Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
Some anon sent me this paper, asked if there was a rebuttal somewhere. It’s a well cited economics paper, 1248 citations on Google Scholar. I wasn’t familiar with it, but reading it over, I see some things comment on. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2002). The inheritance of inequality. Journal of economic Perspectives, 16(3), 3-30….
Continue ReadingNot intended as a proper book review. I didn’t read this book yet. Back in 2019, Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith published a serious comic book Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. It does what it says, argues mostly without left-wing shame tactics for the billion dollar bills on the street. Well, I…
Continue ReadingThe companion video for the paper, published back in December
Continue ReadingPrior posts touching on Gregory Clark: What does money buy? Selected readings from lottery studies, Thinking about intergenerational stability of socioeconomic status Updated 2020-02-23: Actually, cancellation comes for Gregory Clark too, Steve Sailer has the story write-up: Economic Historian Gregory Clark’s Lecture on “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls” Is Postponed for Crimethink Most people…
Continue ReadingSometimes I take the time to read a ‘normal’ book. This was one of them, prompted by some friends who wanted my opinion. The best thing I can say about this book is that it is short. It’s rather boring. It consists mostly of vague predictions, mostly hedged in the extreme, about the future. It’s…
Continue ReadingKirkegaard, E. O. W., & Karlin, A. (2020). National Intelligence Is More Important for Explaining Country Well-Being than Time Preference and Other Measured Non-Cognitive Traits. Mankind Quarterly, 61(2). https://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2020.61.2.11 Patient people fare better in life than impatient people. Based on this and on economic models, many economists have claimed that more patient countries should fare…
Continue ReadingIn science, we are generally mostly interested in causal relationships because these are the ones that matter. Causality is generally defined in terms of counter-factuals: if things were such and such, or had been such and such, things would be such and such (instead). One can formalize this reasoning with the do-operator and related methods…
Continue ReadingThere is a list that’s floating around (meaning: copy pasted without sources), and it’s also got no exact sources, so it’s unclear how legit it is. So I did some searching to confirm, and this blogpost can then be the new reference post. I noted that some of the titles were wrong, sometimes they change…
Continue ReadingSee prior post on national IQs and who you can’t cite. Economists and intelligence researchers don’t generally talk: Test scores, on the other hand, offer direct measures of a variety of more-or-less specific abilities and, when the tests in question are well-constructed, objective, standardized tests, they are fairly precise measures that can be kept quite…
Continue ReadingSometimes when I complain about the horrible state of the art in social science, and especially in human resource management, senior colleagues tell me that it’s near impossible to convince companies to do proper large randomized trials. Perhaps, but if that’s how science needs to get done, then work on convincing them. Fortunately, there are…
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