I was told when I was a graduate student that the modal published research paper was cited zero times. They then went on to say that the median was one or two, while the mean depended on how good the journal was. Well, someone went looking in political science:
“The modal number of citations to a political science article is zero is true, but most political science articles have more than zero citations is also true.” — @tompepinsky.com
So, at least in political science the median appears to be 26 and the mean 71. That’s a lot higher than I expected, but then poltiical science articles tend to cite far more papers.
My only real thought is this: what question is each number answering? The mode really just let’s you know that the distribution is truncated at zero. It’s a mechanical artifact more than anything. The median, or any of the quantiles, on the other hand, seems only informative if you have a benchmark in your head of at what point an article seems to to be moving the literature. Is 26 substantial, or is it just inframarginal noise for the 90% of articles that don’t really matter? It seems to me all these numbers only matter as fractions of the maximum. If 8123 is the ceiling, how does that change how we interpret a paper with 7 citations?
Most of this seems more like academic appointment accounting, which is almost by definition uninteresting, but it’s a great reminder that statistics have no meaning absent a context that goes beyond other statistics. That said, with just a minimal context, it’s amazing how far knowing nothing but the mean, median, and mode can take you.
The American Community Survey (ACS) collects information on how many times people have been married. Using the 2024 ACS, we can see how that changes across ages. Getting married is what we call an absorbing state. Once you get married once, you’ll never be married zero times again. So long as people get married across the age distribution, the proportion of never married people falls.
The same is true for getting married a 2nd time. Then, you’ll never have been married once ever again. While the proportion of people never married must shrink with age, the proportion of people married once can rise. If a few people get divorced or married a 2nd time, but an even bigger number of people get marred for the first time, then the group of people married only once can grow. The ACS stops measuring once someone has been married three times – then it’s “three or more” times. A subsequent divorce the universal absorbing state. Those people never go into another category.
The chart shows the proportion of people by age and the number of times that they’ve been married. Darker hues reflect divorces.* Importantly, this is the snapshot in 2024. So each age group is a cohort snapshot in time. That’s why the proportion of people in their 80s who’ve been married zero or one time is greater than people in their 70s. They’re a different cohort. When the now 80-year-olds were in their 70s, the sum of the blue and light yellow bars were larger than for more recent 70-year-olds.
You can read it as the narrative is designed. There are good guys resisting a group of marauding (in some cases literal) children. But I think it implies a vastly more important question that we’ve been learning the answer to every day for the last two years: are there rules? If someone does not care to follow the rules, what are the consequences? If someone is creating bespoke rules on the fly with the implied promise that you are taking on great personal risk if you do not follow their rules, are they actually rules or are they something else?
Funny thing about high level governance, it takes on a far greater “fog of war” than a more optimistic observer of institutions might expect. The shape of the current US federal government and the actions it takes appears to be determined far more by the actions of individuals willing and capable of making decisions in a fog of war. That favors people who know that rules aren’t real if they are unenforced. But it also implies the potential for far greater consequences if an authority ever decides to impose consquences for prior transgressions within the fog of war in the interest of resetting precedent for the future.
Coming into 2026, all the chatter was about cutting short term rates (which the Fed does directly by fiat). Long term rates, which are generally set by the broader financial markets, were more or less steady, despite the angst over ongoing gigantic federal deficits; the world remained ready to absorb T-bonds, since they are regarded as the most liquid and secure yield-bearing instruments for global finance.
The Iran war has changed all that. The administration, like other administrations in other conflicts over the past half-century, apparently underestimated the adversary’s resilience in the face of bombing. Without further comment on the geopolitics, it suffices for our purpose as investors to assume that there is a good chance that the conflict will continue for some time, and thus oil prices will remain elevated. This works through the system as persistent inflation, even if the immediate effects of consumer gasoline prices are stripped out of the inflation measure. Bond buyers naturally must take into account expected inflation in pricing what rates they are willing to pay for. Also, the unprecedented boom in data center construction is competing for investment dollars. And so, the ten-year T-bond yield has surged from 4% in late February to over 5% now.
As everyone knows, the price of existing long-term fixed debt (e.g., T-bond, corporate bond, etc.) goes down as rate go up, since the existing bond now has to compete in the market with new, higher yielding bonds. Thus, bondholders are crying in their soup, as the price of IEF (ETF that holds 7–10-year T-bonds) has dropped 7% year to date, and the longer-termed (20+ year) TLT is down 10%. Those are big hits to what are thought to be safe, secure holdings.
What can investors do to protect themselves against further rate increases? One approach is simply to avoid holding long-term bonds or bond equivalents (fixed-rate debt). You can hold very short term (e.g. 3-month) T-bills, as in the TBIL fund. Or you can hold instruments with floating rather than fixed rate. For instance, FLOT holds floating-rate government debt, PAAA is a complex but AAA-rated ETF, and many preferred stocks (e.g., NLY-F) also pay some fixed increment above the current market short-term rate. The values of these instruments are relatively insensitive to overall interest rates.
For a more direct hedge, that goes up when long-term bonds values go down (i.e., when rates go up), there are several funds that use derivatives that essentially short T-bond values. TBT is a straightforward, plain vanilla -2X short of the 20+ year T-bond index. With TLT down 10%, TBT is (unsurprisingly) up a full 21% YTD (total return). PFIX is an actively-managed fund that does something similar, but with wilder swings. It is up a sizzling 30% in 2026, but it was down by 12% in late June. Most advisors seem to recommend TBT or PFIX for tactical trading only, to hold only when you have conviction that rates are going up soon. If the Fed come out swinging tomorrow with a QE bazooka to drive down rates, these stocks will likely crater. That said, if you hold long-term bonds (or fixed-yield preferred stocks, which are like super-long term bonds) in your portfolio, folding in a little PFIX will smooth out the overall portfolio ups and downs. If rates drop and PFIX crashes, your broader bond portfolio should be up.
RISR takes a middle ground, it holds interest-only strips of mortgage-backed securities, so it brings in a decent current yield (5.8% now), and its value rises somewhat as rates go up. Its total return YTD is 6.2% – – maybe not something to brag about at a cocktail party, but it beats CDs.
Here is a 3-year chart of some of these stocks (total return):
Another strategy is to buy individual bonds and hold them to maturity, so you know exactly what the final payout will be.
Saving the best for last: it turns out that if you are a homeowner with a fixed-rate mortgage, you are effective “short” long-term debt, so you “own” a primo hedge against rate increases. Congratulations!
Disclaimer: Nothing here should be considered advice to buy or sell any security.
I have heard the term “whinging” at least twice so far in 2026, both times from fairly sophisticated speakers. I don’t recall ever hearing it before this year. Is this a new trend?
“Whinging” is a British/Commonwealth term that means much the same as “whining,” although (surprisingly) they derive from completely different Old English roots. However, it feels a bit sharper and more dismissive than mere complaining. Thus, whinging is a more intellectual-sounding put-down than whining. And goodness knows how much we need more effective put-downs around here.
ChatGPT informs me that in the realm of finance, the word fills a useful niche. Calling someone a whinger often implies not just that they’re wrong, but that they’re engaging in repetitive, unproductive complaining:
In investing discussions, you’ll often see phrases like: “perma-bear whinging”, “shareholder whinging”, “whinging about management”, “stop whinging and buy the index”
where an American 30 years ago would more likely have written: whining, griping, bellyaching, complaining.
In economics, practitioners often want to distinguish between a legitimate complaint or critique, versus repetitive, emotionally-driven complaining. Thus:
Calling an argument “whinging” implies that the speaker is expressing dissatisfaction without offering analysis or solutions. That rhetorical function is useful in debates over inflation, trade, housing, inequality, central banking, or academic economics itself.
I suppose the first one who unleashes the term “whinging” wins; it is tough to dig out from being buried by a term like that. Knowing all this hopefully leaves you better armed for your next testy exchange over trends or policies.
Here’s the Polymarket…market… for bets on the outcome of the US midterms in November over the last 7 days. You’ll notice a 7 percentage point (13% relative to a 54pp baseline) increase in the expected probability of the leading outcome. That’s a very big change, most of which happened over 3 days. In a $12.8 million market where the largest shareholder has $73k on the line, that is a very, very big move.
I don’t have any insight into what is happening here, I would simply note that there was to my knowledge no singular news item or event that appears to have sparked this. It’s just a great example of what makes betting markets so interesting. There is some tacit knowledge held by a relatively small number of inviduals, but within and through this market this information has now become at least partially observable in the form of a price. Now, to be extra, super, you just won’t believe how clear about this, I don’t have any insight to lay on top of this, no personal model to share, and I would strongly advise very nearly everyone against trying to participate in this market for personal profit. But, nonetheless, this is useful information. If you made me choose between a world with sports gambling or everything else gambling, I might very well choose “everything else.” At least the world captures some value from the revealed information that is, at least in part, subsidized by enabling a very real and serious addiction. I don’t know that we can say anything similarly positive about sports gambling.
Update: longer timeline as of 10am this morning (7/11 to 9/21)
Inspired by Canada’s attempt to integrate into the European Union, here is a non-exhaustive (and highly correlated) list of advantages that Americans have benefited from, been subsidized by, or captured rents from over the last 100 years:
Immigration
The world’s largest free trade zone (50 states, 3.8 million square miles, 116m-350m people)
Friendly neighbors
Two coasts to transport goods from
Serving as the world’s reserve currency
The lowest perceived probability of defaulting on its national debt
The absence of historic or prospective hyperinflation
Possessing nuclear weapons that can both credibly be used and, more importantly, not used (NB: I’m not excited about this one, but I at least can’t rule out that it has deterred antagonistic military action)
The world’s most prestigious higher education institutions
Relatively high levels of interpersonal trust
I have no doubt that there is many, many more. I just wonder which of these we will still be intact in 10 years. Are they all still intact now?
Addendum: This is not meant to be a list of simply good policy choices. Those are, in actuality, far easier to achieve. Rather, this is a list of physical and societal attributes that either simply have to exist or take a significant amount of coordination across time and, more difficult still, generations, to achieve.
I try to avoid nakedly partisan output, especially in this forum. I give my self a little more leeway on social media, but still try to remain within reason. And over my entire liftetime, the intellectual capability of the president has always been a target for insult (sometimes horrifically so) by the opposition party. But we have arrived, at some point in the preceding months or years depending on your vantage, at the arrival of a sitting President who genuinely appears to be limited in his ability to self-regulate.
A sundowning old man, addicted to AI slop, surrounded by supplicants and apparatchiks, with control over the US nuclear arsenal.
If you let the post play, it shows 7 posts over 10 minutes. The rapidity of posts is, I believe, relevant because it signals that it is unlikely to be the product of a staffer in charge of his social media. PR staff would, regardless of content, prefer that posts each have their own time at the top of the feed to generate attention. By firing off so many posts in rapid sequence, each post is buried by the subsequent. This is not professional PR.
As for the posts, it is precisely the kind of content that would generate a lot of interest from juveniles and those in cognitive decline. It’s the kind of slop, AI or otherwise, that gets a lot of attention from individuals with zero opportunity cost of time on Facebook. Read in conjunction with the all-caps posts of threats to ban trade with whole swaths of the globe and other similarly illegal executive actions, it’s just part of the evermounting evidence that the President is not in full control of his impulses. Putting aside what Thomas Schelling would say about fragility and faillings of madman theories of conflict, it’s brings up one of the most important reforms we can and should be pushing for in the next administration.
Age limits on representation.
Reliable, unbiased cognitive tests would be first-best, of course, but the problem there is a) failure is endogenous to the control of the branch administrering them, and b) extrication in the wake of a failure is the kind of stress test that our system does not seem up to at the moment. For all of it’s coarseness, counting days since the record of your birth is straightforward and relatively easy to enforce before being allowed on the ballot in the first place.
One of the realities of modern medicine is that our ability to preserve the body is likely to outpace our ability to preserve the mind at a level adequeate to the task of high representative office. At the same time, our abilitty to extricate and replace someone unfit to their duties in the public sector will likely always be limited relative to similar processes in the private market, where executive services will always be at will in any context where the executive is not themselves the owner.
From a public choice/political economy perspective, age limits will not be an easy legislative or constitutional feat. Representatives will always favor the status quo rules that helped them get their job and subsequently keep it. This is only made more complicated by the basic human optimism regarding our own current and future capacities. And perhaps the simplest obstruction is also the biggest: the reward for winning an election is the expected incumbent advantage in the next election. To limit the prospective future terms for any sitting official, in their current position or the one they aspire to, is to reduce the value of what they already earned, and nobody likes that.
In the face of all that, however, remains a simple truth. The citizens of the United States and the broader world are all made less safe by a sitting President whose self-control and capacity to understand complex contexts has waned well-beyond the threshold of reliable decision-making. That’s a cost big enough and bad enough, wrapped in all the risk aversion and loss-aversion who can possibly imagine, that it should at least have a chance to motivate real legislative action. At least a chance.
Raghu Parthasarathy has put together a few graphs looking at labor salaries at the University of Oregon. This isn’t the first potential observation of what others have termed “administrative bloat” at research universities, but the flatness of professors at budget category makes for a useful comparison of slopes.
I don’t know whether this is good or bad, but it does leave me with a couple questions
What do Directors do?
What is getting bundled into “Other”?
For directors, this could be a lot of things. They could be directing centers launched with private money, which means they are perfectly likely to be research professionals without teaching obligations and at-will contracts outside the tenure track ecosystem. They could, however, also be service professions working on the sports, entertainment, and student services side of things. The pool, the gym, the student outreach center – perhaps the scale of each now requires their own bespoke middle management position.
“Other” is, of course, far harder to parse without doing some actual digging, which of course I am in no way willing to do.
Is this bloat? Is it an academic institution drifting away from research and other forms of traditional public service? Not sure. What I am confident in is this is further evidence of the attractiveness of employee slots unattached to tenure. I’ve written before on what tenure is and how it is intended to be leveraged as a mechanism within the production of scholarship. Maybe the University of Oregon is simply trying to deleverage from tenure. Or maybe the bundle of goods being offered is more complex than previously, requiring a new layer of middle management. I’m curious if any of our readers have additional insight for the comments. Because, at the very least, this is more evidence that what is being produced at major universities is changing.
Lebron James is obsessed with golf. His new YouTube channel is what is getting the most attention, but this has been a publicly known fact for a while. There’s even a (largely unevidenced) theory that he chose to play his potentially final season in Philadelphia for it’s proximity to elite golf courses.
I just want to take this time to deconstruct why Lebron’s golf obsession is interesting. It’s a reminder that first derivatives often matter more than both absolute values and higher order derivatives. Let me explain.
Lebron at 41 years of age, in the face of history, experience, and logic, is still one of the 20 very best human beings at basketball in the world. So, in terms of absolutes, playing basketball should still give him immense satistfaction. The problem, of course, is his personal reference point (how good he used to be) and the rate of decay he is experiencing from that reference point. This is a person who spent more than two decades getting better and better at something, who arrived at a point where they were literally the very best in the world at it, only to then at some point in time arrive at the awareness that they were in fact getting worse at it. To be clear, that rate of decay is far slower than anyone could have predicted, but it remains decay nonetheless. And it’s not just “getting worse”. It’s getting worse at something that you are orienting your every day around. Your meals, your sleep, your family life, everything, all in dedication to something you are getting worse at.
I’m now going to generalize from my own lived experience, but I think the emotional returns to dedication are always stronger when the first derivative is positive, but no amount of work can guarantee it. You can work harder and increase the positive gains or, failing that, slow down the decay, but at some point the decay is inevitable (i.e. the work shows up in the second derivative). And no matter how much you slow it down, decay just isn’t as satisfying as the day-to-day lived experience as improvement or even plateauing.
And this is where golf comes in. Golf is a sport that has much lower athletic barriers to entry and, for Lebron or anyone who is starting out, a vastly lower reference point for quality. It is entirely likely that every time Lebron has ever picked up a golf club he is better at golf than he was the previous month. It is the 100% inverse to what Lebron has experienced playing basketball for at least 7 or 8 years now, likely longer. The relief he must feel, directly experiencing and observing the returns to his efforts.
Coming to terms with being past your prime is a standard trope in narrative fiction of all formats, but from an actual mental health point of view, I don’t think it is given enough attention, particularly for those at the tops of their field. There are vanishingly few purely natural elites in any profession, vocation, or craft. Most have had to sacrfice whole avenues of life experiences to achieve such levels, and when they do begin to decay they either have to endure public scrutiny bordering on censure, or the quiet tragedy of being alone in their ability to discern just how much they have lost. The latter is almost worse. Almost.
As a final tidbit, let me make a loose connection to technological innovation and AI specifically. Obsolescence hurts. A negative first derivative hurts. But what hurts even more is an unexpected shock that accelerates that decay. Injuries are mentally hard for athletes, in part, because of their often discontinuous nature. They were still improving, the rate at which they were improving was accelerating, until they weren’t. There are professions that are wrestling with this right now. There are professionals who reasonably expected to have another half decade before the decay began. That timeline is now in question. And most of us don’t have the luxury of being a generationally great athlete who can immediately become great at something completely new.
