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Weaving the Strands: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 2.0

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Re: Weaving the Strands: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 2.0

Regarding the minimum wage debate and those greedy corporations that would gladly starve people if they could get away with it merely to eke out a few pennies more profit....


In March each year, the Census Bureau conducts a special survey of many of the same U.S. households that make up the monthly jobs report. Respondents are asked about the size of the company they work for, and the responses are then sorted into six categories ranging from fewer than 10 employees to 1,000 or more.

In a recent analysis, the Employment Policies Institute used this data to determine the size of a typical minimum-wage employer. Contrary to the rhetoric of organized labor and its allies, the vast majority of people earning the minimum wage aren't working at large corporations with 1,000 or more employees. Roughly half the minimum-wage workforce is employed at businesses with fewer than 100 employees, and 40% are at very small businesses with fewer than 50 employees.

The results are similar even if you ... broaden the analysis from minimum wage employees earning $7.25 an hour to "low-wage" employees earning $10 an hour or less: 46% still work for businesses with 100 or fewer employees.
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So, let's pretend that you run one of these small businesses that employ half the minimum wage employees in the country....$0.50 / hour x 2,000 hours = $1,000 plus ancillary costs like employer share of payroll taxes and unemployment insurance = $1,100 per employee or about $95 / month per employee. Now imagine you look your wife in the eye as she holds your infant child in her hands and tell me again about these greedy employers.
 
Re: Weaving the Strands: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 2.0

I've been reading Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow. Amazing stuff. It's quite revelatory to learn about how our minds work.


One of his most important findings is that we all tend to drastically overweight experience based on small sample sizes (in other words, our intuitive understanding of statistics is worse than terrible, it is actually misleading). A small sample size means it is too tiny to draw any meaningful generalizations, yet we all tend to generalize based on a few, or even just one, experience anyway. (how many times have we heard a person say "Company X? their customer support sucks!" and find out it is based on one bad experience).


What I found quite striking was that, for kidney cancer, the counties with the lowest per capital incidence are small rural counties. And, for kidney cancer, the counties with the highest per capita incidence are small rural counties.

Our minds insist on supplying a "reason" or an "explanation" for this data based on intuition, association, and inference. Yet what this data "really" indicates is that kidney cancer is relatively rare, and so if you have a small population, the difference of just one or two incidents will skew the results substantially.


In other words, if you flip a coin three times, the chances are one in four that the result will be all heads or all tails. If you flip a coin seven time, the chances are one in sixty-four that the result will be all heads or all tails. Yet our mind says, "wow, one in four! something significant must be going on here!" for the first data point, yet our mind also says "meh, one in sixty-four, no big deal" for the second data point....yet it is exactly the same baseline data set in both cases!


I suspect that much of the polarization we see today comes from people who cannot imagine that anyone who disagrees with them could be doing so from a position of honesty, that things are so "obvious" that anyone who can't see what we see somehow "must be" acting from a position of duplicity. Yet we also know that people drastically overweight their own experiences when deriving conclusions drawn from scanty data.
 
Re: Weaving the Strands: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 2.0

FreshFish said:
I've been reading Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow. Amazing stuff. It's quite revelatory to learn about how our minds work.


One of his most important findings is that we all tend to drastically overweight experience based on small sample sizes (in other words, our intuitive understanding of statistics is worse than terrible, it is actually misleading). A small sample size means it is too tiny to draw any meaningful generalizations, yet we all tend to generalize based on a few, or even just one, experience anyway. (how many times have we heard a person say "Company X? their customer support sucks!" and find out it is based on one bad experience).


What I found quite striking was that, for kidney cancer, the counties with the lowest per capital incidence are small rural counties. And, for kidney cancer, the counties with the highest per capita incidence are small rural counties.

Our minds insist on supplying a "reason" or an "explanation" for this data based on intuition, association, and inference. Yet what this data "really" indicates is that kidney cancer is relatively rare, and so if you have a small population, the difference of just one or two incidents will skew the results substantially.


In other words, if you flip a coin three times, the chances are one in four that the result will be all heads or all tails. If you flip a coin seven time, the chances are one in sixty-four that the result will be all heads or all tails. Yet our mind says, "wow, one in four! something significant must be going on here!" for the first data point, yet our mind also says "meh, one in sixty-four, no big deal" for the second data point....yet it is exactly the same baseline data set in both cases!


I suspect that much of the polarization we see today comes from people who cannot imagine that anyone who disagrees with them could be doing so from a position of honesty, that things are so "obvious" that anyone who can't see what we see somehow "must be" acting from a position of duplicity. Yet we also know that people drastically overweight their own experiences when deriving conclusions drawn from scanty data.
Click to expand...

I would add to this to say the new propaganda is replete with graphs and numbers to take advantage of this human weakness. People assume that the other side is wrong, first off, then when the article they are reading includes a graph or statistics...well, that proves the reader is right.

Most of the articles posted by partisans on here are from biased sources, but the poster thinks otherwise...google most political issues and see how the articles use 'facts, statistics and graphs' to support that the other party does it more than the writer's party.





They don't completely make up info, they just present the parts that suit their intention and the reader, pre-disposed to take a side, declares that is enough proof for them.
 
Re: Weaving the Strands: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 2.0

pirate said:
Most of the articles posted by partisans on here are from biased sources, but the poster thinks otherwise...google most political issues and see how the articles use 'facts, statistics and graphs' to support that the other party does it more than the writer's party.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's a very astute observation of a very sad state of affairs these days: "While I may be a murderer, at least I'm not a serial killer, like they are" pretty much sums up a great deal of "dialog" these days. :(
 
FreshFish said:
Yeah, that's a very astute observation of a very sad state of affairs these days: "While I may be a murderer, at least I'm not a serial killer, like they are" pretty much sums up a great deal of "dialog" these days. :(
Click to expand...

You do realize he was including you in that remark, right?
 
FreshFish said:
I've been reading Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow. Amazing stuff. It's quite revelatory to learn about how our minds work.


One of his most important findings is that we all tend to drastically overweight experience based on small sample sizes (in other words, our intuitive understanding of statistics is worse than terrible, it is actually misleading). A small sample size means it is too tiny to draw any meaningful generalizations, yet we all tend to generalize based on a few, or even just one, experience anyway. (how many times have we heard a person say "Company X? their customer support sucks!" and find out it is based on one bad experience).


What I found quite striking was that, for kidney cancer, the counties with the lowest per capital incidence are small rural counties. And, for kidney cancer, the counties with the highest per capita incidence are small rural counties.

Our minds insist on supplying a "reason" or an "explanation" for this data based on intuition, association, and inference. Yet what this data "really" indicates is that kidney cancer is relatively rare, and so if you have a small population, the difference of just one or two incidents will skew the results substantially.


In other words, if you flip a coin three times, the chances are one in four that the result will be all heads or all tails. If you flip a coin seven time, the chances are one in sixty-four that the result will be all heads or all tails. Yet our mind says, "wow, one in four! something significant must be going on here!" for the first data point, yet our mind also says "meh, one in sixty-four, no big deal" for the second data point....yet it is exactly the same baseline data set in both cases!


I suspect that much of the polarization we see today comes from people who cannot imagine that anyone who disagrees with them could be doing so from a position of honesty, that things are so "obvious" that anyone who can't see what we see somehow "must be" acting from a position of duplicity. Yet we also know that people drastically overweight their own experiences when deriving conclusions drawn from scanty data.
Click to expand...

Humans, by and large, are pattern identifiers and not sorters of the intangible. So they are predisposed non-existent patterns rather than holding restraint on decisions. This happens all the time. Old wives tales are the most culturally relevant example.

---

Statisticians have witnessed this. There is an idea within Bayesian statistics called "prior elicitation". The idea of Bayesian statistics is that you start with a "prior" notion of the chance of certain unknowns (parameters) and then use data to refine this uncertainty into something (a bit) more certain.

Thus bayesian statistics gets caught into terminology of "prior belief" and "posterior belief". Expert elicitation is a means of informing the structure of the prior to reflect the state of knowledge.

What has been observed, however, is that an expert's belief is often much more narrow than what is warranted by data... Too sure of their own knowledge.

Often the way we detect this is the shifts in the posterior. If your expert is in the ballpark the data should inform within the range given, initially, by the expert. If it doesn't, then it should cast doubt on the reliability of the expert.

Expert systems are appealing in that you are trying to reduce the nature of the unknown as opposed to using mathematically vague priors.

The contrast here is too vague versus too specific.

----

IMO, my personal belief is that we know a lot less than we think we do. Information is hard to sift through and requires work. However, burning a witch only requires gasoline and a flame.
 
Re: Weaving the Strands: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 2.0

joecct said:
May be surprising to you, but I have no trouble with a State deciding to raise its minimum wage. Washington sometimes makes mistakes in one size fits all.
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Not necessarily surprising as you're not so much of a libertarian. Minimum wage increases tend to have broad support so they must be attracting people beyond the usual lefty coalition.
 
Re: Weaving the Strands: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 2.0

Rover said:
Not necessarily surprising as you're not so much of a libertarian. Minimum wage increases tend to have broad support so they must be attracting people beyond the usual lefty coalition.
Click to expand...

They have short-term support, at least until unemployment kicks in.
 
Re: Weaving the Strands: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 2.0

FlagDUDE08 said:
They have short-term support, at least until unemployment kicks in.
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Because places like Mississippi are really rocking it in the employment department with their low minimum wage...
 
Re: Weaving the Strands: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 2.0

Rover said:
Because places like Mississippi are really rocking it in the employment department with their low minimum wage...
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Isn't it funny how there's so many examples out there of his utopia and they're all backwoods backwater hellholes that no one in their right mind would want to live?
 
Re: Weaving the Strands: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 2.0

ScoobyDoo said:
Isn't it funny how there's so many examples out there of his utopia and they're all backwoods backwater hellholes that no one in their right mind would want to live?
Click to expand...


I always wondering why libertarians don't just all move to Somalia, where there's no government and presumably if you arm yourself enough, no taxes either. ;)
 
Re: Weaving the Strands: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 2.0

Rover said:
I always wondering why libertarians don't just all move to Somalia, where there's no government and presumably if you arm yourself enough, no taxes either. ;)
Click to expand...

Another perfect example.
 
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