[FRIAM] one adage a day.

thompnickson2 at gmail.com thompnickson2 at gmail.com
Wed Dec 9 18:25:38 EST 2020


In my present state, I have just enough energy to claw myself to my computer, and write a single pithy sentence.  I so I think I will take up adage-writing.  Need HTML for best presentation:  Here’s the adage-of-the-day:

 

Never explain yourself: you don’t know a damn thing about yourself, and everybody Else already knows more than they want to know.  

 

Back to the couch, 

 

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, December 9, 2020 7:25 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] More on social mobility

 

To continue to try to add raw material to the discussion that EricC took up on this when I made some overly-simple claims earlier, here is a Brookings summary article on work by Raj Chetty (cited in the earlier thread as well):

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2018/01/11/raj-chetty-in-14-charts-big-findings-on-opportunity-and-mobility-we-should-know/

A thing I find striking in Chetty’s output is how many compilations he can produce that make statistical analysis superfluous.  There are data that are so close to a perfect line that there is little for a regression to do, or that are so consistent with time-constancy that there is no suggestion of a signal to look for other than stasis.  A lot of it seems to come from finding good conditions on which to bin data, though the bin categories do not seem highly artificial or cherry-picked, to me.

 

I got to the above from an article by Edsall that, again, seems to me well-sourced:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/opinion/trump-social-status-resentment.html

 

So probably necessary to refuse to speak in sound-bites about income or wealth mobility, and to use more complete sentences that refer to specific conditions, even though if one has that granularity, there are interpretations of the sound-bite that mobility has been badly impaired that still seem correct, to me.

 

EricS

 

 

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