A good tweet: Of course, putting this question to good use requires judgment. There are no iron rules for mapping a causal claim to a prediction about large-scale data in the messy real world. And there are always a million ways you can explain why the causal claim is still true even if the predicted …
Author Archives: Walter
Forecasting update
In February, I recapped my track record as a forecaster, going back to 2015. I’m a bit more than halfway through my first season as a “Pro” on the INFER forecasting platform so I thought I’d post an update. 64 questions have resolved. I’ve forecast on 7 of them. Of users who’ve forecast on at …
Prediction and resilience
In Radical Uncertainty, the authors make a common argument: Instead of trying to predict the future, you should prepare for a wide range of scenarios, including ones you can’t even fully articulate. You should become more robust or resilient: The attempt to construct probabilities is a distraction from the more useful task of trying to …
The German labor market
A paper by an MIT economist explains its unique features… Germany has less low-wage work and less inequality than the US, but more flexibility and lower unemployment than France. Germany—the world’s fourth largest economy—has remained partially insulated from the growing labor market challenges faced by the United States and other high-income countries. In many advanced …
Notes & quotes: ‘Radical Uncertainty’
I recently read Radical Uncertainty by the economists John Kay and Mervyn King. A few notes, then a bunch of block quotes that stood out to me… Notes I strongly disagree in practice with their argument against probabilistic reasoning. Only economists who’ve spent time in finance and business schools could possibly think that probability and …
My writing for Quartz
I recently left Quartz after ~2.5 rewarding years as an editor there. The most gratifying editorial aspect of that work was editing hundreds of interesting features from nearly every reporter on staff. There are too many of those pieces to try and select favorites. But I wrote a bit, too. And I wanted to link …
A.O. Scott on pragmatism and art
…Among my principal guides are Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Dewey. If there’s an implicit allegiance here, a school of thought in which I might claim membership, it’s some version of pragmatism. That is, I believe that our understanding of art emerges from our experience of it, and that our notions of beauty and value …
Edmund Wilson on journalism
“When I speak of myself as a journalist,” he wrote, “I do not of course mean that I have always dealt with current events or that I have not put into my books something more than can be found in my articles; I mean that I have made my living mainly by writing in periodicals. …
Corporate social responsibility
There’s a lot of buzz and debate about ESG and corporate social responsibility lately, so I wanted to post something I worked on recently on this topic. I helped Quartz put together a page describing its mission to “Make Business Better,” and most of that reflects group work bridging a range of perspectives within the …
How economics thinks about technology and labor
A recent David Autor review paper sums up the evolution: I began by asking what the role of technology—digital or otherwise—is in determining wages and shaping wage inequality. I presented four answers corresponding to four strands of thinking on this topic: the education race, the task-polarization model, the automation-reinstatement race, and the era of AI …
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beyond the times 