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Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Here is my op-ed on deficit reduction from this morning’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required). For those without subscriptions, the thrust (which won’t be new to long-time readers of this blog) is that raising taxes can’t convert fiscally irresponsible spending to fiscally responsible spending.
If your household is over budget, you can address that problem either by spending less or by earning more income. It is tempting to fall into the trap of thinking that by analogy, the government can address its budget problems either by spending less or by raising taxes. But the analogy fails because raising taxes is not like earning more income; it’s more like visiting the ATM.
The government is an agent of the taxpayers. Raising taxes to pay for government spending depletes our assets just as visiting the ATM to pay for household spending depletes our assets. That’s not at all like earning income, which adds to our assets.
So insofar as the supercommittee relies on tax increases to address issues of “fiscal irresponsibility”, it will have failed.
A couple of followups on yesterday’s post about Wisconsin:
1) Several commenters have pointed out that the conflict in Wisconsin is not (directly) about wages, benefits or working conditions, but rather about collective bargaining. This seems to me to be a distinction without a difference; nobody would care about collective bargaining unless they expected it to affect wages, benefits, and/or working conditions. The point stands that workers who are very upset about losing their collective bargaining rights must expect to use those rights to achieve above-market compensation.
2) Jim from Wisconsin made a comment, and I made a reply, that I think bear highlighting here. Jim from Wisconsin said:
Futhermore, isn’t the idea in private business that if you want the best and the brightest, you pay them well? Don’t we want our Government programs run effectively and efficiently? Seems to work in the private sector, so why can’t this apply to public sector as well?
To which I replied:
The problem with this is that every “best and brightest” who is hired by the public sector is unavailable to the private sector, so it’s not at all clear that we WANT the best and brightest in the public sector. To take an extreme case, I don’t want the best Silicon Valley engineers tempted to work as high school teachers; I’d rather have them pushing the limits of technology. From the point of view of economic efficiency, this is the one and only reason why public sector employees ought NOT be overpaid. (It’s also a reason why private sector employees ought not be overpaid, but there’s generally less threat of that happening because of the private-sector profit motive.) It’s the one and only reason not to overpay public employees — but it is a good and sufficient reason.
Continue reading ‘Wisconsin Followup’
Here is a test post for Tom.
This morning’s probability puzzle, as originally posted, contained a remark at the end saying For extra clarity … “the medicine killed him” should be interpreted to mean that if he hadn’t taken the medicine, he wouldn’t have died.
I’ve realized that for some readers that wording might be subtracting more clarity than it’s adding. It is, however, correct as originally stated.
Happy New Year, one and all. I’ll see you in 2011.
Over the course of my childhood, I remember asking exactly one intelligent question. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make my parents understand what I was asking. Perhaps it was that frustration that deterred me from ever formulating an intelligent question again.
I was, I think, six years old at the time, and my question was this: If you’re traveling at 50 miles an hour at 1:00, and you’re traveling at 70 miles an hour at 2:00, must there be a time in between when you’re traveling exactly 60 miles an hour?
What made this question intelligent—and probably what made it incomprehensible to my parents—was that I was very keen to distinguish it from the question of whether your speedometer would have to pass through the 60-mile-an-hour mark. It seemed clear to me that the answer to that one was yes—that even if your true velocity could somehow skip directly from 50 to 70, the speedometer needle, in the course of whipping around from one reading to the other, would have to pass through the midpoint.
I quite vividly remember worrying that my question about your speed would be misinterpreted as a question about your speedometer, a question to which I thought the answer was obvious and therefore could only be asked by a very stupid person—a very stupid person for whom I did not wish to be mistaken. Therefore I prefaced the question with a long discourse on how it was thoroughly obvious to me that if your speedometer reads 50 miles an hour at one time and 70 miles an hour at another, then surely it must pass through 60 on the way, but that this was not not not not not the question I was about to ask, which concerned your actual speed and not the measurement thereof. By the time I got around to formulating the question itself, my parents (or at least my father; I don’t remember whether my mother was present) had quite understandably given up on figuring out what I was trying to get at.
If you don’t blog, you might be surprised by how many spam comments show up every day. (These are automatically generated comments with no content beyond “Loved this post”, together with an attempt to get you to click through to the commenter’s web site.) I use the phenomenally great (and free!!!) software Akismet to snag these comments before they ever get through, and it’s amazingly accurate, though every once in a while there’s a false positive. That is, sometimes a legitimate comment gets tagged as spam (often because it contains a lot of links but sometimes for no apparent reason). So every now and then, I look through the spam folder and rescue those comments, if any.
But a moment ago, I hit a wrong button and permanently deleted 200 spam comments (all generated within the past few hours!) before I’d looked at them. Statistically, there was probably nothing legit in there anyway. But if by chance I threw your baby out with my bathwater, I do apologize — and please try again.
I’m sure this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but some readers might be interested. I’ve been invited to write the entry on Quantum Game Theory for the Wiley Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Sciences, and I thought I’d share the current draft. If this is your cup of tea, your feedback is welcome.
A couple of weeks ago, here at the University of Rochester, two fine student organizations—the History Council and the Finance/Economics Council—joined forces to sponsor a debate on the topic “Is Health Care a Right?”. The disputants were myself and history professor Ted Brown, who graciously agreed to speak first at my request.
Over the course of the evening, I proposed a variety of mutually contradictory health care policies; my intent was not to endorse any one of them, but to demonstrate that all of them were preferable to Professor Brown’s pet proposals. I cribbed some important ideas from David Goldhill’s Atlantic Monthly article, and some important ideas and facts from the always insdispensable Bill Easterly. The format did not lend itself to citations or hyperlinks, but I’m glad to make amends here.
Continue reading ‘Is Health Care a Right?—The Movie’
Henry Molaison, it is said, was a man who lived in the past—an amnesia victim unable to form new long term memories, so that each new experience was quickly forgotten. From age 27 (when he underwent brain surgery for epilepsy) to age 82 (when he died last year), Henry Molaison could remember only the first 27 years of his life.
Today—and I literally mean today—Henry Molaison’s brain is being sliced and diced at the U.C. San Diego Brain Observatory in furtherance of neurological research. And starting soon, you can watch the slicing live via webcam. The process started yesterday, and they’re currently (as of 12:20PM eastern time on Thursday, December 3) on break, but a note on the site says that “cutting will resume shortly”.
The World Wide Web is a strange and wonderful place.
Godel’s theorem (or at least one of Godel’s theorems) says that no matter what axioms you adopt, there will always be true statements in arithmetic that can’t be proven. In Chapter 10 of The Big Questions I give an explicit example of such a statement, involving Hercules’s ability to win a certain game against a very persistent hydra.
There are many popularizations of Godel’s original argument, of which at least one (by Nagel and Newman) is superb. They do a marvelous job of boiling the argument itself and the surrounding issues down to a little over a hundred sparse pages. But I can boil it down further, into a single blog post. I can do this via the magic of one of my favorite expository techniques, a technique I call “lying”. I will lie to you throughout this post, by sweeping important technical details under the rug and (slightly) corrupting some important ideas to make them easier to grasp—but without, I think, sacrificing the flavor and the gist of the argument. At the end, once we’re clear on the big picture, I’ll ‘fess up to some of those lies.
Here, then, is (more or less) how Godel proved that arithmetic contains true but unprovable statements:
Continue reading ‘Godel in a nutshell’
It seems to be well known that supermarkets charge cereal companies for prime display space. It seems to be less well known that bookstores do the same thing. They do, though. For example, the publisher of The Big Questions is paying for prominent front-of-the-store display space at all Barnes and Noble and Borders stores—except for those located in Manhattan—through the month of November. (At least the B&N contract runs through the end of November; I’m unclear on whether the Borders contract runs as long.)
There have been several reports of individual stores failing to honor this commitment. My publisher will be having a chat about this with the Barnes and Noble folks in a couple of days, and prior to that discussion it would be useful to know just how widespread the problem is.
So—if you happen to be going past a Barnes and Noble (or a Borders) in the next couple of days, I’ll be most grateful to know whether you found The Big Questions out on the front table where it ought to be. You can comment here or email me at “questions at landsburg dot com”. Please include the address of the store, or the street it’s on, or the town it’s in —whatever you’ve got. Thanks for your help!
I suppose I should be gratified to learn that this blog is so influential, but I can feel nothing but sadness at Amazon’s response to my post about Ass Meat Research Group and his co-authors Frozen Horse and Chilled and Frozen Hors the Fresh (formerly Chilled the Fresh). These authors’ names have been removed from all Amazon listings. I am so very glad that I saved the screenshot.
It’s been a great week on the blog with thoughtful and thought-provoking comments cropping up everywhere. Several threads have touched on the question phrased most succinctly by Al. V. on the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Physics thread:
Are the laws of mathematics inherent in our universe, and therefore really a product of physics (and not the other way around), or are they supra-universal?
This question, of course, plays a starring role in The Big Questions , where I’ve explained why I believe that the supra-universality of mathematics (thanks for that word, Al!) gives the most coherent explanation of why anything exists at all.
Continue reading ‘Another Great Week’
