Visualizing States by Population

They typical map of the U.S. shows physical areas, not population ... on which is based economic and political power. Check this out instead:

 

Do note that psychologists have evidence that people are not very good at assessing relative areas. So even though this is an improvement (if population and power are what you're interested in), we can still make careless mistakes. For example, Texas has about 8 times the population of Oklahoma, but many people would underestimate that based on this map.  

In ECON 3020, I do talk a little about the "big 4", and you can see why.

Informed Opinion on the Trump Administration's Initial Proposals for Taxes

Most commentary about taxes is NOT informed. 

This is especially true amongst politicians and the media.

It's also a bit true for accountants: they tend to know the rules of how taxes are collected, but not they why and how of their set up and history.

Anyway, you probably can't get much better than this post at The Grumpy Economist (John Cochrane, now at the Hoover Institution, after many years at the University of Chicago, here's is Cochrane's Google Scholar page ... 50K cites is future Nobel Prize range for some). 

Fair warning: Cochrane's politics are conservative, but I do not regard him as putting his politics before his economics. Oh, and he's a macroeconomist, which always helps when discussing macroeconomics.

Anyway, the post is called "Tax Talk". Here's some summaries:

• No taxes on tips: little effect on the federal budget, there are lots of better ways to help workers, but it was a campaign promise.
• No taxes on social security: cute, but this really isn't addressing the big problems with this system.
• No taxes on overtime: really bad, overtime pay exists for the wrong reasons already, and this will just make them worse.
• Renewing the tax cuts passed in 2017: these had sunset provisions, and expire soon. In general, this was the most successful tax reform since the mid-80s, and should be a no-brainer (no matter which party is in charge).
• Adjusting the SALT cap: (SALT is the federal tax reduction for people in high tax states), this is avoiding the main issue, people like SALT because it corrects for state governments that are inefficient or profligate, fix those problems instead (easier said than done).
• Closing the carried interest loophole: when I hear people I know talk about this one, I want to just say "Oh, shut up, already". This is a super complex issue that people want to boil down to "rich people, bad", and "finance, bad". They shouldn't. If you don't have a lot of experience viewing the world through option pricing, you shouldn't even be talking about this one.
• Tax cuts for "American products": WTF, for the most part we don't tax products ... so anyone interested in this one ought to be asked to name the taxes on products they'd like to change.

Average Workweek

The BLS publishes data on the length of the average work week. Here it's charted by Visual Capitalist:

 

There isn't much theory about how this does or should behave. There's two things interacting here: how good is business, and how timely is hiring. 

If business is improving faster than hiring, it goes up. If business is not as good as hiring, it goes down. 

Recessions show as deep valleys because, believe it or not, firms actually try to hold on to employees (because they have a lot invested in many of them).

Beware Correlations Without Some Notion of Causality

 Correlation between variables means nothing if you don't have some explanation for a causal mechanism from the one to the other.

 

That's a hypothesis test in that footnote. Don't trust those either: look at that p-value! The null hypothesis is that there's no relationship between the two variables, and that's easily rejected. Yeah, maybe there really is a relationship here, but I think it's probably a Type I error (i.e., rejecting a true null).

This is not saying hypothesis tests are bad. Instead it means they can be done prematurely and thoughtlessly. Garbage in garbage out, as they say. 

In gray, it notes a website devoted to these, as well as a companion site dedicated to academic papers based on probably spurious correlations.