prior probability

Celia Cruz was born on this day in 1925 in Havana. ¡Libertad para mi Cuba!

Hat tip: @kottke

We’ve heard of Johannes Haushofer’s iconic “CV of failures“, but Professor Haushofer’s anti-CV has got nothing on Caitlin Kirby’s skirt consisting of academic rejection letters (pictured below). Kirby, a doctoral candidate at Michigan State University, defended her dissertation while wearing a skirt made of 17 rejection letters–rejections from grants, scholarly journals, and academic conferences–that she had received during the course of her graduate studies:

To make this unconventional skirt, Kirby printed out 17 rejection letters and folded each one into a fan, connecting them in rows until they resembled a skirt. According to this report, Kirby still had many rejection letters left over. Good for her! Hat tip: @pickover.

By now, you have probably heard of Greta Thunberg, the world-famous Swedish teenage climate-change activist who has urged immediate action to address the risks posed by man-made climate change. That’s putting it mildly; in the words of Ms Thunberg, “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” Although Ms Thunberg is no doubt a very eloquent speaker, her stern and strident call for action suffers from a fundamental flaw: one must also consider the benefits–not just the costs–of continued economic growth. Climate activists like Ms Thunberg do a great job of pointing out the environment costs of economic growth, but we must not blind ourselves to the benefits of growth nor ignore the costs of economic decline. A further irony is that curtailing the world’s continued economic growth will make it less likely that we will find a solution to climate change! To sum up, fanaticism in defense of the environment is a vice.

Check out Kay Hymowitz’s excellent review of Daniel Markovits’ new book (pictured below), which is titled The Meritocracy Trap (Penguin, 2019). Here is one revealing excerpt from her review of Markovits’s book: “As economist (yes, Harvard-educated) Tyler Cowen has quipped: ‘The best critiques of the meritocracy have come from those with extreme merit.’ I’ll come back to this puzzle later, for it’s one that Markovits’s book, like others in the genre, doesn’t fully explore.”

Check out the entire set of “machine learning flash cards” here. They were created by data scientist Chris Albon (@chrisalbon).

In anticipation of today’s announcement of “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,” check out this fascinating survey essay by Allen R. Sanderson and John J. Siegfried titled “The Nobel Prize in Economics Turns 50,” which was published in American Economist, Vol. 64, No. 2 (2019), pp. 167–182, and is available here. In the words of Sanderson and Siegfried, “as a well-known quip has it, economics is the only field in which two people can share a Nobel Prize for saying opposing things,” such as the 1972 econ Nobel awarded to Gunnar Myrdal and F. A. Hayek or the 2013 prize awarded to Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller. Also, check out this critique of the other Nobel prizes. In any case, no person born in Africa, Latin America, or Oceania has ever won a Nobel prize in economics. Hat tip: Timothy Taylor.

Tampa, Florida is a case study of the decline of streetcars and the corresponding rise of massive roadways in North American cities. In 1920, for example, Tampa had an elaborate streetcar system consisting of 13 lines owned and operated by the Tampa Electric Co. Today, Tampa is a veritable “hellscape of highways,” a traffic-congested city bisected by three intrusive interstate expressways (4, 75, and 275) as well as an elevated toll road, while only one streetcar line is left up and running. To visualize this radical difference, compare the top map of modern-day Tampa with the bottom map of Tampa circa 1920. (Hat tip: Jake Berman, u/fiftythreestudio.) In addition, check out Jake Berman’s website titled “The Lost Subways of North America.”