I’ve long wanted to blog about the astonishing mathematics of Alexandre Grothendieck, who was surely the greatest mathematician of the 20th century and arguably the greatest of all time. This week, I had occasion to blog not about the mathematics per se (I’m still figuring out how to do that in a readable way) but about the remarkable letter from Grothendieck that surfaced last month, and the intellectual property issues that it raises.

Having started the week with one remarkable letter, we ended it with another, this one from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on the issue of secession.

In between, I asked readers to enlighten me about some stuff I just don’t get, we saw new evidence that people are less religious than they say they are, and we used a study on beauty and daughters to illustrate how statistics can deceive.

I’ll return on Monday, probably with a few more thoughts on secession. Have a good weekend!

It was a week of madness. We started with a post on hysteria about debt and deficits, visited Michael Pacanowsky’s classic investigation of whether the utterance “Please Pass the Salt” can cause salt to travel, and dredged up an old proposal to reduce carbon emissions by making everyone wear a device that plugs up one nostril—segueing from the latter into an even crazier proposal from this week’s Washington Post. We rounded out the week with some educational madness, which gave me a chance to plug the brilliant writing of Caitlin Flanagan.

Note: Wednesday’s blogpost currently links to just the first page of Pacanowsky’s article; in the next few days I hope to have permission from the copyright owner to link to the entire thing.

On a less mad note, there’s an economic principle that says it’s best for everything to be taxed equally; paradoxically (until you understand it) this means that capital income should be taxed not at all. Last week, we saw that this is because a tax on capital income implicitly taxes current and future consumption at different rates; on Tuesday of this week, we saw that it’s also because a tax on capital income implicitly taxes current and future labor at different rates.

Next week: More madness, more sanity, more economics, and probably some math and some physics as well. See you then.

Still reeling from the revelation that four Supreme Court Justices have withdrawn their support for the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, I am pulling myself together to bring you this week’s blog roundup. Or actually two weeks’ worth of blog roundup, since I skipped last week’s due to travel.

Continue reading ‘Weekend Roundup’

It was another abbreviated week due to holidays, but we still had time for our first video post, a celebration of Ronald Coase’s 99th birthday (and a summary of the ideas behind his well-deserved Nobel prize), and a bit of silliness before capping off the week (and the year) with a survey of 2009’s Top Ten posts here at the Big Questions blog.

Today I am off to the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in Atlanta, Georgia. As usual, I’m taking Sunday off, but I’ll be back here Monday, blogging from Atlanta.

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.

This was a week of economics, religion and miscellanea.

Two weeks ago, I’d posted the first half of my honors exam in economics. This week I posted the second half, and continued my practice of slowly doling out the answers with a post on the best and worst ways to be taxed.

A complimentary note from my old friend Deirdre McCloskey triggered a thread about religion and inspired my mini-review of John Polkingohorne’s, theology.

An offhand remark from a mobster inspired a thread about remarkable coincidences, and the most recent shallow pontification from the self-proclaimed “Ethicist” inspired me to complain.

I’ll be back on Monday with more deep thoughts and light diversions, along with some holiday gift ideas.