Archive for January, 2016
January 29, 2016
I’ve been reading a book called How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg
The author recounts a classic stock advisor scam that goes like this …
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One day, you receive an unsolicited newsletter from an investment advisor, containing a tip that a certain stock is due for a big rise.
A week passes, and just as the Investment advisor predicted, the stock goes up.
The next week, you get a new edition of the newsletter, and this time, the tip is about a stock whose price the adviser thinks is going to fall.
And indeed, the stock craters.
That’s good, but it gets even better …
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Posted in Math & arithmetic, Math & Quant Skills, Statistics - Probabilities | Leave a Comment »
January 25, 2016
First, a good news story.
After about 5 hours of snow blowing & shoveling (12 hours if you count yesterday, too), I finally got to the heap of snow left by the snow plows at the bottom of our driveway.
I hacked away at for quite awhile and then … you guessed it … the plow came back and deposited another a new gargantuan pile of snow, re-blocking the driveway
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Believe it or not, I was able to just laugh it off … and, the Lord rewarded me.
A couple of minutes later, the plow returned … the driver honked for me to back away … then proceeded to maneuver his plow like a sports car … totally removing the pile he had previously deposited.
He honked and waved.
I gave him a thumbs up … my faith in mankind temporarily restored.
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Of course, the incident reminded of my pick for the best commercial ever …
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Posted in Commercials, Snow | Leave a Comment »
January 22, 2016
Here’s a chart that caught my eye re: the value of a college degree …
Since the mid-60s, the real wages of a worker holding a bachelor’s degree have increased by about 40%.
The increase for workers with a graduate degree is even greater …. almost 90%
That sounds formidable, but even it is only about 1.3% per annum.
Source
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Dragging the numbers down further …
During the same period, real wages for high school grads only increased about 15% … about 1/4% per annum.
And, real wages for workers without a high school degree stayed flat … or arguably, fell.
Of course, those small percentage differences in growth rates have a dramatic compounding effect …
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Posted in Economics, Employment - Jobs, Wages | Leave a Comment »
January 21, 2016
The NY Times ran a piece by Harvard Prof Greg Mankiew summarizing his views re: high and increasing college tuitions.
One of Mankiw’s identified causes is “Baumol’s Cost Disease”
Many years ago, the economist William Baumol noted that for many services — haircuts as well as string quartet performances — productivity barely advances over time.
Yet as overall productivity rises in the economy, wages increase, so the cost of producing these services increases as well.
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Education is a case in point …
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Posted in Education - Academics, Productivity, Tuitions | Leave a Comment »
January 19, 2016
Starting up my strategy course and pitching some stuff from strategy guru Michael Porter.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I feel obligated to remind folks that the consulting outfit started by Porter – went bankrupt a couple of years ago and got acquired by Deloitte.
How ironic … an uber-strategist’s own company goes belly up.
Here’s the scoop …
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Posted in Consulting - Consultants, Porter, Michael | 3 Comments »
January 15, 2016
Remember the post-San Bernardino revelation that DHS doesn’t check social media before granting visas because applicants might think that their privacy is being violated.
Well, guess what.
Employers don’t feel the same need to tread lightly when vetting job applicants.
To that point. according to a 2015 Harris poll, a majority of employers (52%, to be precise) use social networking sites to screen job candidates during the hiring process. Source
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Specifically, what are employers looking for?
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Posted in Background checks, Employers, Social Media & Networking | Leave a Comment »
January 14, 2016
Last night’s Powerball payoff was $1.6 billion.
Even at Powerball’s ridiculous odds – 1 chance in 250 million of winning – that’s a good bet statistically, right?
Let’s go thru some math.
In econ-speak, the nominal expected value of the payoff is $1.6 divided by 250 million … about $6.
Since each PB ticket costs $2 … and $6 is way greater than $2 … that’s a good bet, right?
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As Mr. Miyagi would tell the Karate Kid: “Not so fast, Grasshopper”
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Posted in Behavioral Economics, Econ, Economics, Expected value, Powerball | 2 Comments »
January 13, 2016
According to the WSJ …
9 out of 10 business owners surveyed by the American Association Colleges and Universities said that recent college graduates as poorly prepared for the work force in such areas as critical thinking, communication and problem solving.
“Employers are say that they don’t care about all the knowledge you learned because it’s going to be out of date two minutes after you graduate … they care about whether you can continue to learn over time and solve complex problems.”
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Are employers being too critical?
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Posted in College life, Education - Academics | Leave a Comment »
January 11, 2016
The most recent former mayor of Philadelphia was named Michael Nutter.
His successor – the current Philly mayor – is James Kenney.
Channeling President Obama, Mayor Kenney hit the airwaves on Friday to declare that the shooting of a Philly cop “had nothing to do with being Muslim”.
click to view video
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Say, what?
The Mayor’s comments followed a police new conference announcing that the shooter said that he “had pledged allegiance to ISIS and that he targeted an officer because police defend laws that are contrary to the Quran.”
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And, that’s not all …
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Posted in Political correctness, Stop saying, War on Terror | 1 Comment »
January 8, 2016
Let’s end the week with something from the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up file …
There has been an epidemic of burglaries in DC.
The DC police chief chalks it a change in criminals’ organization structure:
“We used to say that violence was neighborhood-based … now criminal street gangs are organized around armed robberies.
They’re involved in a high number of robberies and they don’t just do it in one neighborhood.”
In MBA-speak, they used to be organized geographically … now they’re organizing functionally.
Hmmm.
Recognizing the problem, Mayor Muriel Bowser did the what mayors do ….
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Posted in Crime, Government & Politics, Laughs | 1 Comment »
January 7, 2016
Hot topic these days is how wages have remained stagnant for a long, long time … while productivity – think output per labor-hour has soared.
The political explanation: over-sized paychecks to greedy CEO’s have been draining the coffers.
That may be a part of the answer, but I bet it’s statistically insignificant.
I haven’t run the nums, but I bet that zeroing all CEO compensation wouldn’t budge the below chart.
In addition to greedy CEO’s, the batch of suspects usually includes: automation (shifting jobs to machines & computers), globalization (moving jobs to low wage areas), immigration (an influx of cheap labor).
In other words, the supply of labor and the demand for labor are out of whack.
OK, I get that.
But nobody seems to ever mention a pretty obvious bump in the supply of labor ….
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Posted in Economics, Labor force participation rate (LFPR), Wages | 3 Comments »
January 6, 2016
Over the past couple of weeks, there has been an endless series of media spots about some Pew Research data demonstrating, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the middle class is shrinking.
A common headline played off the rich are getting richer. theme:
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Pretty dire, right?
Not so fast.
Digging deeper into the Pew numbers paints a different picture…
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Posted in American Dream, Income & Wealth, Income Inequality, Pew Research | Leave a Comment »
January 5, 2016
The mainstream media loves to bash big business and praise big government, but guess what … the American people don’t seem to buy it.
Each year, Gallup asks which is the bigger future threat: big business, big government or big labor.
For 50 years, big government has won that horse race … usually by a pretty big margin.
But, post 9-11 and during the Obama honeymoon period, the government-as-a-threat numbers dipped a bit.
That improvement was short-lived.
Most recently, the numbers have hit historic highs with about 70% thinking that big government is the biggest threat.
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The breakdown by political party affiliation has a few surprises to offer …
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Posted in Gallup, Government Angst, Polls & Surveys | Leave a Comment »
The Homa Files 