18 Comments

Stigler's Law of Eponymy (of which I had never heard, grateful to you!) is going in my little container of treasures, alongside J.B.S Haldane's description of the steps of scientific advance:

1. This is worthless nonsense.

2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.

3. This is true, but quite unimportant.

4. I always said so."

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I presume you mean Lowrey's Law of Eponomy, right? 😉

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I always said so.

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Money well spent in this substack!

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Mar 28·edited Mar 28

Yet another example that being left or "woke" is a synonym for mental illness. Dudley must have the patience and kindness of a saint.

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Clearly we should apply the Dudley rule to state statistics and reserve the Sahm rule for national ones

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Under Stigler's Law of Eponymy, the idea to do this shall be known as the Weeyams Approach to Nomenclature. Francis Turner -- who's that?

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Weeyams approach inside the US, Turner approach outside

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Another reason to discard your cell phone and all the apps. Salm seems like a petty young woman.

" We are going to Hell in a Handbasket ". Author anyone?

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“We know this because Claudia Sahm angrily tweeted out an email she received from Dudley, in which he politely points her toward the same rule that he came up with 20 years prior, in a Goldman Sachs research report:”

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I’ve stopped reading paperback thrillers these days. I just look forward to Chris’ latest takedown.

And to think I shuddered, fifty years ago, when my friend Peggy told me I’d love studying economics.

Well, I was half-right. Takedowns in economics is what I’ve been waiting for, and I got ‘em now.

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Academic plagiarism is an unending pursuit. And it's obvious to me that the loser "justifies" herself by exhibiting extreme anger toward the person that presented the concept the first time around. But anyone that lists Christine Romer and Janet (I'm not shoutin', I'm) Yellen as economics "heroes" (or did she call them "heroines") is stuck in Loserville, population 1.

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In some way I can understand Sahm’s anger: we all feel shame when we’re caught doing something wrong. Most kids will lash out to hide that shame. Hopefully as we become adults we grow up emotionally and own our mistakes. But it’s entirely something else when the mob sides with the person who did the wrong thing, and as Chris points out, everyone then shuts up because there’s nothing to gain from rocking the boat. Our collective behavior is as immature as school children’s.

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How about we ALL do the RIGHT THING and call it what it should be called! It should be the ORIGINAL identification, naming and convention that the FIRST PERSON TO WRITE THE RULE DOWN and identifies as such IS THE RIGHT NAME TO APPLY. If it’s a bloody RULE OF ECONOMICS, it HAS NO IDEOLOGICALLY DETERMINED RULES OF APPLICATION. This is a BULLSHIT ARGUMENT.

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why include Sahm's name at all?

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Up with Dudleys

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It looks as if Dudley noted it first, and then Sahm very likely discovered it on her own. Dudley's version looks better, actually-- if I understand it correctly, he uses a 3-month moving average, but she requires 12 months, which is a lot more time to have to wait for a predictor. Andhe uses .33pts and she uses .5 pts, if I remember rightly.

So I think we could say there are two rules, the Sahm Rule and the Dudley Rule, and the Dudley Rule is better.

Probably there is some rule even better. This is not theory-based, so it's a matter of data-fitting. Find out what the shortest time period is that can be used to predict past recessions. A good undergrad semester paper. (Note that "best" must balance two errors, false positives and false negatives, and the balance you want depends on your tastes.)

Another easy paper would be to look at the state level. Maybe that gives an even better rule, one that works further in advance. Someone should check out whether having the current number of states would have predicted past recessions correctly.

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I like when they put the definition in the parentheses after saying the rule because no one will ever remember the rule then after you read the definition its like "well, that's dumb"

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Dudley should say that HIS rule CAN be used at the state level. You use 1/3 of a point at the state level for the Dudley rule, and 1/2 percent at the national level for the SAHM rule. It's a troll but would maybe actually work, since SAHM is disavowing usage at the state level.

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