Knowing and Making

Via the excellent Simoleon Sense weekly roundup , I find  this link which claims to discover "the single most important question in your life". The research behind it claims to have found that the answers on a single kindergarten test can predict future income, college attendance, quality of college, college graduation (and while they're at it, a close link between college ranking and future wages). I don't have the knowledge to challenge their results and I would not want to suggest that there's anything untoward about this research. But one thing makes me really, really puzzled: the results are too good . Specifically, the regressions show an incredibly close linear fit between rank  (or percentile) in the kindergarten test, and absolute  salary. And a similarly close fit between rank in the test, and percentage chance of going to college. The following image not only shows that unrealistically close linear fit, but they also imply an almost constant  d...

Talking of identity economics , I can now identify the author of almost every Worthwhile Canadian Initiative posting within the first couple of sentences. They are trying to confuse me by throwing two new authors into the mix, but I have figured out their wily ploy. So in the first Frances Woolley post I have recognised , she has mentioned in passing a mysterious fact. Squidward Tentacles, SpongeBob's co-worker, probably did better in school than SpongeBob did. He has intellectual pretensions, to play clarinet and to dance. But these aspirations only make him miserable in his job as a cashier at Krusty Krab. Canada, like many other countries, has expanded access to post-secondary education, but the demand for educated workers has not kept up to the supply. A study by Marc Frenette based on data from the 1980s and 1990s found over thirty percent of university graduates were over-qualified for their jobs. But the quantity demanded and supplied should be equal in equilibrium - at l...

Paul Krugman has been cheerleading for Britain for a while. I'm not sure I agree with him that the pound is cheap, but it's good to see we that some of our signs of robustness are visible from outside. Why is our economic performance so good? This is one - charming - theory .