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"One of the presentations was by Ole Peters, from the Department of Mathematics at the Imperial College of London. His presentation compared time series analysis with ensemble analysis. Time series analysis takes one realization of a process and runs it over a very long time period and then looks at the distribution over the course of that run, whereas ensemble analysis creates many copies of the process and runs these over a shorter period, and then looks at the distribution of those results. Time series analysis is what you see over many years in one universe, ensemble analysis is what you see when you take many universes and integrate across them to look at the distributional properties.
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"This so-called exponential discounting -- reducing the value of something by a fixed percentage for each unit of time -- is standard practice in economics. It comes into play whenever people consider investing for long-term payoff, whether by building railroads for high-speed trains or reining in carbon emissions to preserve the climate. And it discounts the distant future especially drastically. This is why economists and others often squabble over the right annual percentage to use -- should it be 5 percent, 7 percent, 1 percent? Change this a little, and values change a lot. "
"According to construal level theory (CLT) [Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2003). Temporal construal. Physical Review, 110, 403–421], psychological representation of information depends on “psychological distance”, that is, on whether the relevant information refers to the near or distant psychological space. While CLT was originally developed to account for intertemporal choice, Trope and Liberman proposed that it could account for other dimensions of psychological distance such as social distance. We follow up on Trope and Liberman’s proposal and demonstrate how CLT accounts for a wide range of economic behaviors such as predicting the choices of others, advice giving, saving for retirement, and the failure to annuitize assets at retirement. By explaining how CLT can account for these various economic behaviors and suggesting novel predictions, we hope to stimulate researchers to investigate further the role of psychological distance in economic behavior."
"Speechifiers through the ages, including policy makers today, usually talk as if they want decisions to be made in far mode. We should try to live up to our ideals, they preach, at least regarding far-away decisions. But our reluctance to use contracts to enable more far mode control over our actions suggests that while we tend to talk as if we want more far mode control, we usually act to achieve more near mode control. "
Benabou shows how groupthink can spread even if individuals are rational. Let’s say your boss and a few of his associates get a damn fool idea ... What do you do?
You could speak up. But the costs of this might be high; even if don’t get sacked, you might be ostracised in various subtle ways, and even if you don’t you risk feeling foolish during the time - which could be many months - in which your warnings seem not to be vindicated. And the benefits of speaking up are small. You’ll not change corporate strategy or win friends in high places.
in list: Economic Crisis
David Sirota responds to Nate Silver post on rational v. radical progressives
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If American history teaches anything, it is that the "dangerous" epithet is the last and most banal refuge of those who seek to preserve the status quo. From Joe McCarthy slandering progressives as dangerous communists to George W. Bush saying anti-war activists were dangerous terrorist sympathizers, Estasblishmentarians have been painting their foes as threats to the nation for decades.
response to Nate Silver article on rational v. radical progressives
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This chart can be critiqued at two levels, from within its frame (the outcome-oriented vs. process-oriented pairing seems to be flipped, as can readily be seen by comparing that with the conversation vs. action-oriented pairing) and from outside its frame: Nate naturally takes an abstract analytic approach, whereas I introduced a somewhat similar distinction in terms of historical processes, contrasting the "progressivism" of the post-60s era (which named itself in opposition to the Cold War liberals who brought us Vietnam) with the "classical progressivism" of the early 20th Century, that was a modernizing, rationalizing philosophy that existed in tension with populism,
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This is further complicated by the fact that Nate's so-called "rational progressives" tend to deny that politics is a battle at all. Isn't that, after all, the whole point of Obama's bipartisan crusade? In contrast, I've been going on for quite some time about politics as a battle of ideas--an idea that comes from Gramsci, just the sort that Nate goes on to warn against:
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The first type of progressivism has its philosophical underpinnings in 18th Century, Enlightement-era thought. It believes that politics is a battle of ideas. It further believes that through the use of reason and the exchange of ideas, human society will tend to improve itself through scientific and technological innovation. Hence, it believes in progress, and for this reason lays claim to the term “progressive”. Because of its belief and optimism in the faculties of human reason, I refer to this philosophy as rational progressivism.
Rational progressivism tends to be trusting, within reason, of status quo political and economic institutions -- generally including the institution of capitalism. It tends to trust these institutions because it believes they are a manifestation of progress made by previous generations. -
The second type of progressivism is what I call radical progressivism. It represents, indeed, a much more radical and comprehensive critique of the status quo, which it tends to see as intrinsically corrupt. Its philosophical tradition originates in 19th Century thought -- and specifically, owes a great deal to the Marxist critique of capitalism and the Marxist theory of social change. It also finds inspiration in both the radical movement of the 1960s and the labor and social movements of late 19th and early 20th centuries (from which it borrows the label "progressive").
Radical progressivism is more clearly distinguishable from "conventional" liberalism and would generally be associated with the "far left" -- although on a handful of issues such as free trade, it may find common cause with the "radical" right. Radical progressivism embraces the tradition of populism and frequently adopts a discourse of the virtuous commoner organizing against the corrupt elite.
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