Steven Landsburg | The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

Continue reading ‘The Honor Roll’

on June 7, 2011

in Heroes and Personal

. 6 Comments

On May 17 of this year, these fifteen World War II veterans were awarded the French Legion of Honor medal for their service in France. They were cited for their courage and their contributions toward the French liberation. Third from the left, in the light blue jacket, is my Dad.

Words like “awe” and “gratitude” cannot begin to describe what I feel toward these people, whose sacrifices secured the unprecedented safety, prosperity and freedom that have graced my life and so many others of my generation. In the world they created, those sacrifices have become (for people like me) unimaginable.

These are the giants who cleared my path through life. I’m glad to see them honored, though no honor can ever be enough.

The High Price Of Wi-Fi

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on June 6, 2011

in Economics and Empirical Puzzles

. 13 Comments

One of my weaker columns when I wrote for Slate was a highly unsatisfactory stab at why some hotels charge for wireless and others don’t. Today my wife, who had never seen that column, asked me the same question, and I think my off-the-cuff answer was probably better than anything I said in Slate.

So here’s my new stab at this:

Status Report

Published

on May 20, 2011

in Blogging

. 3 Comments

I’m on the road in beautiful Bellingham, Washington, with very little opportunity to blog. Otherwise, I’d have chimed in a few times in the ongoing discussion of the “Who Owes Whom” post that immediately precedes this one. As it is, I’ll save all my comments till I return next week.

Who Owes Whom?

Published

on May 18, 2011

in Current Events, Economics and Outrage

. 59 Comments

Under the headline “Ultimatum Holding Up Trade Deals”, the New York Times reports that:

The Obama administration said on Monday that it would not seek Congressional approval of free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea until Republicans agree to expand assistance for American workers who might lose jobs as a result.

I have said this before and I will say it again: Anybody who loses his job because of a free trade agreement was overpaid to begin with. The $20-an-hour American who loses his job to a $5-an-hour Colombian is an American who has spent the past few years charging his countrymen twenty dollars for something they ought to have been able to buy for five.

So if I were writing this article it would have read something like this:

The Obama administration said on Monday that it would not seek Congressional approval of free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea until Republicans agree to extort additional money from American consumer/taxpayers who might stop being overcharged as a result.

I guess that’s why I never got that call from the New York Times.

Sins of Omission

Published

on May 13, 2011

in Fluff, History and Outrage

. 6 Comments

The Smithsonian Magazine asks its readers to vote on who had the best Civil War facial hair. Burnside wins, as well he should. But how is Longstreet not even among the candidates?

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We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

Published

on May 12, 2011

in Progress and Technology

. 22 Comments

I haven’t been able to find the exact quote, but unless my memory is playing tricks, Martin Gardner once posed the question “What modern artifact would most astonish Aristotle?”, and concluded that the answer was a Texas Instruments programmable calculator that could be taught to execute simple series of instructions. That was, roughly, 1975.

Here is what my iPhone does: It listens to the radio and tells me the name of the artist, song and album. It scans bar codes and tells me where to get the same item cheaper. It gives me step by step directions to anyplace I want to go. It points me to the nearest public bathroom. It recommends restaurants, based on cuisine, price, and proximity. It plays any music I want it to play, and it recommends new music based on what it’s learned about my preferences. It shows me a photograph of the entire earth and lets me slowly (or quickly) zoom in on my (or your) front porch. It takes pictures. It takes videos. It lets me edit those pictures and videos. It photographs 360 degree panoramas. It plays movies. It plays TV shows. It displays pretty much any book, newspaper or magazine I want to read. It reminds me where I parked my car. It lets me draw rough sketches of diagrams with my fingers and makes them look professional. It allows me to accept credit cards. It takes dictation. It checks the stock market or the weather with the push of a button. It reminds me of my appointments. It lets me browse the Web. It shows me my email. It locates and summons nearby taxicabs. It turns itself into a carpenter’s level. It turns itself into a flashlight. It makes phone calls. It makes video calls. And, oh yes — it has a calculator.

Now who would have been more astonished? Aristotle confronted with Martin Gardner’s calculator, or the Martin Gardner of 1975 confronted with my iPhone? I’m going to say it’s a close call.

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Make Them Gamble

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on May 11, 2011

in Innovations and Politics

. 26 Comments

A Guest Post

Jamie Whyte

Last week, Britain had a referendum to decide whether or not to replace its current “first past the post” electoral system with the alternative vote system (AV). During the campaign, the No to AV campaign claimed that changing to AV could cost £250 million, in part because voting machines would be introduced with it. Yes campaigner and member of parliament, Simon Hughes claimed that this was false and that the No campaigners knew it was. He asked the electoral commission to stop the No campaigners from lying.

Similar appeals are often made by other frustrated political disputants. But the idea that electioneering politicians should be allowed to say, and voters to hear, only what the electoral commission deems to be true and honestly believed is outrageous. It would make election outcomes depend on the judgement, not of the voters, but of the electoral commissioners.

The proposal is also unnecessary. As anyone who has argued with blowhards will know, there is an easy way of showing that someone does not really believe what he says. Challenge him to a wager. Demand that he put his money where his mouth is.

If the No campaigners really believe that changing to AV would cost £250 million, they will be willing to bet on it. By offering the wager, and having it declined, Mr Hughes would expose their insincerity. Equally, Mr Hughes’ failure to suggest the wager may tell us something about his own alleged certainty on the matter.

Politicians should generally be obliged to bet on the outcomes their various claims. This would discourage their lying which, incredible as it may sound, is even more widespread than people working with the standard definition of lying realise.

Star Drop

Published

on May 9, 2011

in Personal and Silk

. 8 Comments

First time doing this move; that’s my daughter’s voice in the background telling me everything I’m doing wrong. Next time will be smoother:

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And a bonus picture:

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The Architect

Published

on May 3, 2011

in Heroes, Math and Personal

. 11 Comments

Through the 1970s — which is to say, yesterday — Dan Quillen barraged the field of algebraic topology with a stream of new techniques and concepts that not only invigorated the field, but ramped up its power to solve problems in geometry, arithmetic and other mathematical areas where you might have thought topology had no business sticking its nose.

The greatest of these great accomplishments was Quillen’s development of higher algebraic K-theory, a long-sought holy grail for mathematicians. Pre-Quillen, one had a sense that there ought to be a subject called higher K-theory, and a general sense of what it should look like, and reasons to hope that K-theory, if only we could figure out what it was, would be the great unifying theme behind much of mathematics, and a tool for translating insights in one field into useful techniques in another. Many had tried and failed to lay the foundations of the subject. Then Quillen, in one 63 page paper, not only laid the foundations but brought the subject to a state of maturity that, in the words of Hyman Bass, one normally expects from the efforts of several mathematicians over several years:

The paper…is essentially without mathematical precursors. Reading it for the first time is like landing on a new and friendly mathematical planet. One meets there not only new theorems and new methods, but new mathematical creatures and a complete paradigm of gestures for dealing with them.

Much of my mathematical youth was spent exploring that planet. I met Quillen only once, and very briefly, but great mathematicians, like great poets, reveal so much of themselves in their work that one comes to feel a certain intimacy just by studying them. In that sense, Quillen was my close companion many a year.

Dan Quillen died this week at the age of 70, after a five year battle with Alzheimer’s. Scouring the web for obituaries and other recent mentions, I found very little besides a brief article from a Gainesville newspaper about an Alzheimer’s patient named Daniel Gray Quillen who had gone briefly missing in June, 2010. Followup stories identify the missing man as “a senior citizen with Alzheimer’s”.

“A senior citizen”?!?!?! Part of me wants to scream: “Dammit, this is no generic senior citizen! This is Daniel Fucking Quillen, Fields Medalist, Cole Prize Winner, architect of higher K-theory, conqueror of the Serre conjecture, and one of the intellectual giants of the 20th century!”

Arguably none of that has any place in a short note about a man gone briefly missing, so my gripe is not with the Gainesville Sun. My gripe is with the Universe. If I were running the Universe, there’d be some level of accomplishment that confers immunity from death, deterioration and obscurity. I’m not sure exactly where I’d set that bar, but I’m sure Dan Quillen would have cleared it.

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D’oh — Second in a Series

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on May 2, 2011

in Bad Reasoning and Economics

. 14 Comments

The problem with locavores — the breed of environmentalists who tout locally grown food, partly to minimize energy costs — is that they’re insensitive to the quality of the environment. A New York locavore spurns California tomatoes because of the energy spent trucking them across the country. But to focus on a small number of factors, like energy consumption, is to ignore a vast number of others: Do California tomatos, grown in locations where there might have been vineyards, displace California grapes? Do New York tomatos, grown in greenhouses where there might have been housing developments, lengthen morning commutes? What other useful services might California or New York workers provide if they weren’t growing tomatos? What are the alternative uses in each location for fertilizers, or farming equipment, or the resources that go into producing fertilizers and farming equipment?

Last August, Steven Budiansky, the self-described “Liberal Curmudgeon”, wrote a New York Times piece that I criticized on this blog for, essentially, making 1% of the right point and ignoring the other 99%. Now, having reread Budiansky, I think I was unfair to him. He had this right all the way through.

D’oh — The First in a Series

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on April 25, 2011

in Bad Reasoning, Blogging, Economics and Policy

. 39 Comments

When something is wrong on the Internet, bloggers love to pounce. But since no blogger is infallible, most of us can find ample fodder in our own past writing, if we go back and reread it with a sufficiently critical eye. Over the next few weeks, I plan to revisit some things I got wrong the first time around. (You’ll recognize those posts by the Homer Simpson logo.) I hope others will be inspired to do the same.

To lead off this series: In December, 2009 I blogged about space scientiest James Hansen, who prefers carbon taxation to cap-and-trade. His argument: A carbon tax allows for the possibility of additional carbon abatements through altruism. Under cap-and-trade, if I altruistically decide to buy a fuel-efficient car, someone else gets to buy an SUV. Whereas under a carbon tax, if I altruistically decide to buy a fuel-efficient car, less gas gets consumed.

Wait a second, though. Under a carbon tax, if I decide to buy a fuel-efficient car, I drive the price of gas down, which encourages someone else to buy an SUV. So altruism is equally ineffective under either policy, no?

That’s the argument I made in December, 2009. I now believe that:

Under a plausible interpretation of Hansen’s argument, I was wrong.
But Hansen is still unconvincing, though for somewhat subtler reasons.

Friday Quotes

Published

on April 22, 2011

in Bad Reasoning, Economics and Paul Krugman

. 44 Comments

Paul Krugman, economist:

This insight illustrates a general principle of the economics of taxation: the incidence of a tax — who really bears the burden of the tax — is typically not a question you can answer by asking who writes the check to the government.

Paul Krugman, blogger, remarking on a straightforward application of that principle:

There are multiple things wrong with this claim, but the most fundamental, I think, is that it represents a remarkable misunderstanding of the reasons why we have taxes in the first place.

(Edited to add: My response to Krugman is here.)

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Dead Man Followup

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on April 21, 2011

in Bad Reasoning

. 162 Comments

Since even Paul Krugman manages to be completely confused about this and this, allow me to summarize:

1) A tax imposes a burden.

2) If a tax has no effect on a man’s lifestyle, then it imposes no burden on him.

3) Therefore, if a tax has no effect on a man’s lifestyle, then it must impose a burden on someone else.

That is the argument that Krugman things betrays “no coherent picture of how the pieces fit together”. I would like to know more specifically whether he disagrees with 1), disagrees with 2), or disagrees with the logic that leads from 1) and 2) to 3).

In more detail:

You Can’t Tax a Dead Man

Published

on April 21, 2011

Continue reading ‘You Can’t Tax a Dead Man’

. 57 Comments

On Monday, I wrote about the man who can’t be taxed. There were many comments, some confused, some insightful, and (at least) one brilliant. Let me highlight that brilliant comment, then beat the point to death a little, and then draw a large moral.

Our commenter Ken B invited us to imagine a dead man, with, say $84,000,000 in his bank account (and a will that requires this bank account to be maintained forever). And let’s suppose the government confiscates, say 82 of those 84 millions, thereby allowing it to reduce other people’s current or future taxes —making those people richer. They buy more stuff. They eat more, they burn more gas, they occupy more space. Where did that stuff come from?

(Alternatively, instead of lowering someone else’s taxes, the government takes the opportunity to spend more, in which case the government claims more stuff. We still have to ask where it comes from.)

It certainly did not come from the dead man, who was eating nothing, burning no gas, and occupying no more space than he continues to occupy. Instead, somebody else must decide to consume less.

But initially nobody wants to consume less. So people, collectively, are trying to consume more stuff than is available. This excess demand for stuff pushes up prices and/or interest rates until people are willing to cut their consumption.

There is no meaningful sense in which the dead man paid the tax. Instead, the tax burden is borne by those people who were hurt by rising prices and/or interest rates.

The President’s Taxes

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on April 20, 2011

in Current Events, Policy and Politics

. 118 Comments

Just a couple of days ago, President Obama excoriated the Republican Congress for wanting to keep tax rates low for “people like me” — that is, people who, like the President, have very high incomes.

Now we learn that on an income of $1.7 million, the Obamas paid $450,773 in taxes, taking full advantage of the Bush tax cuts. I think it is fair to ask: If the President believes that people like him ought to be paying more, then why didn’t he pay more? There is absolutely no rule against sending in more money than you owe.

Now you might say that the Obamas believe it’s important to raise many billions more in taxes, and that sending in an extra hundred thousand or so would make essentially no progress toward that goal. But I don’t think you’d continue to say that if you thought about it. If the Obamas are one of, say, a million families in their financial position, and if the Obamas, and only the Obamas, send in some extra money, that’s only (by Mr Obama’s reckoning) one one-millionth as good as repealing the Bush tax cuts — but at the same time it’s costly to only one one-millionth as many taxpayers. Surely these things should scale.

Happy Passover

Published

on April 19, 2011

in Fluff and Religion

. 2 Comments

Hat tip to my architectural consultant MRF.

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The Man Who Can’t Be Taxed

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on April 18, 2011

Continue reading ‘The Man Who Can’t Be Taxed’

. 111 Comments

Nothing makes my job easier than a journalist who writes about something interesting and gets it 100% wrong.

Thanks, then, to Elizabeth Lesly Stevens for her column in yesterday’s Bay Citizen. Stevens wants to tax the “idle rich”, her Exhibit A being Robert Kendrick, heir to the $84 million Schlage Lock Company fortune. According to Ms. Stevens, Mr. Kendrick appears to do pretty much nothing but park and re-park his four cars all day long. Taxing people like Mr. Kendrick, she says, has to be part of any solution to America’s fiscal crisis.

Here’s what Ms. Stevens misses: Assuming the facts are as she states them, it is quite literally impossible to raise revenue by taxing the likes of Mr. Kendrick. We could argue about whether it’s desirable, but because it’s impossible, the discussion is moot.

Subtraction Distraction

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on April 11, 2011

in Bad Reasoning, Current Events, Economics, Paul Krugman, Policy and Politics

. 24 Comments

Paul Krugman, getting less serious by the minute, on the budget deal:

It’s worth noting that this follows just a few months after another big concession, in which [Obama] gave in to Republican demands for tax cuts. The net effect of these two sets of concessions is, of course, a substantial increase in the deficit.

Well, no, actually. The net effect of these concessions is a (small but not insignificant) cut in spending coupled with a (somewhat larger) set of tax cuts.

To sum that up by saying that the “net effect” is an increase in the deficit is like saying that if a woman gives birth to twins and then murders her husband, the “net effect” is to increase the population. We’re entitled to care about more than just the bottom line.

Unhealthy Reasoning

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on April 8, 2011

in Bad Reasoning, Economics, Paul Krugman and Policy

. 42 Comments

Paul Krugman on the Ryan budget proposal:

And then there’s the much-ballyhooed proposal to abolish Medicare and replace it with vouchers that can be used to buy private health insurance….

…The House plan assumes that we can cut health-care spending as a percentage of G.D.P. despite an aging population and rising health care costs.

The only way that can happen is if those vouchers are worth much less than the cost of health insurance.

Well, this is just plain illiterate. In fact, the only way that can happen is if the voucher system affects people’s health care choices. Which is, you know, the whole point.

Cyclical Fluctuations

Published

on April 8, 2011

in Miscellaneous, Self-Promotion and Silk

. 2 Comments

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(Larger and more easily viewable version here.)

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Exotica

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on April 5, 2011

in Math and Progress

. 5 Comments

This is really very cool. In several ways.

First: For the past year or so, there has been a remarkable website called Math Overflow where research mathematicians gather to swap ideas, to ask for help when they get stuck, and to offer help when they can. Frequent contributors include the Fields Medalists (a Fields Medal is roughly the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize) Terry Tao, Tim Gowers, Bill Thurston and Richard Borcherds. Others who have popped up from time to time include Vaughan Jones (yet another Fields Medalist), John Tate, whose thesis reshaped modern number theory, and Peter Shor, the pioneering figure in quantum computation. And every day, one runs across dozens of other folks who nearly any top math department would be proud to have (and in many cases are proud to have) on their faculties. If you already know a lot of math, you can get a hell of an advanced education browsing this site.

Senator B.S.

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on April 4, 2011

in Bad Reasoning, Current Events, Outrage and Politics

. 31 Comments

A lot of people think of janitors as a group that’s not particularly well paid. Those people might be surprised to learn that in the last five years alone, American janitors earned over $250 billion! That’s billion! With a B!

Despite that enormous income, janitors pay no taxes whatsoever — or at least no taxes whatsoever over and above the taxes that are paid by you, me and other ordinary Americans. And shockingly, it appears that the U.S. Congress would rather cut spending than institute a new tax on janitorial income.

If the above strikes you as insane, congratulations. You are smarter than the intended audience of Senator Bernie Sanders, who observes in his new book “The Speech” that General Electric’s shareholders collectively earned a staggering $26 billion over the past five years, and paid absolutely no tax on that amount.

Of course $26 billion is only a tenth of what janitors earned over the same time period, but I guess it does look mighty big if you don’t bother dividing by the number of shareholders. Without having all the numbers in front of me, my best guess is that we’re talking maybe a few hundred bucks per shareholder, though of course (as with janitors) some earn more and others earn less.

And as for the shareholders paying absolutely no tax, perhaps they didn’t, as long as you don’t count taxes on dividends, capital gains and wages. To wit:

Announcement

Published

on April 1, 2011

in Current Events

. 10 Comments

I’m pleased to announce that as of today, April 1, I’ll be joining the Obama Adminstration’s economic team. My first assignment is to produce an estimate of the number of lives saved or created by the Libya operation.

(A hat tip for the inspiration to my colleague Mark Bils, who really should have his own blog.)

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Justice Denied

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on March 31, 2011

in Bad Reasoning, Current Events and Law

. 34 Comments

John Thompson spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row, for a crime that it seems very likely he did not commit. Prosecutors were aware that blood found at the crime scene was not Mr. Thompson’s, but they failed to turn this evidence over to the defense attorneys.

Does Mr. Thompson deserve compensation? A jury thought so, to the tune of $14 million. But five Supreme Court justices disagree, so Thompson gets nothing.

That’s because, according to the majority, it was only a single rogue prosecutor who misbehaved, so it would be wrong to punish the whole district attorney’s office. The dissenting minority argued that in fact there was a pattern of lax training in that office, so the jury award should stand.

But if an innocent man spends 18 years in prison, why should his compensation depend on the nature of the misconduct that sent him there — or even on whether there was any misconduct in the first place?

Look. We’ve pretty much all agreed that we want to have a justice system. Since all justice systems make mistakes, that means we’ve pretty much all agreed that we’re prepared to tolerate a certain number of mistakes. The question, though, is: Who should bear the costs of those mistakes? Should the costs fall entirely on an unlucky few like John Thompson who just happen to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, or should they be spread more evenly among the populace that is perfectly happy to share in the benefits of the justice system?

Yesterday’s Puzzle

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on March 25, 2011

in Fluff, Puzzles and Science

. 12 Comments

I didn’t think anyone would get it. I was completely stumped myself until I got help from my friends. But Neil got it.

In his words, “We have onomatopoeaic words for the sounds made by all of the animals on the right.”

Or, as I prefer to think of it, the animals on the right all have vocabularies (consisting, in most cases, of a single word) while those on the left do not.

A donkey brays, and when it brays it says hee-haw. The donkey makes it to the right of the line not by virtue of braying, but by saying hee-haw. Thus the elephant, which trumpets, but thereby merely makes a noise (as opposed to saying a word) is consigned to the left.

Lions, tigers, and jaguars all roar, but to the best of my recollection from extensive reading (mostly at about age 5), lions and tigers, when roaring, actually say the word “roar”, while a jaguar merely roars incoherently. Chickens say “cheep”. Hens say “buck-buck-buck” (the act of saying this is called “clucking”). Roosters can crow in either of two dialects: Some say “rrr-rr-rrr-rr-rrrrr” while others (who my five-year-old self considered unbecomingly pretentious) say “cock-a-doodle-doo”. Pretentious they may be, but as a scientist, I am here to record the facts, not to judge them.

What Was I Thinking?

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on March 24, 2011

in Fluff, Personal and Puzzles

. 32 Comments

It was said of me in graduate school that “He’s never happy unless he’s making a list”.

My compulsion to make lists has abated over the years, but it lasted long enough that I still find occasional relics lying around.

Recently I ran across the list reproduced below, dating, apparently from my zoology phase, when I was making lists that classified animals according to various criteria. But I was completely unable to recall what criterion had governed this particular list. What rule places the giraffe on the left and the dog on the right?

The Art of Abstraction

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on March 23, 2011

in Birthdays, Heroes and Math

. 4 Comments

Today is the birthday of the magnificent Emmy Noether, known as the “mother of modern algebra”, and one of my mathematical heroes. She is one of the few mathematicians in history who fundamentally changed what mathematics is about.

It was Emmy (I use her first name in order to distinguish her from her mathematician father Max) who first fully recognized the power of abstraction, which became the driving force of 20th century mathematics. She demonstrated time and again that it can be easier to solve a general problem than a specific one, and therefore the best way to attack a specific problem is often to generalize. Do you want to prove a fact about polynomial functions? First notice that polynomial functions can be added together, and they can be multiplied, and they obey certain laws along the way (like associativity and commutativity). Now prove a theorem that applies to anything that can be added and multiplied subject to those laws. Do it right, and you’ll replace intricate calculations with simple logical deductions. What was hard becomes easy. You get your result for free, and a whole lot of other results as a bonus.

Or, if you that doesn’t quite work, figure out what additional properties you’re using about polynomials, beyond associativity and commutativity, and prove a theorem about everything that has those properties.

To get a sense of how revolutionary this was, consider the Hilbert Basis Theorem, one of the foundational results of modern algebra. Have a look at Hilbert’s original proof — though you might not want to work through every detail in the 62 pages of equations and formulas. By contrast, Noether’s proof of a more general, more powerful and more useful version occupies all of one paragraph on Wikipedia.

Strategic Reasoning

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on March 21, 2011

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. 23 Comments

Senator Jay Rockefeller adds his voice to the chorus calling for the U.S. to deplete the strategic petroleum reserve in order to bring down oil prices.

Put aside the question of whether we should want to bring down oil prices. Put aside the question of whether this is a good use of the strategic reserve. Let’s just ask whether this idea would even work.

Simple economics certainly suggests that the answer is no. Oil, after all, is an exhaustible resource. This means that every barrel sold today is a barrel that can’t be sold tomorrow. Therefore profit-maximizing oil suppliers, of whom there are many, must constantly be asking themselves whether they’d prefer to sell another barrel now or leave it in the ground to sell later. And the key inputs to that decision are the current price and the expected future price.

If the government starts depleting the oil reserve now (with, presumably, the intent to replenish it in the future), they bid down current prices and bid up expected future prices — creating an incentive for all the other suppliers to sell less now and more in the future — pushing current prices right back up again. For a non-exhaustible resource, this would partially offset the government’s action, but for an exhaustible resource (like, for example, oil) there should be a 100% offset, at least on a naive application of Hotelling’s Rule.

Big Numbers

Published

on March 18, 2011

in Blogging and Math

. 8 Comments

Sorry to have been uncharacteristically absent all week; I’ve been busy in a good way, though I hope and expect to get back to more regular blogging before long. In the meantime, to keep you busy, let me give you a pointer to a marvelous essay I’ve long been a fan of, and just happened to get reminded of today: Scott Aaronson’s take on the old riddle of who can name the biggest number. Have fun with this, and I’ll see you soon.

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Defici(en)t Thinking

Published

on March 10, 2011