7 November 09 (pm)

Workout notes: maybe a walk after the game I am watching. Right now Navy leads Notre Dame 14-0 early in the 3′rd quarter and are running the ball very well. They are picking up first downs and controlling the ball.

Dave Quigg drove us to Springfield for the conference; Dave gave a talk on branched processes. The main talk was on astronomy and the use of data and statistics; U. of Illinois, Springfield professor John Martin was the speaker. He talked about many topics; one of his areas of research is star formation, especially the larger blueish stars that appear off of the main galaxy plane (formed there or ejected to there? Note that these stars have relatively short life spans.

As far as the statistical issues, some that were discussed were those of detection (accounting for noise and variation) and some of the major biases that astronomers have to deal with; one is the Lutz-Kelker bias: when one measures the small angles that one deals with in astronomy, error really can’t be negative because angles can’t be negative. Hence there is a bias in the positive direction which means that the parallax errors tend to be biased toward more parallax, hence distance is underestimated which leads to underestimation of luminosity.

Also the Malmquist Bias was discussed: this is the bias which states that, in situations where one is limited by signal strength, those entities emitting the stronger signals tend to be oversampled (e. g., brighter stars are oversampled).

Politics

Paul Krugman
No, Ronald Reagan didn’t start any great economic awakening.

Aha. I see that some commenters insist that I was unfair or, some insist, intellectually dishonest in my post on the fact that advanced economies actually grew faster in the era before modern finance took hold. There have been assertions that it was all about rebuilding from the war, or that the picture looks very different if you look at per capita real GDP, with some flat assertions that if you look at the numbers right growth has been better since 1980s.

Um, no.

Take the United States, which wasn’t damaged in the war. Take per capita real GDP. Give hostages by taking data from 1950 to 1980, which means including the 1980 recession, but stopping at 2007, so that the current slump isn’t included. Then here’s what you get:

Growth in per capita real GDP from 1950 to 1980: 2.2 percent per year
Growth in per capita real GDP from 1980 to 2007: 2.0 percent per year

Oh, and if we look at real median family income instead, we get:

Growth from 1950 to 1980: 2.3 percent per year
Growth from 1980 to 2007: 0.7 percent per year

Sorry: there’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980.