Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Lead Exposure and Criminal Behavior

If you’re in the vicinity of the University of Rochester this Tuesday, please join us:

Title: Lead Exposure and Crime

Presenter: Kevin Schnepel on 3/19 at 5pm in Goergen 101

Description: Early-life exposure to lead (pB) is linked to higher rates of violent crime among juveniles and adults. In this lecture, I will cover key findings in the academic literature and discuss the challenges associated with (and solutions for) identifying the causal impact of lead pollution on crime rates.

Bio: Kevin Schnepel is an Associate Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University and studies the economics of crime. Kevin’s work aims to improve our understanding of the ways in which we can lower crime and improve social welfare ranging from investments in early-life health to criminal justice diversion programs.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Why We Need Billionaires

The next time somebody asks me why there have to be billionaires, I will point that person to this tweet from Elon Musk:


Musk went ahead and invested about $100 million in SpaceX and $6 million in Tesla — totaling about half of his proceeds from the sale of PayPal, in which he was an early investor.

Who invests $100 million in a project that has a 10% chance of success? Answer: Essentially nobody who doesn’t believe that success will bring a reward of at least $1 billion.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Animation

You should watch this:

Click here for full-size version.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Innumeracy at CNN

At the moment (and it’s been this way for quite a while), CNN has Amy Klobuchar 84 votes behind Pete Buttigieg, and 2.1% of the vote behind Pete Buttigieg. Which should mean that the total number of votes counted is about 4000. But Klobuchar and Buttigieg have about 11,000 each, and Bernie Sanders has more than that. None of the anchors seems even slightly perturbed by this.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Bob Murphy and Me

murphyshow Here is a link to my appearance on the Bob Murphy show.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

The Case Against The Case Against Education

I am quite unqualified to review Bryan Caplan’s blockbuster The Case Against Education, by virtue of the fact that I have not (yet) found time to read all of it. But I think I have a pretty good idea what’s in it, and an even better idea of what others are saying is in it. So this will be a review not of Bryan’s book, but of the various paraphrases that are floating around the internet. Those paraphrases might or might not be accurate representations of Bryan’s thinking, but they deserve to be treated as arguments in their own right. So this will be a review of those arguments.

Continue reading ‘The Case Against The Case Against Education’

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Alex Tabarrok!

I am delighted to announce that Alex Tabarrok, of George Mason University and marginalrevolution.com, will be speaking at the University of Rochester this Wednesday (February 21) on the topic “Is the FDA Safe and Effective?”. The event will start promptly at 6:30PM in Goergen 101, and is open to the public.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Matters of Money

I have some questions about how money works.

I’ll start by talking about Bitcoin, though my questions are more general than that.

As you are probably aware, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that is currently trading for US Dollars at the rate of (depending on the exact moment when you’re reading this) somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000 per Bitcoin.

As you are somewhat less likely to be aware, Bitcoin Cash is another cryptocurrency that is currently trading for US dollars at the rate of something less than $2000 per Bitcoin Cash token. Despite the similar name, Bitcoin Cash is (now) entirely separate from Bitcoin. It originated in a “hard fork”, where each holder of Bitcoin was given an equal amount of Bitcoin Cash for free (so if you were holding, say 50 Bitcoins, you got 50 Bitcoin Cash tokens). After the fork, the two currencies have evolved, and will continue to evolve, separately.

The technology of Bitcoin Cash is very similar to the technology of Bitcoin. It offers the same sorts of anonymity, security, and so forth. There are some reasons to believe that in the future, Bitcoin Cash will be a bit easier to trade than Bitcoin (though that is not true in the present), and there are some other technological differences between them, but I’d be surprised to learn that those differences are accounting for any substantial fraction of the price differential.

The total supplies of Bitcoins and of Bitcoin Cash are currently about equal (because of the way that Bitcoin Cash originated). In each case, the supply will gradually grow to 21 million and then stop.

Continue reading ‘Matters of Money’

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Winston Churchill Foresees Donald Trump

Those who are possessed of a definite body of doctrine and of deeply-rooted convictions upon it will be in a much better position to deal with the shifts and surprises of daily affairs than those who are merely taking short views, and indulging their natural impulses as they are evoked by what they read from day to day.

Churchill, The Gathering Storm

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

McCloskey at Chicago, Take Two

It was a pleasure and an honor to reminisce about Dee McCloskey for the Festschrift volume just released by the University of Chicago Press. It was less of a pleasure to discover that the U of C Press had ignored all the editorial corrections I sent them.

If you run into this volume, please don’t read my chapter. Read the corrected version here instead.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

A Modified Algorithm for Evaluating Logical Arguments

A Guest Post

by

Bennett Haselton

In a previous guest post I had argued that we should use a random-sample-voting algorithm in any kind of system that promotes certain types of content (songs, tutorials, ideas, etc.) above others. By tabulating the votes of a random sample of the user base, this would reward the content that objectively has the most merit (in the average opinion of the user population), instead of rewarding the content whose creators spent the most time promoting it, or who figured out how to game the system, or who happened to get lucky if an initial “critical mass” of users happened to like the content all at the same time. (The original post describes why these weaknesses exist in other systems, and how the random-sample-voting system takes care of them.)

However, this system works less well in evaluating the merits of a rigorous argument, because an argument can be appealing (gathering a high percentage of up-votes in the random-sample-voting system) and still contain a fatal flaw. So I propose a modified system that would work better for evaluating arguments, by adding a “rebuttal takedown” feature.

Continue reading ‘A Modified Algorithm for Evaluating Logical Arguments’

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Quick Crossword Update

I realize I’m overdue to announce the winners of the crossword contest from last week. I promise to get to this before the weekend!

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Nature or Nurture?

My sister snapped this picture of my Dad and me sitting on a couch:

No, this wasn’t posed. It’s just how we happened to be sitting.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

The Egomaniac in Chief

So President Obama finds it remarkable that he’s been mistaken for a valet driver and a waiter.

I have some questions for my readers:

  1. Is there anyone who hasn’t been mistaken for a driver, a Home Depot associate or something of the sort?
  2. When this has happened to you, have you felt terribly insulted by it?
  3. Do you feel that casual strangers owe you more respect than they owe to a valet driver or a waiter?
  4. Do you feel that your social or occupational status is so great that it should be immediately visible to casual strangers that you are not employed as a valet driver or a waiter?
  5. If you answered yes to the previous question, have you sought professional help?

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Something to Celebrate

Here’s a key lesson of economics: Trade is good, but trade with people very unlike yourself is even better. I’m a teacher who eats beef, drives a car and lives in a house. I don’t need other teachers so much as I need students, ranchers, autoworkers and architects. If your neighbors love gardening as much as you hate it, you’ll find it easy to hire a gardener. If it’s the other way around, you’ll do well in the gardening business.

The lesson spills over beyond the markets for goods and services. We learn new ways of thinking and new ways of living from people who think and live differently than ourselves.

We thrive on diversity — diversity of skills, diversity of interests, diversity of lifestyles, diversity of religious and political outlooks, diversity of culinary and artistic tastes, diversity of lifestyles, and, lest we forget, diversity of income. Capitalists need workers and workers need capitalists. A wealthy factory owner won’t stay wealthy for long if here’s nobody to work the assembly lines. A middle-class assembly line worker won’t be middle-class for long if there’s nobody building factories.

Let us then celebrate diversity, not try to extinguish it. And let’s not forget that diversity of income — or, if you prefer, “income inequality” — is just as much a blessing as diversity of skills, preferences, cultural outlooks, and ways of living.

Continue reading ‘Something to Celebrate’

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

I GIve Up

These were the posted prices at my local gas station this morning:

(Note the 5 cent discount for cash on regular and premium, as opposed to the 65 cent (!!!) discount on plus.) Unless this was just a mistake, my complete inability to explain it makes me question whether I should be allowed to teach economics.

Continue reading ‘I GIve Up’

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Live Streaming Sex

The Future of Freedom Foundation plans to livestream my talk this afternoon, titled “More Sex is Safer Sex and Other Surprises”. I believe you’ll be able to find the stream here. Starting time (I think!) is 6PM.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Update: livestream cancelled for techical reasons but high quality video will be available in a few days.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

The Party’s Over

Thus the headline in today’s New York Times. Well, the Tea Party was nice while it lasted.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Good News and Bad News

Good news and bad news: Romney lost; Obama won.

What’s most depressing about the Obama victory is that it seems to have come largely as a reward for two things: the execrable auto bailout and a despicable campaign of character assassination.

What’s most refreshing about the Romney loss is that it seems to have come largely as a punishment for his cruelly evil immigration rhetoric. (Remember “self-deportation”?) This is tempered somewhat by the fact that Obama seems to have escaped punishment for his cruelly evil immigration policies. (Under Obama, deportations have reached an all-time high.)

Obama, I believe somewhat more than Romney, pitched his rhetoric at an audience presumed to be incapable of critical thinking. It’s a little depressing to be reminded how large that audience must be.

Continue reading ‘Good News and Bad News’

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

The Other Dunce

I tried listening to Mitt Romney on the radio Sunday morning, but after a few minutes it just got too depressing.

Here’s what I heard in that few minutes:

1) We need to maintain defense spending because (among other reasons) it “creates jobs”. If Mitt Romney does not understand that the creation of jobs — i.e. the consumption of resources that could be valuably employed elsewhere — is the downside of defense spending, then he has no better chance of “fixing the economy” than a blue-bottomed monkey.

2) It is “immoral” for us to “pass on debt” to future generations — future generations who will almost surely be richer than we are. Note that in this context, “pass on debt” means exactly the same thing as “leave a smaller inheritance”. So Romney’s view is that there’s a moral imperative for the relatively poor — namely us — to transfer income to the relatively rich — namely our grandchildren. What’s interesting about that is that Romney is already on record in favor of a more progressive tax code, the sole purpose of which is to transfer income in the opposite direction — from the relatively rich to the relatively poor. (More precisely: Romney would tax capital income at a lower rate for the “middle class” than for the “rich”. Since there is no conceivable efficiency-based justification for such a policy, his position can only indicate a pure preference for rich-to-poor redistribution.) Either Romney has just declared himself immoral, or he’s just spouting random words. (Or, just possibly, he has a good argument for why we have a moral obligation to redistribute from the rich to the poor in some situations but not others. I would like to hear him articulate that argument.)

Continue reading ‘The Other Dunce’

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

The Numbers Racket

If you’re the sort of person who reads economics blogs, you’ve probably heard that the median US worker has enjoyed hardly any income gain over the past few decades. Here are the numbers behind the noise (all corrected for inflation):

A mere 3% increase over 25 years does indeed look pretty grim. And note that the year 2005 is pre-crash, so what we’re seeing is not an artifact of the recession.

Now let’s look a little deeper and ask which demographic groups account for all this stagnation. White men? Nope, their median income is up 15%. Nonwhite men? Up 16%. White women? Up 75%. Non-white women? Up 62%. That’s everybody:

What gives? How can the median income shoot up in every demographic sector while the overall median remains nearly unchanged?

Continue reading ‘The Numbers Racket’

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Kindle Update

The all-new revised edition of The Armchair Economist is now available in a Kindle edition (as well as paperback) here.

As of this writing, the Amazon page still says you are buying the 2007 version, but that’s wrong. The version you’ll get is the new 2012 version.

Barnes and Noble still has the 1993 version for the Nook. This will be fixed in a day or two.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

A Tale of Two Cities

The London subway stations have NO trash receptacles. The tracks look like this:

The New York subway stations have more trash receptacles than I can count. The tracks look like this:

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Quote of the Day

You do not examine legislation in light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

—Lyndon Johnson

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Econ 101 for the Supercommittee

Here is my op-ed on deficit reduction from this morning’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required). For those without subscriptions, the thrust (which won’t be new to long-time readers of this blog) is that raising taxes can’t convert fiscally irresponsible spending to fiscally responsible spending.

If your household is over budget, you can address that problem either by spending less or by earning more income. It is tempting to fall into the trap of thinking that by analogy, the government can address its budget problems either by spending less or by raising taxes. But the analogy fails because raising taxes is not like earning more income; it’s more like visiting the ATM.

The government is an agent of the taxpayers. Raising taxes to pay for government spending depletes our assets just as visiting the ATM to pay for household spending depletes our assets. That’s not at all like earning income, which adds to our assets.

So insofar as the supercommittee relies on tax increases to address issues of “fiscal irresponsibility”, it will have failed.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Wisconsin Followup

A couple of followups on yesterday’s post about Wisconsin:

1) Several commenters have pointed out that the conflict in Wisconsin is not (directly) about wages, benefits or working conditions, but rather about collective bargaining. This seems to me to be a distinction without a difference; nobody would care about collective bargaining unless they expected it to affect wages, benefits, and/or working conditions. The point stands that workers who are very upset about losing their collective bargaining rights must expect to use those rights to achieve above-market compensation.

2) Jim from Wisconsin made a comment, and I made a reply, that I think bear highlighting here. Jim from Wisconsin said:

Futhermore, isn’t the idea in private business that if you want the best and the brightest, you pay them well? Don’t we want our Government programs run effectively and efficiently? Seems to work in the private sector, so why can’t this apply to public sector as well?

To which I replied:

The problem with this is that every “best and brightest” who is hired by the public sector is unavailable to the private sector, so it’s not at all clear that we WANT the best and brightest in the public sector. To take an extreme case, I don’t want the best Silicon Valley engineers tempted to work as high school teachers; I’d rather have them pushing the limits of technology. From the point of view of economic efficiency, this is the one and only reason why public sector employees ought NOT be overpaid. (It’s also a reason why private sector employees ought not be overpaid, but there’s generally less threat of that happening because of the private-sector profit motive.) It’s the one and only reason not to overpay public employees — but it is a good and sufficient reason.

Continue reading ‘Wisconsin Followup’

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Test post

Here is a test post for Tom.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Update

This morning’s probability puzzle, as originally posted, contained a remark at the end saying For extra clarity … “the medicine killed him” should be interpreted to mean that if he hadn’t taken the medicine, he wouldn’t have died.

I’ve realized that for some readers that wording might be subtracting more clarity than it’s adding. It is, however, correct as originally stated.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Happy New Year

Happy New Year, one and all. I’ll see you in 2011.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share

Speed Math

speedometerOver the course of my childhood, I remember asking exactly one intelligent question. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make my parents understand what I was asking. Perhaps it was that frustration that deterred me from ever formulating an intelligent question again.

I was, I think, six years old at the time, and my question was this: If you’re traveling at 50 miles an hour at 1:00, and you’re traveling at 70 miles an hour at 2:00, must there be a time in between when you’re traveling exactly 60 miles an hour?

What made this question intelligent—and probably what made it incomprehensible to my parents—was that I was very keen to distinguish it from the question of whether your speedometer would have to pass through the 60-mile-an-hour mark. It seemed clear to me that the answer to that one was yes—that even if your true velocity could somehow skip directly from 50 to 70, the speedometer needle, in the course of whipping around from one reading to the other, would have to pass through the midpoint.

I quite vividly remember worrying that my question about your speed would be misinterpreted as a question about your speedometer, a question to which I thought the answer was obvious and therefore could only be asked by a very stupid person—a very stupid person for whom I did not wish to be mistaken. Therefore I prefaced the question with a long discourse on how it was thoroughly obvious to me that if your speedometer reads 50 miles an hour at one time and 70 miles an hour at another, then surely it must pass through 60 on the way, but that this was not not not not not the question I was about to ask, which concerned your actual speed and not the measurement thereof. By the time I got around to formulating the question itself, my parents (or at least my father; I don’t remember whether my mother was present) had quite understandably given up on figuring out what I was trying to get at.

Continue reading ‘Speed Math’

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Share