The stock market speaks: How Dr. Alchian learned to build the bomb (2014)
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
"We knew they were developing this H-bomb, but we wanted to know, what's in it? What's the fissile material? Well there's thorium, thallium, beryllium, and something else, and we asked Herman Kahn and he said, ‘Can't tell you’… I said, ‘I'll find out’, so I went down to the RAND library and had them get for me the US Government's Dept. of Commerce Yearbook which has items on every industry by product, so I went through and looked up thorium, who makes it, looked up beryllium, who makes it, looked them all up, took me about 10 minutes to do it, and got them. There were about five companies, five of these things, and then I called Dean Witter… they had the names of the companies also making these things, ‘Look up for me the price of these companies…’ and here were these four or five stocks going like this, and then about, I think it was September, this was now around October, one of them started to go like that, from $2 to around $10, the rest were going like this, so I thought ‘Well, that's interesting’… I wrote it up and distributed it around the social science group the next day. I got a phone call from the head of RAND calling me in, nice guy, knew him well, he said ‘Armen, we've got to suppress this’… I said ‘Yes, sir’, and I took it and put it away, and that was the first event study. Anyway, it made my reputation among a lot of the engineers at RAND."
My second thought : I’m a little surprised that the use of lithium in nuclear weapons represented enough of an increase in the total demand to boost the stock price that much.
Sometimes it’s takes a human looking at a chart to see what a million tables of data can’t
Luckily I think there's enough people who acquired immunity the hard way to save us.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/th...
"Always try to get data that's good enough that you don't need to do statistics on it."
https://breckyunits.com/2400.png
Don't need to do statistics on that to see that xkcd added strong bias.
But more important than that, the problem is the right arrow on the X-Axis implies the placebo experiment is ongoing and did not come to an abrupt end.
~30,000 volunteers with just a placebo against a disease with a >99% survival rate vs having NO CONTROL GROUP for a new class of vaccines that we inject in over 1,000,000,000 people. We have diseases with fatality rates of 50% that we still keep placebo groups for. This was not a hard decision.
We had a very clear scientific way to judge the long term efficacy of the vaccines but they dropped it. It was not to save lives—the math doesn't add up—it was because they made the sale and didn't want to "sell past the close".