The Custom-House

How to communicate data better

How to communicate data better

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution links to a web site with examples of very effective graphics - these communicate lots of information at a glance.

How to maximize the resale

How to maximize the resale value of your home

Paul Kedrosky at Infectious Greed and Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution link to a recent study on the resale returns to different types of home renovations. Cowen's summary?

"Many of these amenities sell for more than what they cost to install. So the bottom line here supports the conventional wisdom of the trade. People don't fix up their homes enough before selling them."

New critique of risk assessment

New critique of risk assessment

Lawrence Solum recommends downloading and reading "Against 'Individual Risk': A Sympathetic Critique of Risk Assessment " by Mattew Adler. The abstract describes the paper as:

"...In short, the Article provides a wide ranging, critical analysis of contemporary risk assessment and risk regulation. The perspective offered here is that of the sympathetic critic. Risk assessment itself - the enterprise of quantifying health and safety threats - represents a great leap forward for public rationality, and should not be abandoned. Rather, the current conception of risk assessment needs to be reworked. Risk needs to be seen in Bayesian rather than frequentist terms. And regulatory choice procedures must be focused, centrally, on the total numbers of the persons exposed to toxins, radiation, pathogens, or other health or safety hazards - not merely the risk that some particular person (whatever her place in the exposure distribution) incurs."

Solum says:

"...Adler's work continues to advance the ball on a set of issues that is absolutely crucial in both theory and practice of administrative law. Here's how I think about it. "Cost-benefit analysis" and its methodological cousins are here to stay. Given that fact, it is crucially important that this methodology be made as supple as possible. In recent work, Adler has focused on the idea for risk...

Bush Administration economic policy making

Bush Administration economic policy making - documentary evidence

Some of the documents Ron Suskind used in his recent look at Bush Administration economic policy making (The Price of Loyalty) may be found here: "An Experiment in Transparency". Timothy Noah at Slate reports on the release project - Suskind posted 20 documents to his web site today, and plans to post about the same number each week for a while. I first learned about this from Brad DeLong: "Documents, Documents, Documents".

One of the documents is a memo from a Treasury press officer to Secretary O'Neill with guidance on how to talk with the press at a February 2001 budget rollout. DeLong provides commentary here and here DeLong's second comment has some good insight into how the Treasury Secretary compromised his standing with senators and his independence with respect to the administration political staff, by lying to avoid embarrassing the White House.

Michael Lewis, a Bloomberg.com columnist reviews Suskind's book. Lewis suspects that Fed Chair Allan Greenspan cooperated with the author to send a message to the administration:

"The character in this drama with interesting motives isn't O'Neill but his more shadowy friend, Alan Greenspan. It's evident that Greenspan helped with the book; his fingerprints are all over the thing.

Why would the Fed chairman grant an interview, even off the record, to a journalist he knew to be armed and dangerous to the Bush White House? Surely, not out of a sense of loyalty to his old friend Paul O'Neill. If Greenspan had that gene, he wouldn't have lasted as long as he has.

Even more surely, not out of ignorance that he was helping to explode a political bomb. Greenspan doesn't get out of bed before examining the political consequences.

The only good explanation is that he knew exactly what Paul O'Neill's book would say -- that the fiscal irresponsibility of the Bush administration had been almost criminal and that the manner in which Bush made decisions was deeply disturbing -- and he was pleased to have it said..."

I learned about this column from Brad DeLong.