This Could Have Been Three Posts...

... if I had time to provide decent comments on each item, that is.  Instead of delving into my thoughts about the following links, though, I'll just put them up Marginal Revolution style.

Psychohistory, the sci-fi version of what I do for a living. For those with some knowledge of the history of macroeconomics, you'll notice that as early as 1942, Asimov saw the importance of the Lucas Critique, something economists didn't latch on to until 1976.

while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events. [...] The character responsible for the science's creation, Hari Seldon, established two axioms:

• that the population whose behaviour was modeled should be sufficiently large
• that the population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses

That last bullet point is the one macroeconomists took nearly 35 years to figure out.

A mind-boggling "How to Deceive with Statistics" entry. The nature of averages suggests that your friends are cooler than you. The money quote:

Let’s imagine a small department offering three courses for the semester. One is a survey course with 80 students, one an upper-level course with 15 students, and one a seminar with five students. Now what is the average class size? Clearly, it is (80 + 15 + 5)/3, or 33.3 students. This is the number the department is likely to publicize.

But once again, let’s adopt the perspective of the average person and reexamine these numbers. Eighty of the 100 students find themselves in a class with 80 students, 15 find themselves in a class of 15 students, and five in a class of five students. Thus, the average student’s class size is (80 × 80 + 15 × 15 + 5 × 5)/­100, or 66.5 students. This number is less likely to be publicized by the department.

Did that just blow your mind? It did mine.

Theories of International Relations and Zombies. How is this *not* something I need to read?  A nice discussion by the author is available here. Max Fisher at the Atlantic Wire, capturing a lot of why I find zombies so fascinating, has this to say:

[...]the beauty of zombie theory is that it applies too [sic] all sorts of emerging trans-national security threats, including those we have yet to anticipate or imagine.

Yes. Zombies are really just a proxy for disasters and crises of a scale and nature we can't quite foresee.  Namely, the zombie apocalypse.  If someone wants to buy this book for me, I will put a detailed review up on this blog with a shout out / link to the website of your choice.