Alex Tabarrok on TV managers gone wild
“In the perfectly competitive model, price is equal to average cost and firms operate efficiently at minimum cost. Yet, Syverson finds that in the typical US industry a firm at the 90th percentile of the productivity distribution makes almost twice as much output with the same inputs as a firm at the 10th percentile.”
“There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.”
Deng vs. Xi and the showdown for China’s future
“A longtime advocate of reform describes how Chinese rulers fit onto two axes: one representing the extent of their power and the other the quality of their thoughts. The worst, like Mao, are strong with bad ideas. The best, like Deng, are strong with good ideas. He calls Mr Xi a strong leader whose philosophy remains unclear. Yet he fears that the party chief was marked, durably, by his upbringing during the Cultural Revolution, leaving his ideas “perhaps more aligned with Mao’s”.”
“In 1923, an official British report on secondary schools remarked: “It is well known that most boys, especially at the period of adolescence, have a habit of ‘healthy idleness.’” Meanwhile, the report warned, girls tended to be “over-conscientious”, putting their reproductive organs at risk.”
Wonderful support for broad time series questions found here
“Tellingly, the exponential smoothing model is always picking the naive model (the orange line and blue line overlap 100%). In other words, the naive forecast of”next month’s coil prices will be the same as this month’s coil prices" is more accurate (at almost every forecast horizon) than 7 extremely sophisticated time series models. Unless you have some secret information the coil market doesn’t already know, beating the naive coil price forecast is going to be extremely difficult.
It’s never the answer anyone wants to hear, but if forecast accuracy is your goal, you should use the most accurate model. Use the naive model."