Daily Data Dump - Monday

One last week of summer. Models tell us more than hindsight. Tim Harford, the author of The Logic of Life, defends economics and modeling against a critique of a historian-turned-journalist. My main problem with economists isn't that the field is formalized and expresses itself in equations. Rather, it's the tendency to speak with greater force of authority as to the nature of the world than they truly have insight of. A modest amount of knowledge over and above plain common sense is greatly useful, but confusing a modest amount of knowledge for a great amount of understanding is a recipe for disaster (this is clearly evident in the engineering analogy which Harford elaborates upon). Don't Believe the Hype About Aborigines, Yiddish, or Ebonics. I'm particularly interested in the section on Guy Deutscher's new book, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. It seems that the ...