and the sun rises in the East.

Here's today's installment.

From Brad Delong quoting Kevin Drum  describing the misleading  Social Security “statistics” used by  Alan Simpson.

Drum points out that , since 1940 

 For men, life expectancy at age 65 has gone up   from 78   to 83 .. Since retirement age has gone up from 65 to 67, this means that over the past 60 years the expected payout period has increased by about three years. …….. Alan Simpson  …. has no clue about this.:

HuffPost suggested to Simpson ………… that his claim about life expectancy was misleading because his data include people who died in childhood of diseases that are now largely preventable....According to the Social Security Administration's actuaries, women who lived to 65 in 1940 had a life expectancy of 79.7 years and men were expected to live 77.7 years.

………. Simpson continued to insist it was inaccurate.... Simpson is…… taken very seriously ……. And has …no idea ……… this was true.

From Brad himself pointing out  that the respected conservative economist, Greg Mankiw quoted ,without comment, the  abstract  from a  paper by Jim Conley and Bill Dupor:

Our results suggest that…the Stimulus   created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs 

 

 

 Delong himself then comments: 

Wow! Seriously? The stimulus directly resulted in a net loss of six hundred and fifty thousand jobs?... But wait.

How ?... Conley and Dupor …ran ..a state-by-state regression. Different states received different amounts of ARRA spending, so looking at the differences in employment growth rate between those states after the ….stimulus        should tell us how many jobs were   ….. created or destroyed.... Now, you may say: "Wait, but states where employment goes down should be expected to get more stimulus money, since those are just the states that were hardest-hit by the recession!"

... Conley and Dupor's results are statistically insignificant. Bluntly, what they have found is nothing....

Conley and Dupor's abstract should read "We find no evidence for a significant effect of the….the stimulus……on  job creation." That would be scientifically honest,………………….. the abstract makes the more politically incendiary claim that the ARRA destroyed jobs, which the authors actually did not find....

Mankiw linked to this paper without comment, evaluation, or qualification. But he could have just as easily linked to…a… paper by Daniel J. Wilson, which uses a methodology similar to that of Conley and Dupor, but finds strongly positive (and often strongly significant) effects of the stimulus