While it's disgusting Faux would blare this factoid, ignoring the billions and billions corporations do not pay, it's still pretty astounding. Illegals are getting tax credits for a loophole on the child credit.
Let me get this straight, illegal advocates claim they just didn't know when that illegals passed off someone else's social security as their own, but magically, become astutely aware and hire CPAs to help them get cash back from the IRS?
Now if the press will cover the billions lost by corporations promising to create jobs, in order to get state and local tax credits and some contract, instead offshore outsourcing those jobs, yet somehow the tax credits and financial incentives are never rescinded.
Remember your discussion is for the rest of the class. Most people, including finance and economics, business readers, who are the ones most to hit this niche econ site, have no idea what a H-1B guest worker Visa even is or what the problem is.
Presumably, this was open competition -- though many RFPs have been issued on a sole-source basis. We do need to be certain RFPs for technical, scientific, and management services give American (small) businesses a chance to compete for federal $.
We were stonewalled on H-1B data for years, in fact the FY 2010 H-1B Characteristics report to Congress is late -- I believe the 2006 and 07 reports were years late. I remember a news organization had obtained FOIA for detailed H-1B data and (at quite an expense) the government couldn't produce a readable query output.
It appears that the INS was able to produce occupational reports, in FY 2001, 191,397 H-1B visas (I assume continuing and initial approvals) were granted in Computer Related Occupations alone.
The Employment and Training Administration doesn't seem to be in any hurry to distribute H-1B Training Assistance Grants. It appears that they dole out Grants when the kitty reaches 200 million. At $500.00 per visa, times 85,000 visas the yearly take would be $42,500,000.00 it appears that it takes 5 years to get around to issuing RFPs for these grants.
There is a current RFP for these retraining grants (Closed June 2, 2011)
There will be at least two more articles on the unemployment report, One on length, types of payroll jobs, overall, part time, which is through the roof and another with some demographics, such as the black unemployment situation, the young, the old and whatever else useful can be extracted.
The text in this article or section may be incoherent or very hard to understand, and should be reworded if the intended meaning can be determined. The talk page may have details. (August 2011)
The 'talk page' takes you to where the author of the article has posted that a rewrite is in the works. 'WikiProject Statistics' and 'WikiProject Mathematics' are both involved.
But now, about the "1:1 inputs" ... what do you (RO) mean by that? The ui represent upper bounds for the Ui functions of the Xi, which are components of a pre-transform vector where all Xi are less than or equal to the same upper bound, x (nothing goes to infinity, everything bounded?). So what are the inputs? I am thinking inputs are the upper bounds.
I have googled on "1:1 input" and find only one link, to MIT concerning construction engineering (google-cached homework by Yeunwoo Cho, August 11, 2011) --
www-math.mit.edu/cse/codes/trusscode.m
Cho isn't actually using "1:1" -- really it turns out that every instance of "1:1" is in "-1:1". Cho writes in, I'm not sure exactly which programming language but something like C, pretty standard thing with some i's and some j's and a couple of k's here and there. Like sometimes there's "j=1:N" but sometimes that will be "-1:1" so you get the picture -- start at -1, then probably 0 and then stop at +1.
But I still don't know what "1:1 inputs" are.
What's most interesting ... or troubling ... is the assumption (in many places and maybe fundamental) of continuity. That's what we have discussed before here at EP, although not with the sophistication of the Wiki article. What happens when a discontinuity is imposed on a market, for example, a circuit breaker? Maybe it doesn't matter because there's always some market open somewhere. But still, the inputs are presumably based on actual market data from moment to moment, maybe even records of actual trades ... and there goes your assumption of continuity in the range of your function, out the window! You would just have to build a whole lot more theory and write (or otherwise generate) many, many more lines of Fortran or whatever. And any 'proof' you thought you could rely on .... what happened to that? What would Gauss say?
It's only the conceptual models that are continuous, wouldn't you think? That is, the underlying thing is discrete mathematics. That is, the empirical copulas. But then there follows immediately the "Monte Carlo integration" for the "quantity of interest" -- approximated through the Monte Carlo algorithm. Now we are going to infinity, of course.
So, okay. Then having given due credit on the pure math side to the one and only Carl Friedrich Gauss (to be expected in any branch of mathematics!) and also Archimedes (how did Archimedes get into this? because "it's all Greek to me"?) -- we get to "Applications," quote below --
Dependence modelling with copula functions is widely used in applications of financial risk assessment and actuarial analysis – for example in the pricing of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Some believe the methodology of applying the Gaussian copula to credit derivatives to be one of the reasons behind the global financial crisis of 2008–2009. Despite this perception, there are documented attempts of the financial industry, occurring before the crisis, to address the limitations of the Gaussian copula and of Copula functions more generally, specifically the lack of dependence dynamics and the poor representation of extreme events. ....
While the application of copulas in credit has gone through popularity as well as misfortune during the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, it is arguably an industry standard model for pricing CDOs. Less arguably, copulas have also been applied to other asset classes as a flexible tool in analyzing multi-asset derivative products. The first such application outside credit was to use a copula to construct an implied basket volatility surface, taking into account the volatility smile [see link at Wiki] of basket components. Copulas have since gained popularity in pricing and risk management of options on multi-assets in the presence of volatility smile/skew, in equity, foreign exchange and fixed income derivative business. ....
[One example given as typical application of copulas is ... ] Analyzing and pricing spread options, in particular in fixed income constant maturity swap (CMS) spread options.
Recently, copula functions have been successfully applied to the database formulation for the reliability analysis of highway bridges, to the analysis of spike counts in neuroscience and to various multivariate simulation studies in civil, mechanical and offshore engineering. [citation needed]
There was once, and may still be, a mysterious building in Corvallis, Oregon, where there was very little observable activity of any kind (although building and surrounding grounds were scrupulously maintained) and which had just one label on it, "Applied Theory." People around OSU generally assumed the building to be some part of the secret government (so secret that I can neither confirm nor deny that it exists).
Revenge of the geeks?
The dilemma may be that the more you try to eliminate risk, the riskier it gets.
This is for serious EPers only! Goats only, no sheep need read any further.
Image: Seal, Department of Treasury
Just an image to spice things up!
Scales symbolize equity, justice.
Thirteen stars represent the original states, 1789.
The key ... what exactly does that signify?
_______________
Pending Ira's response ... it happens that interesting and lively discussion is occurring over at EP's left-column-for-links -- Angry Bear.
Discussion over at Angry Bear actually refers to, and discusses, documentary evidence drawn from economic history, "going as far back as the data allows in the United States."
Discussion based on data! What a concept! Check it out!
The 'Opus 1' series specifically addresses the question of what is "the real reason beyond the income tax"? The discussion starts with, and leans on, "a paper that incorporates a review of a book: Does Atlas Shrug? [The paper is titled] 'The Economic Consequences of Taxing the Rich'. It caught my attention because the paper is written by a tax lawyer: Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, the Irwin I. Cohn Professor of Law and director of the International Tax LL.M. Program ... He also served as consultant to the U.S. Treasury on tax competition and OECD on tax competition, and is a member of the Steering Group of the OECD's International Network for Tax Research and chair of the American Bar Association's Tax Section Committee on Consumption Taxes."
Avi-Yonah cites to "an excellent historical survey by W. Elliot Brownlee of the rates facing the rich from the beginning of the U.S. income tax in 1913 to the present" (Avi Yonah, quoted in 'Opus 1' at Angry Bear).
__________
I digress slightly here to note that the founder of the original (now much-debauched) Chicago school (of economics), Henry C. Simons, was a professor on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, not in the Department of Economics. Although a professor of law and not an economist by profession, Simons created much of basic monetarist theory and founded the original 'Chicago School'. How did a law professor become a leading light in both economic theory and economic policy? The answer lies in Simons' approach to economic policy -- namely by way of asking the fundamental question of libertarian thought as it applies to economics, "What economic policy best furthers individual liberty?" Simons believed that individual liberty was not only compatible with democracy but dependent on it. Simons' purpose and work was subsequently perverted by the later -- not the initial -- work of Nobelist Milton Friedman. Perversion of Simons' vision of libertarian economics (which Simons perhaps would have termed 'neo-classical') is today enshrined in the avowedly anti-democracy Ludwig von Mises Institute (located in Alabama, although proclaiming to be the defining source for all economics of the 'Austrian School').
Excerpted for review purposes from 'Opus 1' (at Angry Bear) --
"I never really thought about it, but laws are the means by which we create taxation. They do reflect our reasoning. So, maybe we need to consider law arguments as we discuss taxes?" (Opus 1, Part 1).
"Let me give a little bit of my philosophy here. A long time ago I figured out that in the end, after all the pros and cons are lined up, the research is done, the discussion had, the reason anyone does anything is because they wanted to do it. [Formulation of 'Postmodernist' premise, current c. 2000 C.E.] ... Secondly, I am only as free as I allow you to be. [Formulation, IMO, of basic 'post-anarchist' premise] Before someone starts thinking “libertarian talking here”, I understand that if in my freedom I accumulate enough money such that you have to rent a toilet from me verses buying your own, I'm not free because now I have to make sure the toilet is always available at the time of your need. If I don't accommodate your timing, then I am at risk of retaliation by you (and maybe a few of your friends).
"I have presented in the past that the goal of our economy is defined in the Constitution: ['Opus 1' quotes Preamble of the Constitution, neglecting to cite to Sixteenth Amendment or to extensive evidence as to intent of the People and of Congress in enacting and ratifying that amendment to the Constitution. Anyway, to continue quote of 'Opus 1' ... ]
"Specifically but not exclusively “domestic tranquility”, “general welfare” and “posterity”. An economy has been developed to serve our purpose. In the crudest terms of economic purpose; to create capital, as in "a company exists to create profit". But for me, the crude answer begs the question: why create capital? Because I want to... because of my values. I see taxation as how money comes into play in meeting the goals as stated."
Analysis of 'Opus 1' differs from the analysis of Henry C. Simons, who endorsed redistributive income tax primarily for the purpose of preventing essentially anti-liberty concentrations of economic power, that is, in order to further democratic government within a democratic society. Rather than reasoning, as many do today, that liberty follows from (or is defined as?) unrestrained accumulation of capital in private hands ('globol capital'), Simons believed that the value of liberty was primary, not derivative, and that the preservation of liberty requires that capital be decimated in the cause of necessary restraint of (if I may borrow a term from Ira) "our true enemy" -- which Simons would say is excessive concentration of power whether political or economic, that is, whether concentrated in privately-held fortunes, media ownership, corporate entities or (lest we forget such phenomena as Stalinism!) national or state governments. It is a fortunate by-product of the economics of freedom that, both the stream of economic progress and the stream of personal liberty flow from the same source -- an enlightened people determined to live in a free society.
I suggest that this may be Ira's point, but I'm not sure. Just taking Ira seriously.
Also see, PDF of paper by Ronnie J. Phillips, The 'Chicago Plan' and New Deal Banking Reform, Working Paper No. 76 (June 1992), including excellent bibliography --
In 1992, economist Ronnie J. Phillips presciently wrote (excerpted for review purposes) --
... technology seems to have driven the developments of near monies in recent years and it is unlikely that 100% reserve banking could have affected the development of computers which, as we have seen in recent years, enable the creation of financial assets which would have been technologically impossible in the past.
... The problems we face today are in large part a direct result of the programs that were implemented during the early New Deal. The first and most obvious is federal deposit insurance. The amount of money necessary to pay off all depositors is unknown. We have done nothing to fundamentally change the situation. Even modest reforms to limit the amount of federal deposit insurance have been difficult to implement.
The 100% reserve idea did not disappear after the passage of the Banking Act of 1935, in fact, Irving Fisher spent the remainder of his life lobbying Congress and the public on the need for 100% reserves ... It is also not surprising that in recent years, we have seen the emergence of "narrow banking" or "core banking" proposals which are in the tradition of the 100% reserve plan.
If we are ever again faced with economic, and particularly financial, problems on the level of the Great Depression, the clamor for the separation of the depository and lending functions of banks may reappear. It is also clear that the Federal Reserve can do little to cajole banks into lending when they do not wish to do so. What we are seeing is banks buying more government debt, which is available today on a scale far beyond the 1930s. The Federal Reserve can effectively restrain activity during a boom, but during a business downturn can do little to stimulate the economy beyond cutting interest rates to historically low levels. This is precisely the situation we face today.
What are the differences between early 1990s and now twenty years later? One thing for sure, central banks had a much easier time controlling the gold market than they do today. For another thing, that was the last of the pre-WTO era. And there are other differences.
Also see, A Program for Monetary Stability. The Millar Lectures. Number Three 1959 by Milton Friedman, (no free download, available but no longer in print ).
I'll try to take apart a copula with the probability distribution functions and show how the inputs are required to be 1:1. That's the deal with the "gamma" filter and you have to replace those Copula symbols for the actual complete function and it's assumptions to see the problem. It's very complex so here is the Wired explanation in English. If you have advanced probability theory and statistics you'll get this, else, I'd click the above link read that plus the Wired for now. I think Wired did a great job to explain this without requiring everyone to get a PhD in probability and statistics (and still be lost).
I'll try to write up another exercise for the reader on these numbers and reference his method vs. some others. I think it's way too low but the fundamental problem here is getting that monthly non-institutional civilian population number and even yearly, accurate.
It's good though he shows his methods. I actually left a comment on his blog where the problem is, it's with the low ball on non-institutional population as well as in payrolls, a job is a job and it doesn't matter if it's 10 hours per week, whereas the CPS are people.
Weren't you wondering recently how Dean Baker at Beat the Press [one of the sites listed in the left column] arrived at his assumption of 90,000 new labor market entrants each month?
I saw the story at the left and you are so busy I want to make sure you see what he says.
It seems to me though that since so many of the 1,781,000 he cites are from abroad on work visas, a far higher percentage than 64% of them would be working. Surely there would be far fewer retirees among them than in the native born US population. 90,000 just seems too low, especially vs. the much high figures others use. Interesting that he does not speculate why others' figures are so much higher.
"There is another way to back out a growth number. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the civilian non-institutionalized population over age 16 increased by 1,781,000 people over the last 12 months. If we assume that 64 percent of this increment to the above 16 age population is employed (roughly the 2000 percent) then this would imply an increase in employment of 1,140,000.
However, this would overstate payroll employment slightly since roughly 6 percent of the workforce is self-employed. If we assume that 6 percent of the increment is also self-employed, this implies that roughly 1,070,000 payroll jobs are needed to keep pace with the growth of the labor force, or just under 90,000 a month."
I always tell my anarchist friends that where there's a power grid, there's a government. The only question is whether that government is publicly owned and managed, privately owned and publicly regulated .... or ..... (Some of them have moved off-grid!)
As I recall, going back about 150 years, Fisk and Gould managed high profits (mostly going into their own pockets) for the NYC RR by having crews turn track around rather than replacing it. That would work for a while, because the track was originally T-shaped, and one whole half of the top of the T had not been used. Simple matter of business sense.
But then, as need arose to replace track again, Fisk and Gould management ordered the track turned again .... and again .... and again. Eventually there were frequent accidents. Eventually British share holders staged a revolt, seeking to displace Fisk and Gould, but the rascals avoided the seemingly inevitable by stealing the printing press used to print stock certificates, moving it in the dead of night across the river to New Jersey, there printing up enough shares to control the election of a 'new' board of directors at the next general meeting!
Some anarchists suggest solutions for this kind of misbehavior, not pretty.
"Measure us against other First World countries" -- Jersey
Everything about 'First World' and so forth is complicated by globalization. The champions beyond any competition as to low death rates are Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. These really should be considered as a new kind of 'First World'. But these are all averages, and probably the averages do not include guest workers in those countries.
Estimated average crude death rate for the entire world is 8.6 per thousand. Death rate for the entire European Union is 9.6! Death rate for USA is 8.38.
But I still think that if we see more people dying in a country like the USA -- a year-to-year increase -- that would be a signal of Third World-ization. I think that because I read stories of a public square in Calcutta where thousands are constantly gathered to die and where the government provides a service to pick up and dispose of corpses on a daily basis. That's the place that received much attention from St. Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa, beatified by popular acclaim). So I think that whatever 'Third World' means, it includes people dying in our midst in a way that they do not in the USA, at least not yet in large numbers. To some extent, this may be due to high incarceration and high overall institutionalization rates. However, I read news stories and hear anecdotal evidence that corpses are routinely picked up in cities in USA everyday -- people who died and froze overnight at a bus stop, for example. It's a matter of degree.
Some may say that I am equating over-population to 'Third World', and that may be, although it is, then, a matter of the definition of 'over-population' as much as it is the definition of 'Third World'! The Netherlands is more densely populated than either India or Haiti. Singapore is about as densely packed as any country in the world (behind only the gaming states of Macau and Monaco), yet Singapore has none of the characteristics we expect in a Third World country, unless autocratic government is one of those.
For our purposes, median and quartile figures are much better than averages. However, the most available and supported statistic for mortality comparisons across countries is life expectancy, which is a complicated calculation based on population data including migration, incidence of various diseases and trends in life expectancy for various diseases -- not a true statistic but a projection, a weighted average kind of thing. For my purposes, I would prefer the raw median age at death statistic. The idea, however, is that in USA median age at death is the same as life expectancy. So what we get is live expectancy numbers.
Duffy notes that median age at death (USA) in 1970 was 70 although life expectancy at birth was 71. However, in 2000, both were 78 (now creeping up on 79). That convergence of the raw median death statistic and the life expectancy projection, I suspect, is intentional as CDC life expectancy formulas are developmental.
__________
"That's another thing to look at -- the difference between the lives lead by elites, average and poor people." -- Jersey
Yes, that's the problem alright, not only with mortality stats. There are numbers by 'racial' categories plus the super-category of 'Hispanic', but I haven't found a good source for mortality according to income levels or poverty levels or homelessness.
Maybe somebody can help me in that regard.
Maybe I could figure something out be going down to the county-level reports and correlating income levels with counties, but that would be a whole lot of work (unpaid) and time (limited).
For sure, if I could get into stats of life insurance companies, and their underwriting standards, I would find interesting correlations between credit ratings and mortality rates used in calculating premiums and profits. But, even then, there would be questions of hidden and unidentified dependent factors. So there'd have to be a lot of data and then factor analysis.
I think shortcomings in data collection come down to bias -- the bias of media, bureaucracy and even of academia that SuperAmerica is basically perfect, the system is so good, that any mishaps must be considered to be the moral fault of those who 'can't cut it'. Therefore, rather than attempt to carefully count those who 'don't count', SuperAmerica attempts to solve 'the problem' by continuing to import foreign workers and outsource work -- which data, however, are also not collected and published with care.
Maybe I am too cynical, but I suspect that there is a small industry today, centered in Washington, D.C., to prevent data collection as well as to obfuscate data collection processes that are available to the public and are fairly transparent.
The country as a whole hasn't gone from First World to Third World status, for the reasons you point out.
But it's been true for years that we fail dismally on numerous measures when compared to our First World peers.
Isn't the key question whether what we're doing today is going to enable our descendants live a First World life -- or not? On that score I think it's clear we are continuing to make disasterous decisions.
In Mexico the elite lives a mostly First World existence. That's another thing to look at -- the difference between the lives lead by elites, average and poor people.
A slow motion pervasive blackout has afflicted the East Coast from South Carolina to Maine. Millions are without power and the blackout statistics are not firm and not trustworthy. Typically, mainstream media lays this off on a storm. This is not so.
Private utilities have underinvested in Grid Infractructure according to IEEE's infrastructure report and other better analyzes. The second empirical confirmation of underinvestment is part of the utility industry's practice of dividend payout of almost all profits. This leaves America with a confused, aging grid vulnerable to storms. And the storms will only get much worse.
Upper management in private utilities practices a corrupt culture of cronyism with the utility regulators that makes even K-Street blush. Like all of corporate America, the focus is keeping the hog feeding trough of executive compensation full with the rate-payers money.
There is a danger of ever larger blackouts, major parts of the country without power for months, and repair crews unable to keep up. On the East Coast, folks will endure Irene induced blackouts for weeks. The economic effect touches lives, commerce, e-commerce and all aspects of life in these times.
It is almost too late for the more elegant solutions of centralized grid management. But BigTech is lauching incredible conspiracies to take over the Grid. Now, we are faced with survival situation.
Ordinary folks will have to find ways to generate their own power, as a matter of economics and survival. At this time, you can buy wholesale natural gas at half price and electicity the same and generate your own power.
But not all will be able to afford these solutions, never mind understand the technology and the economics of power distribution. Therein is the danger to the economic fabric of society, if you will, the social contract as it has come to be. Government is giving us no leadership or vision to look ahead, plan or at least survive. The worst in government, do not even believe in any kind of emergency aid.
A bit of science, if that is allowed in this country still. More than twice the molecular volume of fossil fuel combustion takes the form of water. CO2 is only half of water volume. That fantastic torrent of water is finding its way into every kind of extreme weather.
We need to fear and plan for the worst.
I'm having to stop and deal with some admin stuff, the site performance has slowed to a crawl. That said, I plan on writing a series of posts on employment, jobs, from the numbers to policy.
Enough is enough and this is just getting outrageous.
As always I'm eager to read what you're going to write about my "favorite" topic, unemployment.
Still all this stuff can make a person's head explode after awhile. I am somewhat shielded by my ignorance of how statistics should be produced and how far from the ideal some of the data and methods used are -- plus there's the holes, too, the things not even measured that should be.
But you of course understand what is and what should be and suffer accordingly.
So please pace yourself. Get out and have some fun too.
Thanks again for all you do. I cannot tell you how much I've come to rely on your steady and scrupulously honest voice and your insistence that the truth be told about the economic emergency that's engulfed us.
While it's disgusting Faux would blare this factoid, ignoring the billions and billions corporations do not pay, it's still pretty astounding. Illegals are getting tax credits for a loophole on the child credit.
Let me get this straight, illegal advocates claim they just didn't know when that illegals passed off someone else's social security as their own, but magically, become astutely aware and hire CPAs to help them get cash back from the IRS?
Now if the press will cover the billions lost by corporations promising to create jobs, in order to get state and local tax credits and some contract, instead offshore outsourcing those jobs, yet somehow the tax credits and financial incentives are never rescinded.
Remember your discussion is for the rest of the class. Most people, including finance and economics, business readers, who are the ones most to hit this niche econ site, have no idea what a H-1B guest worker Visa even is or what the problem is.
Presumably, this was open competition -- though many RFPs have been issued on a sole-source basis. We do need to be certain RFPs for technical, scientific, and management services give American (small) businesses a chance to compete for federal $.
Do you know if that's by law or is it something that could easily be changed by issuing a new regulation?
Ridiculous. Heartbreaking. Not that $50 million a year will go far but it should go and not stay in a kitty for another 3 years.
Great work by the way, keep it up.
Are you saying our government is giving away money to train foreigners on guest workers here or ? I don't know what this means.
We were stonewalled on H-1B data for years, in fact the FY 2010 H-1B Characteristics report to Congress is late -- I believe the 2006 and 07 reports were years late. I remember a news organization had obtained FOIA for detailed H-1B data and (at quite an expense) the government couldn't produce a readable query output.
It appears that the INS was able to produce occupational reports, in FY 2001, 191,397 H-1B visas (I assume continuing and initial approvals) were granted in Computer Related Occupations alone.
See Appendix A
http://www.doleta.gov/grants/sga/03-100sga.cfm
The Employment and Training Administration doesn't seem to be in any hurry to distribute H-1B Training Assistance Grants. It appears that they dole out Grants when the kitty reaches 200 million. At $500.00 per visa, times 85,000 visas the yearly take would be $42,500,000.00 it appears that it takes 5 years to get around to issuing RFPs for these grants.
There is a current RFP for these retraining grants (Closed June 2, 2011)
The last time distributed H-1B Techinical Skills Training Grant funds was in 2003.
http://www.doleta.gov/grants/grants_awarded.cfm
There will be at least two more articles on the unemployment report, One on length, types of payroll jobs, overall, part time, which is through the roof and another with some demographics, such as the black unemployment situation, the young, the old and whatever else useful can be extracted.
Stay tuned!
Will U.S. regulators require People's Bank of China to disclose their secret computer codes?
Looks like a pretty good article at Wikipedia Copula_(probability_theory), where a Wiki editor has added a warning label --
The 'talk page' takes you to where the author of the article has posted that a rewrite is in the works. 'WikiProject Statistics' and 'WikiProject Mathematics' are both involved.
But now, about the "1:1 inputs" ... what do you (RO) mean by that? The ui represent upper bounds for the Ui functions of the Xi, which are components of a pre-transform vector where all Xi are less than or equal to the same upper bound, x (nothing goes to infinity, everything bounded?). So what are the inputs? I am thinking inputs are the upper bounds.
I have googled on "1:1 input" and find only one link, to MIT concerning construction engineering (google-cached homework by Yeunwoo Cho, August 11, 2011) --
www-math.mit.edu/cse/codes/trusscode.m
Cho isn't actually using "1:1" -- really it turns out that every instance of "1:1" is in "-1:1". Cho writes in, I'm not sure exactly which programming language but something like C, pretty standard thing with some i's and some j's and a couple of k's here and there. Like sometimes there's "j=1:N" but sometimes that will be "-1:1" so you get the picture -- start at -1, then probably 0 and then stop at +1.
But I still don't know what "1:1 inputs" are.
What's most interesting ... or troubling ... is the assumption (in many places and maybe fundamental) of continuity. That's what we have discussed before here at EP, although not with the sophistication of the Wiki article. What happens when a discontinuity is imposed on a market, for example, a circuit breaker? Maybe it doesn't matter because there's always some market open somewhere. But still, the inputs are presumably based on actual market data from moment to moment, maybe even records of actual trades ... and there goes your assumption of continuity in the range of your function, out the window! You would just have to build a whole lot more theory and write (or otherwise generate) many, many more lines of Fortran or whatever. And any 'proof' you thought you could rely on .... what happened to that? What would Gauss say?
It's only the conceptual models that are continuous, wouldn't you think? That is, the underlying thing is discrete mathematics. That is, the empirical copulas. But then there follows immediately the "Monte Carlo integration" for the "quantity of interest" -- approximated through the Monte Carlo algorithm. Now we are going to infinity, of course.
So, okay. Then having given due credit on the pure math side to the one and only Carl Friedrich Gauss (to be expected in any branch of mathematics!) and also Archimedes (how did Archimedes get into this? because "it's all Greek to me"?) -- we get to "Applications," quote below --
There was once, and may still be, a mysterious building in Corvallis, Oregon, where there was very little observable activity of any kind (although building and surrounding grounds were scrupulously maintained) and which had just one label on it, "Applied Theory." People around OSU generally assumed the building to be some part of the secret government (so secret that I can neither confirm nor deny that it exists).
Revenge of the geeks?
The dilemma may be that the more you try to eliminate risk, the riskier it gets.
Here are some other analyses and confessions.
http://theamericanscene.com/2008/12/23/ahi-quanto-a-dir-qual-era-e-cosa-...
http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/05/28/revenge-of-the-nerd.html
Hi, Ira! And other interested EP readers!
This is for serious EPers only! Goats only, no sheep need read any further.
Image: Seal, Department of Treasury
Just an image to spice things up!
Scales symbolize equity, justice.
Thirteen stars represent the original states, 1789.
The key ... what exactly does that signify?
_______________
Pending Ira's response ... it happens that interesting and lively discussion is occurring over at EP's left-column-for-links -- Angry Bear.
Discussion over at Angry Bear actually refers to, and discusses, documentary evidence drawn from economic history, "going as far back as the data allows in the United States."
Discussion based on data! What a concept! Check it out!
The Effect of Individual Income Tax Rates on the Economy, Part 1: 1901 - 1928
The Effect of Individual Income Tax Rates on the Economy, Part 2: The Great Depression and the New Deal, 1929 - 1940
The Effect of Individual Income Tax Rates on the Economy, Part 3: WW2 and the Immediate Post-War Recovery
There's also (at Angry Bear) a related three-part series, "Define Rich" by Daniel Becker ('Divorced one like Bush')
Define rich Part 1
Define rich Part 2
Define rich Part 3
Part 3 is where tax table data are involved.
Also another series by author of 'Define rich', this two-part series entitled 'Opus 1' (still 'to be continued') --
Opus 1: A Discussion on taxation
Opus 1, Second movement: On taxation
The 'Opus 1' series specifically addresses the question of what is "the real reason beyond the income tax"? The discussion starts with, and leans on, "a paper that incorporates a review of a book: Does Atlas Shrug? [The paper is titled] 'The Economic Consequences of Taxing the Rich'. It caught my attention because the paper is written by a tax lawyer: Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, the Irwin I. Cohn Professor of Law and director of the International Tax LL.M. Program ... He also served as consultant to the U.S. Treasury on tax competition and OECD on tax competition, and is a member of the Steering Group of the OECD's International Network for Tax Research and chair of the American Bar Association's Tax Section Committee on Consumption Taxes."
Avi-Yonah's paper (March 2002) is available as a downloadable PDF online, courtesy of The Yale Law Journal (111 Yale L.J. 1391, 2002).
Avi-Yonah cites to "an excellent historical survey by W. Elliot Brownlee of the rates facing the rich from the beginning of the U.S. income tax in 1913 to the present" (Avi Yonah, quoted in 'Opus 1' at Angry Bear).
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I digress slightly here to note that the founder of the original (now much-debauched) Chicago school (of economics), Henry C. Simons, was a professor on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, not in the Department of Economics. Although a professor of law and not an economist by profession, Simons created much of basic monetarist theory and founded the original 'Chicago School'. How did a law professor become a leading light in both economic theory and economic policy? The answer lies in Simons' approach to economic policy -- namely by way of asking the fundamental question of libertarian thought as it applies to economics, "What economic policy best furthers individual liberty?" Simons believed that individual liberty was not only compatible with democracy but dependent on it. Simons' purpose and work was subsequently perverted by the later -- not the initial -- work of Nobelist Milton Friedman. Perversion of Simons' vision of libertarian economics (which Simons perhaps would have termed 'neo-classical') is today enshrined in the avowedly anti-democracy Ludwig von Mises Institute (located in Alabama, although proclaiming to be the defining source for all economics of the 'Austrian School').
For more on Simons and the 'Chicago Plan', see, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_plan
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Excerpted for review purposes from 'Opus 1' (at Angry Bear) --
Analysis of 'Opus 1' differs from the analysis of Henry C. Simons, who endorsed redistributive income tax primarily for the purpose of preventing essentially anti-liberty concentrations of economic power, that is, in order to further democratic government within a democratic society. Rather than reasoning, as many do today, that liberty follows from (or is defined as?) unrestrained accumulation of capital in private hands ('globol capital'), Simons believed that the value of liberty was primary, not derivative, and that the preservation of liberty requires that capital be decimated in the cause of necessary restraint of (if I may borrow a term from Ira) "our true enemy" -- which Simons would say is excessive concentration of power whether political or economic, that is, whether concentrated in privately-held fortunes, media ownership, corporate entities or (lest we forget such phenomena as Stalinism!) national or state governments. It is a fortunate by-product of the economics of freedom that, both the stream of economic progress and the stream of personal liberty flow from the same source -- an enlightened people determined to live in a free society.
I suggest that this may be Ira's point, but I'm not sure. Just taking Ira seriously.
See generally, American Monetary Institute
Also see, PDF of paper by Ronnie J. Phillips, The 'Chicago Plan' and New Deal Banking Reform, Working Paper No. 76 (June 1992), including excellent bibliography --
Link immediately starts download of PDF http://levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp/76.pdf
In 1992, economist Ronnie J. Phillips presciently wrote (excerpted for review purposes) --
What are the differences between early 1990s and now twenty years later? One thing for sure, central banks had a much easier time controlling the gold market than they do today. For another thing, that was the last of the pre-WTO era. And there are other differences.
See also, entire book by Phillips, The Chicago plan & New Deal banking reform (1995), (link to Google Books).
Also see, A Program for Monetary Stability. The Millar Lectures. Number Three 1959 by Milton Friedman, (no free download, available but no longer in print ).
Also see generally, American Monetary Institute
I'll try to take apart a copula with the probability distribution functions and show how the inputs are required to be 1:1. That's the deal with the "gamma" filter and you have to replace those Copula symbols for the actual complete function and it's assumptions to see the problem. It's very complex so here is the Wired explanation in English. If you have advanced probability theory and statistics you'll get this, else, I'd click the above link read that plus the Wired for now. I think Wired did a great job to explain this without requiring everyone to get a PhD in probability and statistics (and still be lost).
I'll try to write up another exercise for the reader on these numbers and reference his method vs. some others. I think it's way too low but the fundamental problem here is getting that monthly non-institutional civilian population number and even yearly, accurate.
It's good though he shows his methods. I actually left a comment on his blog where the problem is, it's with the low ball on non-institutional population as well as in payrolls, a job is a job and it doesn't matter if it's 10 hours per week, whereas the CPS are people.
Weren't you wondering recently how Dean Baker at Beat the Press [one of the sites listed in the left column] arrived at his assumption of 90,000 new labor market entrants each month?
I saw the story at the left and you are so busy I want to make sure you see what he says.
It seems to me though that since so many of the 1,781,000 he cites are from abroad on work visas, a far higher percentage than 64% of them would be working. Surely there would be far fewer retirees among them than in the native born US population. 90,000 just seems too low, especially vs. the much high figures others use. Interesting that he does not speculate why others' figures are so much higher.
"There is another way to back out a growth number. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the civilian non-institutionalized population over age 16 increased by 1,781,000 people over the last 12 months. If we assume that 64 percent of this increment to the above 16 age population is employed (roughly the 2000 percent) then this would imply an increase in employment of 1,140,000.
However, this would overstate payroll employment slightly since roughly 6 percent of the workforce is self-employed. If we assume that 6 percent of the increment is also self-employed, this implies that roughly 1,070,000 payroll jobs are needed to keep pace with the growth of the labor force, or just under 90,000 a month."
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/how-many-jobs-does-it...
I always tell my anarchist friends that where there's a power grid, there's a government. The only question is whether that government is publicly owned and managed, privately owned and publicly regulated .... or ..... (Some of them have moved off-grid!)
As I recall, going back about 150 years, Fisk and Gould managed high profits (mostly going into their own pockets) for the NYC RR by having crews turn track around rather than replacing it. That would work for a while, because the track was originally T-shaped, and one whole half of the top of the T had not been used. Simple matter of business sense.
But then, as need arose to replace track again, Fisk and Gould management ordered the track turned again .... and again .... and again. Eventually there were frequent accidents. Eventually British share holders staged a revolt, seeking to displace Fisk and Gould, but the rascals avoided the seemingly inevitable by stealing the printing press used to print stock certificates, moving it in the dead of night across the river to New Jersey, there printing up enough shares to control the election of a 'new' board of directors at the next general meeting!
Some anarchists suggest solutions for this kind of misbehavior, not pretty.
"Measure us against other First World countries" -- Jersey
Everything about 'First World' and so forth is complicated by globalization. The champions beyond any competition as to low death rates are Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. These really should be considered as a new kind of 'First World'. But these are all averages, and probably the averages do not include guest workers in those countries.
Estimated average crude death rate for the entire world is 8.6 per thousand. Death rate for the entire European Union is 9.6! Death rate for USA is 8.38.
See, IndexMundi
See also, Wiki article
But I still think that if we see more people dying in a country like the USA -- a year-to-year increase -- that would be a signal of Third World-ization. I think that because I read stories of a public square in Calcutta where thousands are constantly gathered to die and where the government provides a service to pick up and dispose of corpses on a daily basis. That's the place that received much attention from St. Teresa of Calcutta (Mother Teresa, beatified by popular acclaim). So I think that whatever 'Third World' means, it includes people dying in our midst in a way that they do not in the USA, at least not yet in large numbers. To some extent, this may be due to high incarceration and high overall institutionalization rates. However, I read news stories and hear anecdotal evidence that corpses are routinely picked up in cities in USA everyday -- people who died and froze overnight at a bus stop, for example. It's a matter of degree.
Some may say that I am equating over-population to 'Third World', and that may be, although it is, then, a matter of the definition of 'over-population' as much as it is the definition of 'Third World'! The Netherlands is more densely populated than either India or Haiti. Singapore is about as densely packed as any country in the world (behind only the gaming states of Macau and Monaco), yet Singapore has none of the characteristics we expect in a Third World country, unless autocratic government is one of those.
See, Wiki article
For our purposes, median and quartile figures are much better than averages. However, the most available and supported statistic for mortality comparisons across countries is life expectancy, which is a complicated calculation based on population data including migration, incidence of various diseases and trends in life expectancy for various diseases -- not a true statistic but a projection, a weighted average kind of thing. For my purposes, I would prefer the raw median age at death statistic. The idea, however, is that in USA median age at death is the same as life expectancy. So what we get is live expectancy numbers.
There's a report on New Jersey in particular (1970-2000) by Maria L. Baron Duffy, M.A.S., that you might find interesting --
http://www.state.nj.us/health/chs/topics0401.pdf
Duffy notes that median age at death (USA) in 1970 was 70 although life expectancy at birth was 71. However, in 2000, both were 78 (now creeping up on 79). That convergence of the raw median death statistic and the life expectancy projection, I suspect, is intentional as CDC life expectancy formulas are developmental.
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"That's another thing to look at -- the difference between the lives lead by elites, average and poor people." -- Jersey
Yes, that's the problem alright, not only with mortality stats. There are numbers by 'racial' categories plus the super-category of 'Hispanic', but I haven't found a good source for mortality according to income levels or poverty levels or homelessness.
Maybe somebody can help me in that regard.
Maybe I could figure something out be going down to the county-level reports and correlating income levels with counties, but that would be a whole lot of work (unpaid) and time (limited).
For sure, if I could get into stats of life insurance companies, and their underwriting standards, I would find interesting correlations between credit ratings and mortality rates used in calculating premiums and profits. But, even then, there would be questions of hidden and unidentified dependent factors. So there'd have to be a lot of data and then factor analysis.
I think shortcomings in data collection come down to bias -- the bias of media, bureaucracy and even of academia that SuperAmerica is basically perfect, the system is so good, that any mishaps must be considered to be the moral fault of those who 'can't cut it'. Therefore, rather than attempt to carefully count those who 'don't count', SuperAmerica attempts to solve 'the problem' by continuing to import foreign workers and outsource work -- which data, however, are also not collected and published with care.
Maybe I am too cynical, but I suspect that there is a small industry today, centered in Washington, D.C., to prevent data collection as well as to obfuscate data collection processes that are available to the public and are fairly transparent.
The country as a whole hasn't gone from First World to Third World status, for the reasons you point out.
But it's been true for years that we fail dismally on numerous measures when compared to our First World peers.
Isn't the key question whether what we're doing today is going to enable our descendants live a First World life -- or not? On that score I think it's clear we are continuing to make disasterous decisions.
In Mexico the elite lives a mostly First World existence. That's another thing to look at -- the difference between the lives lead by elites, average and poor people.
A slow motion pervasive blackout has afflicted the East Coast from South Carolina to Maine. Millions are without power and the blackout statistics are not firm and not trustworthy. Typically, mainstream media lays this off on a storm. This is not so.
Private utilities have underinvested in Grid Infractructure according to IEEE's infrastructure report and other better analyzes. The second empirical confirmation of underinvestment is part of the utility industry's practice of dividend payout of almost all profits. This leaves America with a confused, aging grid vulnerable to storms. And the storms will only get much worse.
Upper management in private utilities practices a corrupt culture of cronyism with the utility regulators that makes even K-Street blush. Like all of corporate America, the focus is keeping the hog feeding trough of executive compensation full with the rate-payers money.
There is a danger of ever larger blackouts, major parts of the country without power for months, and repair crews unable to keep up. On the East Coast, folks will endure Irene induced blackouts for weeks. The economic effect touches lives, commerce, e-commerce and all aspects of life in these times.
It is almost too late for the more elegant solutions of centralized grid management. But BigTech is lauching incredible conspiracies to take over the Grid. Now, we are faced with survival situation.
Ordinary folks will have to find ways to generate their own power, as a matter of economics and survival. At this time, you can buy wholesale natural gas at half price and electicity the same and generate your own power.
But not all will be able to afford these solutions, never mind understand the technology and the economics of power distribution. Therein is the danger to the economic fabric of society, if you will, the social contract as it has come to be. Government is giving us no leadership or vision to look ahead, plan or at least survive. The worst in government, do not even believe in any kind of emergency aid.
A bit of science, if that is allowed in this country still. More than twice the molecular volume of fossil fuel combustion takes the form of water. CO2 is only half of water volume. That fantastic torrent of water is finding its way into every kind of extreme weather.
We need to fear and plan for the worst.
I'm having to stop and deal with some admin stuff, the site performance has slowed to a crawl. That said, I plan on writing a series of posts on employment, jobs, from the numbers to policy.
Enough is enough and this is just getting outrageous.
As always I'm eager to read what you're going to write about my "favorite" topic, unemployment.
Still all this stuff can make a person's head explode after awhile. I am somewhat shielded by my ignorance of how statistics should be produced and how far from the ideal some of the data and methods used are -- plus there's the holes, too, the things not even measured that should be.
But you of course understand what is and what should be and suffer accordingly.
So please pace yourself. Get out and have some fun too.
Thanks again for all you do. I cannot tell you how much I've come to rely on your steady and scrupulously honest voice and your insistence that the truth be told about the economic emergency that's engulfed us.
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