The Utterly Predictable Problem of Long-Run US Budget Deficits
For anyone who can do arithmetic, it did not come as a surprise that the "baby boom generation," born from 1946 up through the early 1960s, started turning 65 in 2010. Here's the pattern over time of the "Daily Average Number of People Turning 65." The jump of the boomer generation is marked.
- 17/04/2019
- 6
Trade Imbalances: US in Global Context
A substantial amount of the discussion of international trade issues starts from the premise that the United States has huge trade deficits and China has huge trade surpluses. But what if only half of that premise is true? Here are a couple of tables on trade balances that I've clipped out of the IMF's World Economic Outlook for April 2019. One shows national trade deficits and surpluses in dollars; the other shows them as a share of the nation's GDP. Of course, the 2019 figures are projections.
- 14/04/2019
- 5
Have the Identification Police Become Overly Intrusive?
Every intro statistics class teaches "correlation is not causation"--that is, because two patterns consistently move together (or consistently opposite), you can't jump to a conclusion that A causes B, B causes A, some alternative factor C is affecting both A and B, or that among all the millions of possible patterns you can put side-by-side, maybe the correlation between this specific A and B is just a fluky coincidence.
- 14/04/2019
- 4
Analysing China's Growth and Inequality
Since 1978, China's share of world population has declined mildly from 23% to about 19%. In those same 40 yeas, China's share of world GDP has risen dramatically from 3% to about 20%. Here's China's share of world population and the global economy since the start of its economic reforms.
- 12/04/2019
- 4
Bias Has Been Overestimated at the Expense of Noise
Daniel Kahneman (Nobel 2002) is of course known for his extensive work on behavioral biases and how they affect economic decisions. He's now working on a new book, together with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, in which he focuses instead on the concept of "noise".
- 11/04/2019
- 5
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