Monthly Archive for September, 2014

Juke and Jive

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 24, 2014
in Bad Reasoning
. 49 Comments

leafWhich is better — an electric car (like, say, the Nissan Leaf) or a gas-powered car (like, say, the Nissan Juke)? There are innumerable websites to help you decide, but an awful lot of them seem to repeat the same bizarre logic.

Take, for example, the comparison page at CleanTechnica. Here we have, in the pro-Leaf column:

The benefits to…public health as a whole from not emitting the pollution that would come from burning gas.

This is immediately followed by a cost comparison, which counts (again in the pro-Leaf column) the $7500 tax credit for electric vehicles.

Sorry, but you can’t have this both ways. My friend Alice believes that when you shop for a car, you should respond to the incentives you’re faced with, and not worry about spillover effects on others. She, therefore, cares not a whit for public health benefits, but is very impressed with that $7500 tax credit. My friend Bob, on the other hand, has a highly developed social conscience. He, therefore, is very much concerned with his neighbors’ health, but correspondingly reluctant to lift $7500 from his neighbors’ pockets.

The CleanTechnica page, then, is addressed neither to Alice nor to Bob, nor, apparently, to anyone else with a coherent philosophy, but only some moral schizophrenic who cares passionately about the state of his neighbors’ lungs but not a fig for the state of their pocketbooks.

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Jobbing Between Two Lives

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 22, 2014
in Books and Empirical Puzzles
. 26 Comments

cadWhen the Greek goddess Hera wanted to know who enjoys sex more, men or women, she had the good sense to ask Tiresias, who had lived as both. (She did not, however, have the good sense to accept Tiresias’s answer).

When sociologist Kristen Schilt wanted to know why men and women succeed differently in the workplace, she had the good sense to ask workers who have lived as both. I’ve read only a fraction of Schilt’s book, but I learned a little about it from Jessica Nordell’s thoughtful writeup in the New Republic. The upshot seems to be that when women become men, they feel that they’re taken more seriously, whereas when men become women, they feel the opposite.

As Nordell points out, this really is a cool idea because a change in gender doesn’t change your skills or education, so when we track people’s experiences before and after their crossings, we’re holding a lot of relevant variables constant.

On the other hand, as Nordell also points out, there’s at least one important variable that’s not being held constant, and that’s testosterone level. When you go from female to male, you acquire a lot of testosterone; when you go from male to female you give up a lot. That opens up a lot of possibilities. Maybe testosterone makes you more effective at work, which leads to better treatment. Or maybe the treatment doesn’t change at all, but your testosterone level leads you to perceive it differently. (Likewise, of course, for a variety of other hormones.)

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Post-Ferguson

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 18, 2014
in Current Events
. 25 Comments

A number of things happened over the summer while I was largely on hiatus from blogging. Some of those things happened in Ferguson, Missouri.

I probably would not have blogged about Ferguson in any event because, like you, I don’t know the facts and the facts make all the difference. But I do want to share this remarkable blog post from the remarkable writer and law enforcement officer Chris Hernandez, who knows a lot more than most of us about the use of deadly force in general.

Hernandez makes a number of factual assertions for which I cannot, of course, vouch, but I think his perspective is both eye-opening and important. I encourage you to read this.

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Puzzle Contest Update

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 17, 2014
in Puzzles
. 7 Comments

As of now, I’ve received exactly one completely correct answer to this week’s crossword. (The submission actually contained four errors, but it was followed almost immediately by an email from the submitter with the requisite four corrections, so I’m giving full credit.) Congratulations to our frequent commenter EricK.

The contest, however, remains open. I’ll be sending free autographed books (your choice of The Big Questions, The Armchair Economist, Fair Play, or More Sex is Safer Sex) to EricK and the three runners-up, where the runners-up will be determined by some yet-to-be-determined combination of accuracy and timeliness. The contest will close on a date still to be determined, but I plan to keep it open for at least another week. Keep those submissions coming!

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Monday Puzzles

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 15, 2014
in Fluff, Geek stuff, Pedantry, Puzzles and WTF?
. 14 Comments

Click image to solve puzzle.

So it turns out that if you take a notion to create a crossword puzzle, put it on your blog, and include a “submit” button so that solvers can send you their answers, then — at least if your skill set is similar to mine — writing the code to make that “submit” button work will be about twice as difficult and three times as time-consuming (but perhaps also several times as educational) as actually creating the crossword puzzle. I certainly learned some hard lessons about the difference between POST and GET. But it’s done and (I think) it works.

To do the puzzle online click here. For a printable version, click here. If you do this on line and want to submit your answer, use the spiffy “Submit” button! (And do feel free to compliment the author of that button!). The clues are subject to pretty much the same rules that you’d find in, say, the London Times or the Guardian.

I will gather the submissions and eventually give proper public credit to the most accurate and fastest solvers. Feel free to submit partial solutions; it’s not impossible that nobody will solve the whole thing.

Let’s try to keep spoilers out of the comments, at least for a week or so.

I have one very geeky addendum to all this, leading to a second Monday puzzle — one that might be easy to solve for a reader or two, but most definitely not for me. Unless you’re a very particular brand of geek, you’ll probably want to stop reading right here. But:

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Discussion Question

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 11, 2014
in Economics, Musings and Wealth and Poverty
. 32 Comments

Imagine a world where everyone is equally risk-averse, and where there are two assets available: You can hold stock in an umbrella company, or you can hold stock in a sunscreen company. Depending on the (quite unpredictable) weather, one of these stocks is sure to gain value at 100% a year while the other is sure to lose value at 95% a year, but it’s impossible to know which is which.

Given this, the smart thing to do is to hold a balanced portfolio of the two assets and earn a comfortable 5% per year. Most people in this imaginary world are smart enough to figure this out. But a small number are stupid enough to put all their eggs in one or the other basket. Half these people are quickly wiped out; the other half become super-rich.

Now we have a society in which nobody smart is especially rich, and everyone rich is especially dumb.

Question: Does this parable contribute anything useful to understanding some aspect (obviously not all aspects!) of the wealth distribution in the world we inhabit? Discuss.

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The Coinflipper’s Dilemma

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 8, 2014
in Economics, Game Theory, Memories and Personal
. 9 Comments

flipperThis is the story of how I came to write a little paper called The Coinflipper’s Dilemma.

When I was in high school, my English teacher must have had a free period at the time when my math class met, because every day he would march into the math class and empty his pockets on the table, whereupon my math teacher did the same. Then whoever had put down the most money scooped up everything on the table.

I am ashamed to admit that it took me until this summer to think about computing the equilibrium strategy is in that game.

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The Goldwater Standard

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 3, 2014
in Heroes, History, Policy, Politics and Progress
. 26 Comments

goldwaterFifty years ago this Labor Day weekend, the presidential campaign of 1964 got underway in earnest. It is often said that Barry Goldwater “lost the election but won the Republican party” or even “lost the election but won the future” by nudging the center of either the party or the country several notches to the right.

I don’t see it. Where is the contemporary mainstream politician — Republican or otherwise — who would repeal the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or at least those provisions (Titles II and VII) that authorize Federal regulators to override private business decisions about whom to serve and whom to hire? Where is the contemporary mainstream politician who would sell the Tennessee Valley Authority? Or end all agricultural supports? If Goldwaterism is in fact ascendant, then how did entitlement spending, as a percentage of GDP, manage to grow for most of the past 20 years — even though Republicans controlled the House of Representatives for 16 of those 20? For that matter, how is it that after all those years of Republican control, the National Endowments of the Arts and Humanities — two of the more noxious weeds to arise from the soil of the Goldwater defeat — continue to thrive?

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