In a week when we took on the issues of health care and immigration, our most contentious issue turned out to be the complexity of arithmetic. We also touched on some odd Christmas gifts and the solutions to some old puzzles.

I’ll be back, of course, on Monday. But to tide you over the weekend, you might want to check out the interview with John Allison, the former CEO of BB&T, which is part of the “What Went Wrong” series over at BigThink. Needless to say, I can find parts to disagree with, but overall I think it’s one of the most insightful interviews yet in this series. A choice quote:

If you want to really think about what happened in the housing crises, it was a government policy, through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and affordable housing policies, what they call the community reinvestment act, etc., that created a massive misallocation of credit. If the government gets into allocating credit over time it will make sure we aren’t as productive as we should be. So the government regulations usually in the end look like credit allocations usually to those that are politically favored at the expense of making sure credit is allocated to the most productive segments in the economy. So I think government regulation in the long term is almost always destructive.

We started the week with the solution to one problem from Part I of my honors exam; I still owe you answers to the remaining four questions, and I still owe you the questions from Part II. Stay tuned.

We revisited the recurring issues of anti-discrimination policy and free trade. Reader comments, particularly from the ever-thoughtful Sierra Black, made me realize something new (to me) and important: When I write about free trade, I tend to focus on “why trade is good for us” (where “us” means the United States) rather than “why trade is good for the other guys” (where “the other guys” often means developing nations). I do this because most of the anti-trade screeds I run across are written by people who think trade is bad for us. But by presenting the arguments in a one-sided context I’ve misled readers like Sierra into wondering whether they also apply to developing nations. The answer is “Yes, only more so”—while trade benefits everyone, it benefits the smallest and poorest countries the most. Sometime soon when we revisit this topic, I’ll have to make a point of elaborating on the theory and evidence behind that.

We had a little math this week, and then some more serious math, including my attempt to squeeze the entire gist of Godel’s argument into one blog post. If you want to understand how we can know that not all true statements in arithmetic can be proven, that’s the post you should read.

We closed the week with posts on the spirit of Thanksgiving and the spirit of the day after Thanksgiving. I’ll be back on Monday.