It’s not clear to me the regulators understand what risks they are actually mitigating, if any.
2,511 karma · joined October 26, 2020
You can absolutely get hauled in front of a judge for fraud and abuse in the use of NIH grants. You can be required to pay all of the money back, among other punishments. Google will reveal a variety of cases.
It is in fact rare for retired federal bureaucrats to become professors. It is much more common for people at the Secretary level to get teaching positions at schools of public policy. I am not aware of any former CIA directors holding those roles but I invite you to look.
These schools are not “hotbeds of spies” - truly that it is a completely uninformed statement.
By the way, very few law professors work via grants and even fewer via NIH grants.
- he doesn’t have anything like a majority in the Argentine congress (in either house). I don’t know Argentine law and would welcome comments from someone who actually does but it would surprise me if this is something the president can do unilaterally.
- as a practical matter, Argentina itself does not have enough dollars to make this happen. You need a ton (more than that…) literally of physical currency to make this work. I don’t think their reserves are sufficient to cover it. (You need many additional tons of coins to make it practical too…)
Separately this is generally not a great idea economically. You do kill inflation in Argentina (replaced with American inflation but that is extremely low and stable by Argentine standards). But you have no control over your monetary policy or your exchange rates. If your economy is export driven to (e.g.) China, you now have to worry about the dollar-yuan rate, which is not under your control.
Of course this is also Argentina which is a particular basket case economically so I won’t rule out the possibility that this could be better than what they have now (or would have had under the loser in this election). But my guess is this would be worse if implemented.
For a country which produces a large number of really outstanding economists (including great macroeconomists!) Argentina is surprising disaster.
If the advertisers, Meta is going to be accountable to advertisers to an extent in terms of what they measure and report and that requires data. Is this even hard to understand??? If this were your service, you would have exactly the same two options to pay for it.
If you don’t like Meta or advertisers having data about you, don’t use Meta’s services!
Acting like there is some “human right to use Instagram on your own terms” is deeply mysterious to me. There isn’t. You know how the deal works. You get the service and they advertise to you.
The underlying behavior seems really objectionable and should be illegal. The question is whether it is actually illegal under the law.
If a bunch of firms use the same software to set prices but do so independently and without any attempt to coordinate with each other… that’s a pretty decent defense?
(Can they argue that they had no knowledge of their competitors’ use of the software? There may of course be internal emails saying “we know X is also using it.” Suppose there aren’t AND the software vendor promised exclusivity to all of them independently. Would we want this to be illegal? What if all of the firms offer similar products and set prices by estimating the same demand curve?? This becomes a little far fetched of course.)
I don’t view this as obviously “per se illegal” territory. I would love to be wrong bc yeah it’s really objectionable, but I don’t think the case is a slam dunk.
So called “algorithmic collusion” of which this is likely an example is an unsettled area of theory
Plaintiffs submitted some recordings in either this or a related case of an agent who said she wouldn’t even bother to show a house that didn’t have a guaranteed commission. The NAR is not so stupid as to have a “you must sign here that you will only show houses with a commission” form.
>> the incidence question … is a semantic one
Definitely not semantics. This relates to the elasticity of demand and supply in the market. The incidence can be on the buyer OR the seller OR shared. Depends on the good and the demand.
Not at all. 0% related.
>> Does she see her office having influence on that, at least tangentially, to anything happening at USPTO?
If she does she really shouldn’t.
Absolutely not.
I want to get antitrust enforcement right not to just “do more of it”
Members:
- lawyers who work in the agencies on antitrust
- lawyers who work in competition practices of major law firms
- lawyers who work as competition counsel in-house at large firms
- legal scholars (in law schools) who write on these issues
- economists who work in the same agencies (FTC and DoJ)
- economists who work in the litigation consulting industry
- economists who work in academia on antitrust and competition issues (anyone in an economics department who lists “industrial organization” as a research field).
Plus our various groupies and hangers-on, who are numerous, because our parties are amazing…
OPs take is correct. It is the opposite of “insanely misinformed.”
She has lost her big cases! She is ineffective. That’s the metric which matters.
This whole idea of “we’re going to send a message” or “we’re not afraid of losing cases” is ridiculous.
She has not moved the needle on antitrust law at all and is unlikely to, even in a hypothetical second Biden term.
Microsoft paid their lawyers maybe $10-20 million in legal fees and still acquired Activision, bc the FTC brought a crappy, implausible case.
Google will pay their lawyers a similar amount and the FTC is likely to lose again bc their case is weak!
You need to try cases under the antitrust laws as they are, not as you want them to be.
Filing these speculative long shot cases wastes the FTC’s valuable time.
There are important mergers which don’t get attention bc Lina is wasting her time with Microsoft and Google.
Her entire term is characterized by poor execution. You are the one who is misinformed.
Helpful explanations are another.
(Philosophy of science has moved on since Popper!)
MMT is bullshit. Total and complete bullshit. That’s a bigger topic than I have time or space for. You can’t even get those clowns to commit to anything their theory implies at all! Every time an obvious objection is raised they say “oh well that’s not what we mean!” Yeah ok so tell us what you DO mean.
Sorry but MMT is extremely frustrating. It’s not even playing the same game as normal macro. It as as much a “competitor” to standard macro as astrology is to astronomy. Like astrology, it has essentially nothing to do with reality.
If you want to learn more, you are spoiled for choice. There are lots of places to look. Here’s a random list from the top of my head right now.
Ljungqvist and Sargent’s Recursive Macroeconomic Theory is a standard grad level text taught nearly everywhere. Has been for probably 20 years.
Stokey, Lucas and Prescott is another, more math methods focused.
DeJong and Dave is a macro empirics book.
Jianjun Miao’s book is another solid option.
Stachurski focuses on computational methods.
Acemoglu has a book on modern growth theory.
McCandless “the abcs of rbcs” is IMO underappreciated.
Beyond this you’ll need chapters from various volumes of the Handbook of Macro and related texts. There’s a long one by Fernandez-villaverde and co-authors about modern DSGE models. That’s available for free on his website I think.
It’s a huge literature. If you are serious about it, enjoy and good luck!
But I think any macro scholar would tell you quite honestly where they think the limits of their models are. It’s like any other scientific endeavor: “this paper on Topic X is our best understanding right now but it’s subject to revisions.”
Similar example from outside macro: there are not many finance professors who will make large bets on the prices of specific assets on the basis of their models, including models in which they have high confidence as being on the current research frontier. That certainly doesn’t mean they are idiots or that they aren’t trying or whatever. It just means it’s really hard.
Imagine a physical science, but make it harder bc you generally cannot do controlled macro experiments (sometimes there are natural experiments if you are very lucky) you can certainly never repeat them AND when your experimental subjects discover that you are trying to predict or understand their behavior they might change it on purpose bc they don’t want to be understood or predicted!
In several ways it’s a lot harder than physics! Murray gell-man said something to that effect once. Something like “imagine how hard physics would be if electrons could think.”
Macro is hard. It’s really, really, really hard.
It’s _really easy_ to write down a moderately realistic macro model which you have absolutely no hope of ever solving numerically (an “extremely realistic model” would be even worse). That’s not going to do anyone any good.
It would be a totally empty exercise: “here’s something which I bet would be great but we’ll never know!”. It’s impossible to confront such models with data, which is absolutely the bread and butter of any macro paper.
It is still hard but somewhat less hard to write down a simplified model which you can solve and which can give you insights. By necessity you lose some realism in this exercise. There is no way around that. It’s not a lack of cleverness or imagination.
It is possible to confront such models with data to make the whole exercise empirical, which credible macro is and must be.
By necessity these insights might be useful or not depending on how much of the useful machinery of realism you dropped from your model to make it solvable.
If you personally want something “better”, you are welcome to try. I encourage you! If you show that your method works - that it involves plausible assumptions, can be solved, and can be made empirical - the macroeconomists of the world will beat a path to your door and gladly study your methods.
The exercise not a charade. There are currently no alternatives to mainstream empirical macro bc all of the purported alternatives are (for lack of a better word) complete BS (example: MMT).
Sincerely,
An antitrust economist.
This remark is totally ignorant of the reality in the social sciences. Certainly in economics (which I know well) this hasn't described the reality of empirical work for more than 30 years. Political Science and Sociology are increasingly concerned with causal methods as well.
Medicine on the other hand is the opposite. Medical journals generally publish correlations when they aren't publishing experiments.
“After becoming caught in a trap set to catch etc…” is a more accurate description, IMO.
All kinds of economists estimate models on very large data using computers. Does that count or not?
What good is it specifically to “know habermas as well as feature selection” ? What problems are you solving?
Maybe “the world needs an explanation of what you mean when you say computational social science” would make a nice follow up…
Here the answer is yes. Dan Ariely is a complete fraud and so is Francesca Gino.
There are so many credible accusations of fraud against Ariely that about four of them get treated together very quickly at the end of the article, else the article would be several times longer. If you own his books, throw them away or shelve them with your fiction.
Also note that there are serious behavioral economics researchers who do hard work that isn’t remotely like this “nudging” or “priming” BS.
In that situation, Reddit has to be partially accountable to their advertisers. The advertisers will want some measure of control over who sees the ads and some reporting on performance.
I get that no one likes ads but I don’t think it’s that hard to understand Reddit’s situation. You would do exactly the same if you ran an expensive website. In 30+ years of the web no one has found another model which works.
Truly this is one of the most outlandish statements I have ever read on the internet. Bravo.
Contemporary North Korea is a decentralized paradise I suppose. Cuba must be similar? I would love to know your opinion of China before the Deng reforms, Vietnam before it liberalized, or of state planning in Venezuela, to say nothing of the also-centrally-planned Soviet Union??
You ask us to imagine “what the state of our nation might have been today,” if we had stayed on that path?!? You need only have visited Russia in the 1990’s to see what an absolute disaster that was. Lucky for you if you didn’t make that trip there are still parts of the world where you can see it if you dare.
Quantification of uncertainty is bread and butter for us! Criticize the field fo relying on null hypothesis significance testing, not for failing to provide measures of uncertainty!!
Seriously the fraction of papers in which you see these data used is in my personal experience 0. As a fraction of the total amount of economics research produced annually is probably 10^-6 or smaller. It just isn’t necessary in 99.99999% of papers to make any reference to any national or regional populations 2,000 years ago or more.
Also maybe ask the authors of these papers how seriously they take the estimates OR how much weight they ask the estimates to bear in their papers?? “Not very” and “not much” are the most likely answers.
The average scientific field has hundreds of journals. In Econ there are five to ten which matter. It’s too time consuming to read more than a small fraction of the work that comes out even in my own sub-field. I would have thought math was even worse but I don’t know the field.
When you’re a grad student you have to read a few methods and applications papers. When you’re a professor you have to stay on top of what matters in your field but you mostly attend conferences and seminars for that.
Other than that… we don’t read anyone’s work. Indeed nearly all research isn’t ever cited and the fraction of cited papers not in the “central methodology” category above which are actually carefully read is probably extremely low.
I’m saying this in part bc sometimes people outside of academia feel like “being department chair” means the person is super prestigious or well respected within the department or outside of it. Generally that’s not actually the case. It’s a bit of a demotion in terms of what academics care about. (Frequently it comes with a raise bc you need to offer a substantial carrot to get people to even take the position.)