Daily Data Dump – Thursday

Daily Data Dump – Thursday

Should you go to an Ivy League School? “Clearly, going to a top-ranked school seems to deliver far higher earnings at age 28 than poorer ranked schools. In fact, the relationship is highly non-linear. Contrary to what you may have heard (“All top-ranked schools are the same”); it in fact looks like the difference between top-ranked Harvard and 9th ranked Dartmouth is on the order of ~$4,000 a year (perhaps $100,000-$200,000 over the course of a lifetime?).”

The Other Social Network. Speaking of non-linearities: “And of course there’s the H-Factor. “I think the name had a lot to do with it,” says Ting. “When we go to a school and say this site is from Columbia, it doesn’t carry the same marketing punch as, This is from Harvard.”


Bronze Age Mediterraneans may have visited Stonehenge. “The new evidence shows that ‘the Boy with the Amber necklace’ spent his childhood in a warm climate typical of Iberia or the Mediterranean. Such warm oxygen values are theoretically possible in the British Isles but are only found on the extreme west coast of South West England, western Ireland and the Outer Hebrides. These areas can be excluded as likely childhood origins of his on the basis of the strontium isotope composition of his teeth” Migrations in the days of yore….

The Uncanny Accuracy of Polling Averages*, Part I: Why You Can’t Trust Your Gut. The Cowles Commission found that stock market newsletters weren’t effective in increasing returns to subscribers. But they also concluded that the “demand” was too strong for them ever to not be a part of the investment scene. The same with verbal punditry which doesn’t take model-based quantitative form. Of course the proof is in the pudding, macroeconomic models haven’t done better than simple heuristics in predicting economic performance, but the economy is a more complex system than an election.

The Judgment of the Future. Remember that history is not always Whiggish. Secular intellectuals in the 19th and early 20th centuries of a progressive bent, such as Jack London and H. G. Wells, were amongst the most enthusiastic promoters of a systematic and more efficacious race-based Social Darwinism. Even though conservatives, whether they be Christians in the West or Confucians in the East, were racialist in any modern sense, they were much more moderate than the more ’scientific’ progressives in their attitudes toward the ‘lower races,’ and definitely closer to contemporary ‘right thinking’ norms than the secular futurists of 1900.

Razib Khan