Newt’s Not the News: Prediction Markets Double Rick Perry’s Chances for GOP Nomination
OK, so Newt Gingrich’s senior staff have quit. But Newt’s not the news. At least according to the political prediction markets. The real news is that Texas Governor Rick Perry is likely to enter the Republican nomination race. The connection, of course, is that many of the staffers who quit have close ties to Governor Perry.
The figure below tells the story. (Click inside for graph). Since yesterday’s announcement, you can see the markets have re-evaluated Perry’s chances of winning the nomination from around 5%, up to 11%. There’s a tip here for newsgatherers: Focus on the details, and you’ll notice that the Perry’s prediction market rally began just after 11am. But the story broke three hours later, just before 3pm. Read More »
A Grain of Salt
I’m back to inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent researches.
Jamie asked:
‘Take it with a grain of salt’ is one I always have trouble with – do you know the origin?
The Yale Book of Quotations has the following entry:
Read More »“Addito salis grano
With the addition of a grain of salt.Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis bk. 23, sec. 149. Usually quoted as ‘Cum grano salis’ (with a grain of salt). The reference is to salt being added to Pompey’s antidote to poison.”
Why Ranking Charities by Administrative Expenses is a Bad Idea
How does one know whether a charitable donation will make an impact? For this we need a simple formula (easy to write, hard to apply):
Idea X Implementation = Bang for your buck
When I give talks about aid effectiveness, people often comment that they too think this is important. And to make sure they are supporting good charities, they always hone in on the charities’ finances to see how much goes to administrative and fundraising expenses. Charity Navigator, for example, scrubs these numbers and doles out stars to charities that don’t spend “too” much on operations.
Given the title of my book with Jacob Appel, More Than Good Intentions, many assume that they are speaking my language, and that I admire such focus on those numbers too.
But I do not. Those numbers do not tell you what is really happening. Read More »
Google Makes a Bad Economist
I love Google. But it’s not a very good economist. Type “unemployment rate,” and here’s what it yields:
The first of these links is from Google, and it tells you that the unemployment rate is 8.7%. The second is to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tells you that it is 9.1%.
Technically, both are correct. But you are better off not relying on the Google number. You see most economic discourse is about seasonally-adjusted data—the unemployment rate adjusted to take account of the usual seasonal ups and downs. But Google links instead to the non-seasonally-adjusted data, which virtually no one pays attention to. And this is why its little graph wiggles up and down so much. Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 