Author Archive for Steve Landsburg

Can My Readers Throw Some Light On This?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 8, 2013
in Rationality
. 55 Comments

On allexperts.com, we find the following query:

How can I find a list of retail markup % by industry? My husband won’t let me buy new lamps because his mother worked in a lamp store 60 years ago and the markup was “astronomical”. I’m betting that there are plenty of things he buys that have a similar markup as do lamps. I know that the average markup varies between industries (i.e. groceries being very low). Appreciate any insight! Thanks!!!!

Several questions arise, or which the most compelling is: When you buy a lamp, why would you care about the markup, as opposed to, oh, say, the price? In fact, if you’re the sort of person who worries about things like minimizing your carbon footprint and otherwise curbing your resource consumption, you should of course prefer items with high markups, since the markup is the part of the price that doesn’t reflect resource consumption. Or to put this another way: Given the price of the lamp, isn’t it better for the seller to earn more profit rather than less?

Since economic theory tells me that the author of this inquiry is perfectly rational, I see only a small number of possibilities:

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The Ricardian Model

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 6, 2013
in Current Events and History
. 8 Comments

With Richard III much in the news lately, I’ve been inspired to reread Paul Murray Kendall’s excellent biography of the king (Kindle edition here). Here’s a little tidbit I learned from that book:

In early 1464, with Lancastrian rebellions breaking out all over England, King Edward IV found it prudent to raise an army. He therefore dispatched “commisions of array” to the twenty-two counties of southern England, each charged with rounding up the able-bodied men of the county and turning them into an army. In most cases, the county commission consisted of a half dozen or more men, including one great magnate. But Richard, Edward’s brother, inspired so much trust that he was appointed sole commissioner for nine counties — everything from Shropshire and Warwickshire through Somerset to Devon and Cornwall. Richard, in other words, was solely responsible for levying troops from a quarter of the realm. He was not yet twelve years old.

This makes me believe that my seventeen-year-old stepdaughter has too few chores.

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Stress Test

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 4, 2013
in Economics
. 41 Comments

A man applies for a job, which requires him to undergo three days of testing. But just before the testing period begins, he gets another good job offer. How does this affect his effort and performance?

If you’ve got your economics-blinders on, you’ll probably answer: Once he’s got an offer in hand, he won’t try as hard and therefore won’t do as well. But Michigan grad student Susan Godlonton decided to put that theory to the test. She was here in Rochester this week to tell us what she learned.

Godlonton did her research in Malawi, where her research funds went a long way. 278 job applicants were recruited for a three-day training program, with job offers contingent on their performance. At the beginning of the training period, about 20% of the applicants (randomly chosen) were offered an alternative job; another 20% were randomly told they’d not be getting the alternative offer. (Still others were told they had various probabilities of receiving the alternative offer, but let’s concentrate on the extremes.) These alternative offers were kept secret from the evaluators at the training session.

The result: After controlling for background characteristics such as performance on standardized tests, previous experience, age, and so forth, applicants with no outside offer perform considerably worse in the training sessions, as measured by written exams, and the quantity and quality of their verbal participation. Those with alternative offers are 11.3% more likely to make verrbal contributions, and their verbal contributions are better.

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More Sex on Valentine’s Day

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on January 28, 2013
in Self-Promotion
. 16 Comments

Valentine’s Day (i.e. February 14) will find me at the University of Maryland’s Baltimore County campus, speaking about why More Sex is Safer Sex. The lecture is free and open to the public. Join us if you’re in the neighborhood! More details here.

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Grammar Question

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on January 24, 2013
in Miscellaneous
. 45 Comments

A friend asked this question in another forum. Maybe you guys can help:

Many of these towns have a road whose name comes from the next town over.

In the future, there will be companies whose workforces consist entirely of robots.

I’d prefer a book whose characters weren’t so stupid.

Are these correct uses of the word whose? On the one hand, we usually reserve the word “who” for people and use “that” for inanimate objects. On the other hand, the word “that” does not have a possessive form analogous to “whose”.

Every one of these sentences can of course be rewritten to avoid the problem (“I’d prefer a book with characters who weren’t so stupid”.) But the question is whether they sound okay to you as written.

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Why The Debt Ceiling Matters

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on January 22, 2013
in Current Events, Economics and Politics
. 106 Comments

A number of commenters (at least one here and several elsewhere) have asked why we need a debt ceiling. If the Congress wants to spend less, why don’t they just go ahead and spend less?

The answer is that different spending programs command different majorities. Snip and Snap vote to fund rabbit hospitals; Snap and Snurr vote to fund trapeze subsidies; Snurr and Snip vote to fund lava lamp research. Plausibly, they’d all prefer to eliminate all these programs. Even if Snap thinks rabbit hospitals and trapeze subsidies are both great bargains, he might not be so happy about getting two for the price of three.

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The Party’s Over

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on January 18, 2013
in Uncategorized
. 29 Comments

Thus the headline in today’s New York Times. Well, the Tea Party was nice while it lasted.

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I Don’t Get It

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on January 7, 2013
in Current Events, Economics and Policy
. 107 Comments

The frequently brilliant David Henderson seems to me to have fallen off a cliff in his (limited) defense of the recent tax bill. David thinks it’s a (relatively) good thing that under the new bill, income taxes rise only for those making over $400,000 and the estate tax is locked in only for estates over $5 million. (Relative, that is, to an across-the-board increase.)

David, in other words, seems to be saying that it’s a good thing that the tax code just got more progressive, and that a very small number of people are now going to bear a significantly greater share of the burden. I disagree.

Taxes are too high because spending is too high. But taking the path of spending as given (and David is right when he says that the delay of the sequester bodes very ill for that path), the question is not “how high should taxes be?”; that question is settled. Over time, taxes will be high enough to cover the spending. The only question is “how should the tax burden be distributed?”. The answer the politicians have agreed on is “a whole lot less equally”. They’re taking less now than they might have, but they’ll have to take more in the future, and when that time comes, they’ll have set a precedent that the rich should bear a greater fraction of the burden than they did a month ago.

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Why Do I Feel Like I Fell Off a Cliff?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on January 1, 2013
in Current Events and Policy
. 35 Comments

The fiscal cliff deal that passed the Senate last night is appalling.

It raises marginal tax rates at the top (allegedly to “Clinton era levels” but actually higher once you account for the phaseouts of personal exemptions and itemized deductions), but not for anyone else, nibbling away at the rewards for productivity, and placing an ever-greater share of the tax burden on an ever-smaller fraction of the population.


Edited to add: Greg Mankiw has pointed out to me that the phaseouts were present in the Clinton years as well, so my remark about today’s rates being “higher once you account for the phaseouts” is wrong. On the other hand, as Greg also points out, with the increase in Medicare taxes pursuant to Obamacare, total tax rates are in fact higher than they were under Clinton. Greg points to this link for clarification.

Worse yet, it increases the rates on dividends, capital gains and inheritances, encouraging wealthy people to save less, consume more, and demand a greater share of the world’s resources.

The AMT, one of the few bright spots in the tax code, is permanently “fixed”, which is to say that almost nobody will pay it now.

This deal does absolutely nothing to control entitlement spending, which means it’s 100% fiscally irresponsible. Let’s be clear about this. When you’re overspending, the fiscally responsible thing is to spend less, not to cover the difference by visiting the ATM and depleting your assets. Wealthy taxpayers are the government’s ATM; the assets the government takes today won’t be there when they need more tomorrow. Let’s say it one more time: After all the talk about “fiscal responsibility”, there is nothing fiscally responsible about this deal.

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Over the Cliff

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 31, 2012
in Current Events and Policy
. 26 Comments

Re the fiscal cliff, I’ve tried hard to keep my head in the sand, figuring I can always go back to watching the news in 2016. So I’m not completely up to date on all this stuff, and I might be missing something important. But here are a few last-minute observations:

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Merry Christmas

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 24, 2012
in Economics and Literature
. 54 Comments

I think I’ll make the reposting of this an annual tradition:

What I Like About Scrooge

scroogeHere’s what I like about Ebenezer Scrooge: His meager lodgings were dark because darkness is cheap, and barely heated because coal is not free. His dinner was gruel, which he prepared himself. Scrooge paid no man to wait on him.

Scrooge has been called ungenerous. I say that’s a bum rap. What could be more generous than keeping your lamps unlit and your plate unfilled, leaving more fuel for others to burn and more food for others to eat? Who is a more benevolent neighbor than the man who employs no servants, freeing them to wait on someone else?

Oh, it might be slightly more complicated than that. Maybe when Scrooge demands less coal for his fire, less coal ends up being mined. But that’s fine, too. Instead of digging coal for Scrooge, some would-be miner is now free to perform some other service for himself or someone else.

Dickens tells us that the Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his 50 cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor’s household should—presumably for a houseful of guests who lavishly praised his generosity. The bricks, mortar, and labor that built the Mansion House might otherwise have built housing for hundreds; Scrooge, by living in three sparse rooms, deprived no man of a home. By employing no cooks or butlers, he ensured that cooks and butlers were available to some other household where guests reveled in ignorance of their debt to Ebenezer Scrooge.

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Robert Bork, RIP

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 19, 2012
in Current Events and Law
. 27 Comments

Robert Bork will be remembered for many things, but the most important, and the reason we are so fortunate to have had him with us, is his eloquent and influential insistence that antitrust law is there to protect consumers, not to protect inefficient firms. The Supreme Court eventually agreed. He was, in my opinion, wrong about a lot of things, but he left the world better than he found it.

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Carbon Tax Policy: No Simple Answers

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 17, 2012
in Economics and Policy
. 78 Comments

Assuming carbon emissions damage the environment, should they be discouraged through taxation? And if so, should the tax revenue be earmarked for damage abatement, or should it be paid into general funds?

Elizabeth Kolbert, writing in the New Yorker, suggests that economic theory decides this question in favor of a carbon tax. As I pointed out last week, she’s plain wrong. As a followup to some of the discussion on that post, here’s a simple example to illustrate that no policy can be infallible:

A steel mill pollutes the air, causing $24 worth of damage to the business of a laundromat next door. (Or if you prefer, read $24 worth of expected damage to the owners of oceanfront property or farmers in currently temperate zones.)

If the steel mill is forced to bear the consequences of this damage, it reduces its output. This cuts the pollution damage by $12, and cuts the profits of the steel mill by $17.

Question: Which is the best policy?

  1. The steel mill incurs no penalty for polluting.
  2. The steel mill pays a tax (or fine) equal to the damage it causes; the revenue is used to reduce the national debt.
  3. The steel mill is required to reimburse the laundromat for all damage.

Answer: It depends. Consider the following scenarios:

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A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 10, 2012
in Bad Reasoning, Economics and Policy
. 119 Comments

Writing in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert illustrates the power of analogy:

A man walks into a bar. He orders several rounds, downs them, and staggers out. The man has got plastered, the bar owner has got the man’s money, and the public will get stuck with the tab for the cops who have to fish the man out of the gutter.

…..

The man pulls into a gas pump. He sticks his BP or Sunoco card into the slot, fills up and drives off. He’s got a full tank; the gas station and the oil company share in the profits. Meanwhile, the carbon that spills out of his tailpipe lingers in the atmosphere, trapping heat and contributing to higher sea levels. As the oceans rise, coastal roads erode, beachfront homes wash away, and, finally, major cities flood. Once again, it’s the public at large that gets left with the bill.

In both cases, Kolbert endorses the “fair and logical” solution: The man should be taxed to incorporate the costs that his choices impose on the rest of society.

I like this game. Can I play too?

A man chooses to build his house on the oceanfront instead of 100 miles inland. This makes him especially vulnerable to rising sea levels and therefore leads him to lobby for a carbon tax. The man gets his house; the builders and contractors share in the profits, and the public at large bears the consequence of higher gas prices.

Or even:

Some people want to burn a lot of carbon, which raises global temperatures, imposing costs on owners of oceanfront property. Other people want to protect their oceanfront property, imposing costs on the people who want to burn a lot of carbon. A journalist at the New Yorker convinces her readers that the only “fair and logical” solution to this conflict of interests is to come down entirely on the side of the property owners, leading to the implementation of suboptimal policies. The journalist gets paid, the magazine editors congratulate themselves on the influence of their writers, and the general public suffers the consequences.

Should the property owner and the journalist be taxed for exerting their malign influences?

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DeLong Shot

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 7, 2012
in Bad Reasoning and Knowledge
. 48 Comments

First Brad Delong claimed that we can’t know things by pure reason. In response, I offered a counterexample:

The ratio of the circumference of a (euclidean) circle to its radius is greater than 6.28 but less than 6.29

Now Delong attempts to “refute” this counterexample by observing that it doesnt tell us anything about neutron stars (!!!). Leave aside the fact that it actually does tell us quite a bit about neutron stars (the circumference-to-radius ratio for a neutron star is not equal to 2π, but you’d still be hard pressed to compute its value if you didn’t know what π was). The larger point is that knowledge doesn’t have to be about neutron stars to be knowledge. It can be knowledge about, oh, say, euclidean circles.

Of course, as DeLong rightly observes, “we reason like jumped-up monkeys using error-prone Humean heuristics on brains evolved to improve our reproductive fitness”. And of course it is equally true that we perceive like jumped-up monkeys using error-prone sensory apparatus evolved to improve our reproductive fitness. Yet DeLong appears to acknowledge that our perceptions are sometimes informative. (I use the word “appears” because, true to form, DeLong prefers hissing and stamping his feet to actually spelling out an argument.) Why, then, should reason be more suspect than perception? DeLong isn’t in the mood to tell us.

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Looney Tunes

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 30, 2012
in Oddities
. 12 Comments

So there’s this man-eating creature named Jozin who lives in a bog, and is vulnerable only to crop-dusting powder. The mayor promises his daughter in marriage to whoever can defeat the creature. A stranger comes to town, borrows a crop-duster, captures Jozin, and wins the daughter. The end.

This, I think, is as good an example as any of why a gripping story requires more than just a good beginning and a happy ending. But sometimes, a hefty dose of looniness can fully compensate for the complete absence of dramatic tension. Et voila:

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Unreasonable

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 29, 2012
in Bad Reasoning, Knowledge and Philosophy
. 49 Comments

Brad DeLong appears to argue here that because pure reason once led him, Brad Delong, to an incorrect conclusion about which direction he was facing, it follows that pure reason can never be a source of knowledge.

(If that’s not his point, then the only alternative reading I can find is that Thomas Nagel is guilty of choosing a poor example to illustrate a point that DeLong would rather ridicule than refute.)

It would be too too easy to make a snarky comment about how we’ve known all along about Brad DeLong’s tenuous relationship with reason. Instead, here, for the record is a list of ten facts, of which I am willing to bet that DeLong is aware of at least 7 — none of them, as far as I can see, accessible to humans via anything but pure reason:

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Breakfast in Singapore

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 27, 2012
in Fluff
. 17 Comments

(Source here. Hat tip to our sometime commenter Val.)

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How High Should Taxes Be?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 16, 2012
in Current Events, Economics and Politics
. 69 Comments

How high should taxes be? High enough to cover expected outlays going forward — but no higher.

That’s because any additional revenue would be used to pay down the federal debt, which is a bad idea. It was almost surely a mistake to run up this much debt in the first place, but now that we’ve got it, the best thing to do is to keep it forever.

Here’s why:

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Accounting for Numbers

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 14, 2012
in Logic, Math, Ontology and Philosophy
. 81 Comments

Over at Less Wrong, the estimable Eliezer Yudkowsky attempts to account for the meaning of statements in arithmetic and the ontological status of numbers. I started to post a comment, but it got long enough that I’ve turned my comment into a blog post. I’ve tried to summarize my understanding of Yudkowsky’s position along the way, but of course it’s possible I’ve gotten something wrong.

It’s worth noting that every single point below is something I’ve blogged about before. At the moment I’m too lazy to insert links to all those earlier blog posts, but I might come back and put the links in later. In any event, I think this post stands alone. Because it got long, I’ve inserted section numbers for the convenience of commenters who might want to refer to particular passages.

1. Yudkowsky poses, in essence, the following question:

Main Question, My Version: In what sense is the sentence “two plus two equals four” meaningful and/or true?

Yudkowsky phrases the question a little differently. What he actually asks is:

Main Question, Original Version: In what sense is the sentence “2 + 2 = 4″ meaningful and/or true?”

This, I think, threatens to confuse the issue. It’s important to distinguish between the numeral “2”, which is a formal symbol designed to be manipulated according to formal rules, and the noun “two”, which appears to name something, namely a particular number. Because Yudkowsky is asking about meaning and truth, I presume it is the noun, and not the symbol, that he intends to mention. So I’ll stick with my version, and translate his remarks accordingly.

2. Yudkowsky provisionally offers the following answer:

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Good News and Bad News

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 6, 2012
in Uncategorized
. 133 Comments

Good news and bad news: Romney lost; Obama won.

What’s most depressing about the Obama victory is that it seems to have come largely as a reward for two things: the execrable auto bailout and a despicable campaign of character assassination.

What’s most refreshing about the Romney loss is that it seems to have come largely as a punishment for his cruelly evil immigration rhetoric. (Remember “self-deportation”?) This is tempered somewhat by the fact that Obama seems to have escaped punishment for his cruelly evil immigration policies. (Under Obama, deportations have reached an all-time high.)

Obama, I believe somewhat more than Romney, pitched his rhetoric at an audience presumed to be incapable of critical thinking. It’s a little depressing to be reminded how large that audience must be.

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Can A Million Puppets All Be Wrong?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 5, 2012
in Current Events and Policy
. 28 Comments

The million-puppet march on Washington is advertised as a demonstration in favor of public broadcasting, but of course that’s not exactly what it is.

What it is, exactly, is a demonstration in favor of the current level of funding for public broadcasting.

Now: Just how many of those puppets — or how many of their human fellow marchers — do you imagine would be able to tell you what the current level of funding for public broadcasting is?

And insofar as these humans are out there marching and chanting without pausing to inquire into what they’re marching and supporting — well, I guess that explains their affinity for puppets.

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Your President Hopes You’re Stupid

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 1, 2012
in Bad Reasoning, Current Events and Politics
. 99 Comments

Joe Biden says that Mitt Romney has lied about Jeep and outsourcing; Romney intimates that President Obama has lied about Libya. I presume there’s been substantial truth-stretching on both sides and about many issues. Truth-stretching (or lying) relies on the ignorance of voters. There’s plenty of ignorance to go around, which is why truth-stretching works.

Treating voters as ignorant is one thing; treating them as stupid is quite another. You rely on ignorance when you cite “facts” that are hard for people to check — as, for example, when the President presents himself as sympathetic to immigrants and hopes you don’t know about the record number of deportations on his watch. You rely on stupidity when you blithely contradict yourself, hoping nobody will notice. The latter seems far more cynical.

I’m sure both candidates have been guilty of treating voters as both ignorant and stupid, and I called attention to several instances (on both sides) in my commentary on Debates One, Two and Three. But it does seem to me that it’s the President who is banking most heavily on voter stupidity.

A few examples:

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Sandy and the Ants

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 31, 2012
in Current Events and Economics
. 80 Comments

I was asked in another thread to refute the notion that Hurricane Sandy is “good for the economy” because at least it will create a lot of construction jobs.

I — and so many others — have so thoroughly debunked this notion in so many venues over the years that I fear I can find nothing new to say, so I’ll leave you with this:

If you find yourself in an argument about this, ask your opponent whether it’s “good for the ants” when you put a stick down their anthill, wiggle it around and destroy their infrastructure. Go ahead and acknowledge that this can sure put a lot of ants to work.

Or, for that matter….

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Mortgage Solution

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 31, 2012
in Puzzles
. 16 Comments

The solution to yesterday’s mortgage puzzle:

Commenters pointed to several reasons why biweekly payments of (say) $500 will pay your mortgage off so much faster than monthly payments of $1000, but of these by far the most important is that biweekly payments of $500 add up to 500 x 26 = 13,000 dollars, whereas monthly payments of $1000 add up to 1000 x 12 = 12,000 dollars. With the biweekly payments, you make the equivalent of 13 monthly payments every year.

In other words, the key observation is that two weeks is not half a month.

My colleague Michael Wolkoff posed this puzzle to me many years ago, and I’m embarrassed to admit I failed to solve it before Michael gave me the solution. I was reminded of it yesterday when I got a biweekly-plan offer in the mail.

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Mortgage Puzzle

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 30, 2012
in Puzzles
. 34 Comments

I have recently acquired a 30 year mortgage.

Today I’ve received a letter offering to let me make payments on a biweekly basis instead of a monthly basis. If I accept this offer, I will make a biweekly payment equally to exactly half my current monthly payment — and my mortgage will paid off in 23.6 years instead of 30.

Question: How can such a small change in the timing of my payments shave a full 6.4 years off the life of my mortgage?

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The Mourdock Platform

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 24, 2012
in Current Events, Policy and Politics
. 68 Comments

Richard Mourdock, Indiana Senate candidate, has announced his opposition to interference with God’s revealed intent. I presume, then, that he’ll be taking a principled stand against firefighting, medical intervention, federal debt reduction, and unseating incumbent Presidents.

Update: Mourdock now clarifies his position by saying that “God does not want rape”. I’d thought he was saying that if a pregnancy occurs, God must have wanted it, which would seem to be an instance of the general principle that if anything occurs, God must have wanted it. Now we’re told that there is no such general principle — from which I am left to conclude that the only way to tell what God wants is to ask Richard Mourdock. This is a logically consistent criterion, but what if, for example, Mourdock happens to be indisposed at the moment when, say, terrorists attack the White House? How will we know whether it’s okay to resist?

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Debate Number Three

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 22, 2012
in Current Events, Policy and Politics
. 80 Comments

Limited commentary this time, partly because I am no expert on foreign policy so there’s no reason you should care about most of my opinions. On the other hand, the candidates had an exceptionally broad definition of foreign policy, which included trade, deficits, unemployment, education, etc. Commentary also limited by the fact that my attention wandered from time to time.

That said, here are my comments, typed in real time, unedited, not carefully thought through, perhaps in some cases ill-advised:

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Second Debate

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 16, 2012
in Current Events and Politics
. 92 Comments

My wife, who really ought to have her own blog, heard only the few minutes dealing with immigration and then China and summed up the candidates’ shared position as “We sure love immigrants, but we sure hate foreigners”.

I, by contrast, slogged through the entire thing. Here are my own less brilliant comments, typed in real time while watching the debate; not edited and perhaps in some cases not sufficiently thought through:

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Kidney Failure

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 16, 2012
in Current Events, Economics, Policy and Snark
. 65 Comments

So Alvin Roth wins the Nobel Prize for, among other things, figuring out the best way to allocate kidneys subject to the constraint that you’re too damned dumb to use the price system.

Next up: A Nobel prize in medicine for figuring out the best way to prolong your life while repeatedly shooting yourself in the head.

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