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An anonymous math department chairman reports on his own strategy for cutting down on the workload. He believes that one of the most important determinants of a successful career is luck. So each year, he randomly rejects half the applicants without even reading their folders. That way, he eliminates the unlucky ones.

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Looking for a Christmas gift for that special econonerd in your life? Try Steven Landsburg’s new book, The Big Questions.

I recently finished it, and it is much fun. Reading it is like having dinner and sharing a bottle of claret with a smart, creative, iconoclastic friend. The conversation jumps from topic to topic in math, physics, philosophy, economics, public policy, etc., in a seemingly random fashion, and your friend does not always convince you of his point of view. But throughout you are entertained, and in the end you are even edified.

I’m of course delighted by the sales push, but even more so by hearing these words from someone I respect as much as Greg.

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Steven’s new book, The Big Questions, has a lot of good things in it, as one would expect from an author who proudly declares himself a math geek. His explanation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (pages 135–141) is a model of clarity in the popularization of science. His geometrical illustration of a Talmudic rule on the division of an estate (pages 205–213) shows the mathematical imagination at its best.

Landsburg is an economist by profession — a professor of economics, in fact — and has the economist’s insight that many matters commonly discussed in terms of morality can be reduced to cold arithmetic: “When things are priced correctly, there’s no need to moralize about them.” He gives some illuminating examples.

But then things take a darker turn:

Reading the book, one is carried along effortlessly on this gentle current of math-based good sense until Chapter 19, whose title is “On Not Being a Jerk.” Suddenly we are in white water — actually, in the strange looking-glass realm of open-borders fanaticism.

Now, the whole point of Chapter 19 is to bring some mathematical good sense to the issue of immigration policy—exactly the kind of mathematical good sense that Mr. Derbyshire was celebrating just a few paragraphs back. But Derbyshire is so eager to announce his disagreement with the conclusions that he ignores the math completely. One wonders whether he read as far as Chapter 23 in The Big Questions, where he’d have encountered this passage:

If you’re objecting to a logical argument, try asking yourself exactly which line in that argument you’re objecting to. If you can’t identify the locus of your disagreement, you’re probably just blathering.

Mr. Derbyshire, who wants to reject a conclusion without questioning either the assumptions or the logic, is blathering. More specifically:

Chapter 19 is about “not being a jerk”, with applications to, among other things, immigration policy. Now, admittedly, jerk is a loaded word, but I don’t use it in a scattershot way; instead I measure jerkiness by the number of dollars you’re willing to take from Peter in order to give a dollar to Paul, where Paul is someone you care about more and Peter is someone you care about less (with the threshholds for jerkitude presumably differing depending on whether Paul is your spouse, your child, your nephew, your neighbor, your countryman, or someone whose skin color you happen to approve.) (I am indebted for this formulation to the anonymous proprietor of the YouNotSneaky blog.)

In the chapter, I intentionally bias matters WAY in the direction of the anti-immigration position by intentionally ignoring all of the benefits immigrants bring to Americans, and weighing only the benefits to the immigrants themselves versus the costs they bring to (some) Americans. I then calculate that when we admit one additional Mexican, the benefits (to the Mexican) are about 2.3 times the costs (to Americans). If you were to reweight those costs and benefits to account for the Mexican’s relative poverty, you’d have to replace that 2.3 with something closer to 5. I asked the reader to focus on those numbers and to ask “What is the threshhold for admitting one additional Mexican? Is it more or less than 2.3? More or less than 5? More or less than 10?”.

I did this in order to focus attention on the fundamental issues: Restrictive immigration laws are good for some people and bad for others. Maybe you care more about one group than the other. If so, how much more do you care, and how much more would you have to care before it would be legitimate to label you a jerk?

Now comes John Derbyshire, who just loves the way I am able to reduce so many other matters to “cold arithmetic”, to ignore this calculation completely before going off on a largely irrelevant screed about why he wants to restrict immigration. A few more specifics:

• Mr. Derbyshire paints a (to him) grim picture of 49 million new Mexican immigrants. While he and I might or might not disagree about the desirability of 49 million new Mexican immigrants, that is completely irrelevant to the content of my chapter, which addresses the question: Do we currently have too many immigrants or too few? (Or, equivalently, would one additional immigrant be a good thing or a bad thing?). Surely Mr. Derbyshire can appreciate the logical possibility that the optimal number of new immigrants could be more than zero and still less than 49 million.
• Mr. Derbyshire wants to know why I am so all-fired solicitous of Mexicans, while ignoring the interests of Romanians, Turks, and Brazilians. I’d have thought it would be clear to any reader that I was attempting to illustrate a method, and that I used Mexicans as an example because I had the relevant numbers close at hand. Of course the same method would apply to Romanians, Turks and Brazilians, though perhaps the numbers would come out differently. Presumably this never occurred to Mr. Derbyshire because he is so thoroughly uninterested in the actual numbers.
• This is irrelevant to the main point, but I can’t resist quoting Derbyshire to the effect that “Immigration is just a policy, like farm subsidies or tax credits.” Great examples, actually. Farm subsidies are pretty jerky too, though I haven’t calculated whether they are more or less jerky than border fences.
• And finally: This is also irrelevant to the main point, though it’s directly relevant to a much larger point, which I’ve addressed in detail elsewhere. Here is Derbyshire:

Nor is an immigrant exercising any transcendent human right. Who on earth ever thought so? If I seek to settle in Country X, I am asking Country X a favor, which the authorities there might properly refuse. If they do refuse, I have no grounds for complaint. It’s their country.

Having already assigned a technical meaning to the term—a meaning that it is not directly applicable here—I can’t respond with “What a jerk”. I willl therefore confine my commentary to: “What a blockhead.” If a resident of Country X seeks to sell or rent me a plot of land, Country X does me no favor by allowing me to consummate that transaction because Country X does not own that land in the first place. A citizen of Country X owns the land, which is not the same thing at all. All Country X can do is stand between two consenting parties to a private transaction. It’s like saying that if I seek to purchase a candy bar, and have to walk past Benny the Bully in order to do so, Benny the Bully is doing me a favor, which Benny might properly refuse. After all, it’s his turf.

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Here and here.

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When I decided to write a textbook that competed directly with Deirdre’s own, she was my strongest booster. When I decided to follow up with a book for the general public—the book that became The Armchair Economist—Deirdre told me exactly how to sell it to the publishers. Fifteen years later, the Armchair Economist remains one of the bestselling popular economics books in at least six languages, and at multiple levels—intellectual, practical and personal—I owe it all to Deirdre.

So it was with considerable delight that I received Deirdre’s recent email with subject line “Your Splendid Book”. But as I fully expected (having had this conversation with her more than once), her praise was tempered with disapproval of my “adolescent” atheism:

As you know, I don’t think the assault on religious belief is among its charms. You are very indulgent towards the on-going, searching, preliminary character of faith in physics but, in the style of a adolescent who has just discovered that “the stories they’re liable/ To tell in the Bible:/ They ain’t necessarily so,” unwilling to extend the same indulgence to the faith that a lengthy roster of idiots including Galileo and Newton worked on. You need to read, say, Polkinghorne, but haven’t.

With Deirdre’s permission, I’m responding here on the blog:

• Aside from a snarky comment or two, The Big Questions is not, in whole or in part, an assault on religious belief. I do offer a non-religious account of the fabric of the Universe that I find compelling; while this account could be certainly be wrong, I’m not sure that the act of offering it counts as an assault on the alternatives. I do point to inadequacies in several of the standard arguments for belief in God, just as I point to inadequacies in Richard Dawkins’s arguments to the contrary; this is largely equal-opportunity carping. And I do mention in passing that I find all religions to be patent hokum (just as gratuitously as I mention my taste for Diet Coke), but I’ve not attempted to write a sustained defense of that judgment. That’s not what the book, or even any part of the book, is about.
• What I do claim in The Big Questions is that to a large extent, religious believers do not believe so much as they believe that they believe. That is, they “believe” only because they’ve never stopped to think hard about what they really do believe. (This is not a pejorative judgment; none of us has the time to think deeply about more than a small number of things, and there’s no particular reason God should be among them.) Take your average devout Christian, transport him back to the cave where the newly crucified Christ has just been laid to rest, ask him to predict whether this body is going to be resurrected in the next week or so, and somehow convince him that the lives of his children depend on getting the answer right—and I’ll bet that in most cases good old-fashioned materialism will displace religion in a hurry. Obviously I could be wrong about this, but it’s my defense of this assertion, as opposed to any mockery of Bible stories, to which I’ve devoted substantial space in The Big Questions.
• In fact, my expectation that most belief is shallow is precisely the reason I don’t think it’s worth assaulting.
• What exactly is wrong with “adolescent” insights, anyway? Early adolescence is when a lot of people first realize that reindeer can’t fly.
• I have, in fact read Polkinghorne. (That’s John Polkinghorne, the theoretical physicist who keeps writing books defending his simultaneous faith in science and Christianity.) In fact, I’ve read Polkinghorne for the sole and sufficient reason that Deirdre once told me to. And he has, actually, some interesting things to say, though they don’t prove what he thinks they prove. (Indeed, I think they come pretty close to confirming the non-religious vision I offer in The Big Questions.) He also spouts what seems to me like an extraordinary amount of nonsense. I’d meant to elaborate on all this here, but I think this post has gotten long enough as it is. So let’s add John Polkinghorne to the list of topics I promise to blog about soon.
  

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  ]]> http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/11/30/lament-of-deirdre/feed/ 19 http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/11/05/public-service-announcement/ http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/11/05/public-service-announcement/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:05:46 +0000 Steve Landsburg http://www.thebigquestions.com/?p=618 The “Look Inside” text for The Big Questions should be up on Amazon’s website in a few days. Meanwhile, Snorri Godhi suggested in comments that I should post the index for your perusal. Good idea, Snorri. Just click on “Index” at the top of this page.

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  ]]> http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/11/05/public-service-announcement/feed/ 1 http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/11/03/todays-the-day/ http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/11/03/todays-the-day/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:05:49 +0000 Steve Landsburg http://www.thebigquestions.com/?p=474 I once owned a book where page 317, in its entirety, read as follows:

  ERRATA

  On page 317, change ERRATA to ERRATUM.

  It’s a good thing I didn’t steal that joke. Because as it happens, The Big Questions contains an actual erratum. True, it’s only two missing letters. But of all the letters in the book, these are probably the two I’d least like to have seen go missing.

  Fortunately, I discovered this erratum within minutes of receiving my first hardcover books a couple of weeks ago, and the Free Press division of Simon and Schuster sprang into action. Everyone, from the publisher to the editorial assistants to the warehouse managers, understood immediately that we needed to fix this. Better yet, they kept me involved and informed throughout the process, which contrasts dramatically with experiences I’ve had with other publishers.

  Doubly fortunately, I happened to pour out my woes to the brilliant psychometrician Ellen Julian, who suggested that we make up cards much like the one illustrated here and somehow get them into the tens of thousands of books that were scheduled to leave the warehouse the following Monday morning. (This was a Thursday.) The Free Press made it happen in a day, and all would have been well had I not awakened on Saturday to the sickening realization that the cards contained the wrong URL. Now it was the weekend and too late to have new cards made in-house.
  
  After a frantic phone consultation with a very supportive publisher, I located a print shop that agreed to produce the cards over the weekend and deliver them to the warehouse first thing Monday morning. Triply fortunately, that print shop was FedEx/Kinko’s number 1220 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, which delivered on all their promises and more, even while fielding hourly phone calls from an increasingly frantic author seeking reassurances. On Monday morning, the Kinko’s manager hand-delivered the cards to the warehouse at the moment they opened.

  Today is the day The Big Questions will appear in stores. Yesterday I dashed down to my local Barnes and Noble, got an advance peek, and verified that the errata (excuse me, erratum) cards are indeed present.

  Therefore, I have absolutely no reservations about encouraging you to trot down to your own local bookstore and pick up a copy—or, if you prefer, to order one online.

  If you do, these are some of the big (and occasionally small) questions you’ll find addressed:

  Why is there something instead of nothing? What do we learn from economic models? What arguments are there for and against the existence of God? How does color vision work? Why do virtually all economists oppose economic protectionism? What do religious believers actually believe? Do we have free will? Do we have ESP? Is there such a thing as a legitimate disagreement? How do we discover truths in mathematics? What is the difference between truth and provability? What are the limits of human knowledge? What does Godel’s incompleteness theorem say? How much can we learn from pure logic? How much can we learn from pure evidence? How can we distinguish correlation from causality? What does the Heisenberg uncertainty principle mean? What is most odd about the quantum world? What is the difference between right and wrong? What does it mean to be socially responsible? What do we owe our neighbors? What do we owe to future generations? How do we recognize fairness? What can we learn from metaphors? How big should the welfare system be? Why is the price system efficient? How should we deal with pollution? How should we think about rising inequality? Should poor people receive the same medical care as rich people? How should we think about global warming? What should we study? What justifies a belief? How should we live?

  Enjoy your reading. And then come right back here to the blog and join the fray.

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  ]]> http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/11/03/todays-the-day/feed/ 10 http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/10/15/up-and-running/ http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/10/15/up-and-running/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:09:43 +0000 Steve Landsburg http://www.thebigquestions.com/?p=52 The Big Questions should be in the stores shortly. I expect and hope that my readers will have a lot to say about it. I welcome your thoughts, comments and complaints at this email address: questions at landsburg dot com.

  Over the years, I’ve learned a lot from my readers and I expect I’m about to learn a lot more. I’ll use this blog to share some of what I learn—along with anything else that strikes my fancy.

  If you choose to comment, your first post will be held for moderation. Once that first post is approved, your future posts will be approved automatically. I’ll delete or edit comments only when they’re clearly quite unserious or abusive. I’m looking forward to this dialogue.

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