[Part of the Soviet Union series] In this post, I cover food and nutrition in the Soviet Union. What were the Soviets eating? ... It's complicated (I) The Paradox I begin with one chart: (This post deals with the post-1960 period) So the Soviets were seemingly eating more calories than the Americans right almost until the end of the Soviet Union. Given that some people thought of the Soviet Union as a place stricken with famines and widespread queuing, this may look surprising. (Actually, the last famine i…

Cohen's d is one of the most popular measures of effect size out there. It happens sometimes that Cohen's d is not accurately translated into our intuitions of how relevant soething is. Here I will explain it with a few charts. Cohen's d measures effect size, which a standarised measure of the difference between two distributions. In the case of Cohen's d, That's the difference between two distribution's means, over a pooled standard deviation, and it looks like this: Let's look at some examples. First, he…

Many people do not understand what capitalists do within capitalism. Some suggest they ought to be removed, as they are just parasites who tax the productive elements of society (e.g. workers) (I) It is said, for example, that capital income (rents, interest, dividends, capital gains) does not come from producing anything, but from owning. It's not from matching capital with labor and such, because it's entrepreneurs who do that. To a point, it would be workers (CEOs, HRs, etc) too. Elon Musk, or Amancio Or…

[Part of the Soviet Union series] I wanted to do a longer post on the fall of the USSR, and that will appear here at some point, but I wanted to do a quick post now with some minor points. First, a chart of the fall, measured from peak GDP, That's 13 years to recover. Some communists take this to mean.. ahá! This proves that communism works, as GDPpc falled badly when the transition to capitalism happened. Here's the chart for the years prior to the fall: So communism was zooming along, then a transition …

Many economists say we are living through a Great Stagnation. The term, was made famous by Tyler Cowen'sbook of the same name and the latest iteration is, of course, Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth. But they usually look at economic factors like Total Factor Productivity (TFP) or GDP per hour worked. By these measures, we are living through a stagnant period. Some expected that the stagnation would go away once we properly accounted for the Internet and similar hard to account for innov…

Robin Hanson has a recent post in his blog that is best summarised by his tweet: https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/723905628004073473 Do read the full post, though. Here, I argue that there are good reasons to reject the argument, even if we grant Hanson his view on personal identity. From his drawing, I don't get exactly what he means. (Are the dots a period of amnesia? Of 'mind jump'?) So I redrew them to present the cases better: So the Case A is you going to a party, and then forgetting about it.(…