Author Archive for Steve Landsburg

Are Old Lives Worth Less?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 20, 2020
in Current Events, Economics and Policy
. 57 Comments

For cost-benefit analysis, the usual ballpark figure for the value of a life is about $10,000,000. But I keep hearing it suggested that when it comes to fighting a disease like Covid-19, which mostly kills the elderly, this value is too high. In other words, an old life is worth less than a young life.

I don’t see it.

People seem to have the intuition that ten years of remaining life are more precious than one year of remaining life. That’s fine, but here’s a counter-intuition: An additional dollar is more precious when you can spend it at the rate of a dime a year for ten years than when you’ve got to spend it all at once — for example, if your time is running out. (This is because of diminishing marginal utility of consumption within any given year). So being old means that both your life and your dollars have become less precious. Because we measure the value of life in terms of dollars, what matters is the ratio between preciousness-of-life and preciousness-of-dollars (or more precisely preciousness-of-dollars at the margin). If getting old means that the numerator and the denominator both shrink, it’s not so clear which way the ratio moves.

Instead of fighting over intuitions, let us calculate:

I. Value of Life for the Young

Suppose you’re a young person with 2 years to live and 2N dollars in the bank, which you plan to consume evenly over your lifetime, that is at the rate of $N per year. I’ll write your utility as

U(N,N)

Suppose also that you’re willing to forgo approximately pX dollars to avoid a small probability p of immediate death. Then (by definition!) X is the value of your life. (The reasons why this is the right definition are well known and have been discussed on this blog before. I won’t review them here.) This means that

(1-p)U(N,N) = U(N – (pX/2), N – (pX/2))

= U(N,N) – (pX/2)U1(N,N) – (pX/2)U2(N,N)

(where the last equal sign should be read as “approximately equal” and the Ui are partial derivatives).

Because you’ve optimized, U2(N,N) = U1(N,N), so we can write

X = U(N,N)/U1(N,N)

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Aftermath

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 18, 2020
in Puzzles
. 2 Comments

The victors in last week’s crossword challenge were:

First place, with a score of 276/276: A tie between Dan Williams and Richard Kennaway.

Second place, but heartbreakingly close, with a score of 274/276: Another tie, between Tim Goodwyn and the team of Dan Grayson & Carol Livingstone

Third place: Paul Epps

Fourth Place: Eric Dinsdale

Fifth Place: A tie between Paul Grayson and Biopolitical

Thanks to all of the above and all the rest who participated.

Some notes:

1) There are 276 white boxes in the puzzle. I scored one point per box. Other scoring systems are possible, such as one point per word.

2) I am open to the possibility that some of the answers marked wrong are just as good as the answers counted as right. I’ll try to give this some thought.

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Goofus, Gallant and the Law

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 15, 2020
in Law and Rationality
. 17 Comments

I.

Why do some people sign up to have their brains frozen for possible future resurrection, while others don’t? You might think it’s because the first group has more faith in future technology, but Scott Alexander has survey data to suggest otherwise. Active members of the forum lesswrong.com, many of whom had pre-paid for brain freezing, thought there was about a 12% chance it would work. Among members of a control group with no interest in the subject, the estimate was about 15%.

In a long and characteristically thoughtful blog post, Alexander concludes that:

Making decisions is about more than just having certain beliefs. It’s also about how you act on them.

and

The control group said “15%? That’s less than 50%, which means cryonics probably won’t work, which means I shouldn’t sign up for it.” The frequent user group said “A 12% chance of eternal life for the cost of a freezer? Sounds like a good deal!”

Goofus (says Alexander) treats new ideas as false until somebody provides incontrovertible evidence that they’re true. Gallant does cost-benefit analysis and reasons under uncertainty.

So a few weeks ago when we all thought that the chance of a global pandemic was, oh, about 10%, Goofus said “10%? That’s small. We don’t have to worry about it.”, while Gallant would have done a cost-benefit analysis and found that putting some tough measures into place, like quarantine and social distancing, would be worthwhile if they had a 10 or 20 percent chance of averting catastrophe.

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Current Events

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 12, 2020
in Current Events, Heroes and Math
. 11 Comments

conway.small The poster to the left hangs on the wall of my office. Can you figure out the pattern to the sequence? Now can you estimate the size of the nth entry?

John Horton Conway died yesterday, a victim of Covid-19. His unique mathematical style combined brilliance and playfulness in equal measure. I came across his “soldier problem” at an impressionable age, and was astonished by the beauty of the solution. You’ve got an infinite sheet of graph paper, with one horizontal grid line marked as the boundary between friendly and enemy territory. You can place as many soldiers as you like in friendly territory, at most one to a square. Now you can start jumping your soldiers over each other — a soldier jumps horizontally or vertically, over an adjacent soldier (who is then removed from the board) into an empty square. The goal is to advance at least one soldier to the fifth row of enemy territory. Conway’s proof that it can’t be done struck me then as utterly beautiful, utterly unexpected, and a compelling reason to learn more about this mathematics business.

He invented the Game of Life. He invented the system of surreal numbers, a vast generalization of the usual real numbers, designed for the purpose of assigning values to positions in games but adopted by mathematicians for purposes well beyond its original design. (Don Knuth’s book on the subject is a classic, and easy reading). His Monstrous Moonshine conjecture is the reason I own a t-shirt that says:

which I am prepared to argue is the most remarkable equation in all of mathematics. He was the first person to prove that every natural number is the sum of 37 fifth-powers. More than a century after mathematicians first gave a complete classification of two-dimensional surfaces, Conway (together with George K. Francis) found a much better proof. He worked in geometry, analysis, algebra, number theory and physics. And reportedly, he could solve a Rubik’s Cube behind his back, after inspecting it for a few seconds.

Gone now, along with John Prine — another icon of my youth — and too many others. I got the word about Conway just as I was about to go to bed, and am typing this in a state of exhaustion. If I were more awake, it would be more coherent, but it will have to do.

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Animation

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 8, 2020
in Uncategorized
. 9 Comments

You should watch this:

Click here for full-size version.

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Wednesday Puzzle

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 8, 2020
in Puzzles
. 15 Comments

Feeling isolated? Perhaps a crossword puzzle will help.

Click on the image to do the crossword puzzle on line, or click here for a printable pdf.

If you do the puzzle on line, you can click the “submit” button to bring up a form where you can enter your name and submit your solution. I will find a suitable way to honor the best submissions.

Meanwhile, please do not post spoilers!!!.

Update: Thanks to biopolitical, who pointed out that there was a problem with the clue for 24A. That clue is fixed now.

Thanks also to my Mom, who informed me that the pdf wasn’t printing properly. That’s fixed now too.

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Is It A Crime to Stop the Economy?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 21, 2020
in Current Events, Economics and Policy
. 42 Comments

[I am happy to turn this space over to my former colleague and (I trust) lifelong friend Romans Pancs, who offers what he describes as

a polemical essay. It has no references and no confidence intervals. It has question marks. It makes a narrow point and does not weigh pros and cons. It is an input to a debate, not a divine revelation or a scientific truth.

I might quibble a bit — I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a contribution to a debate that nobody seems to be having. I’d prefer to see this as an invitation to start a thoughtful and reasoned debate that rises above the level of “this policy confers big benefits; therefore there’s no need to reckon with the costs before adopting it”. That invitation is unequivocally welcome. ]

—SL

It is a Crime to Stop the Economy

A Guest Post

by

Romans Pancs

The Main Argument

It is a crime against humanity for governments to stop a capitalist economy. It is a crime against those whom the economic recession will hit the hardest: those employed in the informal sector, those working hourly customer service jobs (e.g., cleaners, hairdressers, masseurs, music teachers, and waiters), the young, the old who may not have the luxury of another year on the planet to sit out this year (and then the subsequent recession) instead of living. It is a crime against those (e.g., teachers and cinema ushers) whose jobs will be replaced by technology a little faster than they had been preparing for. It is a crime against the old in whose name the society that they spent decades building is being dismantled, and in whose name the children and the grandchildren they spent lifetimes nourishing are subjected to discretionary deprivation. Most importantly, it is a crime against the values of Western democracies: commitment to freedoms, which transcend national borders, and commitment to economic prosperity as a solution to the many ills that had been plaguing civilisations for millennia.

Capitalism and democracy are impersonal mechanisms for resolving interpersonal (aka ethical) trade-offs. How these trade-offs are resolved responds to individual tastes, with no single individual acting as a dictator. Governments have neither sufficient information, nor goodwill, nor the requisite commitment power, nor the moral mandate to resolve these tradeoffs unilaterally. Before converting an economy into a planned economy and trying their hand at the game that Soviets had decades to master (and eventually lost) but Western governments have been justly constrained to avoid, Western governments ought to listen to what past market and democratic preferences reveal about what people actually want.

People want quality adjusted life years (QALY). People pay for QALY by purchasing gym subscriptions while smoking and for safety features in their cars while driving recklessly. Governments want sexy headlines and money to buy sexy headlines. Experts want to show off their craft. But people still want QALY, which means kids do not want to spend a year hungry and confined in a stuffy apartment with depressed and underemployed parents; which means the old want to continue socialising with their friends and, through the windows of their living rooms, watch the life continue instead of reliving the WWII; which means the middle-aged are willing to bet on retaining the dignity of keeping their jobs and taking care of their families against the 2% chance of dying from the virus.

Suppose 1% of the US population die from the virus. Suppose the value of life is 10 million USD, which is the number used by the US Department of Transportation. The US population is 330 million. The value of the induced 3.3 million deaths then is 33 trillion USD. With the US yearly GDP at 22 trillion, the value of these deaths is about a year and a half of lost income. Seemingly, the country should be willing to accept a 1.5 year-long shutdown in return for saving 1% of its citizens.

The above argument has three problems that overstate the attraction of the shutdown:

  1. The argument is based on the implicit and the unrealistic assumption that the economy will reinvent itself in the image of the productive capitalist economy that it was before the complete shutdown, and will do so as soon as the shutdown has been lifted.
  2. The argument neglects the fact that the virus disproportionately hits the old, who have fewer and less healthy years left to live.
  3. The argument neglects the fact that shutting down an economy costs lives. The months of the shutdown are lost months of life. Spending a year in a shutdown robs an American of a year out of the 80 years that he can be expected to live. This is a 1/80=%1.25 mortality rate, which the society pays in exchange for averting the 1% mortality rate from coronavirus.

It is hard to believe that individuals would be willing to stop the world and get off in order to avert a 1% death rate. Individuals naturally engage in risky activities such as driving, working (and suffering on-the-job accidents), and, more importantly, breathing. Allegedly, 200,000 Americans die from pollution every year. Halting an economy for a year would save all those people. Stopping the economy for 15 years would be even better, and save all the lives that coronavirus would take. Indeed, stopping the economy is a gift that keeps giving, every year, while coronavirus deaths can be averted only once. Yet, with the exception of some climate change fundamentalists, there were no calls for stopping the economy before the pandemic.

The economy shutdown due to coronavirus seems to be motivated by the same lack of faith in progress and society’s ability to mobilise to find technological solutions (if not for this strain of the virus then for the future ones), and by the Catholic belief in the virtue of self-flagellation of the kind sported by climate-change fundamentalists of Greta’s persuasion. This lack of faith is not wholly the responsibility of governments and is shared by the citizens.

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Recommended Reading

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 28, 2020
in Recommendations
. 14 Comments

1. Bernie Sanders says (repeatedly) that he wants the United States to be more like Sweden. Bring it on! No estate or inheritance taxes, no minimum wage, a much higher ratio of consumption taxes to income taxes, an income tax system that is by some reasonable standards far less progressive, school choice, high deductibles and copays for medical care, lighter regulatory burdens and free trade. And a government that has shrunk by a third over the last few decades, ever since the Swedes got fed up with the economic stagnation that went hand-in-hand with the old-style Swedish socialism of Sanders’s fantasies. Farad Zakaria says all this and more in a spectacularly good op-ed at the Washington Post.

2. The ever-thoughtful Robin Hanson observes that if a whole lot of us are going to be struck by COVID-19, it would be a whole lot better for us not to all get sick at once. If I were pretty sure (maybe a bit surer than I am now) that I was destined to get sick eventually, I’d much rather have it be now than a few months later when 70% of my neighbors — including 70% of medical personnel, 70% of food providers, etc. — are all sick too. So maybe it’s time to start incentivizing people to expose themselves, get their illnesses over with, and be immune when the rest of us need them. Robin points out there’s plenty of precedent — parents used to be (and for all I know, still are) routinely advised that when one kid gets chicken pox, it’s a good idea to expose the others, because it’s easier to treat three at once then three in succession. (Of course the parents are aiming to bunch while Robin is aiming to minimize bunching, but the point in both cases is to think about how much bunching is optimal and then aim for it.) More here, with, as usual in a Hanson post, much worth pondering.

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The Rules of Excommunication

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 24, 2020
in Bad Reasoning, Current Events and Politics
. 19 Comments

If Bernie Sanders wants to say that Fidel Castro occasionally did something good, while acknowledging that he often did things that were very bad, I think that’s a reasonable position. (It might also be reasonable to say that Adolf Hitler occasionally did something good, though offhand I can’t think of a good example.)

But surely — surely — if it’s reasonable to say this about Castro, then it’s enormously more reasonable to say that there were good people among the protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, while acknowledging that there were also some very bad people. Because I have not the slightest shred of a doubt that the fraction of people on either side of that Charlottesville protest who were basically good is enormously greater than the fraction of Castro’s policies that were basically good.

You might want to argue that it’s not okay to acknowledge any goodness at all in a Hitler or a Castro or a large crowd of people that includes some number of violent neo-Nazis. I wouldn’t agree with you, because I think it’s always okay to acknowledge anything that happens to be true. But if that’s your position, you have to decide where to draw the line, and if you draw the line in a way that puts Trump beyond the pale, then Sanders is way beyond the pale.

In other words, I see how you can excommunicate both of them, I see how you can excommunicate just Sanders, and I see how you can excommunicate neither. My preference is neither. If your preference is otherwise, we can cheerfully disagree. But if you want to excommunicate just Trump, I’m very skeptical that you’re applying anything like a consistent standard. Feel free to prove me wrong in comments.

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Stop-And-Think

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 17, 2020
in Bad Reasoning, Current Events and Politics
. 19 Comments

I hold these truths to be self-evident:

  1. Any law whatsoever, no matter how desirable on balance, will impose some costs on someone somewhere.
  2. In any society with more than about 12 people, it is virtually certain that those costs will be borne unequally.
  3. If the costs are borne unequally, then the costs borne by various individuals are virtually certain to be non-trivially correlated with at least one observable characteristic.

For example: A law that says you have to pick up after your dog will be costlier for dog owners than for non-dog-owners. Dog owners, depending on the community, will be either disproportionately old or disproportionately young or disproportionately rich or disproportionately poor or disproportionately ill or disproportionately healthy.

Therefore, unless you are willing to conclude that all laws are bad essentially without exception, you cannot argue that a law is bad just because it imposes individual costs in a way that is correlated with observable characteristics.

Therefore when Michael Bloomberg is criticized for supporting a stop-and-frisk policy because it caused disproportionate pain to young people with dark skin, his critics are being either disingenuous or unthoughtful.

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Swamp Creatures

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 11, 2020
in Current Events and Politics
. 47 Comments

Here’s what I saw on the news tonight:

1) A President exploiting the power of his office to manipulate the justice system.

2) A presidential candidate boasting about how, in her first act as a state legislator, she exploited the power of her office to manipulate the insurance market (by requiring the purchase of additional insurance to cover the cost of extended hospital stays for new mothers of hospitalized infants).

The President seeks to change judicial outcomes for the benefit of his small band of cronies. The presidential candidate sought to change market outcomes for what she portrayed as the benefit of a small number of patients.

At least the President seems to know what he’s doing. The presidential candidate seems not to have understood, and still not to understand (or at least pretends not to understand), that you don’t make people better off by forcing them to buy additional insurance after the market has already revealed that they have other priorities.

I also saw a bunch of commentators who, like me, are outraged, appalled, and frightened by the arrogance of the President. None of them offered any comment on the arrogance of the presidential candidate — who, frighteningly enough, seems to me to be probably the least dreadful of the alternatives.

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Innumeracy at CNN

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 11, 2020
in Uncategorized
. 6 Comments

At the moment (and it’s been this way for quite a while), CNN has Amy Klobuchar 84 votes behind Pete Buttigieg, and 2.1% of the vote behind Pete Buttigieg. Which should mean that the total number of votes counted is about 4000. But Klobuchar and Buttigieg have about 11,000 each, and Bernie Sanders has more than that. None of the anchors seems even slightly perturbed by this.

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Essential Reading

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on January 6, 2020
in Books and Self-Promotion
. 1 Comment

essential

The Essential Milton Friedman is now available from Amazon and other sellers, in an electronic edition priced — thanks to the generosity of the Fraser Institute— at an incredibly low 99 cents. I hope this is a subsidy that even Professor Friedman would approve. If you prefer an actual hardcopy book you can hold in your hands, you can request one (for roughly the price of shipping) by emailing publications@fraserinstitute.org . Either way, you’ll save so much money you can afford to pick up a copy of Can You Outsmart an Economist? while you’re shopping.

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The Value of Life — What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on January 1, 2020
in Back of the Envelope, Economics, Geek stuff, Policy and WTF?
. 15 Comments

Trapeze Artist

Edited to add: As Salim suggests in comments, the entire problem is that I assumed an implausible value for wealth (which should be interpreted as lifetime consumption). With a more plausible number, everything makes sense. Mea culpa for not realizing this right away. I will leave this post up as a monument to my rashness, but have inserted boldfaced comments in appropriate places to update for my new understanding.

This is bugging me. It’s a perfectly simple exercise in valuing lives for the purposes of cost-benefit analysis. I would not hesitate to assign it to my undergraduates. But it leads me to a very unsettling and unexpected place, and I want to know how to avoid that place.

It’s also a little geeky, so I hope someone geeky will answer — ideally, someone geeky who thinks about this stuff for a living.

Start here: You’re a trapeze artist who currently works without a net. There’s a small probability p that you’ll fall someday, and if you fall you’ll die. You have the opportunity to buy a net that is sure to save you. What are you willing to pay for that net?

Well, let’s take U to be your utility function and W your existing wealth. If you don’t buy the net, your expected utility is

p U(death)+(1-p) U(W)

But we can simplify this by adding a constant to your utility function so that U(death)=0. So if you don’t buy the net, your expected utility is just

(1-p )U(W)

If you do buy a net at price C, then you’re sure to live, with utility

U(W-C) = U(W) – C U′ (W)

where the equal sign means “approximately equal” and the approximation is justified by the assumption that the probability of falling (p) is small, so your willingness to pay (C) is presumably also small.

Equating these two expected utilities gives me C = p U(W)/U′ (W). If we set V = U(W)/U′ (W), then C = pV. That is, you’re willing to pay pV to protect yourself from a p-chance of death. This justifies calling V the “value of your life” and using this value in cost-benefit calculatios regarding public projects that have some small chance of saving your life (guard rails, fire protection, etc.)

So far, so good, I think. But now let’s see what happens when we posit a particular utility function.

I will posit U(W) = log (W), which is a perfectly standard choice for this sort of toy exercise, though actual real-world people are probably a bit more risk-averse than this. Except I can’t just leave it at U(W) = log(W), because my analysis requires me to add some constant T to make the utility of death equal to zero.

So let’s take E to be the income-equivalent of death; that is, living with E dollars is exactly as attractive as not living at all. Then I have to choose T so that log(E) + T = 0. In other words, T = -log(E).

Now I know that, with your current wealth equal to W, the value of your life is U(W)/U'(W) = W log(W/E) .

Now as a youngish but promising trapeze artist, you’ve probably got some modest savings, so lets make your current wealth W=50,000 (with everything measured in dollars). (Edited to add: This was the source of all the difficulty. W represents something like lifetime consumption, so 50,000 is a ridiculously small number. Let’s go with 5 million instead.) Then here is the value of your life, as a function of E, the income-equivalent of death.

If E = .0001 (that is, if dying seems just as attractive to you as living with your wealth equal one-one-hundredth of a penny), then the value of your life is $1 million. (Edited to add: This should actually be E= 4.1 million dollars, which is considerably more than one-one-hundredth of a penny.)

If E = 6.92 x 10-82, then the value of your life is $10 million. (Edited to add: This should be E = $677,000 which might be a plausible figure.)

If E = 1.29 x 10-864, then the value of your life is $100 million. (Edited to add: This should be E equal to about one cent, which is of course implausible, but that’s fine, because a $100 million value of life is also implausible.)

Edited to add: I won’t continue to edit the details in the rest of this post, but I think this is all straightened out now. Thanks to those who chimed in, and sorry to have taken your time on this!

Now I am extremely skeptical that you, I, or anyone else is capable of envisioning the difference between living on 10-82 dollars and living on 10-864 dollars. Yet the decision of whether to value your life at $10 million or at $100 million hinges entirely on which of these seems more to you to be the utility-equivalent of death.

There is some purely theoretical level at which this is no problem. It is possible that you’d rather die than live on 10-864 dollars and would rather live on 10-863 dollars than die. But I am extremely skeptical of any real-world cost-benefit analysis that hinges on this distinction.

(And this is the range in which we have to be worried, since empirical estimates of the value of life tend to come in somewhere around $10 million.)

If I make you less risk-averse — say with a relative risk aversion coefficient of 4 — almost the entire problem disappears. But the tiny part that remains is still plenty disturbing. Then I get:

If E = .007 (that is, about 2/3 of a penny), the value of your life is $1 million.

If E = .003 (about 1/3 of a penny), your life is worth $10 million.

If E = .0015 (a sixth of a penny), your life is worth $100 million.

So we need to tell the folks in accounting to value your life at either $1 million or $100 million, depending on where you draw the suicide line between having two thirds of a penny and having one sixth of a penny.

This is nuts, right? And how squeamish should it make me about the whole value-of-life literature? And what, if anything, am I missing?

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Aha!

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 26, 2019
in Math, Ontology, Philosophy and Video
. 20 Comments

Christmas week seems like a good time to share this video of my talk on “Truth, Provability and the Fabric of the Universe” delivered in March, 2018 in Madison, Wisconsin. The venue was the Free Thought Festival sponsored by a student group that goes by the umbrella title of “Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics” (AHA for short).

The video is below (or will be soon if you’re patient; it might take a minute or two to load). (Edited to add: I believe I’ve fixed things so it loads quickly now; please let me know if there are any problems.)

Or you can either:

  • click here for a larger display of the same video

    • Or:

  • click here for a (far) higher quality video that might (or might not) take a bit longer to load.

A big hat tip to Lisa Talpey for cleaning up the video and making it possible to see both my face and the slides at the same time.

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Next in Line?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 21, 2019
in Current Events and Musings
. 12 Comments

trump

Let me preface this post by saying that this post is not intended as some backhanded way of suggesting that Trump supporters are disproportionately ignorant. I am pretty confident that rational ignorance (and perhaps even a dollop of irrational ignorance?) is pretty rampant among voters of all persuasions.

That having been said: I am idly curious as to what fraction of those Trump supporters who oppose impeachment/removal are guided by a belief that if Trump is removed from office, then Hillary Clinton will become president. Are there any survey data on this?

Replies that directly address the question about survey data, or that offer plausible arguments based at least partly on logic or evidence, are on-topic. Honest speculation about similar false beliefs among voters of any stripe are on-topic, especially if they come with data and/or plausible arguments. Digressions about what a hero or a villain Mr. Trump is, and what fate he does or does not deserve, are decidedly off-topic on this thread.

Edited to add: I should have added, and am adding now, that the reciprocal question is equally interesting: How many anti-Trumpers favor impeachment/removal because they believe it will make Hilary Clinton president?

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That British Election

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 12, 2019
in Current Events
. 14 Comments

In a showdown between nationalism and socialism, it’s hard to know who to root for. I guess we can be thankful they didn’t form a coalition and compromise on national socialism.

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Life Lessons

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 1, 2019
in Bad Reasoning and Current Events
. 44 Comments

The Washington Post and others of that ilk have been sounding the alarm about declining life expectancy in the U.S., driven mostly by rising death rates due to opioid use and obesity among the young and middle-aged.

There’s something terribly wrong says the Post headline. Maybe. But the content of the article suggests that a better headline might have been There’s something to celebrate. Certainly the article offers no argument or evidence for the former interpretation.

There is something to celebrate if rising death rates result from voluntary, informed choices. The thing to celebrate, of course, is not the deaths themselves, but the fact that people have found something worth dying for — just as, when you buy a house, I’ll congratulate not for the expense, but for finding something that made the expense worthwhile.

You’d think (or at least I‘d think) this was entirely obvious, but apparently it’s not obvious to everyone, so maybe it’s worth offering an extreme example. Suppose we’re all tied to beds in hospital rooms, with doctors monitoring every blip in our health and attending to it immediately. As a result, we mostly live long and miserable lives. Now one day, we engineer a mass escape. Life expectancy goes down for reasons that call for a celebration.

Opioids offer escape from miserable lives. They also offer enhancement of non-miserable lives. The decision to be obese comes with a great many perks — you can spend a lot more time eating M&M’s and a lot less on the treadmill. (I myself spend much of my treadmill time wondering whether I’ve made the wrong choice.) Like all good things, these come with costs. In this case, the cost is in the form of increased mortality. Apparently, people think that’s a cost worth paying. We should be glad for them.

Now you can certainly tell a story in which mortality due to opioid use is up because the world has gotten so much worse that there’s more demand for escape. That would be a bad trend (though even then, we’d want to celebrate the ability of opioids to mitigate some of that misery). Or you can tell a story in which mortality due to opioid use is up because people have gotten so much richer they can afford to be opioid addicts, or because opioids have gotten better, or because they’ve become more readily available. That would be a good trend. The Washington Post article alludes to the former possibility, without a shred of a good reason to think it’s the right story, as opposed to one of many possible stories.

You know what else is way up over the past couple of decades? Expenditures on smartphones. That sounds really really bad if you choose to ignore the fact that the people who are spending all that money get to have smarthpones. Likewise, an upward trend in mortality from M&M consumption sounds really really bad if you choose to ignore the fact that the people who are shortening their life expectancies also get to eat a lot of M&Ms. There is more to life than life expectancy.

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Dear Google: Please Stop Trying to Kill Me

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 27, 2019
in Consumer Advocacy, Outrage, Progress, Rants, Technology and WTF?
. 17 Comments

wm2

When I’m in the car, I use my phone as a music player. Sometimes a song comes on that I’m not in the mood to hear. Once upon a time — in fact, once upon a very recent time — I could say “Okay Google. Next song.” Then the current song would stop and a new song would start. It was all part of Google’s awesome — and free — service. The service was imperfect in some minor ways, but mostly it was awesome and free and I was thankful to have it.

Here’s what happens now when I say “Okay Google. Next song.” The perky Google Assistant voice comes on and says something like “Oh, you want a different song? Okay. Let me sing you one.” Then the perky assistant sings some stupid little jingle for me, and then it returns me to the song I was trying to bypass. My only options at that point are to either a) listen to the rest of the unwanted song, b) try again and have the same thing happen again, which approximately triples my frustration level with each iteration, or c) fumble with my phone, call up the music player, search for the little “next song” button, push it, and try to put the phone back down before I drive into a lamppost. The pattern I’ve developed is to do b) approximately three times, then do c). I hope I’m still alive by the time you read this blog post.

Okay, so the service is still free, and still mostly awesome, right? But I am furious and I think I have a right to be. Let’s review the bidding here. Google has deliberately done the following:

  • Disabled the good and useful “next song” feature, for no apparent reason.
  • Trained its Assistant to mock its users when they try to invoke that longtime feature.
  • Done so in a way that is sure to drive those users into a state of combined frenzy and distraction while they are driving.

Let’s be clear: Mocking users and driving them into a state of frenzy seems to me to be the only conceivable reason for the whole “Here, I’ll sing a song for you, ha ha” bit. I am willing to bet you at substantial odds that no user requested this mockery. It’s apparently put there by Google (or perhaps by a rogue programmer on his last day of work, and overlooked by a lethargic quality control team) for the sole purpose of pissing people off and giving the folks at Google a good chuckle, without regard for possible deadly consequences. It seems to me to be roughly the moral equivalent of throwing watermelons off overpasses.

And just to make that analogy fair: If someone, through sheer technical brilliance and the goodness of his heart, ever designs the world’s most awesome overpass, builds it at his own expense, offers it to the world for free, maintains it for years, and then one day starts throwing watermelons off it — the main thing I’m going to remember is the watermelons.

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Where I’ll Be

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 15, 2019
in Economics, Events and Self-Promotion
. 1 Comment

kennesaw.small

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Current Events

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 14, 2019
in Current Events, Economics and Heroes
. 4 Comments

Congratulations to the winners of this morning’s exceptionally well-deserved Nobel Prize.

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Wild Surmise

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 12, 2019
in Current Events and Wild Surmise
. 3 Comments

This is pure wild speculation, which should put it squarely in the mainstream of commentary on the death of Jeffrey Epstein.

But: Here’s a guy with a notoriously voracious and exotic sexual appetite, deprived of his customary means of achieving three orgasms per day.

Is it so far-fetched to speculate that his death-by-hanging was a case of autoerotic asphyxiation?

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Slips and Lies

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 9, 2019
in Current Events and Politics
. 28 Comments

One winter day in the midst of her husband’s 1980 presidential campaign, Nancy Reagan told a crowd at the Heritage Foundation that she was happy to see “all this beautiful white snow and all these beautiful white people” — which she instantly corrected to “all these beautiful people”. I happened to be standing no more than a few yards from her at the time, and it was crystal clear from her speech pattern, her demeanor, and her facial expression that her slip of the tongue conveyed no deeper meaning (conscious or otherwise). I am quite sure that if snow had been green, she’d have referred to “all this beautiful green snow and all these beautiful green people”.

Much of the press, of course, thought otherwise, or pretended to, leading to a brief contretemps that fortunately blew over.

I was not present at Joe Biden’s recent speech, and I have not seen the video, but I am essentially certain that the phrase “Poor kids are just as bright as white kids” — which Biden, like Mrs. Reagan, instantly corrected — was an equally innocent slip of the tongue. I have little patience for those who are attempting to profit by suggesting otherwise. What Mr. Biden meant to say was that “poor kids are just as bright as wealthy kids”. And therein lies the true outrage. Because that statement is a lie.

Poor kids are not just as bright as wealthy kids. The sources for this empirical fact are easy to find, so I won’t review them here. There are several plausible explanations. First, IQ is highly correlated with wealth and IQ is heritable. Next, poverty is stressful, and stress impedes cognitive development. Et cetera.

Continue reading ‘Slips and Lies’

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The Prestige Cost of Affirmative Action

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 14, 2019
in Back of the Envelope
. 14 Comments

I. The Issue

It’s often claimed (at least by politicians, journalists and their ilk) that affirmative action tends to “stigmatize” succcessful members of the favored group, in the sense that a Harvard professorship is less prestigious when it’s held by someone who might not have made it to Harvard without an affirmative action boost.

It’s approximately equally often claimed that this is effect is too small to worry about.

I’m not aware of anyone on either side of this argument having attempted to settle the question with arithmetic.

In their defense, the question can’t be settled by arithmetic, because it’s pretty hard to quantify the difference in “prestige” between a professorship that reveals you’re likely to be in the top one-one-hundredth of one percent of the population and a professorship that only reveals you’re likely to be in the top two-one-hundredths of one percent of the population. But we can at least give some answers contingent on different assumptions about this issue. (And contingent also, of course, on various modeling assumptions.)

II. A Model

To that end, here is a primitive first-pass model:

Continue reading ‘The Prestige Cost of Affirmative Action’

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Measuring Prestige

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 12, 2019
in Musings
. 22 Comments

You live in a world with 1000 other people, only one of whom can beat you at chess. You can beat the other 999. This gives you great prestige, because this is a world where chess skill is exalted above all else.

Now your chess skills atrophy, and all of a sudden you find that 100 people can beat you at chess; you can beat the other 900. You’ve lost some prestige.

I want to quantify the fraction of your prestige that’s gone missing. Of course the answer could be anything at all depending on how you choose to quantify “prestige”, but I’m looking for a definition that most people will agree captures their intuitions (or at least doesn’t grate too harshly against their intuitions).

Attempt One: If N people can beat you, then your prestige is measured by 1/N. Therefore your prestige has fallen from 1/1=1 to 1/100 = .01. You’ve lost 99% of your prestige.

Attempt Two: Your prestige is measured by the number of people you can beat. Therefore your prestige has fallen from 999 to 900. You’ve lost just under 10% of your prestige.

Which of these seems more “right” to you? And do you have an “Attempt Three” that seems even better?

In a few days, I’ll tell you why I asked.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

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Price Gouging at Its Best

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 11, 2019
in Books, Economics and Quotes
. 0 Comments

From Frank Harris‘s first-person account of the Great Chicago Fire:

Continue reading ‘Price Gouging at Its Best’

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Cultural Interlude

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 5, 2019
in Current Events, Favorites and Music
. 4 Comments

I’m a little surprised that this, from one of my all-time favorite bands, hasn’t been getting more airplay lately:

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Thursday Puzzle/Science Lesson

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 23, 2019
in Puzzles and Science
. 20 Comments

nickelEvery day, a man comes to my door with a United States nickel in his hand. He asks me whether I’d prefer to examine the heads side (which is always painted either black or white) or the tails side (which is always painted either red or green). I choose each day according to my whims.

And the same thing happens to my sister. Different man, different coin, but each day he’s there with a painted nickel, offering to let her examine either the heads side or the tails side.

Sometimes we call each other to compare notes on the colors we’ve seen. Here’s what we’ve concluded:

The Rules

  1. Our heads sides are never both white.
  2. Whenever one of our tail sides is green, the other one’s heads side is white.

We have thousands of observations to support these conclusions: On days when we both examine our heads sides, we never both see white. On days when we examine opposite sides and one sees a green tail, the other always sees a white head.

The Brain Teaser: Today we both chose Tails and both saw green. What colors were on our Heads sides?

Solution: By point 2) above, they were both white. But by point 1) above, that can’t happen. So….?

So what now?

Continue reading ‘Thursday Puzzle/Science Lesson’

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Oxycontin: Yea or Nay

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 16, 2019
in Back of the Envelope, Current Events, Economics and Policy
. 24 Comments

Should oxycontin be legal? Here’s what the back of my envelope says:

oxycontinIn the U.S., there are about 50 million prescriptions a year for oxycontin, most of them legitimate and for the purpose of alleviating severe pain. I’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess that the average prescription is for a two-week supply.

There are also (at least if you believe what’s on the Internet) about 20,000 deaths a year in the U.S. related to oxycontin abuse. If we value a life at $10,000,000 (which is a standard estimate based on observed willingness-to-pay for life-preserving safety measures), that’s a cost of 200 billion dollars a year, or $4000 per prescription.

If those were all the costs and benefits, the conclusion would be that oxycontin should be legal if (and only if) the average American is willing to pay $4000 to avoid two weeks of severe pain. I’m guessing that might be true in some cases (particularly when the pain is excruciating) but not on average. So by that (incomplete) reckoning, oxycontin should either be off the market entirely or regulated in some entirely new way that will dramatically reduce those overdose deaths.

But of course what this overlooks on the benefit side is all the “abusers” whose lives have been enriched by oxycontin. This includes the vast majority who use and live to tell the tale, and also some of the OD’ers, for whom a few years of oxycontin highs might well have been preferable to a longer lifetime with no highs at all. Relatedly, what this overlooks on the cost side is that the average “abuser” is likely to value his life at considerably less than the typical $10 million — as evidenced by the fact that he’s electing to take these risks in the first place. Also relatedly, it overlooks the likelihood that many of those who overdose on oxycontin would, in its absence, be killing themselves some other way.

If the back of your envelope is larger than mine and you make those corrections, I’m reasonably confident that your bottom line will come out pro-oxycontin. (Please share that bottom line!) I am however, mildly surprised (and — both as a blogger who prefers slam-dunk arguments and as a libertarian who prefers to come down on the side of freedom — mildly disappointed) that the first quick-and-dirty calculation comes out the other way.

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Jamie Whyte!

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on April 4, 2019
in Events
. 8 Comments

jamiewhyteJamie Whyte, whose has been at various times an academic philosopher (and winner of the Analysis prize for the best paper by a philosopher under 30), a consultant to the banking industry with Oliver Wyman, a foreign currency trader, the leader of New Zealand’s ACT political party, the research director at the Institute for Economic Affairs, the author of several books that every thinking person should read, a frequent contributor to the European edition of the Wall Street Journal and other publications of that ilk, the incoming editor of Standpoint Magazine, an occasional guest poster on this very blog — and the deliverer of one of the most thought-provoking and entertaining lectures I’ve ever heard when he visited Rochester a few years back — will be here again next week, with two events open to the general public. They are:

Continue reading ‘Jamie Whyte!’

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