Archive for the 'WTF?' Category

Potpourri

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 25, 2021
in Miscellaneous, Recommendations and WTF?
. 16 Comments
  1. I am delighted to be able to point you to the writings of my friend Herrmann Banks. For years, Herrmann has been sharing brilliant and original insights in private conversations and emails, and for years I’ve been telling him he needs to share them more widely. Now he’s up and running. Enjoy!
  2. Many American highways have “HOV” lanes, reserved for cars with multiple occupants. Sometimes a driver with no passengers will cheat and use those lanes. This is of course a blessing to all the rule-abiding drivers in the regular lanes, which have just gotten a little less crowded. So why do those drivers tend to respond by giving dirty looks to the cheaters who just made their lives better?

    I expect this is related to the phenomenon of apartment-hunters getting angry at landlords who won’t rent to them, even though those landlords are making their search easier by renting to someone and thereby reducing the competition for other apartments.

    But in the case of the landlords, the psychology seems to be something like “Yes, you’ve helped me by renting to others but you could have helped me even more by renting to me!”. (Though this overlooks the fact that anybody could have made your life easier by becoming a landlord and renting to you, so maybe you should be equally angry at pretty much everybody.) Whereas with the HOV lanes, it seems like the cheaters have already done everything they could possibly do for you (unless you think they could do more by getting off the highway completely, making a little more room in the HOV lane, and thereby encouraging someone else to cheat).

    People are odd.

  3. The next time somebody encourages you to “buy local” so you can “keep the money in the community”, try asking how they feel about the federal income tax, which is designed to facilitate the largest geographic redistribution of income ever conceived.

Hat tips to my friends Gerry Sohan for point 2) and John Barry for point 3).

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What is an E-flat idiot?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 14, 2021
in Entertainment and WTF?
. 23 Comments

So I was clicking through the stations on Sirius XM and came upon a rebroadcast of an old Jack Benny radio program from 1953, with Bob Hope as the guest star. There is a live and apparently very appreciative audience that laughs expansively at all the “jokes”. (Yes, the scare-quotes are deliberate.) But one instance stands out from the rest: When Dennis Day informs Bob Hope that, having seen all the Road To… movies, he has something to say. And what, asks Hope, is that? The ensuing dialogue goes like this:

Dennis Day: You’re nothing without Bing Crosby!

Bob Hope: You E-flat idiot!

At this the audience laughs uproariously, out of all proportion to all previous laughter, and for what seems like approximately forever (though I now know that it was about 17 seconds).

Having absolutely no idea what an “E-flat idiot” is, I of course turned to Google, where I get several hits — all of them to pages with lists of something like “the longest laughs in the history of radio”, but not one of which leaves me any more enlightened about what an E-flat idiot actually is.

(I realize it’s probably too much to hope that I’ll ever understand why this was funny, but I’d at least like to know what it means.)

Anyone?

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History Lesson

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 14, 2020
in Current Events, Politics and WTF?
. 44 Comments

Alabama Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville is quoted as saying:

I tell people, my dad fought 76 years ago in Europe to free Europe of socialism. Today, you look at this election, we have half this country that made some kind of movement, now they not believe in it 100 percent, but they made some kind of movement toward socialism. So we’re fighting it right here on our own soil.

Over at MSNBC, Steve Benen responds:

It’s true that Tuberville’s father fought in France during World War II, but if the senator-elect thinks the war was about “freeing Europe of socialism”, he probably ought to read a book or two about the conflict.

Apparently, reading a book or two about World War II is not a prerequisite for writing commentary at MSNBC. I wonder which of the following points Mr. Benen has overlooked:

  • Our primary opponents in the European conflict were known as “the Nazis”.
  • Naziism is/was a dialect of socialism.

I’d elaborate, but I’ll keep this short just in case Mr. Benen drops by this blog. Apparently he doesn’t like to read very much.

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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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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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Wednesday Mystery

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on December 5, 2018
in Anecdotes and WTF?
. 9 Comments

This is a true story. The names have been changed and some personal details have been blurred by request.

In the American heartland, there lives a university professor named Fletcher. Like most university professors, Fletcher has collaborated with colleagues from around the world, including my friend Zenobia, who teaches at a college in New England. Their collaboration is relatively recent and has not yet resulted in any publications, though some of their joint work has been posted on the web.

Recently, Zenobia has started to receive (by snail mail) a number of magazines — the sort you might find in dentists’ office, like People and Working Mother — addressed to Fletcher, but at Zenobia’s home address. Fletcher purports to know nothing of how this came about, and Zenobia believes him. Moreover, a number of Fletcher’s other friends, collaborators, acquaintances and relatives have also begun to receive the same sorts of magazines with Fletcher’s name, but their own addresses, on the mailing labels.

The magazine publishers, when queried, have refused to divulge any information about who is paying for these subscriptions.

Zenobia notes that the only possible direct connection between Fletcher’s name and her own home address is that once, on the occasion of the birth of Fletcher’s first child, she used her Amazon account to send him a baby gift. However, there appears to be no similar connection between Fletcher and any of the others who are receiving magazines addressed to him.

This leaves us with two mysteries:

Continue reading ‘Wednesday Mystery’

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WTF?! Indeed!

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 16, 2017
in Books, Economics and WTF?
. 3 Comments

Like most bloggers, I assign each of my posts to one or more Categories, which are listed in small print somewhere near the top of the post. Among the categories I use are “Economics”, “Politics”, “Policy”, “Math”, “Logic”, “Cool Stuff”, “History”, “Oddities” and “WTF?”. The last of these is perfect for this post, which is written to call your attention to Peter Leeson‘s rollicking new book WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird.

(Edited to add: I see now that the jacket copy on Leeson’s book describes it as “rollicking”. Apparently I’m not the only one who thought this was the right adjective here.)

Leeson, some of whose work I’ve blogged about here in the past, takes us on a tour of some of the world’s seemingly most inexplicable behavior — both historical and contemporary — and uses economic insight to render that behavior explicable after all. His explanations are generally plausible and provocative, though I’m sure many an insightful reader will find plenty to argue with. That, after all, is part of the fun.

Here are the blurbs from the back of the book:

Continue reading ‘WTF?! Indeed!’

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Killer Instincts

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 8, 2016
in Law, Musings and WTF?
. 32 Comments

So help me out with this.

1) Correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel sure that it’s not uncommon, when a guy is murdered for a pair of shoes, or for the 23 cents in his pocket, that we tend to read commentary about how this murder is made particularly tragic and/or reprehensible by the fact that the killer gained so little.

2) The murder of schoolteacher Katie Locke is being widely condemned as particularly tragic and/or reprehensible because the killer had sex with her corpse, which was apparently his goal all along.

Do you see my problem here? How can a good outcome for the killer make a murder both better and worse?

Alright, let’s ask what the key difference is. Here’s one: Robbing a corpse (or a soon-to-be corpse) is a zero-sum game. What the robber acquires comes from the pockets of the heirs. Sex with a corpse is probably a positive-sum game; it’s unlikely to interfere with anyone else’s plans.

Unfortunately, that only makes things even more unsettling. It leads to this syllogism:

  1. People feel better about a murder when they learn that the killer stole $10,000 from the heirs as opposed, to, say, 23 cents. This suggests that they care more about the killer than they do about the heirs, who could be pretty much anyone.
  2. People feel worse about a murder when they learn that the killer got some satisfaction even if it came at nobody’s (additional) expense. This suggests that they care a negative amount about the killer.

Put all that together, and these people must be pretty much seething with hatred for the world at large.

Or to put this another way: It appears (taking the murder as given) that people want killers to achieve their goals when and only when those goals are achieved at someone else’s expense. That’s pretty much the definition of “anti-social”.

Continue reading ‘Killer Instincts’

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Innumeracy Watch

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 31, 2015
in Snark and WTF?
. 9 Comments

Did Stanford university surgeons fail first grade arithmetic? Or do they just assume the rest of us did?

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Dear Old Golden Rule Days

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 27, 2015
in Musings, Oddities, Personal, Progress and WTF?
. 16 Comments

ssyShortly before I started Kindergarten, my mother purchased a book called “Steven’s School Years”, with pockets to store my report cards and school projects, and questionnaires for me to fill out at the end of each school year.

I was not diligent about filling in the questionnaires, and they remain mostly blank. But had I been forced to, I wonder how I would have answered the following question, which was to be answered annually at the end of Grades 1,2,3,4,5, and 6:

(According to my mother, my ambition at age three was to be an electric drill, and sometime after that a rabbit. No other records of my early career inclinations seem to have survived.)

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Quote of the Day, Election Edition

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 3, 2014
in Journalism, Rants and WTF?
. 8 Comments

From Katharine Q. Seelye of the New York Times, writing with no apparent sense of irony about Rhode Island gubernatorial candidate Serena Mancini:

She favors raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation, for example, and opposes making Rhode Island a “right to work” state. Her chief focus is creating jobs.

If you doubt the existence or direction of bias at the New York Times, ask yourself when you’re next likely to read a Times piece that says something like:

She favors widespread deregulation, for example, and opposes all taxes on capital income. Her chief focus is alleviating poverty.

Wait, that’s an imperfect analogy, since (unlike the passage from Ms. Seelye) it actually makes sense. Let me try again:

Continue reading ‘Quote of the Day, Election Edition’

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Monday Puzzles

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 15, 2014
in Fluff, Geek stuff, Pedantry, Puzzles and WTF?
. 14 Comments

Click image to solve puzzle.

So it turns out that if you take a notion to create a crossword puzzle, put it on your blog, and include a “submit” button so that solvers can send you their answers, then — at least if your skill set is similar to mine — writing the code to make that “submit” button work will be about twice as difficult and three times as time-consuming (but perhaps also several times as educational) as actually creating the crossword puzzle. I certainly learned some hard lessons about the difference between POST and GET. But it’s done and (I think) it works.

To do the puzzle online click here. For a printable version, click here. If you do this on line and want to submit your answer, use the spiffy “Submit” button! (And do feel free to compliment the author of that button!). The clues are subject to pretty much the same rules that you’d find in, say, the London Times or the Guardian.

I will gather the submissions and eventually give proper public credit to the most accurate and fastest solvers. Feel free to submit partial solutions; it’s not impossible that nobody will solve the whole thing.

Let’s try to keep spoilers out of the comments, at least for a week or so.

I have one very geeky addendum to all this, leading to a second Monday puzzle — one that might be easy to solve for a reader or two, but most definitely not for me. Unless you’re a very particular brand of geek, you’ll probably want to stop reading right here. But:

Continue reading ‘Monday Puzzles’

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And for Five Points, Explain the Universe

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on February 18, 2014
in WTF?
. 12 Comments

I’m starting to prepare a midterm exam for Principles of Economics, and for inspiration I looked at an exam given by a colleague who taught this course about fifteen years ago. There I find the following question, worth 3 points out of 140:

What happened in the Great Depression?

I wonder if you lost points for failing to mention that Clark Gable won the Oscar.

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Friday Puzzle

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 22, 2013
in WTF?
. 14 Comments

Flightstats.com is a website that reports the on-time performance of individual airline flights. If you look up, oh, say, USAirways Flight 464, you’ll find this assessment:

Now the puzzle: How, exactly, does one go about controlling for standard deviation and mean?

Hat tip to Michael Lugo at God Plays Dice

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