The advance announcement (the rough draft) of the real GDP growth rate for the 4th quarter of 2011 came out this morning, at an annualized rate of 2.8%.
How should we interpret this number?
How about with a letter grade?
If we assign letter grades “on a curve” this means assuming that they follow a normal distribution. When doing this, above the mean is a “B” in the 50th through 83rd percentiles, and below the mean in the 17th through 49th percentiles is a “C”, with other letter grades further out in the tails. Done this way, the range for a “C” is 1.6% to 3.5%, putting 4th quarter growth in the top half of the “C’s”.
But … you may have noticed that school is not like that in real life: grade inflation has made the idea that a “C” is “average” quaint at best, and as near as I can figure offensive to students with more self-esteem than ability.
Anyway, several years ago I obtained the grade distribution for all grades assigned at SUU for an entire semester. On this scale, the A’s extend much lower than the 84th percentile, and the B’s much lower than the 50th percentile. In fact, the range for a “B” for real GDP growth, if they are assigned in the same proportion as grades at SUU is 1.6% to 3.2%, making 4th quarter growth a high “B”.
Unfortunately, for the lower 48, the boring answer is always in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Via Newmark’s Door.
… Often when I encounter the “market failure” argument I make a quick riposte of “markets don’t fail, they fail to exist”, which is the Coase/transactions cost response. Transactions costs interfere with the ability of parties to find mutually beneficial trades, thus impeding optimal resource allocation and the creation of maximum gains from trade. Transactions costs lead to missing markets, as in the case of environmental pollution and other common-pool resource situations.
Via Cold Spring Shops.
Regarding the landslide that closed a local highway:
If we have to wait until the 4th of July to get traffic through then that's half of our tourist season. It would be an economical disaster.
Isn’t an economical disaster the best kind to have??
BTW: The article had a great new picture:
The conclusion of a new study from the CDC published in PLoS One is that Morgellons is a mental rather than a physical illness.
Morgellons is a condition in which sufferers claim itchy, non-human, fibers grow from their skin.
The CDC concluded that the fibers were neither the sign of an infectious agent or of a broader environmental poison. Instead, they seem to be clothing fibers that are merely stuck to the skin … basically lint.
It isn’t a very comforting diagnosis, but the CDC also reported that about half of the one in 25,000 people with Morgellons also had evidence of psychiatric illness.
I first posted about Morgellons 6 of 7 years ago … but I can’t put my hands on the URL at this time.
Via Newmark’s Door:
What did the infamous top 1% major in?
According to the Census Bureau’s 2010 American Community Survey, the majors that give you the best chance of reaching the 1 percent are pre-med, economics, biochemistry, zoology and, yes, biology, in that order.
Not bad: I teach economics, and the vXwife teaches biology (and specializes in anatomy and physiology required for pre-meds).
The 20 biggest logo design fails, from Demilked. Here’s a sample:
Makes you wonder if the artists get enough second opinions about their work.
Here’s a cute longread about fungi that eat ethanol: a distillery worries about its neighbors, who’ve complained about a fungus infestation, and an investigator finds out what the fungi are eating.
Via Cold Spring Shops.
I had not heard this story:
… in the 1990s … Deborah Senn, the Washington State Insurance Commissioner, when she publicly put the word out that insurance agents were not allowed to say that any of the rate increases of that time were due to the laws and regulations recently created in the state.
Yet another bureaucrat with control issues. She needed to take a pill – no doubt provided at low out-of-pocket cost by public healthcare.