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Civil Rights and Wrongs

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 25, 2010
in Blogging, Musings and Policy
. 49 Comments

I had planned to get back to our friend the absent-minded driver today, but yesterday’s post on Rand Paul garnered (at least) one comment so good that it deserves to be highlighted.

I said yesterday that the 1964 Civil Rights Law (forbidding racial discrimination in places of public accommodation) infringes on property rights and that all reasonable people ought to be disturbed by that, even if their ultimate judgment is that the benefits of the law outweigh its costs.

Our commenter Jonathan Pryor responded, in effect, as follows (I am paraphrasing):

When you open a restaurant and announce that you won’t serve blacks, you’re not just announcing that you won’t serve blacks. Instead, you’re implicitly announcing that whenever a black person comes in and asks for service, you’re going to call the police and ask the taxpayers to subsidize the cost of your taste for discrimination. You have no property right to those taxpayer dollars.

My first reaction was: This is an excellent point, which I haven’t seen raised before. For the most part, that’s still my reaction. Still, this argument cannot be definitive as a matter of principle, because the same argument applies in many cases where we clearly reject its conclusion. After all, when you open a restaurant, you’re implicitly announcing that whenever a naked person asks for service you’re going to call the police and ask the taxpayers to cover the cost of removal. For that matter, you’re going to call the police every time you get robbed. But we don’t conclude that it should always be illegal to open a restaurant.

Continue reading ‘Civil Rights and Wrongs’

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That’s Rich

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 24, 2010
in Bad Reasoning, Current Events and Rants
. 31 Comments

“It’s now crystal clear what the Tea Party stands for” says Frank Rich midway through a column that makes it crystal clear what Frank Rich stands for, and it isn’t pretty.

Whatever you may think about the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a whole, it indisputably narrows property rights by allowing politicians to dictate the policies of private businesses. Not only is it perfectly reasonable to find that at least a little disturbing, it’s perfectly unreasonable not to find it a little disturbing—even if your ultimate judgment is that it’s a necessary means to a desirable end. Even avid supporters of the Patriot Act ought to acknowledge that it raises legitimate concerns about privacy, even avid supporters of capital punishment ought to acknowledge that it raises legitimate concerns about false convictions, and even avid supporters of the Civil Rights Act ought to acknowledge that it raises legitimate concerns about property rights.

Frank Rich, who equates Rand Paul’s expression of those concerns with nostalgia for the Confederacy, thereby makes himself as scurrilous as those who equate reservations about the Patriot Act with being “on the side of the terrorists”. The “gotcha” game is bad enough when a single thoughtless remark becomes the pretext for dismissing an entire movement. Here the pretext is a single thoughtful remark.

If we are to discredit everyone who is capable of subtler thought than Frank Rich, then there is no hope for the level of public discourse.

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Weekend Roundup

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 22, 2010
in Roundup
. 8 Comments

I am amazed and delighted by the many excellent responses to my call for arguments about religion. These will be very helpful to me as I prepare for my debate with Dinesh D’Souza. Keep them coming!

Commenters also had a lot to say about the puzzle of the absent-minded driver. It seems to me that some of the analyses falter by being less than crystal clear about their assumptions: How much can the driver remember (e.g., if he updates his strategy at the first intersection and then arrives at the second, does he remember his original strategy or his updated strategy?), how much he can commit to (e.g. if he updates his strategy at the first intersection, can he commit to sticking to the new strategy at the second? can he commit to the method of updating he’ll use at the second?), how much he can anticipate (e.g. what does he believe about his future updates?), how smart he is (can he use his knowledge of his current strategy to figure out whether he’s already updated and hence what intersection he’s at?) and how sneaky he is (e.g. might he purposely adopt a bad strategy in order to trick his future self into updating to a good one?). I have what I think is a useful way of forcing puzzlers to be explicit about their assumptions, and had planned to post it on Monday, but I keep revising it, so it might be a few more days.

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The Internet to the Rescue

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 21, 2010
in Cool Stuff, Progress and Progress2
. 10 Comments

Two Russian girls arrive in DC as part of a travel exchange program for which they’ve paid about $3000. The program promises them jobs on arrival but fails to deliver. Instead, they are instructed to travel to New York City to do “hostess work” in a place called the Lux Lounge. Their American friend, currently in Wyoming, pleads with them not to go, but after some initial hesitation they board a Greyhound bus to New York, insisting that everything is fine.

Where can the panicked friend turn? To the Internet, of course. He posts a plea for help. Commenters jump into action, contacting police and social service agencies, pooling information to figure out what bus the girls are likely to be on, and arranging to have them escorted to a police station. A couple of hundred comments later, the girls are safe and sound. One commenter adds:

This is the best use of the Internet that I, personally, have ever seen. I’m so proud to be a member of this community.

Indeed.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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The Absent-Minded Driver

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 20, 2010
in Game Theory and Puzzles
. 34 Comments

Until last week, I had never heard of the paradox of the absent-minded driver, but I was recently told that it has some relevance to my encyclopedia article on quantum game theory. That plus the fact that I am a notoriously absent-minded driver myself made me think I should check out the original source. Here’s what I extracted:

Each day, Albert leaves his office (at the bottom of the map), gets on the Main Highway and attempts to drive home to his house on Second Street. If he turns too soon (onto First Street) or if he overshoots (going all the way to the north end of the Main Highway), he is mauled by dinosaurs.

Obviously, Albert’s best strategy is to go straight at the first intersection and turn right at the second. Unfortunately, both intersections look identical. Doubly unfortunately, Albert can never remember whether he’s already passed the first intersection.

Continue reading ‘The Absent-Minded Driver’

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The Better to Hear Your Comments With

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 19, 2010
in Blogging, Oddities and Personal
. 5 Comments

My 17 year old stepson is learning Photoshop. For his first effort, he…..well, let’s say he sharpened up this picture of his mom and me:

Meanwhile, the responses to yesterday’s Religion on Trial post have been terrific. Keep them coming.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

.

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Religion on Trial

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 18, 2010
in Blogging and Religion
. 63 Comments

I’ll be giving a couple of talks at this summer’s FreedomFest on economic growth, the power of incentives, and why More Sex is Safer Sex. More provocatively, I’ll also be going head to head with Dinesh D’Souza in a session called “Religion on Trial: Is God the Problem?”. Dinesh will argue that religion makes the world a better place, and I’ll argue the opposite. We’ll each call on the testimony of witnesses (in my case, Michael Shermer and Doug Casey). After our closing arguments, a jury of twelve, chosen from the audience, will deliver a verdict.

Dinesh has done this before; I haven’t. So I’m calling on you guys to help me out here by giving me your best arguments—either on Dinesh’s side, so I can practice rebutting them, or on my side, so I can plagiarize them.

Remember that the ultimate question is whether religion makes the world a better place, not whether religion is true. (On the other hand, truth becomes relevant if you’re arguing that religion makes the world a worse place by making people believe false things.) So what have you got for me?

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Weekend Roundup

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 15, 2010
in Roundup
. 0 Comments

roundup2We began the week with another triumph of capitalism, then moved on to a deep unsolved problem in arithmetic—which you, the reader, have an opportunity to help solve. On Thursday, we were honored with a guest post from the provocative Sup Specie Aeternitatis, offering evidence as to the sincerity of Al Gore’s proclaimed beliefs on global warming. We ended with a neat trick for weeding out job applicants.

I’ll be on the road this weekend so I’m taking Monday off. See you Tuesday!

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Toward a More Efficient Labor Market

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 14, 2010
in Book and Education
. 17 Comments

In Chapter 9 of The Big Questions, I lamented the great duplication of time and effort that occurs each spring when the top academic departments are all evaluating the same handful of job candidates, and I wondered why departments don’t free ride by simply announcing “We’ll take anyone with an offer from (say) Stanford”.

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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From an Eternal Perspective

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 13, 2010
in Blogging and Truthseeking
. 58 Comments

My favorite new blogger is the pseudonymous Sub Specie Æternitatis, who I discovered when he left a particularly thoughtful comment on the Fair and Balanced thread here at The Big Questions. A little Google-stalking later, I was immersed in his blog. Before much longer, I was in love with it.

Not only is Æternitatis a great writer; he’s also a gracious colleague who (after I introduced myself by email) agreed to let me reprint one of his incisive commentaries as a guest post here. So without further ado:

Al Gore’s Revealed Beliefs

A Guest Post

by

Sub Specie Æternitatis

It is reported that former Vice President Al Gore just purchased a villa in Montecito, California for $8.875 million. The exact address is not revealed, but Montecito is a relatively narrow strip bordering the Pacific Ocean. So its minimum elevation above sea level is 0 feet, while its overall elevation is variously reported at 50ft and 180ft.

At the same time, Mr. Gore prominently sponsors a campaign and award-winning movie that warns that, due to Global Warming, we can expect to see nearby ocean-front locations, such as San Francisco, largely under water. The elevation of San Francisco is variously reported at 52ft up to high of 925ft.

There being very little reason to suppose that the Pacific Ocean would (or could) rise much less in Montecito than in San Francisco, it follows that Mr. Gore just paid nearly $9 million for property, which according to his professed beliefs, will likely soon be literally under water and hence worthless both as a residence and for resale.

Continue reading ‘From an Eternal Perspective’

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ABC at (Your) Home

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 12, 2010
in Blogging and Math
. 6 Comments

abclogoYesterday I told you about one of the deepest problems in arithmetic. Today I’ll explain how you can help solve it.

We’re on the hunt for ABC triples. A brief recap: We start with an equation of the form A+B = C, where A, B and C have no factors in common. We find all the primes that divide A, B or C, multiply them together and call the result D. The goal is to find examples where C is bigger than D.

If I start with 2+243=245, the primes are 2 (which divides 2), 3 (which divides 243), 5 (which divides 245) and 7 (which also divides 245), so D = 2 x 3 x 5 x 7 = 220, and C (that is, 245) is bigger than D. Success! We’ve found an ABC triple.

We want more. A full understanding of ABC triples would allow us to solve some of the hardest open problems in arithmetic. More importantly, the reason we’d be able to solve those problems is that we’d understand arithmetic itself a whole lot better.
The first step is to find a whole lot of examples to help researchers guess at the underlying patterns.

That’s where you come in.

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The ABC’s of Arithmetic

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 11, 2010
in Math
. 5 Comments

abc123Some of the hardest problems in arithmetic are those that relate multiplication to addition. For example: Is every even number the sum of two primes? This is most assuredly a hard problem—mathematicians have been tackling it for centuries and so far nobody’s solved it. And it relates multiplication to addition. As soon as you talk about primes, you’re (implicitly) talking about multiplication, and of course when you talk about sums, you’re talking about addition.

Or: How many ways can you write the number 2 as the difference of two primes? You can write 2 = 5-3, or 2 = 7-5, or 2 = 13-11. That’s three so far. How many more are there? The betting is that the answer is “infinitely many”, but nobody knows for sure. This problem has stumped some of the best and the brightest not just for centuries but for millennia. And again it relates multiplication to addition. (Well, it relates multiplication to subtraction, but of course subtraction is just addition in reverse.)

The ABC problem has only been around for a few decades, but it’s in many ways the most interesting and important of the bunch. Tomorrow I’ll explain how you can help solve this problem. Today I’ll explain what the problem is.

Continue reading ‘The ABC’s of Arithmetic’

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Triumphs of Capitalism

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 10, 2010
in Oddities
. 11 Comments

Lifted from craigslist, with a hat tip to my sister:

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Weekend Roundup

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 8, 2010
in Roundup
. 1 Comment

roundup4On Monday, we talked about what women want (hint: they prefer larger, and we’re not talking about wallets).

On Tuesday, we talked about beautiful folk songs; thanks to those who pointed me in new directions.

On Wednesday, we asked why job growth has been so sluggish compared to previous recessions.

On Thursday, I linked to a remarkably thoughtful and literate Fox News clip on immigration policy, featuring the fiery Don Boudreaux.

And on Friday, we lamented the economic illiteracy of local television reporters.

I’ll be back on Monday with more.

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Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Journalism Majors

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 7, 2010
in Economics and Rants
. 17 Comments

Alright, this is hilarious. Or pathetic. Or hilarious in a pathetic sort of way. Or something.

Last week in Boston, a water main broke, rendering tap water undrinkable (unless it was boiled). This inspired the journalism majors at Boston station WHDH to produce some highly emotional footage about two tragic side effects—side effects which, as far as it was possible to tell based on everything they teach in journalism school, were entirely unrelated.

First, we had the report on price gouging, featuring a woman weeping—-weeping!—-because her son had been charged $1 a bottle instead of the recent sale price of $3.99 for a case of 24. Then, we had the entirely separate report on frustrated consumers who had visited five stores and/or waited in long lines to buy bottled water. Apparently nobody at WHDH thought to ask how much longer those lines might have been if prices hadn’t risen.

Nor, apparently, have the folks at WHDH ever learned that the whole point of prices is that they adjust quickly to changes in market conditions, and that that’s a good thing. Even the convenience store owner who is a pure altruist and refuses to profit from a crisis would be well advised to raise the price of water and donate the proceeds to charity, rather than allowing all of the available water to be snatched up by whoever happens to arrive first or elbow everyone else out of the way.

Continue reading ‘Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Journalism Majors’

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To My RSS Readers

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 6, 2010
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

This morning’s post contains some imbedded video from Fox News that looks fine on the blog but shows up as a pointer to the wrong video in the RSS feed. Here is a link to the correct video.

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Fair and Balanced

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 6, 2010
in Current Events, Economics and Policy
. 19 Comments

Having linked recently to a Fox News segment hosted by a close evolutionary cousin of a sea cucumber, I am delighted to balance the scales with this clip of a thoughtful and literate three-way conversation about Arizona’s anti-immigration statute, featuring Judge Andrew Napolitano, the journalist Jack Hunter, and my hero, George Mason University’s inestimable Don Boudreaux.

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The Jobless Recovery

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 5, 2010
in Current Events and Economics
. 29 Comments

Mark Skousen, the editor of Forecasts and Strategies, and the proprietor of FreedomFest (where I’ll be speaking on multiple topics this July) sent me the above graph, highlighting just how very jobless this recovery has been, even compared to what we saw after the severe recession of 1981. (There’s been nothing nearly as bad in the intervening three decades.)

What accounts for the difference? The glib answer is “Obama versus Reagan”, but there are plenty of alternative stories. I find some of those stories more convincing than others, but the one thing I’m sure of is that I haven’t put in the kind of hard thought or careful study that entitles me to a strong opinion. I’d be interested, though, in hearing what you guys think.

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A Musical Interlude

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 4, 2010
in Favorites
. 23 Comments

guitarWhat is the most beautiful folk song you’ve ever heard?

Herewith I offer a list of 25 of my top candidates, with links to brief audio clips. For this purpose, I am defining a “folk song” to be something that would likely be filed in the “folk” section of a Barnes and Noble music department.

Note that the criterion is “most beautiful”, not “favorite”, though of course there’s quite a large overlap between the two.

I am aware that my choices might be colored by the circumstances in which I first heard these songs as well as by their intrinsic merit. I also acknowledge, without a shred of embarrassment, that some might consider the overall tenor of this list to be shockingly lowbrow. Nevertheless, I believe every song on this list to be stunningly beautiful in its way.

Do tell me what I’ve overlooked.

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What Women Want: It’s Not Just Wallet Size

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 3, 2010
in Economics and Oddities
. 24 Comments

If you’re planning to lie about your weight on an online dating site, you’d be well advised to shade downward if you’re a woman and (more surprisingly) upward if you’re a man.

That’s one apparent lesson of the data in this recently published paper by three careful researchers. If I’m reading their tables correctly, they say roughly this:

Taking as given your reported age, height, race, weight, income, attractiveness, education, marital status and so forth, there is some class of users who have about a 50/50 chance of contacting you. Now if you are a 5’4″ woman and you subtract 11 pounds from your reported weight (lowering your body mass index, or BMI, by about 1), then you’ll hear not from 50% of that class but from almost 60%. On the other hand, if you are a 5’10” man and you *add* 7 pounds to your weight (adding about 1 to your BMI), you’ll hear from about 53%.

Moreover, these effects fall off very slowly, so that even very thin women gain from underreporting their weights, and even very heavy men gain from overreporting. The effects also fall off very slowly with BMI differences, so that even quite heavy men prefer thinner women, and even quite thin women prefer heavier men.

Continue reading ‘What Women Want: It’s Not Just Wallet Size’

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Weekend Roundup

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 1, 2010
in Roundup
. 7 Comments

roundupHaving taken Monday off for the briefest of honeymoons, I returned on Tuesday with an apparently too-cryptic post that required an addendum to make its meaning clear. Thanks to everyone who sent good wishes and congratulations. I am feeling extremely fortunate.

When I announced last week that I’d be taking a couple of days off, readers took the occasion to raise some issues in the foundations of mathematics. This inspired me to write a long-intended post correcting some elementary errors that frequently come up in these discussions. At least one very confused and feisty commenter jumped to the conclusion that I was saying something controversial and that is was his duty to disagree, loudly and repeatedly.

Thursday’s post was about the magic of the past and the technology of the present, which seem roughly equivalent. And on Friday we took on Arizona’s new immigration law and one of its more fatuous defenders.

With no life-changing events scheduled for the coming weekend, I expect to be back, as usual, on Monday.

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Missing the Big Picture

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 30, 2010
in Current Events, Law, Outrage, Policy and Politics
. 36 Comments

Writing in the New York Times, law professor Kris Kobach promises to rebut all the major objections to Arizona’s new anti-immigration law and proceeds to ignore all the major objections. Professor Kobach’s idea of a major objection is “It’s unfair to demand that aliens carry their documents with them”, whereas my idea of a major objection is “It’s idiotic, hateful and destructive to put obstacles in the way of productive activity.”

The number of “unauthorized aliens” in Arizona at any given moment is estimated as just under a half million—about the same as the number of Jews in New Jersey. Over half the text of the Arizona law is devoted to penalizing employers who hire these people. Now suppose for a moment that the New Jersey legislature were to pass a bill penalizing anyone who hires a Jew. Would Professor Kobach defend this law, as he does Arizona’s, by pointing out that it doesn’t require anyone to carry a driver’s license?

The anti-immigration hysterics keep warning us that foreigners want to come over here and exploit our welfare system. The insincerity of that stance is exposed whenever, as in Arizona, its proponents set out to prevent those very same foreigners from coming here and working.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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The Book With All the Answers

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 29, 2010
in Memories, Musings, Progress and Progress2
. 11 Comments

bunnyDo you remember Mister Bunny Rabbit?. He was a friend of Captain Kangaroo. One day long ago, when I still measured my age in single digits, Mister Bunny Rabbit announced that he owned a book containing the answer to every possible question. I was skeptical about that book, and so was the Captain, who scoffed mightily at the notion. By way of a test, he looked up the question “Where is Mister Green Jeans right now?”. The book’s answer was “In the attic”, which the Captain knew (I forget how) could not possibly be right. While the Captain was still gloating, Mister Green Jeans ambled in and mentioned that he’d just come from the attic.

The Captain was amazed, and so was I. Long into adulthood, I pondered how that book could possibly have known where Mister Green Jeans was. The best answer I ever got was from the journalist Chris Suellentrop, who speculated that it was probably one of those quantum mechanical things where the act of asking the question caused both the book and Mister Green Jeans to settle down from a cloud of possibilities into mutually compatible states. Others—not so very long ago—speculated that perhaps the book was controlled by a satellite operating a surveillance camera.

Nowadays, of course, we can all carry that book in our pockets. I wonder if today’s children would find anything particularly magical about a reference work that has the answers to pretty much everything, and updates them on the fly.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Just the Facts

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 28, 2010
in Logic, Math and Ontology
. 65 Comments

jackwebbDuring our brief intermission last week, commenters chose to revisit the question of whether arithmetic is invented or discovered—a topic we’d discussed here and here. This reminded me that I’ve been meaning to highlight an elementary error that comes up a lot in this kind of discussion.

It is frequently asserted that the facts of arithmetic are either “tautologous” or “true by definition” or “logical consequences of the axioms”. Those are three different assertions, and all of them are false. (This is not a controversial statement.)

The arguments made to support these assertions are not subtly flawed; they are overtly ludicrous. Almost always, they consist of “proof by example”, as in “1+1=2 is true by definition; therefore all the facts of arithmetic are true by definition”. Of course one expects to stumble across this sort of “reasoning” on the Internet, but it’s always jarring to see it coming from people who profess an interest in mathematical logic. (I will refrain from naming the worst offenders.)

So let’s consider a few facts of arithmetic:

Continue reading ‘Just the Facts’

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As Much As Direction

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 27, 2010
in Personal and Poetry
. 15 Comments

Let us please learn new words that mean as much as direction: wife.

That single cryptic line is the complete text of a poem by Richard Brautigan that I first read almost forty years ago. I still don’t quite get it, but for some reason it’s always struck me as hauntingly beautiful. And, following a momentous weekend, it feels like the right thing to post today.

Edited to add: Apparently this post was as cryptic as the poem. One commenter writes:

You make it sound like you would like to get married but have not taken all necessary steps.

In fact, I took all the necessary steps this weekend. It was a lovely wedding.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Intermission

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 23, 2010
in Books, Ethics, Policy and Politics
. 20 Comments

After six months of blogging nearly every weekday, I’m taking a four day weekend. This will give you a chance to browse through the archives for all the good stuff you might have missed. Or, if you’re looking for a good read to tide you over, I can recommend Chapter Two of my book Fair Play. Some of the examples are dated (Wal-Mart, as far as I know, no longer advertises that “we buy American so you can too”), but it makes a good companion piece to yesterday’s post.

I’ll be back on Tuesday with, I expect, something new to say.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Why I’d Rather Be Blogging

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 22, 2010
in Blogging, Economics and Policy
. 65 Comments

You guys—with your thoughtful, witty and relevant comments—have made me thankful I took up blogging. My (considerable) experience with the mainstream media suggests that you meet a much lower class of people there. Let me give you an example.

Once upon a time I wrote a Forbes column drawing an analogy between protectionism (which discriminates on the basis of national origin) and racism (which discriminates, of course, on the basis of race). (Of course the analogy isn’t perfect. For example, racism can be a solitary hobby, whereas protectionism by its nature forces other people to discriminate as well.) There were many responses, of which my favorite was Pat Buchanan’s screed containing both some hilariously misguided economics and a paragraph I’ve had posted on my office door ever since:

Now I do not know what parents pay to send their kids to the University of Rochester. But if the philosophical imbecility of Landsburg is representative of the faculty, it is too much.

Shortly afterward, I was scheduled to appear on John Gibson’s program on Fox News, where the following exchange took place:

This, in turn, led to a flurry of email. To give you the full flavor, and so as not to bias the sample, I am appending every single email I received on this subject, excepting only one relatively positive note from my mother.

Continue reading ‘Why I’d Rather Be Blogging’

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Partly Unclear

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 21, 2010
in Musings and Oddities
. 24 Comments

In the course of planning a rather significant event for the coming weekend, I was forced, for the first time in my life, to confront the following conundrum:

  • Which is sunnier — “partly sunny” or “partly cloudy”?

My faith in the power of pure reason was severely shaken when I realized I could construct equally plausible arguments in either direction. So, with reluctance, I abandoned theory and turned to evidence, in the form of the logos employed by two of the more popular weather forecasting sites:

 
Weather Underground		 Accuweather
Partly Sunny
Partly Cloudy

Weather Underground takes an unambiguous stand: partly cloudy is definitely sunnier than partly sunny. Accuweather is a little, umm, hazier on the issue; apparently at Accuweather, partly cloudy means something like “somewhat wispier clouds, covering more of the central portion of the sun but a bit less of the edges, than partly sunny”. Overall, though, it appears that at Accuweather, partly sunny is sunnier than partly cloudy.

Continue reading ‘Partly Unclear’

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The English Patient

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 20, 2010
in Bad Reasoning, Current Events, Economics and Policy
. 32 Comments

whiteheadA friend living in England (the philosopher Jamie Whyte, actually, whose writing has graced this very blog) sends along a little vignette for the benefit of my American readers who see European health care systems through rose colored glasses.

A 64 year old breast cancer survivor suffering severe back pain is told she’ll have to wait five months for an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon through the National Health Service (NHS). She therefore (and perfectly legally) chooses to pay 250 pounds (about 385 dollars) for a private appointment. He puts her on a waiting list for surgery to remove a cyst from her spine, surgery which is routinely covered by the NHS. But the NHS decides that since she can afford 250 pounds for a private appointment, she can also afford 10,000 pounds (over 15,000 dollars) for private surgery. They therefore deny to provide her the surgery for which she’s been paying taxes her whole life.

This was not an isolated incident; until recently, cancer patients were routinely denied further NHS treatement after privately purchasing lifesaving drugs that are not available through the NHS.

More details here. It’s worth reading the comments, where readers excoriate the patient for “queue jumping” because she used the price system to signal her high demand for medical services. Note that nobody complains about “queue jumping” in the market for, say, oranges, because oranges are not rationed by government bureaucrats and therefore do not generate queues.

The lesson, I think, is that once an inefficient bureaucracy becomes entrenched, a certain fraction of the electorate becomes incapable of imagining anything better. In this case, that fraction seems to have forgotten first that some people need medical care more desperately than others, so that “queue jumping” can be desirable, second that private payments to doctors actually call forth more medical care and therefore shorten queues, and third that maybe it would be better to have a system that didn’t require queuing in the first place.

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Overselling

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 19, 2010
in Books and Oddities
. 18 Comments

deanmartinOver at Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson blogs about a science fiction novel that posits a world where people routinely sell shares in their future income. (I have not read the novel, which is called The Unincorporated Man.) Robin laments that while many reviewers have taken it for granted that we wouldn’t want to allow such contracts, none seem to have seriously engaged the idea.

I’m not sure if this counts as serious engagement, but I am reminded of the apparently little-known fact that the singer/actor/TV phenomenon Dean Martin did exactly this. In fact, he overdid exactly this. By the time he was 27 years old, Martin had sold 10% of himself to MCA Records, 20% to his manager DIck Richards, 35% to his other manager Lou Perry, and 25% to the mobster Frank Costello. That left him with 5% of himself—“$50 for every grand he made” in the words of writer Nick Tosches. A year later, he hired yet another manager and sold him another 10%. Having now sold 105% of himself, it became imprudent to earn money. Therefore, in need of something to live on, Martin sold yet another 10% of himself to nighclub owner Angel Lopez.

Continue reading ‘Overselling’

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