Grey Swan

Preventative Health? Time for new Measures

Posted by Grey Swan on Thursday, August 9th, 2007

I recently canvassed several interns who are working on preventative health measures in D.C. and asked if there was any new ideas being tossed about. They said “No”. This got me thinking - with all the talk about preventing future illness, why are so few ideas tossed about in public? In order to get this [...]

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The Problem with Free College Tuition (College Wars Part I)

Posted by Grey Swan on Saturday, June 9th, 2007

Many European countries offer free education to those who want it. The idea is that education is good, and the more educated people get, the better. Since education is costly however, this is not necessarily true.
The main problem with education is that it is a partially zero-sum pursuit.
While classes in computer science and engineering may [...]

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IQ and Income

Posted by Grey Swan on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

I used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine how IQ affects income. The survey takes a set of young people in 1979 (late teens to early twenties) and interviews them on a broad range of issues every few years. While surveys have continued beyond 1996, I only have data up to [...]

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Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Global Cooling

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

There has been a lot of debate about global warming this past year as temperatures have failed to rise. Of course climate is a complex topic and there are many factors that contribute to how warm or coool a particular year will be. Everything from sunspots to ocean currents have an important impact on global [...]

The US Forever

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

I love America. I like western culture. I don’t ever want to be oppressed by people from another country. A long time ago I would have thought these thoughts and then moved on to playing a game or read a book. But unfortunately, now I am worried enough to shut down the Xbox360 and blog. [...]

The Demographer’s Folly

Sunday, July 29th, 2007

Author’s Note: I have returned home from extended vacation and hope to begin frequent blogs again.
Alarmists have trumpeted the end of the world for many years. Now, a simple extrapolation of continued low fertility rates in Japan predict the last Japanese person will die around the year 2600 (give or take a few hundred years). [...]

Why the Price of Luxury Goods is Spiraling

Sunday, June 10th, 2007

Daily news reports stress that the price of luxury good tends to increase faster than the rate of inflation. Increasingly, middle and upper middle class families are being priced out of the luxury good market altogether. Why? I believe that a combination of age old factors and new trends are the root cause. This includes [...]

IQ and Income

Wednesday, June 6th, 2007

I used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine how IQ affects income. The survey takes a set of young people in 1979 (late teens to early twenties) and interviews them on a broad range of issues every few years. While surveys have continued beyond 1996, I only have data up to [...]