Author Archive for Steve Landsburg

Errata

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 1, 2018
in Books, Oops and Personal
. 14 Comments

Somewhere on my shelves, there is a math book with a page very like the following:

I know this because I remember seeing it (or at least I think I do), but I can’t quite remember which book it’s in.

Fortunately, I didn’t try to steal this joke for Can You Outsmart an Economist?, because it turns out there’s an actual erratum in the main text. It comes in Chapter 16 where a series of problems leads the reader to discover the basics of option pricing. The arithmetic in those problems is all correct, except for one thing: In order to keep the math easy, I assumed an interest rate of 50%. But with an interest rate that high (and given the other assumptions in the chapter), nobody would be mucking around with buying options in the first place; we’d all just be putting our money in the bank and getting rich in a hurry.

So what I should have done is assumed an interest rate of 20%. If you’ve got a copy of the book, you should pencil in the following changes:

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Can You Outsmart an Economist?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 25, 2018
in Books, Cool Stuff, Economics and Personal
. 22 Comments

Can You Outsmart an Economist?

100+ Puzzles to Train Your Brain

My new book is now on sale! Readers of this blog will recognize some but not nearly all of these 100+ puzzles (146, actually, by my count). If you’ve enjoyed my puzzle posts, you’ll probably enjoy these extended discussions of some past puzzles, and the many more that are entirely new. Most of these puzzles are designed to teach important lessons about economics, broadly defined to encompass all purposeful human behavior. All of them are also designed to be fun.

Once you’ve had a look, please don’t hesitate to share your opinions right here on the blog — or better yet (especially if your opinions are positive!) don’t hesitate to share them on Amazon or on Goodreads.

Or, if you’d prefer to taste the milk before you buy the cow, here is the introduction, absolutely free of charge.

You can read a few advance reviews here. And remember, the more copies you buy, the sooner I’ll write the sequel.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Efficient Tariffs

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 23, 2018
in Economics and Policy
. 14 Comments

You’re a policymaker in a country where people buy widgets that are produced both at home and abroad. You can set (separate) excise tax rates on domestic production and imports. (The tax on imports is, of course, what we usually call a tariff.) What tax rates should you set?

The Economics 101 answer makes two assumptions:

1. You care only about the economic welfare of your citizens (and not at all about foreigners).

2. You can’t affect foreign prices (i.e. your country is a negligible portion of the world market for widgets). The fancy way to say this is that the supply of imports is perfectly elastic.

From these assumptions, it follows that both tax rates should be zero. In fact, we can relax assumption 1) and allow you to care as much as you want about the welfare of foreigners; the conclusion doesn’t change.

But suppose we relax these assumptions in a different way:

1A. You care about both the economic welfare of your citizens and (separately) about the tax revenue earned by your government. (I continue to assume, however, that you don’t care about foreigners.)

2A. The foreign supply curve might not be perfectly elastic. Contrary to the Economics 101 assumption, this gives you some market power that you might want to exploit. (I continue to assume, though, that you take the foreign supply curve as given. In particular, this means that your policies do not affect foreign tax rates, so I am assuming away things like retaliatory tariffs.)

Now what’s your best policy? I can’t answer that because you have two competing goals (economic welfare and tax revenue) and I don’t know how much weight you put on one versus the other. But surely if I can show you that Policy A delivers on both goals better than Policy B, you’ll want to reject Policy B. The existence of Policy A leads me to call Policy B inefficient, and surely you’ll want to reject any inefficient policy.

So which pairs of tax rates are efficient?

Continue reading ‘Efficient Tariffs’

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Kavanaugh v. Thomas

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 20, 2018
in Current Events and Politics
. 32 Comments

I keep hearing that the matter of Brett Kavanaugh is “just like Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill all over again”.

Seriously?

Point the First: Clarence Thomas stood accused of boorishness. Brett Kavanaugh stands accused of violent attempted rape. If all the accusations against Thomas were true, he deserved an elbow to the ribs. If the accusations against Kavanaugh are true, he should probably be in jail.

To suggest that there is even a rough equivalence here is sheer madness.

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Quick Thoughts on Kavanaugh

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 17, 2018
in Current Events
. 29 Comments

First: Neither you nor I know who’s telling the truth, who’s honestly misremembering, who’s dissembling, and who’s doing some combination of all three. But if we want to think about what should happen next in the real world, it pays to think first about what should happen next in a hypothetical world where we can somehow be sure that Professor Ford’s account is 100% accurate. In that world, we need to ask this question: Should a night of bad behavior at age 17 be punished by a career derailment at age 53 (assuming there’s been no punishment in the interim)?

The answer, of course, depends on the benefits and costs of that punishment.

First the benefits: Punishments are beneficial when they deter other bad behavior. So we should embrace this punishment only insofar as we believe that some future 17 year old boy will be deterred from committing sexual assualt by the prospect of a career derailment 35 years down the line. How big is that deterrent effect? Not only do I have no idea; I also have no idea how to start forming an idea. That is, I can’t think of any good empirical strategy for measuring such a deterrent effect. We have good data on the deterrent effect of imprisonment, of capital punishment, and of fines — but not, as far as I know, on the deterrent effect of long-delayed career consequences. (I’ll be very glad if any reader can prove me wrong about this.) I do, however, have a guess. My guess is that for boys of the social milieu that Kavanaugh came from, this effect could loom pretty large. True, no 17 year old really expects to be nominated to the Supreme Court some day, but plenty of 17 year olds at prep schools have lavish dreams of future success, and seem to care quite a bit about preserving that future. If my guess is right, the benefits of killing this nomination might be pretty big.

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Public Service Announcement

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 29, 2018
in Personal and Recommendations
. 22 Comments

Having recently dealt with some of the same customer service issues at both Vanguard and Fidelity, I can make these recommendations with confidence:

1) Keep your money at Vanguard.

2) If you’ve made the unfortunate mistake of keeping some of your money at Fidelity and you ever need customer service, and if your customer service representative turns out to be named Cameron Marcil, hang up immediately and try again.

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In the Matter of Sarah Jeong

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 6, 2018
in Bad Reasoning, Current Events and Journalism
. 16 Comments

Two decades after hiring Paul Krugman, the New York Times has doubled down by hiring the venomous Sarah Jeong, whose old tweets include the following rhetorical question:

Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?

According to Jeong’s supporters, the tweet needs to be read in context — it was, you see, intended as a parody of Andrew Sullivan’s audacious piece in New York magazine, advocating research — or at least opposing the suppression of research — into racial differences in IQ.

I’m all for parody. I’m all for taking other people’s logic (and my own!), pushing it to its limits, seeing where it leads, and thereby calling attention to its weaknesses. And I am outraged when authors engaged in this enterprise are taken out of context. If I say “X”, and if “Y” is both analogous to X and clearly outrageous, then Sarah Jeong or anyone else ought to be able to tweet “Y” by way of making fun of me, without having to face down a gang of yahoos accusing her of believing “Y”.

But that’s not what this is about. Because — and here is the crux of the matter — the analogue to

Are some races genetically disposed to be less intelligent than others?

is

Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun?

which is not at all the same thing as

Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?

The problem here is not that Sarah Jeong believes white people are fit only to live underground like groveling goblins. (I feel pretty confident, in fact, that she believes no such thing.) The problem here is that she is attempting to refute Andrew Sullivan’s logic by writing down an analogy (so far so good) and then, having done so, tacking on the phrase “being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins”, which in no way reflects anything Andrew Sullivan said, and which Sarah Jeong pulled out of her ass.

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Monday Solution

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 30, 2018
in Logic, Math and Puzzles
. 14 Comments

The answer to Friday’s puzzle is YES. If I am a logic machine who only states what I can prove, and if I say “If I can prove there is no God, then there is no God”, it does follow that I can prove there is no God.

Once again, it was our commenter Leo who got this first (in Friday’s comment thread, graciously rot-13’d).

As with Thursday’s solution to Wednesday’s puzzle, there are two key relevant background facts:

A) An inconsistent system can prove anything.

B) A sufficiently complex consistent system cannot prove its own consistency. (This is Godel’s second incompleteness theorem.)

Here’s the logic:

1) I’ve asserted that “if I can prove there is no God, then there is no God”. We know that I assert only things that I can prove. Therefore I can prove this assertion.

2) That means I can also prove the equivalent assertion that “if there is a God, I cannot prove otherwise”.

3) Therefore, if I take my axioms and add the axiom “There is a God”, then I can prove that there is something I cannot prove.

4) Therefore, if I take my axioms and add the axiom “There is a God”, then I can prove that my axiom system is consistent (by Background Fact A.)

5) Therefore, if I take my axioms and add the axiom “There is a God”, my axiom system is inconsistent. (Because only an inconsistent system can prove its own consistency — that is, Background Fact B.)

6) Therefore the statement “There is a God” must contradict my axiom system.

7) This can happen only if my axiom system is able to prove that “There is no God”.

So yes, I can prove there is no God.

Continue reading ‘Monday Solution’

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Friday Puzzle

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 27, 2018
in Puzzles
. 10 Comments

A followup to Wednesday’s puzzle:

The assumptions are the same as on Wednesday:

I am basically a logic machine. There are certain axioms that I believe, and I never say anything out loud unless it can be deduced from those axioms via the rules of logic. (Fortunately, I can talk about many things, because my axioms include everything from the usual axioms for arithmetic to a rich set of beliefs about ontology, ethics, psychology, and everything else I care about.)

Now I’ve found myself in a whole new imaginary conversation with the same old imaginary Bob Murphy. This time I found myself saying out loud that “If I can prove there is no God, then surely there is no God.”

The Puzzle: Can I in fact prove there is no God?

Solution forthcoming on Monday.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Thursday Solution

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 26, 2018
in Math and Puzzles
. 38 Comments

Here are the answers to yesterday’s puzzle. The first correct solution came from our commenter Leo (comment #18 on yesterday’s post).

The assumptions of the problem were: Everything I say out loud can be deduced from my axioms. My axioms include the ordinary axioms for arithmetic, among other things. And I recently said out loud that “I cannot prove that God does not exist”.

The questions were: Can I prove there is no God? Can I prove there is a God? And is there enough information her to determine whether there actually is a God?

The answers are yes, yes and no: Yes, I can prove there is no God. Yes, I can also prove there is a God. And no, you can’t use any of this to determine whether there is a God.

To explain, I’ll use the phrase “logical system” to refer to a system of axioms sufficiently strong to talk about basic arithmetic (and perhaps a whole lot of other things), together with the usual logical rules of inference. It’s given in the problem statement that I am a logical system.

Here are two background facts about logical systems:

A. An inconsistent logical system can prove anything at all. That’s because it’s tautological that if P is self-contradictory, then any statement of the form “P implies Q” is valid. If I’m inconsistent, that means I can prove at least one statement (call it P) that’s self-contradictory. Then if I want to prove, say, that the moon is made of green cheese, I note that:

  • I can prove P
  • It’s tautological that “P implies the moon is made of green cheese”
  • Therefore I can conclude by modus ponens that the moon is made of green cheese.

B. No consistent logical system can prove its own consistency. This is Godel’s celebrated Second Incompleteness Theorem.

Now here’s the argument:

Continue reading ‘Thursday Solution’

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Down on the Farms

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 25, 2018
in Current Events, Policy and Politics
. 30 Comments

Suppose there’s a guy in your neighborhood who routinely harasses strangers on the street, calling them ugly names, maybe threatening them with violence, but always stopping short of anything that’s actually illegal.

You consider this bad behavior, so you work to pass some laws that will discourage it. Maybe you criminalize the behavior; maybe you tax it.

The new laws turn out to be somewhat effective. The guy tones it down. He still harasses people, but only half as much.

Question: Do we owe this guy something? Should the taxpayers cut him a check so he won’t feel so bad about having to rein himself in?

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that most of you will answer “no”.

Here’s why I ask:

The President of the United States believes that under current circumstances, much international trade is a bad thing and ought to be discouraged. Unfortunately, there’s a bunch of farmers out there who have been behaving very badly (i.e. trading with foreigners) and the law hasn’t done much to stop them. So the President has expanded the scope of the law to punish this bad behavior via tariffs. And then he’s turned right around and announced a plan to compensate the bad guys.

Continue reading ‘Down on the Farms’

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Wednesday Puzzle

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 25, 2018
in Puzzles
. 21 Comments

Here’s what you should know about me: I am basically a logic machine. There are certain axioms that I believe, and I never say anything out loud unless it can be deduced from those axioms via the rules of logic. (Fortunately, I can talk about many things, because my axioms include everything from the usual axioms for arithmetic to a rich set of beliefs about ontology, ethics, psychology, and everything else I care about.)

Here’s what else you should know: Last night, in the course of an imaginary chat with an imaginary Bob Murphy, I found myself admitting out loud that “I cannot prove that there is no God.”

First Puzzle: Can I in fact prove that there is no God?

Second Puzzle: Can I prove that there is a God?

Third Puzzle: Based on the information given, can you determine whether there is a God?

I’ll answer tomorrow, or in a few days depending on how the comments play out.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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The Elephant in the Brain

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 17, 2018
in Books
. 14 Comments

elephantI haven’t been blogging much lately, but John Lanchester’s boneheaded review of Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s The Elephant in the Brain seemed to demand a response. But I see that Robin himself has saved me the trouble with his devastating refutation here.

This does remind me that I never fulfilled my intention to review the The Elephant myself. This fell through the cracks because I’d accumulated substantial notes while reading it, lost my notes, decided to search for them before reviewing, and then sort of fell temporarily out of the blogosphere for a while. But it is a genuinely terrific book; my lost notes contain a long list of minor quibbles, but the bottom line is that I learned a lot (about others and about myself) and had a lot of fun along the way. There was never a moment when I wanted to put this book down.

The book, for those who have somehow managed not to hear about it, is about the hidden motives for human behavior — the motives we hide from each other, and the motives we hide from ourselves. The table of contents promises to enlighten us about how hidden motives drive our body language, laughter, conversation, and our choices in consumption, art, charity, education, medicine, religion and politics — and the book delivers on those promises with a heady mix of sparkling logic and striking evidence. There are plenty of fun facts you’ll be repeating at cocktail parties, and plenty of deep insights that will make you smarter forever.

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Letter from an Infantryman

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 8, 2018
in Outrage, Personal and Tragedy
. 11 Comments

armydad

I found this among my father’s papers. He wrote it as a 20-year old infantryman who had been in combat for about six months.

I am struck by the eloquence, and doubly struck that he managed to be eloquent in the medium of pen-and-ink, with no copy/paste/delete and not even any crossouts:

Monday, Jan. 8 (1945)

Dear Mother and Dad:

Well, the new year has arrived and with it, sadly enough, have come no great changes. The war is still being fought, I and millions of other boys are still several thousands of miles away from home and our loved ones, and it almost seems as if there will never be an end to this useless, heart-breaking, killing war.

Whether a man is German, American, or French, he looks just the same when he is wounded, dying or dead. The battlefield bullet is a great leveler; it can make the biggest man very small or the weakest man a hero, but in this war most of the heroes are dead.

We who are actively engaged in defeating the enemy would not hesitate to lay down our arms and surrender if we thought that the people who make the peace will fail to make it permanent. The mere thought that our comrades may have died for nothing, that we may have a brief pause from this war so that we can raise sons to fight another war would cause us many sleepless nights. The last thing one dying soldier said to me was that he was dying on the battlefield so that his son would not.

I may sound very bitter and full of resentment and frankly I am. This war should have been averted in 1918 and the ensuing years, but instead of preventing war, the American people actually encouraged it by ignoring everything that was going on around them. For the sake of all the men who have gone through this hell, we must not let this happen again. We must not have allowed so many of our boys to have died in vain.

I can’t possibly express the resentment these boys feel when they hear about these “Victory in Europe Celebrations”, and when they hear about the lotteries that are held to determine the date of the European victory. Here their own sons are being killed, maimed and crippled for life, and they trouble themselves with such trivial tripe. What is the matter with the American public? Is it entirely aloof to this war?

Perhaps I don’t sound like a twenty-year-old kid anymore, but I’ve seen things that I shall never forget, ghastly things that I shudder to think about. I think that a just punishment for any of these “Victory in Europe Celebration” planners would be to pick up a soldier’s boot on a battlefield and find the foot still in it, or sweat out just one artillery barrage. If they could just realize what is going on they would spend all their spare time praying for the safety of their boys and thanking God that America has been spared everything but an army.

Aside from being a little angry, I’m feeling fine. I’ve received several of your packages and everything is swell. I know that God has been answering your prayers, and he will continue to watch over me.

Love, Norman

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End of an Era

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on July 8, 2018
in Personal
. 20 Comments

dad2
Norman Landsburg (1924-2018), a survivor of the worst ravages of the Great Depression, a survivor of the trenches in France, where he landed in the wake of the Normandy invasion (and, according to what I think I’ve just learned while going through his papers, was awarded two bronze stars that he never once mentioned to his wife of 68 years or any of his three children), who transcended a series of hard knocks that would have led many to despair and struggled every day, often against mighty odds, to make a better life for his family, succumbed tonight to complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

His bullheadedness was his greatest vice and his greatest virtue. I owe him a couple of good slaps upside the head (not that I ever got one from him, but he deserves them anyway) and eternal gratitude for the way he eased my setting forth and filled my world with possibilities. Neither debt will ever be paid.

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The Case Against The Case Against Education

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 27, 2018
in Uncategorized
. 34 Comments

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’

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Hanushek Tonight

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 23, 2018
in Events
. 2 Comments

With apologies for the late notice: Eric Hanushek of Stanford University, the great pioneer in the applications of economics to evaluating educational policies, will speaking tonight in Wegmans Hall, room 1400, on the University of Rochester campus. The general public is invited.

Title: Can we put a Price on Student Achievement? Financial Returns for Academic Success

The event will begin promptly at 6:30PM. The general public is welcome.

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Where I’ll Be

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 14, 2018
in Events, Math, Personal, Philosophy and Religion
. 4 Comments

I’ll be speaking this Saturday at the Freethought Festival in Madison, Wisconsin (follow the link to register!) on the topic “Truth, Provability and the Fabric of the Universe”. I’ll be glad to see you there.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Like the Groundhog, He Emerges

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 24, 2018
in Outrage and Personal
. 33 Comments

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed by now that my blogging has been mostly dormant for a while. This is partly because I’ve been working on multiple book projects (e.g. this one), partly because I felt so disillusioned after the outcome of the election season, and partly because I’ve felt like I’ve already said much of what I have to say. But sometimes you can’t resist.

This is the City Mattress store on Monroe Avenue in Brighton, New York:

My wife recently wanted to buy a mattress, drove by the store, and noticed that there were no hours posted in the window. The next day, she guessed at the opening time, happened to get it right, went into the store, and mentioned to the friendly manager that it would be nice if they could post their hours. The manager agreed that being able to post their hours would be very nice indeed, but that the town of Brighton had forbidden them to do so on the grounds that it would “make the store look like a sub shop”.

Question 1: Please study the picture above. How probable do you think it is that you’d mistake it for a sub shop? (Your answer should be a number between 0% and 100%).

Question 1A: By how much would your answer to Question 1 change if this store had its hours posted in the window?

Question 2: If you did happen to mistake this store for a sub shop, how much damage would you feel you’d incurred? (Your answer should be the number of dollars you’d have to lose to feel equivalently damaged.)

Incidentally, the lack of an hours sign inconveniences not only people like my wife, who wasn’t sure when to show up. The manager mentioned that every night at closing time, they have to turn away new arrivals who, due to the lack of a sign, were unaware of the store hours.

The Brighton Town Supervisor is Mr. William Moehle. This is a picture of his house:

Continue reading ‘Like the Groundhog, He Emerges’

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Alex Tabarrok!

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 19, 2018
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

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.

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Good Intentions; Bad Policy

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on January 18, 2018
in Current Events, Economics and Policy
. 29 Comments

I learn from Scott Sumner’s blog that in many California cities, residents with past marijuana convictions will jump to the head of the line for licenses to sell the drug legally — this by way of compensating them for past persecution.

Scott approves. I don’t, for two reasons:

First, if you want to compensate people for past persecution, the right way to do it is with cash, not by misallocating productive resources. If there must be licenses, they should be allocated to those who can use them most efficiently, regardless of any past history.

Second, drug dealers have never been the primary victims of anti-drug laws. They can’t be, because there is free entry and exit from that industry. Anti-drug enforcement leads to exit, which in turn leads to higher profits for those who remain — and the exit continues until the profits are high enough to compensate for the risks. One way to think about this: All those “persecuted” drug dealers were, in effect, employing the government to stifle their competition, and paying a fair price for that privilege in the form of occasionally being convicted and punished themselves.

The primary victims of anti-drug legislation are potential consumers who were deterred by artificially high prices. How do you compensate those victims? You can’t. In a population of 1000 people who have never used drugs, it’s quite impossible to identify the 200 or 300 or 400 who would have happily indulged if only the price had been lower.

Continue reading ‘Good Intentions; Bad Policy’

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The Tax Bill

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 16, 2017
in Current Events, Policy and Politics
. 34 Comments

Compared to an ideal tax code, it’s awful.

Compared to the pre-existing tax code, it’s a vast improvement.

Compared to my expectations going in, it’s a pleasant surprise. It required some real political courage to pass this thing, and political courage always surprises me. There’s also a lot of good sense in it, which sometimes surprises me even more.

Compared to what I suspect we could have had, if only that same good sense and political courage had been harnessed by a president who was capable of understanding the bill’s content, participating in its formulation, and selling it to the public, it’s something of a disappointment.

Scott Sumner does a superb job of summarizing the good, the bad and the neutral. Instead of quoting him extensively, I’ll (strongly) encourage you to go read the original. A few additional remarks:

Continue reading ‘The Tax Bill’

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Matters of Money

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 8, 2017
in Uncategorized
. 36 Comments

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’

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Too Many People?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 28, 2017
in Economics and Video
. 43 Comments

It was both an honor and a pleasure to deliver the annual Hayek Lecture at the Institute for Economic Affairs last week. Here’s the video:

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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WTF?! Indeed!

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 16, 2017
in Books, Economics and WTF?
. 3 Comments

Like most bloggers, I assign each of my posts to one or more Categories, which are listed in small print somewhere near the top of the post. Among the categories I use are “Economics”, “Politics”, “Policy”, “Math”, “Logic”, “Cool Stuff”, “History”, “Oddities” and “WTF?”. The last of these is perfect for this post, which is written to call your attention to Peter Leeson‘s rollicking new book WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird.

(Edited to add: I see now that the jacket copy on Leeson’s book describes it as “rollicking”. Apparently I’m not the only one who thought this was the right adjective here.)

Leeson, some of whose work I’ve blogged about here in the past, takes us on a tour of some of the world’s seemingly most inexplicable behavior — both historical and contemporary — and uses economic insight to render that behavior explicable after all. His explanations are generally plausible and provocative, though I’m sure many an insightful reader will find plenty to argue with. That, after all, is part of the fun.

Here are the blurbs from the back of the book:

Continue reading ‘WTF?! Indeed!’

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Exploding Debit Cards

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 13, 2017
in Innovations
. 15 Comments

A Guest Post

by

Bennett Haselton

The government sometimes issues stimulus checks in the hopes that the windfall will induce people to spend and stimulate the economy. Regardless of the merits of this idea generally, the effectiveness is partly reduced because people choose to save the money rather than spending it.

So: What if, instead of issuing stimulus checks, the government issued “exploding debit cards”, which have to be spent in a given time period or the cards cease to work?

This would seem to have several advantages over stimulus checks:

  • Rather than cutting checks knowing that some of it will be spent, the government is handing out cards knowing that almost all of it will be spent. This means the dollar amount can be less in order to achieve the same stimulus effect. (Even though this is a political consideration, not an economic consideration.)
  • It gives the government more fine-tuned control over when the money is spent — you can issue the cards to different subgroups at different times and require the groups to spend the money in separate time frames.
  • Since the card balance is difficult to convert to cash, this reduces the chance that the money will be spent on illicit purchases the government may want to prevent.

Some people would still find ways to work around it — perhaps by buying goods they could re-sell for cash, or selling their cards for cash (if merchants are lazy about doing ID verification), or buying goods and then returning them for store credit — but, given the effort required, the number would be much lower than the number who would simply save their stimulus checks instead of spending them. (Many people would prefer to save, but the goal here is to achieve a specific economy-wide outcome, not to give every person what they would prefer.)

Not everyone agrees with the merits of issuing stimulus checks. But it seems that any argument in favor of stimulus checks would be an even stronger argument for using exploding debit cards instead. Am I missing something?

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Book Title

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 4, 2017
in Book and Self-Promotion
. 33 Comments

For a book of brain teasers with economic morals, how do we collectively feel about this title?

Rational Explanations: 100+ Puzzles to Make You Smarter About Economics

I’m interested in whether we like it, but more interested in whether we think it will sell books.

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Winston Churchill Foresees Donald Trump

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 2, 2017
in Uncategorized
. 37 Comments

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

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Too Many People?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 26, 2017
in Events and Self-Promotion
. 18 Comments

While most Americans are celebrating Thanksgiving, I’ll be in London, giving the annual Hayek Memorial Lecture sponsored by the Institute of Economic Affairs. Topic: Is the World Over or Under Populated, and How Would We Know? Tickets are required but free, and are available here. If you come to the talk, don’t leave without saying hello!

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Weight Loss Advice From Big Name Economists

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 23, 2017
in Current Events and Economics
. 5 Comments

In my dream, Greg Mankiw and Larry Summers are advising a friend about weight loss.

Mankiw says: If you eat fewer calories, you’ll lose weight.

Summers replies: Not so fast! Sometimes if you eat less ice cream, you crave more cake. Then your calorie intake won’t change and you won’t lose weight. Greg’s advice is fine as an academic theory, but I doubt it will work in practice.

(Note here that Greg never mentioned ice cream in the first place.)

Of course Greg is 100% right, both in theory and in practice. If you eat fewer calories, you will lose weight. Summers responds that if you don’t eat fewer calories, you might not lose weight. True, but entirely off the mark.

I mention this because Mankiw had a recent blog post where he argued that if you cut taxes on capital income you’ll see a big rise in wages. (I happen to have blogged about this twice already in the past 24 hours, but those posts are irrelevant here.) Summers has replied that Mankiw is right in theory but likely to be wrong in practice, and lists three reasons. The first of those reasons comes down to saying that if you cut the corporate income tax, corporations are likely to end up paying more in other taxes, so you haven’t really cut the capital tax after all.

(Note here that Greg never mentioned corporate taxes in the first place.)

Okay, fine. So if you haven’t cut the capital tax, then Greg’s observation doesn’t apply. Likewise, if you haven’t really cut calories, you shouldn’t expect any weight loss. That’s not remotely a refutation.

Continue reading ‘Weight Loss Advice From Big Name Economists’

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