thoughts of the day

thought of the day: in everything going for good enough, this seems to be the best combination

2nd thought of the day: we are all made of the same, we are all the same, just in different geographical-historical positions..but isn't it space and time an illusion? so, no difference at all, just illusion of it?

Environment, Economics and Ecology BSc

A unique degree exploring the relationship between economic and social pressures and their impacts upon our complex global environment

Economic development, population growth, poverty, and globalisation: all place increasing demands on our environment and its resources. 

Our unique environment, economics and ecology degree will equip you with the interdisciplinary knowledge and skills to understand and tackle these complex problems.

General

You will become an expert in environmental economics, policy and ecology. You will develop an interdisciplinary knowledge base that will enable you to understand and solve contemporary environmental problems

Year 1

The first year modules introduce you to the main ideas and concepts giving you the foundation to progress to more advanced material in later years. 

These modules are core.

• Introductory Economics 
• Introduction to Environment, Economics and Ecology
• Tools and Techniques for Studying the Environment 
• Environment, Development and Society 
• Ecological Principles for Studying the Environment
• Environment Field Project

Year 2

You will take a range of core modules to develop your knowledge of the environment, economics and ecology. You can then begin to tailor your degree to your own interests with a choice of optional modules.

Year 2 also includes a departmentally funded residential field trip to Tenerife.

Core modules:

• Economics of Resources and Environmental Policy
• Applied Economics for the Environment
• Applied Economics and Environmental Management
• Environmental Policy
• Residential Field Trip

Optional modules:

• Climate Change
• Ecosystem Processes
• Food, Space, Culture & Society
• Energy and the Environment
• Geographical Information Systems
• Environmental Ecology

Year 3

You specialise further in Year 3 with your independent research project, and a range of core and optional modules.

Core modules:

• Research Project
• Governance of Freshwater Resources
• Environmental Policy and Valuation
• Biodiversity and Society

Optional modules:

• Environmental Hazards
• Atmosphere and Ocean Science
• Environmental Politics
• Sustainable Development and Social Inclusion (Department of Social Policy and Social Work)

Or you can choose optional modules from a range of electives from other Departments.

http://www.york.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/bsc-environment-economics-ecology/

Noah Smith is wrong on the experimental turn in empirical economics

Angrist’s and Pischke’s “ideally controlled experiments” tell us with certainty what causes what effects — but only given the right “closures”. Making appropriate extrapolations from (ideal, accidental, natural or quasi) experiments to different settings, populations or target systems, is not easy. “It works there” is no evidence for “it will work here”. Causes deduced in an experimental setting still have to show that they come with an export-warrant to the target population/system. The causal background assumptions made have to be justified, and without licenses to export, the value of “rigorous” and “precise” methods — and ‘on-average-knowledge’ — is despairingly small.
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2015/06/15/noah-smith-is-wrong-on-the-experimental-turn-in-empirical-economics/

‘Sizeless science’ and the cult of significance testing

"A typical situation is the following. A scientist formulates a null hypothesis. By means of asignificance test, she tries to falsify it. The analysis leads to a p-value, which indicates how likely it would have been, if the null hypothesis were true, to obtain data at least as extreme as those she actually got. If the p-value is below a certain prespecified threshold (typically 0.01 or 0.05), the result is deemed statistically significant, which, although far from constituting a definite disproof of the null hypothesis, counts as evidence against it. (...) The Cult of Statistical Significance is written in an entertaining and polemical style. Sometimes the authors push their position a bit far, such as when they ask themselves: “If nullhypothesis significance testing is as idiotic as we and its other critics have so long believed, how on earth has it survived?” (p. 240). Granted, the single-minded focus on statistical significance that they label sizeless science is bad practice. Still, to throw out the use of significance tests would be a mistake, considering how often it is a crucial tool for concluding with confidence that what we see really is a pattern, as opposed to just noise. For a data set to provide reasonable evidence of an important deviation from the null hypothesis, we typically need both statistical and subject-matter significance."
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2015/03/10/sizeless-science-and-the-cult-of-significance-testing/

"How statistics skew research results (...) "Consider this statement – a change is statistically significant if we are unlikely to get the observed results, assuming the treatment under study actually has no effect. If you find that difficult to understand, you’re in good company. Statistical significance testing relies on weird backward logic, and there’s clear evidence that most students and many researchers don’t understand it.

Another problem is that statistical significance is very sensitive to how many people we observe. A small experiment studying only a few patients probably won’t identify even a large effect as statistically significant. On the other hand, a very large experiment is likely to label even a tiny, worthless effect as statistically significant. For this and other reasons, it’s far better to avoid statistical significance as a measure and use estimation, an alternative statistical approach that’s well known, but sadly, little used.

Estimation tells us things such as “the average reduction in pain was 1.2 ± 0.5 points on the 10-point pain scale” (1.2 plus or minus 0.5). That’s far more informative than any statement about significance. And we can interpret the 1.2 (the average improvement) in clinical terms — in terms of how patients actuallyfelt.

The “± 0.5” tells us the precision of our estimate. Instead of 1.2 ± 0.5 we could write 0.7 to 1.7. Such a range is called a confidence interval. The usual convention is to report 95% confidence intervals, which mean we can be 95% confident the interval includes the true average reduction in pain. That’s a highly informative summary of the findings."
https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/how-statistics-skew-research-results/

Example: my estimation method gives me an effect of 2jobs (effect=2); I'll test whether, if the null hypothesis (effect=0) were true, what would be the probability of me getting the wrong effect of 2jobs (because of wrong sampling)?; in other words, what is the probability of me getting a sample with means=2 when the true distribution has a means=0?; this gives me the p-value; if it is below 5% I assume that there is not many evidence against my estimation.

‘Why is Economics not an Evolutionary Science’ was written in 1898 and is a very significant paper. It called into question the premise that the physics of equilibrium thermodynamics is pertinent to analyzing economic systems; indeed it called into question the premise that economic systems do, indeed, tend to equilibrium. This is in contrast to his contemporary, Walras (1874), who expressed the view, in ‘Elements of Pure Economics’, that “…this pure theory of economics is a science which resembles the physico-mathematical sciences in every respect.” Veblen, in contrast, suggested that the only rational approach is to assume economies evolve; otherwise, he argues, we can describe the economy but have no effective theory of change and development.

Evolutionary Economics is the Only Rational Proposition Veblen starts by asserting that (all) modern sciences are evolutionary sciences (p. 374). Having given the intellectual high ground to evolution, he states that economics is “helplessly behind the times in not being evolutionary” (p. 373). From the perspective of 2010, this is fascinating.

http://emergentpublications.com/ECO/ECO_other/Issue_12_2_6_CP.pdf?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

Integration, Currency Unions, and Balance of Payments

• Peter Temin - MIT
• William Mitchell - CofFEE
• Richard Koo - Nomura
• Martin Wolf - Financial Times

Piketty - Uma nova teoria do capitalismo

“Não há qualquer processo natural e espontâneo que previna que forças desestabilizadoras e promotoras de desigualdades possam prevalecer permanentemente”
(...) aquilo que normalmente acontece é a taxa de retorno do capital (o que se consegue obter de lucro em percentagem do capital investido) ser mais alta do que a taxa de crescimento económico. E que quando isso acontece, não havendo qualquer intervenção exterior, o que temos é um aumento da desigualdade na distribuição de rendimentos. (...)
(...) o capitalismo precisa de encontrar soluções para evitar esta escalada da desigualdade e sugere-as.

A principal é um aumento muito acentuado da carga fiscal sobre os mais ricos. O livro sugere a aplicação de uma taxa de imposto de 80% sobre os rendimentos anuais acima de 500 mil dólares (cerca de 365 mil euros) e uma taxa de 10% sobre a riqueza, que torne mais difícil a perpetuação e aprofundamento das desigualdades. Para evitar fugas de capital de uns países para os outros, Piketty diz que a solução tinha de ser implementada à escala mundial.

SÉRGIO ANÍBAL
http://www.publico.pt/economia/noticia/anda-por-ai-um-novo-marx-1637139