and it only gets worse…

“David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, recently summed up the “Trumpian world-view” writing, “Trump takes every relationship that has historically been based on affection, loyalty, trust and reciprocity and turned it into a relationship based on competition, self-interest, suspicion and efforts to establish dominance.” NYT, June 14

“Donald Trump has dismissed concerns about the widely condemned human rights record of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, praising him as a “tough guy”, a “smart guy” and a “great negotiator”.” The Guardian, June 14

“Clinics that call themselves crisis pregnancy centers are not obliged to tell women when state aid may be available to obtain an abortion, according to a US supreme court ruling that represents a blow to pro-choice groups (…) All three of the court’s female members dissented.” The Guardian, June 27

“A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the (…) United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly. Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes. Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations. The intensity of the administration’s opposition to the breast-feeding resolution stunned public health officials and foreign diplomats, who described it as a marked contrast to the Obama administration.” NYT, July 8

“President Trump on Tuesday pardoned a pair of Oregon cattle ranchers who had been serving out sentences for arson on federal land (…) The pardons undo an Obama administration appeal to impose longer sentences for the Hammonds and show that, at least in this case, the Trump administration is siding with ranchers in the battle over federal lands.” NYT, July 10

“President Trump stood next to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday and publicly challenged the conclusion of his own intelligence (…) “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant,” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said in a statement. “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” ” NYT, July 16

“The Interior Department on Thursday proposed the most sweeping set of changes in decades to the Endangered Species Act, the law that brought the bald eagle and the Yellowstone grizzly bear back from the edge of extinction but which Republicans say is cumbersome and restricts economic development.” NYT, July 20

and it only gets worse…

“Donald Trump’s attacks on the press are “out of control” and damaging “the civic life and debate of the country”, the editor of the New York Times said on Sunday. Dean Baquet was responding to a tweet in which the president attacked his main rival. “The Washington Post is far more fiction than fact,” Trump wrote. `Story after story is made up garbage – more like a poorly written novel than good reporting. Always quoting sources (not names), many of which don’t exist.’ ” The Guardian, April 8

“The Trump administration is expected to announce today a rule that would strip federal funding from clinics that provide abortions or refer patients to places that do. The rule, a return to a Reagan-era policy, is a victory for social conservatives. It’s also a jab at Planned Parenthood, which serves 41 percent of women who receive federally funded family planning services.2  NYT, May 18

“Donald Trump pulled the US out of the landmark nuclear deal with Tehran on Tuesday, moving to re-impose sanctions on Iran and defying pleas from close allies who had called for the agreement to be preserved. The decision marks a bitter defeat for America’s European allies, who have spent months beseeching Mr Trump to stay in a deal that he has denounced as “insane”. Critics warned it would further endanger stability in the Middle East. ” FT, May 8

“Donald Trump has slammed the gun laws of major US allies, claiming foreign countries could better protect their citizens – and possibly stop terrorist attacks – by loosening their gun control laws. In a speech to the NRA Leadership Forum, Mr Trump sought to reassure members of the US’s largest gun rights lobbying group of his support for the Second Amendment, after briefly expressing support for gun control measures in the wake of a school shooting in Florida.” The Independent, May 5

 

another terrible graph [about Neanderthalia]

Another terrible graph that misses by several orders of magnitude the terrible singularity of the United States in terms of homicides by firearms. And that does not include either the other [dove]tail, like the United Kingdom (0.7 per million) and Japan (0.1 per million).

weakonomics

Believe it or not, I had never read Freakonomics..! Therefore, when I saw the book on sale for a negligible price in Dehli Airport—great airport by the way!—, I went for it. Having now read a fair chunk of the book (or unfair chunk, see below!) within two days (during my metro rides), I am rather disappointed by the content and thus puzzled by the then-craze about the book. (Andrew just loved it!) Freakonomics is certainly a well-designed product from a salesman perspective and it thus reads pleasantly enough, but I find it remains at too much of a superficial level. In addition, it sometimes sounds as if the authors have a hidden agenda (more later)! (Now, of course, my reaction of the book is completely irrelevant as it comes very late after the publication in 2005. So, reader,  stop here if you do not want to waste time any further!)

“…if the death penalty were assessed to anyone carrying an illegal gun, and if the penalty were actually enforced, gun crimes would surely plunge.” (p.118)

To wit, the way the book is written sounds much more journalistic than academic: the authors take an economic study or paper about an unusual (freakish) topic and weave a nice story around it, always with the intent of showing “conventional wisdom” is wrong. Since this is a general public book, there is no theory behind the story and it all seems to flow from “common sense”: yes, most drug dealers do not earn enough to make a living because the corporate structure of the drug economy is highly hierarchical and as highly biased towards higher levels. The only foray into theory, namely the discussion about factors impacting kids success rate at school, casts doubts about regression and the distinction between causation and correlation is never truly investigated (even though the mantra correlation is not causation is found therein often enough!). Moreover, by resorting to the journalistic trick of making everything very personal (so-and-so went to drug dealer housing projects for six years, so-and-so decided to re-analyse the school records in Chicago, &tc.), the authors actually lower the credentials of their theories. If so-and-so found this effect, maybe there is another or an hundred others so-and-so going the opposite way! But those others are not mentioned as the book retains this flatland and Unitarian perspective… And the conclusions are anti-climactic: when so-and-so gets hold of the ledgers of a crack dealing gang, the description stops at reporting the hierarchical structure of the organisation and the revenues of the different levels. No major theory appears to be tested. At least within the book.

“Given the number of handguns in the United States (…), the probability that a particular gun was used to kill someone that year is 1 in 10,000. The typical gun buyback yields fewer than 1,000 guns—which translates into an expectation of less than one-tenth of one homicide per buyback.” (p.121)

The above quote puzzled me for a while, until I formalised the experiment as an hypergeometric draw of 1000 guns from a population of almost 300 millions guns, out of which more than 10,000 are crime guns. (The probability that a particular gun is used for a crime is then 1 in 30,000.) And the probability to draw at least one of those guns in one buyback is then approximately 0.03. But this seems to miss the other side of the equation, namely the worth of a human life. (Not that I believe that gun buybacks are particularly effective since, as noted by the authors, they mostly attract “heirldom or junk” (p.121).)

A minor disappointment was to stumble upon the conclusion of the book in…its very middle! I first thought I was confused and this was only the conclusion to a section but no, the second half of the book as I bought it was made of extracts from the authors’ column in the New York Time and of their blog, getting close to a swindle in my opinion! Or at least being the unfair chunk mentioned above. I also find annoying (and so does Andrew!) this insistence upon being rogue economists, as advertised on the front cover of the book, as the authors have shown themselves to be very efficient economists by turning the freakonomics idea into a whole business: books, films, videos, lectures, &tc. Nothing to complain about, except for the rogue label. (Note that they should have registered the franchise as well, given the subsequent profusion of -omics books and sites, from the fantastic Freakonometrics blog of my former colleague Arthur Charpentier, to Soccernomics I recently bought for my son…)