Author Archive for Steve Landsburg

More Triumphs of Capitalism

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 15, 2010
in Oddities
. 2 Comments

Do me a favor. Listen to this 30 second audio clip and let me know if you feel like you can speak a little Gaelic.

gaelic

The clip is from the Subliminal Learn Gaelic Irish/Scottish CD available from Brainwave Mind Voyages. According to their website, listening to this CD while you sleep will train you not just to speak Gaelic but to read it as well. (If the clip above didn’t work for you, please try it again while sleeping.) If you really want to go high-tech, they also offer an ultrasonic track that teaches you Gaelic in complete silence.

In case Gaelic is not your thing, the same company offers subliminal CDs that will teach you to dance, trade stocks, or stop pulling your eyelashes. Or on the racier side, there are CDs for subliminal breast enhancement, “natural male enhancement”, and combating both impotence and the gag reflex.

Unfortunately, nobody seems to have developed a technology that will teach you to keep squirrels in your pocket while you sleep. For the time being, only the traditional methods are available. But who knows what the future might bring?

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Krugman on Climate—Some Final Words

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 14, 2010
in Economics, Paul Krugman and Policy
. 13 Comments

Having blogged twice this week (here and here) on Paul Krugman’s green economics essay, I want to add a couple of quick comments on what it takes to contribute usefully to this discussion.

Continue reading ‘Krugman on Climate—Some Final Words’

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Krugman on Climate

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 13, 2010
in Economics, Paul Krugman and Policy
. 17 Comments

Yesterday I blogged about Paul Krugman’s recent piece on climate control policy. The bottom line: After recovering from a shaky start, Krugman does a good job of laying out the issues and posing many (though not quite all) of the right questions. But I’m not sure he gets the answers right.

A few years ago, writing in Slate, I listed the key questions that the Al Gores of the world mostly fail to address or even acknowledge. (See also the discussion on pages 186-190 of The Big Questions.) Krugman (thankfully) is no Al Gore, and he does address most of these questions. Let’s see how he does with them.

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A Tale of Three Economists

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 12, 2010
in Current Events, Economics, Paul Krugman and Policy
. 12 Comments

Halfway through reading Paul Krugman’s New York Times piece on green economics, I had my snarky retort all ready to go. Then in the second half he went and got all reasonable on me. I still don’t buy his conclusions, but (sadly for readers who like fireworks), he’s not (at least in this instance) nuts.

Continue reading ‘A Tale of Three Economists’

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Weekend Roundup

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 10, 2010
in Roundup
. 0 Comments

We had lots of new readers this week after several posts got considerable attention around the blogosphere: One on the difference between what the economist says and what the non-economist hears, one on blogging and the future of math (with its companion piece on four-dimensional tic-tac-toe), and two posts from the preceding week: My most influential books list and a post on what’s wrong with happiness research.

Bookending the week were my discovery of myself as a character in a novel and an extraordinary triumph of capitalism.

I look forward to seeing our new and old readers again on Monday.

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Triumphs of Capitalism

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 9, 2010
in Oddities
. 12 Comments

The secret of invisibility and the secret of keeping a squirrel in your pocket—all for one low price of $24.95. Now there’s something you’d never see under socialism.

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Blogging, Tic Tac Toe and the Future of Math

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 8, 2010
in Blogging, Innovations, Math and Truthseeking
. 30 Comments

Blogging, as you might have heard, is changing the face of the media. It may also be changing the face of mathematical research. For the first time ever, a substantial mathematical problem has been solved via an accumulation of blog comments, all building on each other. Could this be the future of mathematical research?

Before I explain the problem, let’s talk a little about tic-tac-toe. As you probably figured out long ago, intelligent players of ordinary tic-tac-toe (on a 3 by 3 board) will invariably battle to a draw. But, as you probably also figured out, not every game ends in a draw, because not every player is intelligent.

On the other hand, if we blacken out the three squares on the main diagonal and don’t allow anyone to play there (so the game ends when the remaining six squares are filled, then every game is sure to end in a draw. There’s simply no way to get three in a row when you’re not allowed to play on the diagonal:

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Tic Tac Toe in Four Dimensions

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 7, 2010
in Math and Puzzles
. 11 Comments

In high school, we used to play four-dimensional tic-tac-toe. The board looks like this:

Here each four-by-four subsquare is an ordinary tic-tac-toe board (except that it’s four-by-four instead of the traditional three-by-three). You should think of the four subsquares in the first column (or any other column) as stacked above each other in the third dimension. The red x’s form a vertical line in that direction, so if you manage to place four x’s in those positions, you’re a winner.

You should also think of the four subsquares in the first row as stacked above each other in yet another dimension. The red o’s form a diagonal line passing from the bottom left to the top right (using “bottom” and “top” to refer to directions in this fourth dimension). And the black x’s form another kind of diagonal line, passing from one corner to another through all four dimensions. So there are a lot of ways to win this game.

Continue reading ‘Tic Tac Toe in Four Dimensions’

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Hearing Problems

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 6, 2010
in Economics and Musings
. 39 Comments

hearingFirst, kudos to both Bennett Haselton and Xan, each of whom nailed yesterday’s puzzle in comments. Bennett’s answer has the advantage of requiring no knowledge of algebra; Xan’s has the advantage of giving a (much) more precise bound on how long it takes for history to repeat itself.

Now on to something completely different:

During a belated conversation about health care policy, a colleague remarked that “of course, nobody would want to live in a world where rich people and poor people got the same kind of health care”. The economists around the table all nodded in agreement and moved on to matters that were actually controversial.

It occurs to me that had there been a few non-economists at the table, someone might have objected to my colleague’s matter-of-fact (and surely accurate) observation. And it occurs to me also that maybe there’s a general lesson here about how economists communicate—or fail to communicate—with the world at large.

Continue reading ‘Hearing Problems’

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The Yukiad, Perpetual Motion and Me

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 5, 2010
in Books and Math
. 10 Comments

yukiadIt’s a bit of an odd feeling to be reading a novel and stumble upon yourself as a character. Well, at least a well-disguised version of yourself. The novel is Victor Snaith’s The Yukiad, and the character is a large Scotsman named Pans who tugs at his earrings when he becomes agitated. I am neither Scottish, nor earringed, nor particularly large, but I suspect that Pans, viewed through the haze of poetic license, is I.

When we meet Pans, he is hovering over a glass contraption—a perpetual motion machine, really—consisting of a circular tube containing several colored beads, which travel around the tube, some clockwise, some counterclockwise, all at the same speed, bouncing off each other in perfectly elastic collisions whenever they collide. Pans is currently tugging at his earrings so hard as to cause some concern for the integrity of his earlobes, as he ponders the following question:

But wull tha’ aver gut bark to weer tha’s started, at a’, at a’?

Well, okay, maybe I’m not Pans. Maybe I’m the character Sherloch Humes, a “trim but rather wrinkled gentleman in worsteds”, who calculates for Pans’s benefit that “the configuration of beads is guaranteed to have exactly replicated itself by the year two thousand and nineteen”. I believe that I am the inspiration for one of these characters and that the mathematician Leonid Vaserstein (who is neither Scottish nor wrinkled) is the inspiration for the other, and here is why:

Continue reading ‘The Yukiad, Perpetual Motion and Me’

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Weekend Roundup

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 3, 2010
in Roundup
. 0 Comments

This week’s highlights:

The Tragedy of the Chametz

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 2, 2010
in Economics, Ethics and Religion
. 34 Comments

matzahIt is the season of both Lent and Passover, which means that for Christians and Jews it is the season of making small but pointless sacrifices. This always strikes me as mildly tragic. If you’re going to sacrifice your pleasures in order to feel virtuous, why not at least do it in a way that helps someone? Instead of giving up meat or leavened bread, donate a few hundred dollars to a worthy cause.

[Before you tell me that giving up meat is socially beneficial because it holds the price of meat down, remember that low prices are good for buyers only to exactly the same extent that they’re bad for sellers. Changing a price does no net good. The rigorous proof of this is part of the theory of pecuniary externalities, on which the Wikipedia entry is uncharacteristically useless.]

Observing Lent or Passover has much in common with things like running around a track: You push yourself to do something hard, you feel good about it, and you leave the world pretty much the way you found it. What a shame that you didn’t push yourself to do something useful instead. I bet you could have learned to feel almost as good about that.

Continue reading ‘The Tragedy of the Chametz’

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When Is It Okay to Counterfeit?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 1, 2010
in Economics and Ethics
. 16 Comments

counterfeitsWhen I spoke at George Mason University last week, grad student Eli Dourado brought me up short with a question I wasn’t prepared for. He was riffing off the following passage from The Big Questions:

Is it okay to steal? Certainly not, and I’ve already told you why: The time and effort you spend stealing things is time and effort you could spend producing things instead. Theft leaves the world poorer than it could have been.

Is it okay to counterfeit? Certainly not, because counterfeiting is stealing. The time and effort you spend producing a phony dollar bill entitles you to a Hostess cupcake or a bus ride or a Blockbuster video rental without adding anything to the world’s stock of food, transportation, or entertainment. The cupcake you eat is made of flour and sugar that someone else could have eaten.

With that as background, Eli asked me this:

Is it okay for me to counterfeit if the central bank is not being sufficiently expansionary?

Continue reading ‘When Is It Okay to Counterfeit?’

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Unhappy Reasoning

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 31, 2010
in Bad Reasoning and Rants
. 35 Comments

happyIn a New Yorker essay, Elizabeth Kolbert takes at face value the widely reported statistic that “the average level of self-reported happiness, or subjective well-being, appears to have been flat going all the way back to the nineteen-fifties, when real per-capita income was less than half what it is today”. Proceeding from the assumption that these self-reports tell us something about actual happiness, Kolbert, proceeds to muse on the policy implications, quoting ex-Harvard president Derek Bok with approval:

If rising incomes have failed to make Americans happier over the last fifty years, what is the point of working such long hours and risking environmental disaster in order to keep on doubling and redoubling our Gross Domestic Product?

Wait a minute, now. Self-reported happiness has been flat for fifty years despite rising incomes. Self-reported happiness has also been flat for fifty years despite dramatic increases in leisure and environmental quality. (Since 1965, the average American has gained about six hours a week of leisure—the equivalent of seven vacation weeks a year.) So why aren’t Bok and Kolbert asking why we bother to come home from the office, take vacations, and clean our air and water?

Continue reading ‘Unhappy Reasoning’

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Books, Books, Books

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 30, 2010
in Blogging, Books and Favorites
. 18 Comments

booksTyler Cowen started a blogospheric whirlwind recently when he posted the list of books that had influenced him the most and called on other econ bloggers to do the same. In short order, we got entries from Peter Suderman, E.D. Kain, Arnold Kling, Michael Martin, Niklas Blanchard, EconJeff, Bryan Caplan, Matt Yglesias, Jenny Davidson, Will Wilkinson, Matt Continetti, Ross Douthat, Mike Konczal, Kieran Healy, Ivar Hagendoorn, Scott Sumner, and no doubt others. [Update: Some of these links were wrong; I think they’re all fixed now.]

I’m late to the party, but here’s my list:

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NOW I Get It!

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 29, 2010
in Books and Memories
. 10 Comments

ctcoverFor some decades now, at more or less random times and in more or less random places, I’ve been asking people “Why would you care if your baby’s name reads the same upside down as rightside up?”. I have never gotten an answer that rang true.

One of the various unsatisfactory answers I keep getting is something like: “Umm. You wouldn’t care.” But I know that’s wrong, because I’ve read Clown Town.

Continue reading ‘NOW I Get It!’

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Weekend Roundup

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 27, 2010
in Roundup
. 0 Comments

The Big Questions of the week were:

I’ll let you ponder these further over the weekend and I’ll be back Monday with more.

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Tipping Points

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 26, 2010
in Economics, Fairness and Outrage
. 38 Comments

tippingMario Rizzo has a post on why he gives small tips to cab drivers and Brad DeLong concludes that Rizzo is a liar, a cheat and a psychopath-in-the-making.

You’d never know it from DeLong’s selective summary, but Rizzo’s post is dense with interesting (if elementary) economics. A key point is that when you think you’re tipping a New York cab driver, you’re really tipping the medallion owner. (A medallion is a license to drive a cab; medallions are in fixed supply and currently trade for a price of about three quarters of a million dollars. Your driver is probably leasing his medallion from its owner.) If we all started tipping, say, an extra $2 per ride, then medallion owners would demand another $2 per ride in rental fares—effectively claiming all the additional tips for themselves. (Click here for a slightly longer explanation.)

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Three Sides to the Story

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 25, 2010
in Anniversaries, Economics, Illiteracy and Policy
. 50 Comments

Today is the ninety-ninth anniversary of the legendary fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which reigned for ninety years as the worst workplace disaster in New York history. A hundred and forty six workers died that day, most of them young women. Escape routes were cut off by doors that were kept locked to prevent employee pilfering. The main exit from the factory floor was designed so that only one person at a time could pass through; departing workers had their handbags inspected by a night watchman. “It comes down to dollars and cents against human life, no matter how you look at it”, in the words of then-Fire Chief Edward Croker.

Well, yes, of course it comes down, at least in part, to dollars and cents against human life (where “dollars and cents” are, of course, stand-ins for “a whole lot of other things we care about”). The interesting question is whether the terms of trade were favorable. In other words: If the workers, in advance of the fire, had been fully informed of all the risks and all the potential consequences, would they have wanted those doors locked or open? Or more generally: When the New York state legislature responded to the fire with over two dozen new occupational health and safety laws, were they compounding the disaster?

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Our Place in the Universe

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 24, 2010
in Science
. 25 Comments

universe

 

What are the odds that humankind will survive long enough to colonize the Universe?

Katja Grace argues that the odds are low. Stripped of some nuance, her argument comes down to this:

  1. The fact that we’re around suggests that intelligent life is likely to be common.
  2. No other intelligent life appears to have colonized the Universe.
  3. If they haven’t succeeded, why should we?

By coincidence number one, I discovered Katja’s post (via a ringing endorsement from Robin Hanson) just hours after I’d posted yesterday’s entry here on The Big Questions disputing point 1). Of course, if point 1) fails then so does the entire argument.

Continue reading ‘Our Place in the Universe’

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Are We Alone?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 23, 2010
in Science
. 47 Comments

lw

This diagram, lifted from a lively paper by the astrobiologist Charles Lineweaver, is the tree of life on earth. The “root” at the center is the last common ancestor of all life. Toward the bottom left, you’ll find the genus “Homo”, to which you and I belong, at the end of a twig representing animals. The two neighboring twigs, ending in Zea (i.e. corn) and Coprimus, represent plants and fungi, our two closest relatives.

Professor Lineweaver offers this diagram as an antidote to the superstition that evolution has some tendency to converge on intelligence; his criterion is that we ought not say that evolution “converges” toward some feature unless we observe that feature arising independently in at least two or more twigs. By that same criterion, evolution has no tendency even to converge on heads, which (says Dr. Lineweaver) are likely to be prerequisite for anything like human intelligence.

If human-like intelligence is a fluke, then presumably the ability to build radio telescopes is also a fluke, which stands as a cautionary note for those who expect to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations.

Continue reading ‘Are We Alone?’

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For the Children

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 22, 2010
in Ethics
. 24 Comments

children

In a post last week, I asked:

How can it be okay to remain childless but not okay to have children and treat them badly—given that the children themselves would presumably prefer being treated badly to not being born at all?

There are a lot of comments there worth reading, including one from Ryan Yin that rephrased the problem so clearly that I want to highlight it here.

First, though, some answers that I think don’t work. Cos asked:

Why is it so puzzling that we value the preferences of people who exist over the hypothetical preferences of people who might’ve existed but don’t?

Sierra Black drew the same distinction between people who exist and those who don’t, though she phrased it in terms of rights:

Children aren’t possessions or art projects, they’re people. Before you have a child, you’re a person with a certain right to control what happens to your body. After the child is born, that child has some of the same rights you do, including the right not to be mistreated.

Ryan Yin (after agreeing with Sierra!) put his finger on exactly why I find her answer (and others like it) so unsatifying— though I’m not sure he intended his observation to be used in exactly this way:

Suppose you were thinking of having a child. Suppose that once the child is born, the child would wish he’d never been born (and prefer that to killing himself), and further that this is entirely predictable. By the logic given above, you aren’t allowed to care about this fact until after the child is born (at which point there’s nothing to be done). This seems like a very odd way of valuing the preferences of others.

Exactly! If (as Cos says) it’s perfectly reasonable not to value a person’s preferences until after s/he’s born, or (as Sierra says) people don’t acquire rights until after they’re born, then there can be no objection to creating a miserable life. I might be dooming my child to a life of misery, but that’s okay because s/he hasn’t been born yet and therefore has no rights and no preferences I choose to care about.

Surely this can’t be right. And if it’s not, then the Cos/Sierra story can’t be exactly right.

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Weekend Roundup

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 20, 2010
in Roundup
. 5 Comments

A sudden and mysterious fever left me unable to post my usual weekend roundup on time today. Now that I’m feeling human again, here it is, a few hours late:

We started the week with my best attempt to explain the intuition underlying the spectacular formula eiπ = -1, frequently described as the most beautiful and astonishing equation in all of mathematics. Gauss reportedly once said that if this formula is not immediately obvious to you, you have no hope of being a mathematician—but I’ve heard more than one Fields Medalist say he’d been dumbstruck when he first encountered it.

We reviewed Yale professor Gary Gorton‘s account of the financial crisis; he says it was a bank run, and if you’re going to have banks, bank runs go with the territory.

On the lighter side, we talked about web comics; on the less-light side we talked about the advantages of genocide over other forms of mass murder, and about moral paradoxes.

Barring a relapse, I’ll see you Monday.

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Moral Education

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 19, 2010
in Ethics and Memories
. 58 Comments

tower-of-babelWhen I was a child, my parents spoke to me frequently about the evils of racism. Some people, they said, judge others by the color of their skin, but we don’t do that, and you mustn’t either. And when you meet the people who make those judgments—and you will, they told me—you must never ever ever give them an ounce of credence because we’re right and they’re wrong. There were many discussions of this topic, but in my memory they all ended with the same refrain. We’re right and they’re wrong.

I’m not sure how old I was at the time, but I must have been very young because I already knew the refrain by heart when my father first told me about foreign languages. In other countries, people use different words than we do. We say “cat”, but in Spain they say “gato” and in Russia they say “koschka”.

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In Praise of Genocide

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 18, 2010
in Musings
. 51 Comments

headscratchWell, “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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What Really Went Wrong

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 17, 2010
in Current Events and Economics
. 31 Comments

bankrun

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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Free Will versus Determinism: The Web Comic

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 16, 2010
in Cool Stuff, Philosophy and Recommendations
. 13 Comments

lukesurl

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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Financial Imagineering

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 15, 2010
in Math
. 6 Comments

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

eiπ = -1

Continue reading ‘Financial Imagineering’

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Weekend Roundup

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 13, 2010
in Paul Krugman and Roundup
. 0 Comments

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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This is the Way the World Ends

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 12, 2010
in Science
. 13 Comments

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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