Zoe Heller’s book reviews are skillful, gleeful demolitions, and fun to read. Hence the title of this post, which has no other connection to Heller. This artilce by Afiya Shehrbano comes close to Heller’s standard, and does so in the difficult territory of polygamy, provoked into action by Jemima Khan’s recent BBC program.
You have to love that title, which comes from a paper by Christopher Ferguson and Moritz Heene, which the excellent Andrew Gelman parses, and passes on to the rest of us. Any field that uses statistics is susceptible to publication bias (i.e., not publishing statistical analyses that find “no effect”). It is notorious in pharmaceutical research, where money talks shouts. I am guessing that the reason psychology gets a particularly bad reputation for publication bias, compared with other social sciences, is that it deals with a lot of small experimental data sets – so you really do have a situation where nearly identical experiments can be run twenty times by different researchers, and the one that gets a significant effect gets published. Statistical work in economics and political science tends to keep re-using a small number of mostly public data sets, so the problems are different.
Richard Murphy reports that the OECD’s deliberations on [tax] base erosion and profit-shifting (BEPS) are showing familiar signs of going nowhere. He points to the disproportionate emphasis given to the views of “business” stakeholders – I put business in scare quotes because I doubt that SMEs have much input here, this is going to be mostly the same multi-national businesses who are evading tax in the first place – read the report, and correct me if I’m wrong. So, if you hold a lot of shares in companies that record all their profits in places where they don’t have to pay tax, you can take some comfort. Otherwise, prepare for further austerity.
In Germany much more than in the UK, according to Simona Iammarino.
Image courtesy of Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber.
Research papers that justify today’s austerity policies are scarce, and the first thing economists teach is that scarcity creates market value. The two big jewels in the small crown of austerity justification have been Continue reading
… but Microsoft and Apple did both got their start by copying.
Exxon Hates Your Children – what a name for a website, for a campaign. Nice because it is so obviously true while being literally wrong simply because the corporation has no emotions. If an individual were doing what Exxon does, we would see their actions as hateful and hold them up as objects of hate in return – as indeed we do with the Koch brothers or Gina Rinehart. With Exxon and its ilk you get just a bunch of corporate cogs, a machine of impersonal hatred, banal evil…
A deal among EU states, apparently overcoming strong opposition from the oil industry.
This is very good news for two reasons.
It’s no secret that proceeds from the sale of oil, timber, etc, often wind up in the pockets (and offshore bank accounts) of public officials around the world. It would be hard to add up the damage this does Continue reading
Glenda Jackson’s stirring eh, tribute, to the recently deceased Margaret Thatcher. As you’ll learn at the finish, “nothing unparliamentary has occurred here”.
Also note: on news of Thatcher’s death, Ding Dong the Witch is Dead rocketed to number one in iTunes download chart. Normally this would lead to BBC Radio One (the public broadcaster’s pop music channel) putting it at the culmination of its Sunday chart countdown, but precedent may be broken in this case.
How can we explain all this giddy disrespect for the deceased?
Continue reading
A journal’s editorial board resigns en masse over open access charges. Seems Taylor & Francis wanted $2,995 for an author to make an article open access. Continue reading
Frederick Guy 