Broback's Blog

UPDATE 8/8/2011: Craig Newmark ran all 50 states and was kind enough to send me the results. Bottom line is a flimsy correlation 0.211, which is short of statistical significance. We also get an R-squared figure of .045 which is “not too impressive.” While it ‘aint zero, I gotta come up with something better than […]

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“Deserve” is a word I hear frequently from my progressive friends (but rarely/never from an economist). The word is usually conjured up as a straw man argument. “Those millionaires actually believe they deserve that money!” etc. Sometimes it’s used as Robert Reich did here as in the rich “don’t deserve it.” Even in unguarded moments, […]

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I’ve blogged several times about the Gallup Presidential Center site, where viewers can compare the approval levels of any/all post_WW2 presidents for the same point in their presidency. The parallels between Reagan and Obama are striking (both had to contend with really bad economies, and the resulting bad poll numbers) — yet their philosophies toward […]

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Just read an intriguing quote from Richard Morrill, a Seattle demographer and University of Washington geography professor emeritus. Because there is a generation who thinks this kind of stuff matters beyond all else — I encourage all to refer to his impressive academic credentials. Morrill has had stints at several “smart” organizations including Dartmouth, the […]

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…and buttresses my opinion that retirement may be best enjoyed later in life. There’s been a ton of discussion online of late regarding the lack of a decent ROI provided by many four-year degrees. This recently from the New York Times: Young graduates who majored in education and teaching or engineering were most likely to […]

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In his somewhat misleadingly titled post, my friend Steve breathlessly reports that a small survey of 299 college professors shows them to mostly vote Democratic. Whaaaa…? College professors mostly “D”s? Stop the presses(!?) While I suppose it’s mildly interesting those surveyed happen to be professors of Economics, they are hardly representative of the 15,000 economists […]

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I spend a lot of time banging away on the keyboard producing not-always-complimentary thoughts regarding our President’s economic policies. I’ve posted a bit about his approval rating as well. I would be remiss to not note a job well done by Obama’s intelligence gathering team and his Navy Seals for their execution of Osama Bin […]

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Nothing like a little perspective… World Bank economist Branko Milanovic provides us with evidence which appears to refute the romantic worldview that 1930’s dustbowl poverty is pervasive in the world’s most prosperous country. Some of us have been running this chart/distribution natively in our brains, glad to see the empirical analysis backs us up. I […]

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This common, romantic statement recently surfaced in a post by J. Bradford DeLong and aligns with my other favorite, “the government is us.” Apparently (unlike the University of Washington) they don’t teach Public Choice classes at Berkeley. If they did, DeLong would likely hold a more enlightened view thanks to the work of Tullock, Buchanan […]

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Apologies to Harold Ramis. I’ve written in the past about how Obama and Reagan’s approval ratings have compared at the same point in their presidencies. At the beginning of the year I showed how Obama had a comfortable lead, and I asked who wanted to bet me that Reagan would pass him. No takers. I […]

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