We had substantive posts this week on two of our recurring topics — economic efficiency and the foundations or arithmetic.
The former brought us the honor of an extended visit from Uwe Reinhardt, who, as far as I can tell, objects not to the concept of efficiency or to its usefulness, but to its name. But any crusade to change a well-established technical term is, I think, doomed to failure.
Efficiency, of course, is only one of the normative criteria in the economist’s arsenal. I pointed, for example, to an earlier post where I’d outlined a toy framework for evaluating some of the normative claims made by one of Professor Reinhardt’s Princeton colleagues. That toy framework employs a utilitarian criterion that goes beyond efficiency. It evaluates policies on the basis of “what an amnesiac would prefer”, which is very different than a pure efficiency criterion. This kind of analysis is perfectly standard in economics, so any allegation that we fixate exclusively on efficiency is a bum rap.
On the other hand, some fixation on efficiency can be an extremely valuable exercise, for reasons that I hope this week’s post made clear.
Re the foundations of arithmetic, I posted to dismiss the view that the natural numbers are fictitious. As one commenter pointed out, this was largely an attack on a straw man, because almost nobody believes otherwise. Indeed it was. This was intended as an educational post, not a contentious one, and attacking straw men can be a very effective form of education. When I teach students about continuous functions, I ask them to imagine a hostile party who insists that the function f(x) = x is not continuous, and we talk about how you could most effectively convince him otherwise. The hostile party is imaginary, but there’s a lot to be learned from thinking about how you’d refute him.
We also speculated on the defining idea of the next decade and the ideal reading list for a course on how economists view the world.
And then there was the probability problem: A woman has two children, one of whom is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability they’re both boys? Several commenters explained the answer very clearly. In case you haven’t read the comments and don’t want me to give away the answer, I’ll just say that it’s greater than 45% but less than 49%. See the comments on the original post for the reason why.
We’re coming up on a long weekend, and I’m taking Labor Day off. I’ll see you Tuesday.
