year for 25 years. If you are a retired teacher in Illinois, your...
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Site Scraping? Needlebase R.I.P., Long Live Outwit Hub
Are you a Web data geek? Are you into scraping sites? If so, you may be one of the many people who rely on the highly-regarded Needlebase to help you in your efforts. After reading about Needlebase on...
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How to Get Twitter Followers — NOT. “Faker Score” May Reveal Purchased Fans
For those who help various organizations evaluate their real and potential online audiences, it’s always nice to find a promising new service that can help determine how much effective reach someone...
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College ROI: SmartMoney says University of Washington Beats Harvard, Yale
A little validation for us Huskies from the folks at SmartMoney and their sources — The College Board; U.S. Department of Education and Payscale.com. It will be likely reassuring to UW students and...
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The First Tweet Mentioning Seattle
Been playing with oldtweets, which searches an archive of the first year of statuses posted on Twitter. Makes it easy to see who tweeted what first. Was pleasantly surprised to see an old conference...
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Why Hasn’t Europe Caught Up?
My pal Steve reminded me of his thought-provoking post he made a while back asking the question “Why Hasn’t Europe Caught Up?” Gallup may have a partial answer in this report issued in 2007. The...
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Piling On: Bowdoin College and ROI
The blogosphere has been roiling of late over a report titled What Does Bowdoin Teach? The 360-page document profiled in the WSJ makes the case that the Brunswick college has abandoned its historical...
View ArticleClimate Policy: Why it’s Irrational to be a Public “Denier”
The recent collapse of the carbon trading market in the E.U. has prompted me to put in writing something I’ve been convinced of for some time — that skeptics of man-made catastrophic global warming...
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Bad Times for Mathusians: The Oil Drum Calls it Quits
Almost as if it was choreographed, it was only minutes after reading the passage below from the Economist that I discovered that the respected blog The Oil Drum was to be no more. “Scratch the surface...
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Twitter Data Reveals: Colonoscopies Better Liked than FATCA
There’s been a lot of negativity of late surrounding the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. The core issue according to The Hill is: “Now, the U.S. Treasury expects banks in every country worldwide to...
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Collectivizing Health Care: What Happens to Costs?
The RAND Health Insurance Experiment is referenced in the academic literature as a “gold standard” study, and the main conclusion it reached aligned perfectly with what Econ 101 teaches us — when...
View ArticleI Bet the Post-Mortem Reports are Awesome
Serious Economists universally agree that some goods are better allocated via markets and others are better managed by state distribution. The distinction generally has to do with the nature of the...
View ArticleAbout that Medicare Efficiency…
I’ve been meaning to write up a response to the oft-repeated claim that Medicare is much more efficient than private insurance but then the Wall Street Journal hit the high points for me. Usually that...
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Counting Your Chickens Before They Hatch
A little less than a month ago, my pal Steve engaged in a little triumphalism via posts documenting the decline in Republican favorability: It’s Working: Pubs’ Polls Plummeting Congressional...
View ArticleKrugman and The Fallacy Of The Crucial Experiment
Krugman decided to write about the minimum wage today. As one would expect, he is all for raising it. He provides non-controversial assertions that: It’s low by historical standards. Foreign...
View ArticleTaleb on Statistics
A favorite of mine from Fooled by Randomness: “It is a mistake to use, as journalists and some economists do, statistics without logic, but the reverse doses not hold: It is not a mistake to use logic...
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