Now the physicists know what it was like to be an economist in 1978.
Author Archive for Steve Landsburg
Here’s what I want on election night: A complete list of all Harris’s paths to victory and a complete list of all Trump’s paths. Then as each path becomes impossible, I can cross it off and see possibilities narrowing down.
Of course the meaning of “all Harris’s paths to victory” depends on your background assumptions. For starters, I assumed that the seven oft-cited “battleground states” (PA, GA, NC, MI, WI, AZ, NV) are up for grabs and that all other states (and districts) will fall as expected, where “as expected” means “to the candidate who is currently ahead in the RealClearPolitics polling average”. This leaves 20 paths to victory for Harris and 21 for Trump, as shown:
Here’s exactly what this means: If Harris wins any one of her 20 combinations, she wins the race. If she fails to win any of them, she loses.
So for example, if Trump wins Pennsylvania early, I can cross off Harris’s top 10 rows, leaving her 10 paths to victory. If she loses Georgia, I cross off another 7 and she’s down to 3 paths.
Incidentally, there are also three paths to a tie, as indicated here:
Of course you might not believe that only seven states are up for grabs. So for my second pass, I assumed that seventeen “states” are up for grabs. These are the states that appear, from the RealClearPolitics averages, to be at least barely contestable. They are TX, FL, PA, OH, GA, NC, MI, VA, AZ, WI, MN, NV, NM, NH, ME, NB-2, and ME-2. (The latter two are actually congressional districts, not states.)
Now (unless I’ve made a mistake somewhere) Harris has 1922 paths to victory. Rather than post a 1922 line chart, here is a link to a 37-page pdf document. I plan to have this in front of me on election night.
No matter how this election turns out, the next president of the United States will be a crackpot.
Donald Trump thinks you can fight Covid with bleach injections. Kamala Harris thinks you can fight inflation with price controls.
No, let me correct that. What Trump actually said was that it would be “interesting to check” on whether you could fight Covid with bleach injections. What Harris actually said was that you can fight inflation with price controls.
On that basis, I’d have to conclude that Harris is the more delusional of the two. Unfortunately, Trump has offered me plenty of additional evidence that he’s right up there in Harris’s league. But she’s made it pretty clear he’ll never actually surpass her.
Here is a headline from this morning’s New York Times:
Over the course of the day, I’ve heard three different radio commenters riffing on this theme, mocking the former president for not realizing that presidents don’t control monetary policy.
The mockers are wrong. They’re even obviously wrong. If interest rates are determined by monetary policy and nothing else, then what determines interest rates in an economy without money, where people still borrow and lend?
Interest rates are largely determined by the difference between prosperity now and expected prosperity in the future. If everyone expects to be a lot richer in ten years, they’ll try to borrow more now and drive interest rates up. If everyone expects to be a lot poorer in ten years, they’ll try to save more now and drive interest rates down. And pretty much everything a president does affects both current and future prosperity, so pretty much everything a president does affects interest rates.
Trump’s promise to bring down interest rates is an implicit promise to adopt policies that either a) make us more prosperous today, but only temporarily and/or b) make us less prosperous in the future. In other words, he’s promising to adopt policies that many of us would describe as short-sighted. The New York Times notwithstanding, he’s perfectly capable of fulfilling that promise. He can, for example, appoint a lot of short-sighted people to influential policy positions.
And we know who some of those people are! The New York Times and the radio commentators completely missed the boat on this one. They thought Trump was promising the impossible, but failed to realize that there’s nothing impossible about filling the Cabinet with childless cat ladies.
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The Democrats keep telling us that Donald Trump poses a unique threat to democracy and global stability, so that even if you are disagree with almost all of their policies, you should still vote for the Democratic nominee to keep Trump out of the White House.
I agree with them. I was prepared to vote for Biden. I will vote for Harris. I will do this despite the fact that Biden and Harris represent ideologies I find appalling and support policies that I believe will leave the world a considerably worse place. There are in fact a few Democrats I think are even more dangerous than Trump (I’m looking at you, Elizabeth Warren) but none of them seems to be in the running.
But although they’ve convinced me, I doubt that the Democrats have actually convinced themselves. Because if they have — if they really believe that Trump is such a unique threat that we have to put most of our disagreements about policy aside in order to stop him — they wouldn’t be nominating Harris, or any other Democrat. Instead, they’d be drafting Liz Cheney. (I might have said Nikki Haley, but I think that ship sailed when she addressed the Republican convention.)
Yes, the average Democrat would have to swallow very hard to support Cheney, just as I’ll have to swallow very hard to support Harris. The difference is that Cheney’s probably got a better chance of beating Trump. In a Cheney/Trump race, I’d wager that about 100% of Democrats and 25% of Republicans choose Cheney. That’s a landslide.
You might argue that it would be hard to get the Democratic base out to the polls for Cheney. But after a few months of hammering home the message that the imperative is to stop Trump, I don’t think you’d have more trouble selling Cheney to Democrats than you’d have selling Harris to me — and I am already sold.
I rarely agree with Democrats on political matters. This time around, we’re all on the same side. Let’s do what it takes to win. I will do my part by putting a whole lot of disagreements aside and voting for Harris if I have to. The Democratic National Committee can do its part by also putting a whole lot of disagreements aside and nominating someone with a far better chance of success. The only difference between me and the DNC is nobody cares what I do, but the DNC can make a difference, and maybe save the world. If they mean the things they say, that’s what they’ll do.
My essay on abortion and public policy has appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of the Independent Review, where it will gestate for nine months behind a paywall.
In the meantime, here is a late draft, identical for all practical purposes to the published version. Please note that the Independent Institute (which publishes the Independent Review) holds the copyright, and all requests for reprint rights should go to them, not to me.
I am delighted to announce that the 10th edition of my textbook, Price Theory and Applications, is now available wherever good books are sold. There’s also a free sample chapter.
Here’s what’s special about this edition:
- I started out by rereading large parts of the past several editions, from which I learned that not every change was an improvement. Some things were a lot clearer in edition 7 than in edition 9. (And sometimes vice-versa of course.) I worked hard to make sure that in the tenth edition, every section and subsection would be the best it could be — which sometimes meant resurrecting an old version, or, more often, combining the best of the old and the new.
- In the past, I’ve tried to keep all of the end-of-chapter problem sets to about the same length, which sometimes meant omitting some really great problems. This time, I decided that was stupid. Whenever I had 40 or 50 really good problems, I included them all.
- This edition benefited from the extraordinary talents, wisdom and persistence of the extraordinary Lisa Talpey, who read every draft, called out everything that seemed even slightly unclear, gave me a chance to rewrite, then read it all again, equally carefully, and took me through as many rounds of this as necessary until everything made sense to her. She also caught pretty much all the typos. I am sure that thanks to Lisa, this edition is far friendlier to the reader than any of those that came before.
- For the first time, I designed my own cover! How do you like it?
The publisher’s webpage, and information on ordering for your classes, is here.
The death last week of the pathbreaking comic book artist Trina Robbins reminded me of an odd bit of history. Before she was a cartoonist, Robbins owned and operated a Lower East Side boutique called Broccoli, where all of the clothes were hand-made, the regular customers included (according to Wikipedia) Mama Cass, Donovan and David Crosby — and all of the merchandise was in Trina’s size, so that the store could double as her personal clothes closet.
(Source: Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix by Brian Doherty.)
If you’re in the vicinity of the University of Rochester this Tuesday, please join us:
Title: Lead Exposure and Crime
Presenter: Kevin Schnepel on 3/19 at 5pm in Goergen 101
Description: Early-life exposure to lead (pB) is linked to higher rates of violent crime among juveniles and adults. In this lecture, I will cover key findings in the academic literature and discuss the challenges associated with (and solutions for) identifying the causal impact of lead pollution on crime rates.
Bio: Kevin Schnepel is an Associate Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University and studies the economics of crime. Kevin’s work aims to improve our understanding of the ways in which we can lower crime and improve social welfare ranging from investments in early-life health to criminal justice diversion programs.
I am just back from the G4G conference in Atlanta, where I gave a six-minute talk on how to organize a waiting line. The video of the actual talk will appear on the web eventually, but in the meantime, here is video of my practice run from the night before:
Or, for higher quality video, click here.
I feel like I should record this, on the off-chance that it will save someone else from spending 18 hours glued to a computer screen missing the obvious. It will be of very limited interest.
Actually, let’s make it a puzzle.
So I have a php script — let’s call it A.php — which contains an html form introduced by the line < form method=POST action=”B.php” > .
There are no other calls to scripts anywhere else in A.php, and none at all in B.php.
So I enter the following in my browser’s address bar (I tried this in multiple browsers, all with the same results):
FOO/A.php?QUERYSTRING
(where of course FOO is a web address). This causes some php code to execute. That code checks to see if the query string is nonempty (which it always is at this point), and if so, it displays the form, with a submit button. Here is what happens next:
a) Roughly half the time, I hit the submit button, which calls B.php, which also executes, at which point my address bar shows FOO/B.php . This seems entirely normal.
b) The other half of the time, I hit the submit button, which causes A.php to execute a SECOND TIME (instead of calling B.php). (It now thinks the query string is empty so the form is not re-displayed.) At this point my address bar shows FOO/A.php/B.php (despite the fact that B.php was never called, or at least never executed).
There is absolutely no apparent pattern to when I get a) and when I get b). I sit at my damned screen for hours on end (this started at 6AM and ended at midnight), repeating the same input, sometimes getting a) and sometimes getting b), according to what looks to me like a series of fair coin flips.
So, because I am making **absolutely no changes** to the code, this **must** mean something is going on at the server end, right? So I move all the code to a completely different server, and get exactly the same behavior.
This is not behavior that’s easy to google for. I wasted a little time trying.
Right around midnight, the truth dawned on me.
And now I wonder: Would a programmer with the right background have been able to guess what the problem was quicker than I did? Like, maybe at least 17 hours quicker? Let’s make it a challenge.
If you’re in the vicinity of the University of Rochester this Thursday (November 16), check this out:
If you’re in the vicinity of the University of Rochester Thursday evening at 5PM (that is, November 9, which is likely to be the date on which you’re reading this), please drop by Meliora 203 for a talk on the recent history of bank failures and financial panics.
Our speaker is Professor James Kahn, now of Yeshiva University, late of the New York Federal Reserve bank and the University of Rochester, and one of the people who taught me how to think about economics. The talk will be aimed primarily at undergraduate students, but all are welcome.
Recognizing that I know no more about politics than most of you, and that I have no notable record as a political prognosticator, here is my prediction, as of about a half hour before the second Republican presidential debate: Doug Burgum breaks out of the pack with strong attacks on Donald Trump.
Why? First, he needs a Hail Mary. Second, he needs it tonight, or there’s almost no chance he makes it into the third debate. Third, among the various Hail Mary’s available to him, this seems the most likely to pay off.
Arguably, they all need Hail Mary’s. But those (i.e. most of them) who have refused to substantially attack Trump in the past can’t use this particular Hail Mary without being called out for flip-flopping. (Burgum doesn’t have to worry so much about this, because almost nobody has paid any attention to anything he’s said yet.) Also, Burgum is the one who most needs to get this done tonight, with little prospect of going on otherwise.
A couple of hours from now, you can tell me why I got this wrong.
I know very little about Asa Hutchinson (ex-governor or Arkansas, current candidate for president) but I’ve heard him on the radio a few times and he seems worth listening to. I’ve heard him speak sensibly about markets, about Putin, and about Trump.
I’d very much like to see him on next week’s debate stage. To qualify, he needs 40,000 donors total, of which I believe he currently has about 30,000.
(You’d think that speaking sensibly on a few topics is a pretty low bar to clear, but there will be people on that stage who haven’t cleared it.)
A $1 donation counts exactly as much as a $1,000,000 donation toward this goal. Please consider making a $1 contribution (or more) here:
Not all podcasts are fun (for either the guests or the viewers) but in my experience all podcasts hosted by Bob Murphy are fun for all involved. You can see the latest here or on YouTube:
If you are in the vicinity of the University of Rochester this Thursday, please join us:
I believe I am now caught up on replying to the many comments on my post about Chat-GPT4 failing my economics exam.
My responses are quite out of order, but are labeled with the numbers of the posts I am responding to. So if you search in the page for the number of your post and/or the name you posted under, you ought to be able to find my reply.
Of course if any new comments appear on the GPT4 post, the current post will become at least temporarily inoperative.
If you are in the vicinity of the University of Rochester tomorrow, check it out:
Edit: Here is a new and improved version of the post below. I am leaving the original up for historical reasons, but I recommend following the link instead of reading this post.
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Yesterday, I announced on this blog that ChatGPT had failed my economics exam. (All of the questions on this exam are taken from recent final exams in my sophomore-level course at the University of Rochester.) Multiple commenters suggested that perhaps the problem was that I was using an old version of ChatGPT.
I therefore attempted to upgrade to the state-of-the-art GPT-4, but upgrades are temporarily unavailable. Fortunately, our commenter John Faben, who has an existing subscription, offered to submit the exam for me.
The result: Whereas the older ChatGPT scored a flat zero (out of a possible 90), GPT-4 scored four points (out of the same possible 90). [I scored the 9 questions at 10 points each.] I think my students can stop worrying that their hard-won skills and knowledge will be outstripped by an AI program anytime soon.
(One minor note: On the actual exams, I tend to specify demand and supply curves by drawing pictures of them. I wasn’t sure how good the AI would be at reading those pictures, so I translated them into equations for the AI’s benefit. This seems to have had no deleterious effect. The AI had no problem reading the equations; all of its errors are due to fundamental misunderstandings of basic concepts.)
Herewith the exam questions, GPT-4’s answers (in typewriter font) and the scoring (in red):
I am pleased (I think) to announce that I have just submitted to ChatGPT an exam, consisting entirely of questions taken from recent final exams in my sophomore-level intermediate economics class, and it has earned a score of zero. Not only did it earn a score of zero, but several of its answers would have merited negative scores if I were allowed to give them. The answers are in every case egregiously wrong, showing absolutely zero understanding of the basics.
I am frankly a little surprised; I had expected it to get at least a few things right.
Edited to add: If you are looking for the details, look here.
If you are in the vicinity of the University of Rochester this Wednesday (March 15), you have an opportunity to hear Martin Cox, the director of the John Locke Institute, talking about “How to Be Right”. See details on the poster above.
Ethan Siegel, writing in Forbes, concludes that No, the Universe is Not Purely Mathematical in Nature.
His argument, unless I’ve badly misunderstood him, is that many purely mathematical models of the universe have turned out to be wrong, and one needs observations to guide the building of better models.
I think he has this exactly backward.
If our Universe is uniquely woven from some special fabric, then it at least might (or might not) be possible to discern some of its properties by pure reason.
But if our Universe is a purely mathematical structure, then it is surely one of a great many purely mathematical structures (we know this, because we are familiar with a great many purely mathematical structures). This means that only observations can help us determine which of those mathematical structures we inhabit.
Siegel’s article is well written and fun to read. But I think his arguments constitute evidence for exactly the opposite of the conclusion he wants to draw.
A few years ago, I was driving a Hertz rental car at about 25 mph in a residential neighborhood when the rear-view mirror suddenly flew off and hit me in the face. I came within inches of hitting a parked car. I mentioned this when I returned the car and they graciously discounted my bill.
Today I am driving a Hertz rental car with a big clump of wires dangling down between the accelerator and the brake, so that moving your foot from the accelerator to the brake is a great tangly adventure. This strikes me as equally unsafe. I am on my way back to the car with a roll of duct tape in my hand. I plan to mention this for the benefit of the next guy, but I do wonder if Hertz keeps records of “wildly implausible complaints that were probably manufactured for the purpose of getting a discount” and whether I am about to be flagged as a repeat offender.
I am glad I don’t live in a country where the penalty for criminal behavior includes having your tax returns released to the public.
I am doubly glad I don’t live in a country where the penalty for criminal behavior includes having your tax returns released to the public before you are convicted and indeed before you are ever charged.
I am triply glad that I don’t live in a country where the penalty for criminal behavior includes having your tax returns released to the public at the whim of your political opponents.
And I am quadruply glad that I don’t live in a country where those political opponents get to invent penalties that are not envisioned by any statute.
I wish many things for Donald Trump, and I am sure he would not want me to get most of my wishes. But it would be an outrage for the Ways and Means Committee of the House to release his returns under the current circumstances, where, it seems to me, the release is clearly intended as a punishment for some very bad acts that very clearly occurred.
On the other hand: I have long argued (see Chapter 15 of The Armchair Economist) that when voters make choices on the basis of promises that are ultimately not kept, they should have legal recourse in the form of a lawsuit against the politician who broke those promises. In 2016, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to release his tax returns as soon as they were not “under audit”. It’s not at all clear to me why this promise would have changed anyone’s vote, but presumably Trump (who has presumably thought about this harder than I have) believed it would sway at least some voters; otherwise why would he have made such a big deal about it?
In my ideal world, there would be a class-action suit against Trump by voters who relied on his 2016 promise to release these returns, and, after a trial, he might be ordered to fill the breach by releasing those returns today. One could argue that the Ways and Means Committee is simply bringing about my desired outcome by other means.
But: First, as I just said, in my ideal world, the order to release the returns would come after a trial. We have not had that trial. And second, I am actually very very glad that I do not live in a world where my personal policy preferences are implemented without first going through some sort of process whereby they become law. Like so many of my best ideas, this one is not yet a law. I’m glad I do live in a country where (by and large) non-laws are not enforced, even when I believe they ought to be laws.
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A bit of history:
- One day in the 16th century, a student at Oxford University was sitting in the woods reading a volume of Aristotle, when he was attacked by a wild boar. The student saved himself by shoving the volume down the throat of the boar and choking it to death. He brought the boar back to Oxford, where it became the centerpiece of a great feast. The anniversary has been celebrated at Oxford ever since, with an annual Boar’s Head Dinner.
- One day in 1934, someone at the University of Rochester decided that Rochesterians should celebrate these anniversaries as well. Ever since, with a few interruptions, the University has been the site of an annual Boar’s Head Dinner, where a member of the University community is called upon to re-tell the story of the brave Oxford student, perhaps with some embellishment.
- One day in 2005, I was the one who was called upon. The event was filmed, but the sound quality was horrendous. (So was the video quality, but that seems less important.) I’ve therefore almost never shared it.
- One day a couple of months ago, I mentioned this to my awesome friend Rowan McVey, who volunteered to take the video, improve the sound quality, and add captions. (Note: Rowan was already entirely awesome even before she jumped on this task.)
Herewith the fruits of Rowan’s labors. The two videos linked below are identical except that the first has captions and the second doesn’t. The sound quality is still surely imperfect, but it’s a vast improvement over the original.
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Nearly 9 years ago, Steven posted this brainteaser:
Here I have a well shuffled deck of 52 cards, half of them red and half of them black. I plan to slowly turn the cards face up, one at a time. You can raise your hand at any point — either just before I turn over the first card, or the second, or the third, et cetera. When you raise your hand, you win a prize if the next card I turn over is red.
What’s your strategy?
Read no further if you want to try and solve this brainteaser on your own first!
Continue reading ‘Using a Brainteaser to Discover a Theorem’
If you are in the vicinity of the University of Rochester this Wednesday (November 30), stop by Sloan Auditorium in Goergen Hall at 5PM to hear a lecture from Doug Irwin, Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and a prominent expert in international trade. His topic is “From Globalization to Slowbalization: The Future of World Economic Integration”.
Professor Irwin’s books include Free Trade Under Fire, Peddling Protectionism, Clashing over Commerce, and Three Simple Principles of Trade Policy.
If you’re in the vicinity of the University of Rochester tomorrow (Sunday, November 20), do stop by Dewey Hall room 1-101 at 5PM for a talk on “Applied Political Economy and the Invasion of Ukraine” by Dr. Tom Palmer of the Atlas Network and the Cato Institute.
Dr. Palmer has written extensively on issues at the cusp of economics, politics and philosophy. As the General Director of the Atlas Network’s Global Initiative, he travels extensively to advise foreign NGOs on how to foster economic development and liberal democracy. He has recently returned from doing good work in Ukraine.
