Month: July 2019

The reliability of various news media was a focus of discussion during the 2016 and 2018 elections. Various news sources have been criticized as biased, or even “fake”. A lot of analysis indicated that the opposing sides of the political debate were consuming very different information. Is there a way to improve how we consume news?

Continue reading “News Sources: How to Stay Informed and Limit Bias”

• 16,000 Readers Shared Their Experiences of Being Told to ‘Go Back.’ Here Are Some of Their Stories. NY Times.
• New Inequality Data Is a Gift to Campaign Sloganeers. Barry Ritholtz.
• Josh Hader’s Fastball Is Baseball’s Most Mysterious Pitch. FiveThirtyEight. I find baseball to be the most boring sport to watch but the most fun to read about.
• Harsher Punishments Lead To More Suspensions For Black Kids. Futurity.
• What Senator Hawley Gets Wrong about American Identity. CATO. Probably a good time to point out that I think more Democrats and left-leaning people should read CATO stuff.
• Toddlers Can’t Truly Answer “This or That” Questions. Futurity. Although don’t think recency bias goes away fully as we grow up!’
• I don’t think anything newsworthy happened at the Mueller hearing, but if you haven’t yet, please read the 6 or 7 page executive summaries in the actual, public Mueller report here. If nothing else, it will allow you to smugly ask your fancy dinner party friends if they’ve actually read the Mueller report.

• How U.S. Tech Companies are Helping Build China’s Surveillance State. The Intercept.
• How Iran Sees Its Standoff With the United States. Foreign Affairs.
• New Inequality Numbers Are a Gift to Campaign Sloganeers. Bloomberg.
• Dollar under pressure after Fed fuels bets on large rate cut. Reuters.

Last month I took a look at a question with some relevance to me personally: should I buy a new car? In a similar vein, this week I’d like to take a look at a question that a lot of my peers are currently facing, and one that I faced myself a few years ago. That is, I’d like to take a look at whether going back to school to get an MBA is worth it or not.

This is an example of a cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analyses can aid our decision-making in a lot of situations. They can be used to figure out:

• which R&D project a company should devote resources to
• what price to buy a factory for
• whether you should make an investment in your own education

The basic idea behind a cost-benefit analysis to see if an MBA is worth it is 1) measure the total costs of getting an MBA, 2) define a baseline against which we will measure the “MBA bump”, 3) measure how much we can beat this baseline by, by getting an MBA, and 4) somehow account for the timing of these costs and benefits.

Continue reading “Should You Go for an MBA?”

Lots of different topics this week– investing, Mueller, AOC, minimum wage law. If you have to pick one, read the AOC interview at New Yorker.

• Should You Take the Annuity or the Lump Sum? Of Dollars And Data. HT Barry Ritholtz.
• If I Had Five Minutes to Question Robert Mueller. Lawfare Blog.
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the 2020 Presidential Race and Trump’s Crisis at the Border. New Yorker. Highly recommended.
• How U.S. Tech Giants are Helping to Build China’s Surveillance State. The Intercept.
• Minimum Wage Employment Effects and Labor Market Concentration. SSRN. One of several recent-ish papers that have changed my mind on the economics of minimum wage hikes. I now think there’s pretty good economic evidence that increasing minimum wages is a good idea in most places. “Our findings provide direct empirical evidence supporting the monopsony model as an explanation for the near-zero minimum wage employment effect documented in prior work.” HT Tyler Cowen.