Quiz

****The Quiz will be in class on Wednesday, April 20th****

• ‘‘Shell’’ for the Quiz—giving details about what questions will be on the Quiz.

• 2022 Big Quiz

• Answers to the 2022 Big Quiz

• Histogram for 2022 Big Quiz (Bottom line: anything above 70% is a great score! 70% is 21 questions right.)

Shorter Readings to be Tested on the Quiz (you do not need to read the appendices to any of the papers)

Note: If you have any trouble downloading these papers from the Dropbox link, just get them from the Norlin Library website.

• “Measuring the Essence of the Good Life,” Dan Benjamin, Kristen Cooper, Ori Heffetz and Miles Kimball

• “Challenges in Constructing a Survey-Based Well-Being Index,” by Dan Benjamin, Kristen Cooper, Ori Heffetz and Miles Kimball

• “The New Stylized Facts About Income and Subjective Well-being,” by Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson, and Justin Wolfers

• “Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?” by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

• “Let's Set Half a Percent as the Standard for Statistical Significance,” by Miles Kimball

• “What Do You Think Would Make You Happier? What Do You Think You Would Choose?” by Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles Kimball and Alex Rees-Jones

• “Beyond Happiness and Satisfaction: Toward Well-Being Indices Based on Stated Preference,” by Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Miles Kimball and Nichole Szembrot

Statistics Principles to be Tested on the Quiz

• Statistical algebra

• Whether or not OLS and IV are unbiased given an arrow diagram

• Whether the direction of bias is 0, +, - or ? given an arrow diagram with +’s and -’s on the arrows

• Using the false discovery rate to deal with multiple hypothesis testing. Note that “Who Leaves Mormonism?” and “A Well-Being Snapshot in a Changing World” use the false discovery rate approach. (These are optional readings that I won’t directly test.) On using the false discovery rate approach to a multiple-hypothesis-testing correction, remember that the 1st hypothesis has to be significant by the FDR standard before you can check for whether a second hypothesis is significant by that standard, and then the second hypothesis needs to be significant by the FDR standard before you can check whether a third hypothesis is significant by that standard, etc. That is, you have to go in order and be able to jump over each hurdle, or you have to stop.

Arithmetic with Diminishing Marginal Utility

Paper on "GDP: A Short but Affectionate History"

3-5 pages

Due Sunday, March 20 at 11 PM

Theme: Why constructing GDP well is so hard.

Focus on some issues about how it should be done that people are struggling with. “Struggling with” can mean

• There is a controversy/debate about what is the best way to do it on some particular score

• There are practical difficulties in doing it in a way that seems like it would be good.

Posts on Statistics

1. Evidence that High Insulin Levels Lead to Weight Gain

2. Why a Low-Insulin-Index Diet Isn't Exactly a 'Lowcarb' Diet

3. Cousin Causality

4. Can Religion Reduce Suicide?

5. Less is More in Mormon Church Meetings

6. Who Leaves Mormonism?

7. Mental Retirement: Use It or Lose It—Susann Rohwedder and Robert Willis

8. Data on Asian Genes that Discourage Alcohol Consumption Explode the Myth that a Little Alcohol is Good for your Health

9. Less Than 6 or More than 9 Hours of Sleep Signals a Higher Risk of Heart Attacks

10. The Surprising Genetic Correlation Between Protein-Heavy Diets and Obesity

11. Where is Social Science Genetics Headed?

12. Exorcising the Devil in the Milk

13. Are Processed Food and Environmental Contaminants the Main Cause of the Rise of Obesity?

14. Livestock Antibiotics, Lithium and PFAS as Leading Suspects for Environmental Causes of Obesity

15. How Rising Anorexia Can Go Along with Rising Obesity: Both Can Be Caused By Environmental Contaminants

16. How Lithium May Have Led to Serious Obesity for the Pima Beginning around 1937

17. Henry George Eloquently Makes the Case that Correlation Is Not Causation

18. How Dating Apps Are Making Marriages Stronger

19. After Crunching Reinhart and Rogoff's Data, We Found No Evidence High Debt Slows Growth

20. Examining the Entrails: Is There Any Evidence for an Effect of Debt on Growth in the Reinhart and Rogoff Data?

21. Frightening New England Journal of Medicine Projections for the Rise of Obesity

22. Hypotheses about Salt and Blood Pressure

23. Beyond the Classroom: Using Title IX to Measure the Return to High School Sports (Betsey Stevenson)

24. Justin Briggs and Alex Tabarrok: Fewer Guns, Fewer Suicides

25. Let's Set Half a Percent as the Standard for Statistical Significance

26. Adam McCloskey and Pascal Michaillat: Calculating Incentive Compatible Critical Values Points to a t-Statistic of 3 as the 5% Critical Value after Accounting for p-Hacking

27. Adding a Variable Measured with Error to a Regression Only Partially Controls for that Variable

Also, I referred to “Title IX and the Evolution of High School Sports,” by Betsey Stevenson.

Powerpoint Files

• Adjusting for Scale-Use Heterogeneity in Self-Reported Well-Being

Book Choices for the Group Oral Presentation; First Assignment

Timing: The presentations will begin in the third full week of the course.

Six Books for Six Teams:

1. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling

2. The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson (Related blog posts laid out here.)

3. GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

4. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt

5. The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt

6. The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel

First Assignment, Due 1 PM Tuesday, January 18:

1. Write a few sentences about what drew you to this class and what you hope to learn and get out of it. 

2. List in order your 1st, 2d and 3d choices for the additional book you want to read and do a group presentation on. 

3. Write a few sentences on why you are particularly interested in reading your 1st choice. (Optional: you can write about your 2d and 3d choices, too if you want to.)

Note:

I tried to post this assignment on Canvas. You can submit your answers there. (If you can’t figure out how to submit it on Canvas, you can send it to me in the body of an email.)

Required Reading, Listening and Watching

Note: Many of these assignments have a date after them. This is the target date by which you should have read that assignment.

Books:

1. Happiness: Lessons from a New Science by Richard Layard

2. GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

3. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson (Beware: This book is so successful there are many companion books. You need the original book by Jordan B. Peterson. The title here links to the right Amazon page.)

Videos:

1. Ori Heffetz: Israel Climbs High in UN's 'World Happiness Report’ 1/14

2. Jordan Peterson, “The Phenomenology of the Divine” Q&A beginning at mark 2:19:00. 1/19

Podcasts:

1. Miles Kimball on the Potential of a National Well-Being Index 1/14

Blog Posts

1. Economics Is Unemotional—And That's Why It Could Help Bridge America's Partisan Divide (Pay special attention to the outtake on “Politicism” at the bottom.) 1/12

2. My Highlights from Joseph Biden's First Inaugural Address 1/12

3. Us and Them 1/12

4. Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg on Immobility in America 1/12

5. Measuring the Essence of the Good Life—Dan Benjamin, Kristen Cooper, Ori Heffetz and Miles Kimball 1/14

6. Does Ben Bernanke Want to Replace GDP with a Happiness Index? 1/14

7. Ori Heffetz: Quantifying Happiness 1/17

8. Judging the Nations: Wealth and Happiness Are Not Enough 1/17

9. National Well-Being Indexes and Goodhart’s Law 1/17

10. Tropozoics 1/17

11. Justin Wolfers: More Women Than Men Are Going to College. That May Change the Economy 1/24