Military Spending
The Economist magazine presents some useful data on military spending by the world’s biggest powers. Per person, Israel spends the most on its military, followed by the United States. Most developed states spend less than half of what the US does per person.
However, if one asks how much a state ought to spend on defense, [...]
Shenanigans
I don’t usually blog on finance or economics, but this tale is too good to pass up. James Hamilton on some recent CDS shenanigans:
A credit default swap is sometimes described as an insurance contract written against the possibility of default of a particular underlying asset. If I buy a CDS and the specified asset defaults, [...]
Politics, Evidence, and Medicine
In the wake of the news that NICE approved acupuncture and chiropractic treatments for lower back pain, Daniel Davies has written a fantastic article at Crooked Timber on how politics makes it much more difficult to rationally evaluate the effectiveness of treatments on the evidence.
Doing science is hard to begin with. When large amounts of [...]
