This was a week of economics, religion and miscellanea.
Two weeks ago, I’d posted the first half of my honors exam in economics. This week I posted the second half, and continued my practice of slowly doling out the answers with a post on the best and worst ways to be taxed.
A complimentary note from my old friend Deirdre McCloskey triggered a thread about religion and inspired my mini-review of John Polkingohorne’s, theology.
An offhand remark from a mobster inspired a thread about remarkable coincidences, and the most recent shallow pontification from the self-proclaimed “Ethicist” inspired me to complain.
I’ll be back on Monday with more deep thoughts and light diversions, along with some holiday gift ideas.
Hello Dr. Landsburg, although I have already drawn my own conclusions to a vexing question I thought of in regard to the EGR, I would like to hear yours. Most people would agree that someone who takes things from a long sealed tomb would be stealing. Because the artifacts of value were not in use for anyone alive prior to the theft I can’t imagine that they represented any value if they stayed lying dormant in the tomb. So who ever dug them up and took them would be adding to the world without subtracting from humanity. So would the EGR say that this is a time when stealing was justified? Would this be considered theft at all? They are called “tomb raiders”. Just curious
Steve, help me (us interested) out here. This is WAY of topic but I’d like to know your opinion. How would you setup college football bowls?? Would you keep the bowls or do a (seems to be more fair) playoff system? Have you thought about it?
The arguement is “well if you do a playoff you better not be the 9th ranked team if they take the top 8 or the 17th ranked team if top 16 etc.” I say that’s phooey and would be way more fair. This year there are 4 unbeaten teams and only two get to go to the nat’l championship game!
Ouchris:
Here’s one way to do this: Assume each team has a numerical “strength”, and that the strength of a team is proportional to the sum of the strengths of the teams that it beats.
For example, say teams A, B and C have strengths x, y and z. If team A beats teams B and C, team B beats team C, and team C beats team A, then we conclude that for some constant K, x=K(y+z), y=Kz, z=Kx. We can solve these equations to get (approximately) x=1.3, y=.75, z=1, K=.75. So A ranks first (with a score of 1.3), C ranks second (with a 1) and B ranks third (with a .75).
With more teams, the equations get more complicated and the rankings get less obvious but the same method applies.
This is essentially how Google ranks the importance of web pages: Receiving a link from a page counts as “beating” that page, and your page is assumed to have an importance proportional to the sum of the importances of the pages that it “beats”. This gives a massive list of equations (one for each page on the web) that you can then solve to get the rankings.
Todd: As so often happens with the EGR, much depends on whose preferences are included in the accounting. Our views on abortion, for example, might be very different depending on whether we do or do not count the votes of the unborn (or for that matter the unconceived!).
In this case, the issue seems to come down to whether we count the preferences of the dead. If we don’t, then surely no harm is done by tomb raiding. To me, it’s clear that the preferences of the dead should not count, but I’m aware that what seems clear to me does not always seem clear to everybody.