About the Blog

I shall post videos, graphs, news stories, and other material. We shall use some of this material in class, and you may review the rest at your convenience. I encourage you to use the blog in these ways:

--To post questions or comments about the readings before we discuss them in class;
--To follow up on class discussions with additional comments or questions.
--To post relevant news items or videos.

There are only two major limitations: no coarse language, and no derogatory comments about people at the Claremont Colleges. This blog is on the open Internet, so post nothing that you would not want a potential employer to see.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Data Questions in the News

On your first paper, several of you wrote about college sexual-assault data.  You scooped this US News article (on the AEI website).

In a few weeks, we shall look at chapter 8 of Maier and Imazeki, which considers the "poverty line" that economist Mollie Orshansky devised 50 years ago.  At The Los Angeles Times, John Schwarz writes:
An honest poverty line would clarify how many Americans are poor and yet ineligible for assistance that would allow them to afford the very basics that the assistance programs were intended to provide. It would show that a far higher proportion of the poor than politicians or the public are aware of are hard workers; many millions of them are already in year-round full-time jobs. And perhaps most important, the large numbers of the poor, now and in relation to the past, would help us understand the serious harm inflicted on demand in the economy, which in turn limits business and contributes significantly to the economy's sluggish growth.
Both for the sake of simple justice and to stop fooling ourselves, and causing great harm to the economy, we should celebrate the 50th anniversary of Mollie Orshansky's calculation by doing it right in 2013.

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