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POPSOdds of conception
I saw this posted on Slate, and just want to make a comment about the math. The "extraordinary odds" of a 43-year-old conceiving naturally are only 1-3 (or maybe 5)% in a given month, says the article. Question: what are the odds in two months? This is just a basic probability question. What are the odds of not getting pregnant two months in a row? Say there's a 5 percent chance of getting pregnant, there's a 95% chance of not getting pregnant. The odds of not getting pregnant for two months are thus (.95*.95=.9025). So there's a .05 chance in one month but a .0975 chance of pregnancy in two months. For three months it's (.95*.95*.95=.857). For a three month affair, that'd be a 14.43% chance of pregnancy. Still unlikely but not really extraordinary. Say an affair lasts for 16 months, from February 2006 to May 2007 perhaps. At 3 percent per month, the math works to a 41% chance of getting pregnant. At 5% it's a 59% chance of pregnancy. "Extraordinary odds"? The math says not
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POPS9 Questions for Ben Bernanke This is very sharp. A lot of commentary on the Fed quickly devolves into conspiracy theory and pumping gold portfolios, and so it's refreshing to see some substantive ideas.
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POPSIn Denial About Financial Reform Also see Dan Indiviglio over at The Atlantic: http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/09/why_is_washington_ignoring_the_real_causes_of_the_crisis.php The danger of putting a lawyer in charge of something like this is, in my opinion, best exemplified by Neil Barofsky, the attorney they put in front of TARP oversight. Barofsky has used his pulpit to put out some really meaningless and misleading numbers. We need real information from these guys, not noisy innumerate numbers. See: http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/27/bailout-bad-math-business-washington-barofsky.html
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POPSExodus Out of the Big Banks There's an intriguing idea here that it's good for the talent to disperse to smaller institutions. That it will be a sort of Darwinian process that whittles big banks down until they're no longer too big to fail. And it creates a more diverse Wall Street in the process. Well, really? It seems to me that's no longer true if a handful of the big banks (say Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan) are able to pay off their TARP funds early. Shrinking Citi and Bank of America to beef up Aladdin Capital and Broadpoint may be dandy and help the too-big-to-fail problem. But aren't we just as likely to be shrinking Citi and Bank of America to enlarge Goldman and JPMorgan? I'm not suggesting anything in particular other than that I'm not sure this talent reallocation really does anything material to the bank size issue.
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POPSHarvard Business School Examines Its Failure I find it hard to imagine there's really much soul-searching in many MBA programs. Is the metric they focus on still salary-upon-graduation? Where's the incentive there not to chase and inflate the next bubble?
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POPSThe Economist to Open Theme Park Wow! Economics has become so main stream that it's going to be the focus of an amusement park. As someone who studied economics I find this really, really exciting for the profession!
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POPSThe Man Who Blew Up Wall Street I tend toward the camp who says that the software isn't the problem. As one of the commenters says, "Osinski's software wasn't at fault any more than the manufacturer of his computer was at fault."
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POPSHome Sales Did NOT Improve I just bought a book to study economic indicators and am going to start highlighting these sorts of mistakes. Home sales always jump between January and February because nobody buys houses in January. It's not because housing is stabilizing, it's because Christmas is over.
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POPSWho Will Hire Our Bankers? In the last week I've talked to people who think it's a *great* idea to tax away bonuses of anyone working for TARP recipients. 'But what if it causes all the good people to leave?' I ask. 'Wah wah wah. Where will they go?' 'Here's where.'
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