Well, “praise” might not be exactly the right word, but I do want to argue that by and large, genocide is the least objectionable form of mass murder—for the simple reason that, when successful, it leaves no mourners. Other things being equal, meaningless deaths are best clustered among people who care about each other. I’m pretty sure I prefer the home invader who wipes out a family of five over the serial killer who takes four lives at random, leaving four devastated spouses and twelve grieving children. And likewise I prefer the mass murderer who wipes out an extended “family” of five million to the one who kills, say, four and a half million at random. Taking the death and destruction as given, sowing less misery earns you a little slack.
Continue reading ‘In Praise of Genocide’
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Banks, by their nature, are susceptible to bank runs. Depositors panic and demand their money back, the bank doesn’t have enough cash on hand to meet all the demands, this generates even greater panic and even more demands, and pretty soon the bank is selling off assets at fire sale prices in a desperate attempt to placate the depositors. Back before Federal deposit insurance, this used to happen from time to time. According to Yale’s Professor Gary Gorton, author of Slapped By the Invisible Hand: The Panic of 2007, it happened again recently. The great crisis of the past few years was just another bank run, pure and simple.
Continue reading ‘What Really Went Wrong’
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Like everyone else I know, I am of course a longtime fan of the webcomic XKCD. But somehow it took me until last week to become aware of the frequently brilliant competitor Luke Surl, of which the above is a delectable example. What else out there am I missing?
Hat tip to Harry Brighouse of Crooked Timber.
Click here to comment or read others’ comments.
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Wall Street quants are always trying to dream up new financial products that nobody’s figured out how to regulate. Sooner or later, I suppose, one of them will come up with a bank account that pays imaginary interest. You deposit a dollar and a year later you get an interest payment of i. That’s not “i for interest”; it’s the square root of minus one. I have no idea what that means for economics, but thinking about it is a good way to understand Euler’s (or, the historical record being unclear, perhaps Johann Bernoulli’s) breathtakingly beautiful formula
Continue reading ‘Financial Imagineering’
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Here at The Big Questions, we try to stand up for clear thinking and shame its enemies. This week, the enemies included Paul Krugman (writing on unemployment), the President of the United States (expounding on rising insurance premiums), a Washington Post columnist who seemed to forget that political reforms are supposed to serve a purpose, and that perpetual offender, the Conventional Wisdom, in its judgments about anti-gay agendas and fiscal responsibility.
Unless Krugman or someone like him offers an irresistible target tomorrow, I’ll see you next on Monday. Thanks for visiting.
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Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice. Paleontologist Peter Ward says the seas could turn to sulfur; physicist Michio Kakutani expects the world (along with the rest of the Universe) to end in a deep freeze—though he holds out hope that we could stay warm by escaping to a parallel Universe. Environmental scientist Stewart Brand foresees a climate catastrophe, astronomer Edward Sion worries about supernovas and asteroid impacts, physicst Melissa Franklin contemplates being swallowed quickly and painlessly by a black hole—which wouldn’t be so bad, she says. Astronomer Robert Kirshner imagines a lonely future back here in the Milky Way after the expansion of the Universe transports the other galaxies beyond our observable horizon. Political scientist Graham Allison imagines destruction by nuclear terrorists, and pretty much everyone agrees that sooner or later the earth will be swallowed by a dying sun.
You can watch the video interviews at BigThink, where, as always, I wish they would post transcripts; reading is faster than viewing and skimming is faster still. But if you’ve got the patience, some of these are fun.
What’s your (realistic or fanciful) scenario for the end of days?
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Suppose that year after year, you spend more than you earn. You are worried that you’ve become fiscally irresponsible. Which of the following is not a path back to fiscal sanity for your household?
- Spend less.
- Earn more.
- Stop at the ATM more often so you’ll have more cash in your pocket.
Do we all understand why the answer is C? Good. Now let’s try another one.
Continue reading ‘How to Be Fiscally Responsible’
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In this week’s news, an allegedly “anti-gay” state senator was outed after being arrested on a DUI after leaving a gay bar in California. I hope we can all agree that driving drunk is objectionable and that frequenting gay bars, if that’s your thing, is not. One might be tempted, then, to conclude that people should care about the DUI and not the venue. But I suppose there’s no point in trying to wish away human nature.
What interests me in all this is the promiscuous use of the adjectives “anti-gay” and “hypocritical”. The senator seems to be charged with three counts of anti-gayness, with hypocrisy as an aggravating circumstance. First, he opposes anti-discrimination laws. Second, he opposes gay marriage. Third, he opposes an official day of recognition for gay rights activist Harvey Milk.
Now let’s take these one at a time.
Continue reading ‘Out of the Closet and Into the News’
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In a curiously unmotivated piece at the Washington Post, Anne Lowrey asks: “What if senators represented people by income or race, not by state?”.
I can’t figure out her point. I am all for identifying problems and brainstorming about radical solutions, but I have no idea what problem Lowrey thinks she’s addressing.
The primary problem with representative democracy is that our representatives are captured by special interests. My senators plot to steal from you and your senators plot to steal from me, with a lot of collateral damage along the way. (And yes, you and your neighbors do constitute a special interest, as do I and mine.) The problem is exacerbated by the fact that my neighbors and I have a lot of interests in common, making it easier to steal on all our behalves at the same time. The solution is to make each senator’s constituency more diverse, not, as Lowrey proposes, less.
Continue reading ‘Fixing Elections’
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The Obama administration has its knickers all in a twist over rising health insurance premiums. As you wade through the rhetoric, here are a few things to keep in mind:
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Greed does not cause rate hikes. I’m not sure why some premiums have shot up lately, but I’m quite sure that “greed” is not the answer. That’s because I’m quite sure that the insurance companies are no greedier today than they were a year ago. To explain a change in prices, you’ve got to point to something that’s changed. Greed is pretty much a constant.
Continue reading ‘Premium Prices’
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I don’t usually post on Sundays, but this letter to the New York Times from the indispensable Don Boudreaux is too priceless to pass up.
Edited to add: I don’t always read Krugman’s column, but since Don’s link sent me there today, I can’t resist noting one more outrage: Krugman thinks that extending estate tax relief to the top .25% of estates is a policy “on behalf of” that .25% of the population, as opposed to a policy on behalf of everyone who benefits from capital accumulation, higher wages and economic growth.
Or more precisesly, he doesn’t think that. But he says it.
Click here to comment or read others’ comments.
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We started the week with a pointer to a hilarious recipe for salted water. If you didn’t follow the link then, you should follow it now. Click on the “reviews” tab and don’t be drinking anything when you read through these.
On Tuesday I made some snarky and cynical comments about the effects of health care reform on government spending. Fortunately, nobody at the Congressional Budget Office sued me for libel. Professor Joseph Weiler was not so lucky; when he posted a negative book review on a web site he edits, he was charged with criminal libel in France. Thursday’s post reviewed the astonishing story and Friday’s followed up with an account of the most devastating book review I know of (though commenters offered some good alternatives).
We paused midweek to acknowledge the birthday of Georg Cantor, and to summarize how he taught the world to think about infinity.
Next week: Commentary on health insurance premium hikes and much much more. Come back on Monday!
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Professor Joseph Weiler, who is facing criminal charges in France for posting a mildly negative book review on a web site he edits, has asked supporters to search out and email him copies of even more negative reviews (presumably of academic writing), to submit to the court as evidence that this sort of thing happens all the time.
The review I’ll be emailing is a classic of the genre. It was written by Andre Weil, one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century, and possibly the most erudite person who ever lived. Here’s how I described Weil shortly after his death:
Continue reading ‘The Hunting of the Snark’
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On June 25, 2010, Professor Joseph Weiler, editor of the European Journal of International Law, will stand trial in a French criminal court for running a mildly negative book review on a journal-associated website.
The book in question is The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court by the Israeli law professor Dr. Karin N. Calvo-Goller. According to the reviewer the main part of the book “simply restates the…relevant parts of the ICC Statute.” This rehashing, he adds, is particularly unproductive since a large part of the volume consists of a reprint of the Statute itself.
Continue reading ‘Criminal Law’
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Today is the 165th birthday of Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor, the mathematician who indirectly inspired me to major in math. In my first few semesters of college, I was at best an indifferent student, finding little inspiration in the humanities majors I was bouncing around among, playing a prodigious amount of pinball, and attaining (according to rumor) history’s first-ever grade of C in Peter Regenstrief’s Poltical Science 101. Then one day, my friend Bob Hyman happened to mention that some infinities are larger than others, and set my life on track. This—the vision of Georg Cantor—was something I had to know more about. Before long I was immersed in math.
What does it mean for some infinities to be larger than others? Well, for starters, some infinite sets can be listed, while others are too big to list. The natural numbers, for example, are already packaged as a list:
The integers, by contrast (that is, the natural numbers plus their negatives) aren’t automatically listed because a list, by definition, has a starting point, whereas the integers stretch infinitely far in both directions. But we can fix that by rearranging them:
So the integers can also be listed.
Continue reading ‘Split Infinities’
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Yesterday my lunch companion announced his new weight loss strategy—he’s eating more cake. He’s got it figured that if he eats enough cake now, it will motivate him to take up running someday (even though he’s never run before). So he ordered a slice of chocolate cake and announced that he’d just lost two pounds.
Of course, my friend wasn’t entirely serious; he was just gearing up for a possible future at the Congressional Budget Office, which says we can reduce government spending by enacting the president’s health reform proposal. They’ve got it figured that if we pass this proposal now, it will motivate future cuts in Medicare (even though nobody’s ever had the stomach for those cuts before). If I understand the numbers right, they’re counting that as a “saving” of several hundred billion dollars. Well, pass me that cake.
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An unexpectedly full weekend leaves me caught short without a full fledged blog post for today. I’ll make up for it tomorrow. In the meantime, here are two tidbits to hold you over:
- A useful recipe for salted water. Do not fail to read the reviews.
- A puzzle I got from the mathematician Alexander Merkurjev. If I recall right, he told me that it had appeared on a college entrance exam in the old Soviet Union:
A regular 400-gon is tiled by parallelograms. Prove that at least 100 of those parallelograms must be rectangles.
(A regular 400-gon is a 400-sided figure with all sides equal and all angles equal. The parallelograms can all be of different sizes and shapes—or not. “Tiled” means that the interior of the 400-gon is entirely covered, with no overlaps.)
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We will continue to go through the budget, line by line, page by page, to eliminate programs that we can’t afford and don’t work.
| —President Barack Obama, January 27, 2010 |
The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities…play a vital role in preserving and enhancing America’s cultural legacy.
| —President Barack Obama, February 26, 2010 |
| after requesting increased funding for both agencies |
With that out of the way, let me proceed to our traditional weekend roundup. I was extremely pleased this week to have our first guest post from the distinguished philosopher Jamie Whyte. I’ve been a great admirer of Jamie’s writings since I discovered them a few months ago, and I thought his contribution here—on a radical proposal to improve democracy—was fabulous.
We had two other lively discussions this week, one on why Olympians are like Ponzi schemers (with a followup post a few days later) and one on the fiscal stimulus package on the occasion of its one-year anniversary.
Come back Monday for more!
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I stirred up some controversy on Tuesday with my post equating Olympic athletes to Ponzi schemers, so I want to provide a little more explanation.
What do scammers and Olympians have in common? Let’s start with a simpler question: What do sugar and arsenic have in common? Answer: There’s such a thing as having too much of either. With arsenic, any amount is too much; with sugar, some is good but too much is bad. Likewise for scam artists and athletes. Scam artists, like arsenic, are bad in any quantity; athletes, like sugar, are good in moderation and bad in excess.
Continue reading ‘Arsenic and Gold Medals’
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A Guest Post
by
Jamie Whyte
Last year, the British government decided to lift the top rate of income tax from 41 to 52 percent. Last month, Lord Myners, the UK Secretary of State for Financial Services, said that the policy would raise not nearly as much revenue as had been expected. People are apparently making efforts to avoid paying it. A host of politicians and commentators responded that it was always a foolish idea, a purely “political” policy.
But how can a bad policy be good politics? What defect in the electoral system can explain this?
Continue reading ‘Fewer Voters Are Better Voters’
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Harvard’s Robert Barro, who is good at this stuff, estimates (in round numbers) the effects of last year’s stimulus package (numbers represent billions of dollars):
The executive summary is that income (that is, the total income of all Americans) rises in 2009 and 2010 (while the stimulus money is being spent), and continues a bit higher for another year after that, but falls in later years (when the taxes, with their accompanying disincentive effects, come due). (Of course, the day of reckoning can be delayed, but not forever—so the arithmetic still rules). Adding up over five years, income falls by $300 billion, or about $1000 per American.
These numbers confirm my prejudice that the stimulus package is a bad idea, but they still make me uncomfortable. Let me first add a few remarks about what the numbers mean and then I’ll tell you what I don’t quite get about them.
Continue reading ‘So How’s That Fiscal Stimulus Working For You?’
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What must it be like, I wonder, to be the parent of an Olympic athlete, watching your kid accomplish magnificent feats of almost no social value? When your kid is a taxi driver or a shoe salesman or a carpenter, you can take pride every day in knowing that he or she has taken someone home, or helped someone walk, or given someone shelter. When your kid is an Olympic gold medalist, mustn’t you feel a little sheepish about all the superhuman effort that went into nothing more than taking a gold medal away from someone else?
Continue reading ‘The Olympics, Bernie Madoff and Me’
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Pictured above is the Harvard-educated professor with twin reputations for brilliance and abrasiveness whose destructive rampage has shocked the nation. After a promising early career, the professor’s behavior had recently turned erratic and antisocial, including complicity in the takeover of a major manufacturing firm and conspiracy to take over an entire industry comprising approximately 15% of the economy. The professor is also suspected in the expropriation and squandering of hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars. Old friends and admirers are shocked and saddened.
The other big news story of the week was Tiger Woods’s apology, which merited a full two pages in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. I was going to blog my thoughts on this, but my friend Nathan Mehl has said exactly what I wanted to say, and said it so much more brilliantly than I could possibly have said it myself, that I’m going to send you over there instead.
Click here to comment.
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I’ve long wanted to blog about the astonishing mathematics of Alexandre Grothendieck, who was surely the greatest mathematician of the 20th century and arguably the greatest of all time. This week, I had occasion to blog not about the mathematics per se (I’m still figuring out how to do that in a readable way) but about the remarkable letter from Grothendieck that surfaced last month, and the intellectual property issues that it raises.
Having started the week with one remarkable letter, we ended it with another, this one from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on the issue of secession.
In between, I asked readers to enlighten me about some stuff I just don’t get, we saw new evidence that people are less religious than they say they are, and we used a study on beauty and daughters to illustrate how statistics can deceive.
I’ll return on Monday, probably with a few more thoughts on secession. Have a good weekend!
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When screenwriter Daniel Turkewitz was working on a script about astronauts struggling to survive in crisis conditions, he enlisted a veteran astronaut as a consultant. That worked so well that when Turkewitz began his new project, a script about Maine seceding from the Union to join Canada, he decided to enlist an expert on the legal niceties of secession. In other words, he decided to enlist a Supreme Court Justice.
Eight out of nine justices (plus retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) ignored Turkewitz’s inquiry about what would happen if a secession case were to reach the Supreme Court. Rather astonishingly, however, Justice Scalia responded with the following letter, which Turkewitz’s brother Eric posted on his blog this week:
Continue reading ‘Scalia Against Secession’
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I love evolutionary biology, so I love this argument: Beauty is more valuable to girls than it is to boys, so beautiful parents should have more daughters than sons. You want (or at least your genes want) to pass on your assets to children who can make the best use of them.
So I was delighted by recent news reports that beautiful women do indeed have more daughters. But I was stunned by the reported magnitude of the effect: According to one report, beautiful people are 36 percent more likely to have a daughter than a son!
Continue reading ‘Beauty’s Daughter’
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There are roughly 30 million self-professed fundamentalist Christians in the United States. How many of them really believe what they say they do? New evidence suggests that the number is somewhere around 100. Either that or fundamentalism breeds exceptional callousness toward ones’ pets:
Many people in the U.S.—perhaps 20 million to 40 million—believe there will be a Second Coming in their lifetimes, followed by the Rapture. In this event, they say, the righteous will be spirited away to a better place while the godless remain on Earth. But what will become of all the pets?
Bart Centre, 61, a retired retail executive in New Hampshire, says many people are troubled by this question, and he wants to help. He started a service called Eternal Earth-Bound Pets that promises to rescue and care for animals left behind by the saved.
Promoted on the Web as “the next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World,” the service has attracted more than 100 clients, who pay $110 for a 10-year contract ($15 for each additional pet.) If the Rapture happens in that time, the pets left behind will have homes—with atheists. Centre has set up a national network of godless humans to carry out the mission. “If you love your pets, I can’t understand how you could not consider this,” he says.
Here is the full article by Mike Di Paola, writing in Business Week.
Edited to add: I shouldn’t have said 30 million fundamentalist Christians; I should have said (at least according to the Business Week article) 30 million who expect the Second Coming and the Rapture in their lifetimes.
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Here are some things I don’t quite get. Maybe someone can explain them to me.
1. All through 2008, then-Senator Obama kept telling me that “America’s reputation in the world is critical, not just to our security but to our prosperity”, and therefore American policies should be set with a decent regard for world opinion. Now, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, he keeps warning me that it will be disastrous if foreign interests are allowed to express their opinions in our political campaigns. How are we supposed to have a decent regard for foreign opinions if we don’t listen to them?
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Don’t Get’
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In 1958, the 30-year-old Alexandre Grothendieck stunned the International Congress of Mathematicians with his audacious proposal to remake the foundations of algebraic geometry, vastly expanding the scope of the field, subsuming all of commutative algebra and algebraic number theory, and paving the way for the solution of the elusive Weil conjectures, then considered decades or centuries out of reach. No mathematical vision had ever been more radical or more ambitious. Someday I will blog about that vision. Today’s post is about genius, eccentricity and intellectual property.
Continue reading ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’
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This week we had an explanation of why there is magnetism, a discussion on how to teach math, a debate on child labor and a followup thereto, and a half-hearted defense of Abraham Lincoln—the sort of eclectic mix that you’ll find in The Big Questions. Have you bought your copy yet?
More on Monday!
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