Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

I don't actually think that 'otherwise conflicted' group is especially large in 2013. even 'moderates' approach these things looking for support for their preconceived opinions.

I mean 'serious moderate people rly care about the deficit'...that's almost how they self-define themselves

you can make the argument that small battles are part of the war but timing is everything

nobody on the margins cares about this

this issue is nice fodder but it's not like it's a solid debunking of some widely held belief. It's a pebble in the dam.

Krugman thinks it's both a big deal and not: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel-depression.html?hp

So will toppling Reinhart-Rogoff from its pedestal change anything? I’d like to think so. But I predict that the usual suspects will just find another dubious piece of economic analysis to canonize, and the depression will go on and on.

Just the talking point of the mistake makes a nice mini-catalyst to reenergize the anti-austerity side imo. With a lot of close political issues, just sewing confusion and malaise on your opponent's side gives you enough of an advantage to get something done.

nothing is going to get done because we don't control congress

this is just a win for some bloggers

I mean I'm cool w/ that I read blogs

small victories are generous doses of confirmation bias

so was the study before it was debunked

my supervisor & i found a bunch of these types of errors when we were replicating results last spring. we kind of just shrugged & moved on tho, guess i missed my chance

the story here i think is that excel makes it easy to screw up and people should use more trustworthy systems for crunching publishable numbers.

I vote mechanical pencils and graph paper

fwiw this has been front page of bbc news for the past couple of days (with an "austerity debunked" rather than "lol excel" headline)

lol excel headline

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/17/rogoff-reinhart-excel-errors/

man what kind of fucking scientist uses excel to crunch numbers, a social scientist, that's what kind

totally widespread in econ :-(

real science has too many numbers for excel.

well most of the time if an econ model is too complicated for excel its gonna be mostly nonsense for other reasons

there are many things you can do in excel that you never ever should.

"well most of the time if an econ model is too complicated for excel its gonna be mostly nonsense for other reasons"

lol

i've seen things. horrible things that no man should ever have to see. and done things too. i tell myself i was just following instructions, but sometimes, at night, i wake up screaming and screaming and i couldn't tell you why.

preach it brother paul

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/opinion/krugman-the-jobless-trap.html?ref=paulkrugman&_r=1&

there are many things you can do in excel that you never ever should.

lol indeed ... like pivots.

http://www.gamesexcel.com/games-excel-super-mario-bros.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ6Q224UPkc

this one is great but only shows up for me in 240p

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_whSnPErl7c

It's all Bush's fault

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/04/23/a-rise-in-wealth-for-the-wealthydeclines-for-the-lower-93/

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/04/SDT-2013-04-wealth-recovery-0-1.png

it's high time we cut taxes on the wealthy again

why 93%/$836,033 as a cutoff, out of curiosity?

oh nm sry:

(The focus in this report on the upper 7% of households rather than some other share of high wealth households reflects the limits of the tabulations published by the Census Bureau. The boundaries of its wealth categories dictated the split of households analyzed in this report.)

if that chart doesn't spur a new round of tax raising, then you people need to abandon hope for this administration

It's almost as if when bush left office all the laws that hugely favored the wealthy signed by him and the last x presidents stayed in effect.

you know, you people

DJIA has doubled since then. FYI.

well the start date kinda matters there

starting it in 1981 would be really interesting too

Even more interesting at 1975

THE UNDERGROUND RECOVERY!
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2013/04/29/130429ta_talk_surowiecki?currentPage=all

It’s a huge number: if the government managed to collect taxes on all that income, the deficit would be trivial. This unreported income is being earned, for the most part, not by drug dealers or Mob bosses but by tens of millions of people with run-of-the-mill jobs—nannies, barbers, Web-site designers, and construction workers—who are getting paid off the books.

a lot of those people would wind up paying little or no federal income tax anyway (although they would certainly pay payroll taxes), so I think the deficit assumption here is a bit off

don weiner sometimes it seems like you believe you have been sent here to troll us into seeing the light, but that if we don't soon see the error of our ways, you will forlornly return to your home planet

Off-the-books activity also helps explain a mystery about the current economy: even though the percentage of Americans officially working has dropped dramatically, and even though household income is still well below what it was in 2007, personal consumption is higher than it was before the recession, and retail sales have been growing briskly (despite a dip in March). Bernard Baumohl, an economist at the Economic Outlook Group, estimates that, based on historical patterns, current retail sales are actually what you’d expect if the unemployment rate were around five or six per cent, rather than the 7.6 per cent we’re stuck with.

we're all undocumented now

don weiner sometimes it seems like you believe you have been sent here to troll us into seeing the light, but that if we don't soon see the error of our ways, you will forlornly return to your home planet

It's been 11 or 12 years. I must be very stubborn. Or very stupid. Likely both!

Being a moderate republican is a very cold and lonely place these days. We should allow don to come in and warm himself by the genial fire that is ilx. Like any moderate, his trolling is very pastel colored.

i'm curious what don would do about income inequality

Like any moderate, his trolling is very pastel colored.

I voted for Obama twice, so I must be mellowing with age.

I'm not bothered much by income inequality per se; I'm more bothered at how the system is gamed. Maybe that's the same thing. I don't think raising taxes will control income inequality very much or even change it much. Is there an effective system where the rich don't get richer?

heavily subsidizing higher education worked pretty well in the post-WWII years

the united federation of planets