I've really struggled with how to respond to your post, but I'm going to
leave my quoting to a minimum and make some general points.
At 11:04 PM 1/17/2004 -0600 Dan Minette wrote:
>Further, you give very little in the way of analyis yourself. The main
>arguement you seem to be making is that numbers don't matter because they
>can always be argued away. The problem with this type of arguement is that
>we, then, should never consider correlations because there can always be a
>good retorical arguement to ignore them.
First, as far as I understand the peer review process there is no
obligation on those who criticize shoddy data analysis to conduct better
data analysis themselves.
Secondly, I regret to state that Brin-L isn't in the top tier of my hobbies
these days. I have no doubt that there is a lot of research that could -
and maybe already has - been done. I just don't feel that devoting
several horus to the subject in the hope of persuading people I am pretty
sure would not be convinced anyways is how I want to spend the free time I
have left over from work and school.
>> Likewise, he never connects
>> his analysis to policies, such as, for insistance taking account of the
>> fact that George H. W. Bush raised taxes
>
>He had to because his "read my lips" promise to keep Reagan's policies
>intact were impossible to sustain.
Assign whatever reason to it that you want, if your theory is that
minorities benefit from increased taxes on the rich - then that is the
theory that you should be testing. The motivations for an action should
have no effect on the predicted outcome of those actions.
As it is, using Inauguration Addresses as your sole indicator of economic
policy on the country - without looking at Congress or even any specific
economic policy indicators, does not strike me as a particularly useful,
scientific, or relevant line of inquiry. In other words, to return to
what I said above - another reason why I am not providing my own data is
because I don't find your line of inquiry to be particularly relevant.
>One final proposition. I'll be willing to look at the best 8 years of the
>14 of Reagan-Bush I & II (we don't have data for '03) and compare then to
>Clinton's 8 years. I bet that I will see significant differences in the
>distribution of economic growth.
I'd actually probably agree with that bet. The '90's expansion, fueled in
large part by development in information technology was extraordinary in a
number of ways. Foremost among them was an extraordinary decrease in the
unemployment rate. Since minorites tend to be poor, they almost certainly
benefitted as never-before from this extraordinary reduction.
To quote this week's issue of _The Economist_:
"the younger George Bush presides over 2.3m fewer jobs than when he came to
office..... The figures may paint a bleaker picture than is warranted. To
begin with, comparing job creation with a high point early in Mr Bush's
term is probably the wrong starting-point. Unemployment then, at 4.2%, was
unnaturally low; most economists think the “natural” employment rate—the
rate consistent with stable inflation—is around 5.0-5.5%. As many as 1.5m
jobs at the height of the boom were, in the long run, not sustainable."
If you believe, as most economists do, that the United States reached a
temporary level of unsustainable employment for a period of a few years
during the 1990's - then it is very reasonable to suspect that those groups
that tend to have high unemployment rates, such as minorities, tended to do
very well during that time period.
JDG
_______________________________________________________
John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world,
it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
