Monthly Archive for December, 2015

A Voter’s Guide to Thinking

Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy) offers a Voter’s Guide to Thinking that is so good I am going to reproduce it in its entirety:

  1. If you are comparing Plan A to Plan B, you might be doing a good job of thinking. But if you are comparing Plan A to an imaginary situation in which there are no tradeoffs in life, you are not thinking.
  2. If you see quotes taken out of context, and you form an opinion anyway, that’s probably not thinking. If you believe you need no further context because there is only one imaginable explanation for the meaning of the quotes, you might have a poor imagination. Sometimes a poor imagination feels a lot like knowledge, but it’s closer to the opposite.
  3. If a debate lends itself to estimates of cost (in money or human suffering) and you aren’t willing to offer an estimate in support of your opinion, you don’t yet have an opinion.
  4. If you are sure you know how a leader performed during his or her tenure, and you don’t know how someone else would have performed in the same situation, you don’t actually know anything. It just feels like you do.

    Continue reading ‘A Voter’s Guide to Thinking’

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The Death of Real Business Cycle Theory

Wasn’t there this idea going around that we could explain business cycles through intertemporal substitution of labor supply? (Without the jargon, this means that people work less in times when they are less productive and more in times when they are more productive, so small shocks to productivity — due to random things like weather — tend to have much bigger effects on output.)

Well, it rained here on Wednesday and Thursday of last week, so my roofers spent most of the day pressed up against the garage door trying to stay dry and waiting for little breaks in the rain so they could get something done. On Saturday and Sunday, the weather was beautiful and they didn’t show up. Now it’s Monday and they’re back to work.

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