Category Archive for ‘Current Events’ at Steven Landsburg | The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and Physics

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.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Stop-And-Think

Published

Continue reading ‘Stop-And-Think’

on February 17, 2020

in Bad Reasoning, Current Events and Politics

. 19 Comments

I hold these truths to be self-evident:

Any law whatsoever, no matter how desirable on balance, will impose some costs on someone somewhere.
In any society with more than about 12 people, it is virtually certain that those costs will be borne unequally.
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.

Swamp Creatures

Published

on February 11, 2020

. 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.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Next in Line?

Published

on December 21, 2019

in Current Events and Musings

. 12 Comments

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?

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

That British Election

Published

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.

Life Lessons

Published

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.

Current Events

Published

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.

Wild Surmise

Published

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.

Slips and Lies

Published

on August 9, 2019

Continue reading ‘Slips and Lies’

. 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.

Cultural Interlude

Published

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:

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Oxycontin: Yea or Nay

Published

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:

In 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.

What I Get and What I Don’t Get

Published

on March 14, 2019

in Current Events

. 46 Comments

If you get accepted to college because you faked being a sports star, pretty much everyone is outraged. I get that.

If you get accepted at college because you are a sports star, almost nobody seems to mind. That’s what I don’t get.

Either way, you’ve climbed the ladder by prevailing in a largely meaningless zero-sum (and hence socially useless) game, thereby signalling a dollop of narcissism together with a few mostly irrelevant talents or advantages. What’s the difference?

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

A Matter of Perspective

Published

Continue reading ‘A Matter of Perspective’

on January 9, 2019

in Current Events, Outrage and Politics

. 26 Comments

Let’s stipulate that:

A. The border wall is stupid.

B. The border wall would cost about $5 billion.

According to Democratic congressional leadership, these reasons suffice to withhold funding for the border wall.

This is a radical new stance for the congressional leadership, which last year rejected the Trump administration’s bid to cut roughly $300 million a year from the budgets of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Assuming a 3% interest rate, that’s a present value of about $10 billion — enough to fund two border walls. (Take that, you pesky Canadians!).

One could argue that a border wall is not only stupid but a grotesque symbol of xenophobia. One could equally well argue that a National Endowment for the Arts is not only stupid but a grotesque symbol of government overreach and the politicization of everything.

Walls Versus Walls

Published

on December 31, 2018

in Bad Reasoning, Current Events and Outrage

. 21 Comments

The President of the United States tweets that his proposed border wall is essentially “the same thing” as a wall built around the Obamas’ house (or presumably anyone else’s house) to keep away intruders.

No, you idiot. There is absolutely no relevant similarity between a wall somebody builds around his own house and a wall that you build between other people’s houses. The effect of a wall around my house, if I had one (and if I controlled the gates), would be to increase my control over who enters my living room. The effect of a border wall would be to decrease my control over who enters my living room.

That doesn’t prove that the border wall is a bad idea. But if the President believes there are good arguments for his pet project, why does he resort to ridiculous analogies that have absolutely zero chance of being taken seriously by anybody on either side of the issue? I’m pretty sure Rex Tillerson had this right.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Kavanaugh v. Thomas

Published

on September 20, 2018

Continue reading ‘Kavanaugh v. Thomas’

. 32 Comments

I keep hearing that the matter of Brett Kavanaugh is “just like Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill all over again”.

Seriously?

Point the First: Clarence Thomas stood accused of boorishness. Brett Kavanaugh stands accused of violent attempted rape. If all the accusations against Thomas were true, he deserved an elbow to the ribs. If the accusations against Kavanaugh are true, he should probably be in jail.

To suggest that there is even a rough equivalence here is sheer madness.

Quick Thoughts on Kavanaugh

Published

Continue reading ‘Quick Thoughts on Kavanaugh’

on September 17, 2018

in Current Events

. 29 Comments

First: Neither you nor I know who’s telling the truth, who’s honestly misremembering, who’s dissembling, and who’s doing some combination of all three. But if we want to think about what should happen next in the real world, it pays to think first about what should happen next in a hypothetical world where we can somehow be sure that Professor Ford’s account is 100% accurate. In that world, we need to ask this question: Should a night of bad behavior at age 17 be punished by a career derailment at age 53 (assuming there’s been no punishment in the interim)?

The answer, of course, depends on the benefits and costs of that punishment.

First the benefits: Punishments are beneficial when they deter other bad behavior. So we should embrace this punishment only insofar as we believe that some future 17 year old boy will be deterred from committing sexual assualt by the prospect of a career derailment 35 years down the line. How big is that deterrent effect? Not only do I have no idea; I also have no idea how to start forming an idea. That is, I can’t think of any good empirical strategy for measuring such a deterrent effect. We have good data on the deterrent effect of imprisonment, of capital punishment, and of fines — but not, as far as I know, on the deterrent effect of long-delayed career consequences. (I’ll be very glad if any reader can prove me wrong about this.) I do, however, have a guess. My guess is that for boys of the social milieu that Kavanaugh came from, this effect could loom pretty large. True, no 17 year old really expects to be nominated to the Supreme Court some day, but plenty of 17 year olds at prep schools have lavish dreams of future success, and seem to care quite a bit about preserving that future. If my guess is right, the benefits of killing this nomination might be pretty big.

In the Matter of Sarah Jeong

Published

Continue reading ‘In the Matter of Sarah Jeong’

on August 6, 2018

in Bad Reasoning, Current Events and Journalism

. 16 Comments

Two decades after hiring Paul Krugman, the New York Times has doubled down by hiring the venomous Sarah Jeong, whose old tweets include the following rhetorical question:

Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?

According to Jeong’s supporters, the tweet needs to be read in context — it was, you see, intended as a parody of Andrew Sullivan’s audacious piece in New York magazine, advocating research — or at least opposing the suppression of research — into racial differences in IQ.

I’m all for parody. I’m all for taking other people’s logic (and my own!), pushing it to its limits, seeing where it leads, and thereby calling attention to its weaknesses. And I am outraged when authors engaged in this enterprise are taken out of context. If I say “X”, and if “Y” is both analogous to X and clearly outrageous, then Sarah Jeong or anyone else ought to be able to tweet “Y” by way of making fun of me, without having to face down a gang of yahoos accusing her of believing “Y”.

But that’s not what this is about. Because — and here is the crux of the matter — the analogue to

Are some races genetically disposed to be less intelligent than others?

Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun?

which is not at all the same thing as

Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?

The problem here is not that Sarah Jeong believes white people are fit only to live underground like groveling goblins. (I feel pretty confident, in fact, that she believes no such thing.) The problem here is that she is attempting to refute Andrew Sullivan’s logic by writing down an analogy (so far so good) and then, having done so, tacking on the phrase “being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins”, which in no way reflects anything Andrew Sullivan said, and which Sarah Jeong pulled out of her ass.

Down on the Farms

Published

on July 25, 2018

Continue reading ‘Down on the Farms’

. 30 Comments

Suppose there’s a guy in your neighborhood who routinely harasses strangers on the street, calling them ugly names, maybe threatening them with violence, but always stopping short of anything that’s actually illegal.

You consider this bad behavior, so you work to pass some laws that will discourage it. Maybe you criminalize the behavior; maybe you tax it.

The new laws turn out to be somewhat effective. The guy tones it down. He still harasses people, but only half as much.

Question: Do we owe this guy something? Should the taxpayers cut him a check so he won’t feel so bad about having to rein himself in?

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that most of you will answer “no”.

Here’s why I ask:

The President of the United States believes that under current circumstances, much international trade is a bad thing and ought to be discouraged. Unfortunately, there’s a bunch of farmers out there who have been behaving very badly (i.e. trading with foreigners) and the law hasn’t done much to stop them. So the President has expanded the scope of the law to punish this bad behavior via tariffs. And then he’s turned right around and announced a plan to compensate the bad guys.

Good Intentions; Bad Policy

Published

Continue reading ‘Good Intentions; Bad Policy’

on January 18, 2018

in Current Events, Economics and Policy

. 29 Comments

I learn from Scott Sumner’s blog that in many California cities, residents with past marijuana convictions will jump to the head of the line for licenses to sell the drug legally — this by way of compensating them for past persecution.

Scott approves. I don’t, for two reasons:

First, if you want to compensate people for past persecution, the right way to do it is with cash, not by misallocating productive resources. If there must be licenses, they should be allocated to those who can use them most efficiently, regardless of any past history.

Second, drug dealers have never been the primary victims of anti-drug laws. They can’t be, because there is free entry and exit from that industry. Anti-drug enforcement leads to exit, which in turn leads to higher profits for those who remain — and the exit continues until the profits are high enough to compensate for the risks. One way to think about this: All those “persecuted” drug dealers were, in effect, employing the government to stifle their competition, and paying a fair price for that privilege in the form of occasionally being convicted and punished themselves.

The primary victims of anti-drug legislation are potential consumers who were deterred by artificially high prices. How do you compensate those victims? You can’t. In a population of 1000 people who have never used drugs, it’s quite impossible to identify the 200 or 300 or 400 who would have happily indulged if only the price had been lower.

The Tax Bill

Published

on December 16, 2017

Continue reading ‘The Tax Bill’

. 34 Comments

Compared to an ideal tax code, it’s awful.

Compared to the pre-existing tax code, it’s a vast improvement.

Compared to my expectations going in, it’s a pleasant surprise. It required some real political courage to pass this thing, and political courage always surprises me. There’s also a lot of good sense in it, which sometimes surprises me even more.

Compared to what I suspect we could have had, if only that same good sense and political courage had been harnessed by a president who was capable of understanding the bill’s content, participating in its formulation, and selling it to the public, it’s something of a disappointment.

Scott Sumner does a superb job of summarizing the good, the bad and the neutral. Instead of quoting him extensively, I’ll (strongly) encourage you to go read the original. A few additional remarks:

Weight Loss Advice From Big Name Economists

Published

Continue reading ‘Weight Loss Advice From Big Name Economists’

on October 23, 2017

in Current Events and Economics

. 5 Comments

In my dream, Greg Mankiw and Larry Summers are advising a friend about weight loss.

Mankiw says: If you eat fewer calories, you’ll lose weight.

Summers replies: Not so fast! Sometimes if you eat less ice cream, you crave more cake. Then your calorie intake won’t change and you won’t lose weight. Greg’s advice is fine as an academic theory, but I doubt it will work in practice.

(Note here that Greg never mentioned ice cream in the first place.)

Of course Greg is 100% right, both in theory and in practice. If you eat fewer calories, you will lose weight. Summers responds that if you don’t eat fewer calories, you might not lose weight. True, but entirely off the mark.

I mention this because Mankiw had a recent blog post where he argued that if you cut taxes on capital income you’ll see a big rise in wages. (I happen to have blogged about this twice already in the past 24 hours, but those posts are irrelevant here.) Summers has replied that Mankiw is right in theory but likely to be wrong in practice, and lists three reasons. The first of those reasons comes down to saying that if you cut the corporate income tax, corporations are likely to end up paying more in other taxes, so you haven’t really cut the capital tax after all.

(Note here that Greg never mentioned corporate taxes in the first place.)

Okay, fine. So if you haven’t cut the capital tax, then Greg’s observation doesn’t apply. Likewise, if you haven’t really cut calories, you shouldn’t expect any weight loss. That’s not remotely a refutation.

It’s All About the Rectangles

Published

Continue reading ‘It’s All About the Rectangles’

on October 22, 2017

in Current Events, Economics and Policy

. 27 Comments

Greg Mankiw has a provocative post on how wages are affected by a cut in the tax rate on capital income. The short version: The effect is huge. If the government commits to a permanent tax cut that costs it $1 in revenue this year, then in the long run, annual wage payments will rise by $1.50 (and the annual revenue shortfall will be even less than $1).
.

That strikes me as huge. Wages grow by more than government revenue falls — in fact, by a factor of about 1/(1-t), where t is the initial tax rate. Mankiw’s $1.50 comes from plugging in an initial tax rate of 1/3.

Although Mankiw’s calculation is simple, straightforward and convincing, it managed to drive me crazy for a substantial chunk of a day, because I didn’t really understand what was driving it. Now I do. So let me explain.

Unhealthy

Published

on June 23, 2017

Continue reading ‘Unhealthy’

. 38 Comments

I have not read the Senate “health care” bill, but from the various summaries around the web, I am confident that Barack Obama is exactly correct in his pronouncement that this is not a health care bill. Republicans seem to be supporting the bill because it stems the tide of income redistribution and Democrats seem to be opposing it for the same reason.

But a health care bill that does nothing but change the distribution of income is (again in Obama’s words) not a health care bill. It’s an income redistribution bill, and a fairly stupid one at that. If you want either more or less redistribution, the way to do that is to adjust taxes on rich people and payments to poor people, not to muck around with the health care system.

On the other hand, if your goal is to make the health care system more efficient, then you’ll want a health care bill. What would it take to make the health care system more efficient? For one thing, it would require making people less reliant on insurance and more reliant on their own savings (probably in the form of Flexible Saving Accounts and Health Saving Accounts) so that their choices are constrained by an awareness of costs. This Senate bill, it seems, does absolutely nothing to address those issues. In fact, from what I’ve read, it leaves in place the tax deduction for employer-provided insurance (thereby continuing to incentivize people to buy too much insurance) and (at least according to some news articles) adds new taxes on Health Savings Accounts (thereby incentivizing people to rely even more on insurance). If we’re supposed to be marching toward more efficient health care, this sounds like a step backward, not forward.

A Momentous Week

Published

on May 12, 2017

in Current Events, Heroes, History and Math

. 8 Comments

The most exciting news of the past week had nothing to do with James Comey or Donald Trump.

The University of Montpelier has released high-quality scans of about 18,000 pages of notes and scribbles by Alexandre Grothendieck. If you’re competent in both French and the art of deciphering handwriting that was never meant to be readable except to the author, you can while away some hours sifting through them here.

It would be an understatement to say that Grothendieck was never shy about revealing and publicly analyzing his thought processes, but these notes are presumably less filtered than the tens of thousands of pages he chose to share in his lifetime. FOr the many who are already sifting through them, and for the many more who are waiting to hear the reports of the sifters, they will yield new insights into one of the most extraordinary minds in human history.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

The Dire Prognosis

Published

on March 7, 2017

. 67 Comments

Here is what I wrote on this blog the day after the election:

The big loss is that there will be no unified right-of-center voice in American politics. Toomey, Portman and the rest of them will do what they can, but it’s Trump who will be taken to define Republicanism, which is to say that Republicanism will henceforth be pretty much the same thing as Democratism.

It gives me no pleasure to observe that with the new Trump-endorsed Republican health care plan, I stand vindicated.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Missed Opportunities

Published

on March 6, 2017

in Current Events, Economics and Policy

. 51 Comments

I haven’t seen any of the details, but it looks like the Republican health care plan suffers from many of the same defects as Obamacare, and is in some ways worse.

Mainly: As far as I am currently aware, the plan pretty much leaves in place the main ongoing problem with health care, which is that most people are grossly overinsured, so that health care choices are too frequently made by insurance companies instead of by (cost-aware) consumers and providers. The solution, in broad terms, is to replace insurance with individual health savings accounts (which, if you’re worried about this sort of thing, can be just as heavily subsidized as insurance is). Plenty of Republicans know this, and have been saying it for a long time. But — at least according to what’s in the early news reports — they seem to have come up with a bill that ignores it.

In fact, the Republican bill makes things worse in at least one way, by lifting the Cadillac tax on employer-provided health care plans, thereby encouraging even more overinsurance.

Presumably this was the compromise among feuding factions that the Republican caucus was able to hammer out. Presumably, too, a little leadership from the one person with veto power could have yielded a much better outcome. Too bad the one person with veto power is a self-obsessed loonybird. I do believe a President Bush or a President Cruz — or even, perhaps, a President Clinton — would have insisted on something far far better.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Ken Arrow, RIP

Published

on February 22, 2017

in Current Events, Economics and Heroes

. 13 Comments

Ken Arrow was, until his passing today, the world’s greatest living economist. There are so many tributes to him all over the web that it would be superfluous for me to write another. Here’s a nice one.

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

How Many Deaths Does It Take Till He Knows….?

Published

Continue reading ‘How Many Deaths Does It Take Till He Knows….?’

on January 26, 2017

in Back of the Envelope and Current Events

. 83 Comments

President Trump wants to impose a 20% tariff on Mexican imports. How many Americans will that kill? Let’s play with some numbers.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports (I’m looking at Table 13 in that link) that in 2012, approximately 125 million U.S. households spent an average of $731 on fruits and vegetables. That’s about $91 billion altogether.

I learn from this page that the US imports about $9 billion worth of fresh fruits and vegetables each year from Mexico. That is, then, about 10% of our fruit and vegetable consumption.

I learn from various research reports around the web that the price elasticity of demand for fruits and vegetables is somewhere in the vicinity of .50. (Some say higher, some say lower). This means that a 20% tariff — as the president has just called for — will reduce imports by about 10%.

So the Trump tariff should reduce total U.S. fruit and vegetable consumption by about 10% of 10% — that is, about 1%.

(This is, deliberately, a considerable underestimate, since it entirely ignores the fact that the tariff will also lead to increases in the price of American vegetables, leading to further reduced consumption.)

Now here I learn that low fruit and vegetable consumption is associated with a higher risk of degenerative diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, cataracts and brain dysfunction. “More than 200 studies in the epidemiological literature show, with great consistency, an association between low consumption of fruits and vegetables and high cancer incidence.” Many of the mechanisms for this are well understood. For example, folic acid deficiency leads to chromosome breaks and then to cancer. Your health risks do not drop off continuously with your vegetable consumption; instead there are sudden changes — you’re either above or below the level where chromosome breaks occur. (There are similar issues with at least eight other micronutrients — in addition to folic acid — that we get from fruits and vegetables.) About 10% of the U.S. population is below that critical level. Most of those have very low incomes. (The World Health Organization estimates that worldwide, about 5 million people a year die from inadequate fruit and vegetable consumption, and most of those are very poor.) For a first (very rough) approximation, let’s assume that those with folic acid deficiencies are in fact the poorest 10%. You can see here that these are people with individual incomes below about $10,000.

How to Feel (Much) Better About the Outcome of the Presidential Election

Published

on November 19, 2016

. 42 Comments

I want to really marry the public and the private sector.

–Hillary Clinton

Click here to comment or read others’ comments.

Did Gary Johnson Matter?

Published

on November 9, 2016