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Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Nate Silver Says Something I like a Lot

     You're going to score points with me if you tell me that Eli Manning is the most postseason QB of all time. I'm sure Silver would say he's not trying to praise Eli just giving us what the numbers tell us which makes what he said all the better.

     By what he considers the best measure Silver ranks Eli number 1 all time-since 1970-for playoff QBs. The chance of Manning's playoff performance being just luck is just 1%.. This puts him ahead of Joe Montana-Brady is number 5.

    "The principle is simply that the better the quarterback, the more his team would be harmed by removing him. In the case of Peyton Manning’s teams, I estimate that pulling Manning would hurt them by about a touchdown (7 points) per game. That’s enough to demote them to a projected 8-16 record in the 24 postseason games Manning has played."

    "We can rerun the numbers for all 180 playoff quarterbacks, comparing each QB’s actual record against the simulated one achieved by replacement-level QBs against the same schedule. By this measure, Peyton Manning moves up to 28th on the postseason list; there’s only about a 10 percent chance that a replacement-level QB could have equalled or bettered his 11-13 record."

    "Eli Manning remains No. 1 overall, but this time in a photo finish over Joe Montana and Kurt Warner. Flacco still rates highly, in fourth place. Brady moves up to No. 6, right behind John Elway. Brett Favre advances to 19th from 78th. While there’s still a Dilfer and a Hostetler here and there, it’s a much better list of quarterbacks."

    http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-clutch-postseason-quarterback-of-all-time-is-eli-manning/

      You know who else said something I like? Yes, that's my criteria for merit-guys saying stuff I like. David Glasner. He actually questions that we are indeed in a Great or Secular Stagnation.

      "The world, for all kinds of reasons, seems to be in a rather deplorable state, and the trendlines are not necessarily pointed in the right direction either. I won’t go through the whole, or even a partial, list of what is depressing me these days, but there is one topic that comes up a lot in the economics blogosphere, secular stagnation, about which I can conjure up some reasons for optimism."

      http://uneasymoney.com/2015/06/10/optimistic-thoughts-about-productivity-growth-and-secular-stagnation/


      While I'm a liberal, I'm not a pessimist and no fan of gloom and doom. I notice that a lot of my fellow liberals are awfully pessimistic about just about everything. I don't see the basis for this. 


      Mind you, I think most conservatives are this way as well; most people are very pessimistic and think that the world has never been in a more deplorable state than it is today. 


      So at this point in the post I don't yet know Glasner''s argument but I want him to be right, hope he's right. Heck, even if he's dead wrong, he gets tons of credit with me at least for trying to come up with a less hopeless scenario. 


      "I am not a labor economist, but a quick internet search seems to indicate that a strong empirical connection between labor-force composition and productivity growth has not been found. But another factor, the increase in energy prices, also had a skills aspect, the adjustment to increased energy prices having led to the adoption of new technologies and new methods of production that presumably required new skills different from those that workers had previously acquired. And the new technologies adopted in response to a sudden increase in energy prices had to go through a period of implementation and debugging and improvement during which measured productivity likely declined. Technological transformations require many workers to learn new skills and adapt to new technologies. The time spent learning how to do new things in new ways and figuring out how to do them better and more efficiently may have caused the measured productivity of such workers to drop, thereby slowing down the overall rate of productivity growth."
     "At any rate, if the anomalous decline in productivity in the expansion following the 2008-09 downturn has been caused, even if only in part, by a loss of skills by workers who were induced to change jobs or occupations or who experienced long periods of unemployment, that decline in unlikely to be permanent, so that the rate of productivity growth and the rate of growth in real GDP can be expected to pick up somewhat over time. Stagnation may therefore not be as long-lasting as some people fear."
     "Maybe that’s not such a great reason for optimism, but for now at least, it’s the best that I can muster."
     I'm not a labor economist either-to say the least-but I appreciate the effort. Its nice to have a counter-theory to the Great Stagnation to at least give us some sense of hope. It'll be interesting to see if anyone else tries to build on Glasner's argument-again, whether it works or not I'm not going to pretend to know. 
     There is one other plausible counter-theory-or is it plausible?-Morgan Warstler. I'm totally with him here against Sumner. It seems to me that those who dismiss how much technology has changed things are mostly old guys-Sumner is a self-confessed technophobe which is ironic as he owes his whole MM movement to the Internet. 
     http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=29685

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