Continuations

Last Uncertainty Wednesday, I wrote about how sample correlations are not meaningful under fat tails. Today I want to continue this line of argument in the specific context of the claimed relationship between country IQ and GDP. There is strong evidence that the distribution of GDP growth rates is in fact fat tailed. Why look at growth rates instead of absolute numbers? Because the whole argument has to be a dynamic one and not a static one. We can best see this from the following illustratio...

I will be participating in an ad:tech panel this afternoon with the title “Digital Economy 2010: A Robust Recovery or Another Year of Trench Warfare?" I have to admit that I am not entirely sure what that means, but in a prep call with moderator Mark Mahaney we came up with some fun questions. The one that is most interesting is whether we may be facing a long-term decline in the percentage of GDP that is spent on advertising. I am pretty sure that I saw a statistic to the effect that adverti...

The secular stagnation discussion has a bad title and sounds wonkish but is extremely important – it is about nothing short of understanding what the economy is and should be about. If you want a lot of detail you can read through Marc Andreessen’s epic secular stagnation tweet storm and all the great source material that he links to. At the heart of the secular stagnation discussion is the idea that somehow the economy is growing more slowly than it should. See for instance the following quo...