Eat My Shorts, Landsburg
Steve Landsburg has started a new series called “D’oh,” in homage to Homer Simpson. Steve explains:
When something is wrong on the Internet, bloggers love to pounce. But since no blogger is infallible, most of us can find ample fodder in our own past writing, if we go back and reread it with a sufficiently critical eye. Over the next few weeks, I plan to revisit some things I got wrong the first time around. (You’ll recognize those posts by the Homer Simpson logo.) I hope others will be inspired to do the same.
OK if you insist Steve, I will bring up a huge mistake I think you made several years ago…
In my all-time favorite example of Neoclassicals Gone Wild, Steve made the argument that “more sex is safer sex.” The gist is that when a person decides whether to take somebody home from the singles bar, he is just weighing the private costs (like the girl could be a psycho, she might get pregnant, she could have an STD, maybe there is something to this whole “morality” thing after all, etc.) against the private benefits (use your imagination).
But this utility maximizer, according to Steve, is ignoring the positive externalities of his actions (assuming the guy doesn’t himself have an STD). By throwing himself into the hookup pool that night, he increases everybody else’s odds of not contracting an STD that night. Here’s Steve’s numerical illustration:
Suppose the bar contains two people with infection probability 5% and two with infection probability 85%. Then your chance of a bad draw is 45% (the average of 5%, 5%, 85%, and 85%). But if you replace the two 5’s with four 10’s, your chance of a bad draw goes down to 35% (the average of 10%, 10%, 10%, 10%, 85% and 85%).
Just to make sure we get what Steve is saying here: The people who were originally 5%’ers were the prudes. But if those prudes would follow Steve’s advice to go forth and multiply, then they would put themselves at more risk, it’s true. So if they doubled their activities, their own risk of getting something (and then passing it on to others) would be doubled to a 10%. (We’re speaking in averages across all the population types.)
But, Steve is saying that since there are people out there who are high risk, it actually makes the whole hookup pool safer on average if the prudes would double their activity. Any particular prude would be twice as dangerous as before, but there would be twice as many (former) prudes in the available pool on any given night at the bar.
Now in my response, I listed several objections to Steve’s analysis. But I think I overlooked what might be the most fundamental, given that Steve himself called his argument “more sex is safer sex,” rather than “more sex is Pareto efficient.” (If you don’t get that, don’t worry.)
When my article ran, at least one person emailed me and pointed out what he claimed was a huge flaw in Steve’s own numerical example: Yes, it’s true that any given person’s probability of contracting an STD would go down, if the two 5%’ers were replaced by four 10%’ers.
BUT, the expected amount of disease transmission would go up. Now Steve gave a (fairly contrived) example later on in his article where every man in town goes to the same prostitute, versus a scenario in which there are lots of free-spirited women so that doesn’t happen. And yes in those two scenarios, the spread of the disease would be slowed in the second one, because in the first scenario, if just one guy has it, then pretty soon the whole community will have it.
But in general, it would seem to me that if the goal is to minimize the ability of STDs to spread from person to person, then the robustly correct strategy is to tell everyone, “Stop sleeping around!” In the limit, if every “prude” person saved him or herself for marriage, then the STDs would be strictly confined to the high-risk group whose behavior Steve is taking as given for the purposes of the argument (I think).
Last point: I believe that Steve didn’t just dream this up from scratch, and that there are people who model disease dynamics on computers and agree with him. But I’m pointing out that strictly speaking, Steve’s first numerical example didn’t really make the relevant point (perhaps it COULD make the relevant point, if we spelled out more assumptions). So if Steve is going to give such incredibly counterintuitive advice–that the way to slow the spread of STDs is for prudish people to sleep around more–then I think he should spell it out a bit more carefully.
Soros on Hayek
In the other thread, a molecular biologist is pulling his hair out in the comments when I discuss his field. I have sympathy, and I really hope I don’t sound like Soros talking about Hayek (HT2 LRC). If I were paid to pretend to know a little bit about free market economics, but not much, I don’t think I could have come up with a better essay than this. Holy cow.
(BTW if you don’t know much about Hayek, don’t bother clicking. It’s not an intrinisically interesting piece, unless you want to get to know the guy who will be on the currency you use in 20 years.)
Does Modern Biology Really Depend on the (Full) Version of Evolution?
[UPDATE below.]
In a recent blog post on religious belief David Friedman wrote:
[U]nlike the (current) Catholics, a significant part of what [Protestant fundamentalists in the United States] reject is modern science, in particular the theory of evolution, which underlies quite a lot of modern biology.
You see that claim made a lot in the debates over evolution, but I wonder if it is a factoid rather than a fact.
Note that I am posting this on a weekday, rather than Sundays, because I am asking a purely scientific question: How much of modern biology really would collapse, if it turned out that “evolution” turned out to be wrong?
Well it obviously depends on what we mean by “evolution.” Michael Behe (in my understanding), one of the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement, is happy to concede that all modern organisms come from a single cell. His point however is that that cell couldn’t have arisen just by chance, that the information packed into it must have been consciously put there by an intelligent being. (The being could have engineered this by consciously structuring the inorganic environment such that it would give rise to the cell.)
If we take Behe’s views to be denying “Darwin’s theory of evolution,” then I submit just about nothing in modern biology depends on that particular issue.
Even if we broaden our definition of “evolution,” it’s still not obvious to me how much of biology would be vulnerable. For example, suppose there is a God and He created, de novo, the entire physical universe and all of the organisms on Earth, as they existed in the year 1500. Clearly, modern biology is consistent with that history, except for erroneous theories that extrapolated back before the year 1500 and assumed that there were ancestors to the creatures living in the year 1500, when in reality (in this thought experiment) all the millions of different lines started from scratch in the year 1500.
For an analogy, consider modern Austrian economics in the tradition of Mises and Rothbard. We are fond of stressing Mises’ regression theorem, which traces the purchasing power of fiat money back to the time it was convertible into precious metals, and then going all the way back to barter, when gold and silver were valued as regular goods.
But suppose it turns out that actually, some wise king really did invent money out of the clear blue sky, and got people to hold it through imposing taxation (as the MMTers suggest). How much of modern Austrian economics would collapse?
Not all that much, except of course for our views on the regression theorem. We would have to be a lot more agnostic about the limits of a ruler in imposing a “new equilibrium” etc., but those were really empirical claims. We could still believe in free markets, market-chosen money, Austrian business cycle theory, etc.
UPDATE: OK I shouldn’t have been so foolish as to suppose people would answer my question, rather than telling me why creationism is stupid. Let me give something more specific:
Suppose we are visited next week by aliens in advanced spacecraft. There is no doubt that they are the real deal; they do all kinds of crazy stuff like give us the cure for cancer, show us how to turn Mark Levin’s books into pure energy, and they give us the answers to three unsolved math problems from this list.
Then the aliens tell us, “Sorry to inform you guys, but your biologists went a little bit awry in the last two centuries. We visited your lifeless planet about 2 billion of your years ago, and we placed 18,000 different cells on it in various locations. We had designed each of these cells from scratch. Surveying your genetic material, we think we can still see remnants of about 3,500 of those original “seeds.””
So now my question: In this unlikely yet certainly possible scenario, how many modern biologists would say, “Oh crud, I really hope they are pulling our legs, because otherwise my career is done.” ? I submit that not even a single biologist would have to quit his job. All of a sudden they would “see” new patterns in the various hierarchies, and previously inexplicable problems would disappear (while new ones would emerge). All of the modern understanding of heredity, genetics, natural selection, and speciation would be intact. The only tweak is that we would no longer assume all modern organisms shared a common ancestor.
Does anybody disagree with me on this? If not, then it’s a bit sloppy when people say, “All of biology depends on the theory of evolution.” You can agree with me on this very modest point, and still think everything came from the same cell, which itself arose through pure chance interactions of inorganic molecules in the primordial soup.
Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two
Here’s the sequel… Right now there are only about 4,000 views. Will it break a million?
So what do you guys think? Did Stringham have to sleep with anyone for the cameo at the end? (Inside baseball for 99% of you, sorry.)
Idiot Check on International Trade Accounts
[UPDATE in the block quote…]
I have this as a footnote in a forthcoming article. Can people please confirm its accuracy, or did I get it backwards? (And note, I don’t just mean, “Is this generally right?” I mean, is this exactly right, or did I flip it?)
[UPDATE: Edited due to comments. But it was the fault of the MMTers!!] Strictly speaking, the (X – M) term refers to a
current accounttrade surplus (or deficit), rather than atradecurrent account surplus (or deficit). The two are closely related and can be used interchangeably for our simple purposes in this article. The actual difference has to do with income earned abroad from ownership of foreign assets. For example, suppose Americans owned $100 million worth of corporate stock in a tiny island called Bananistan, and that this stock paid $5 million in dividends every year. The Americans could take that income and use it to import $5 million worth of bananas. If the residents of Bananistan didn’t buy any goods or services from Americans, then the U.S. would have an annual $5 million trade deficit (in goods and services) with the country of Bananistan. However, the current account deficit would be zero, because the annual shipment of $5 million worth of bananas would simply maintain the financial position of the residents of the two countries with respect to each other.
Potpourri
Well it’s time to post my various links, because my Firefox browser tabs are now bigger than the Fed’s balance sheet. (Ba-DUMP. Thanks folks, I’ll be here all week. Remember to tip your waitress.)
* For a while now I’ve conjectured that “the big one” could happen when a Chinese finance minister says something at a press conference regarding US Treasurys that gets slightly mistranslated and causes a worldwide stampede for the exits. This is dangerously close to my scenario.
* It really cracks me up when Paul Krugman can only explain hostile commenters as being “paid trolls.” For what it’s worth, I don’t think Captain Freedom is on Christopher Hitchens’ payroll. Daniel Kuehn probably is on Soros’ payroll, but I don’t think DK knows it, and I think his commentary here is off the clock.
* My hats off to Bryan Caplan for looking like a wimp by standing up to libertarian warmongers. I think violence is vastly overrated, and that (for example) the area we call the United States would be much freer today if the Founding Fathers hadn’t resorted to arms, but instead had continued to write and lecture the masses.
* Lew Rockwell links to the list of dangerous professions, and soldier isn’t in the top 20. (I don’t know what the timeframe is for the list; maybe in 1968 the ranking would be much different.) I’m trying to think of something analogous to “freedom isn’t free,” like “cheddar isn’t cheap.” But probably we shouldn’t even go down that road.
* Here’s an interesting analysis from a SF Fed economist on the interest rate risk facing the Fed. (HT2 Bob Wenzel) Even though I was accused of tinfoil hattery for my interpretation of the Fed’s accounting rule change, I think this guy is saying the same thing about the Fed’s ability to preserve its capital in spite of massive losses.
* A hilarious dissection of finance guru Dave Ramsey. For the record, I love listening to Ramsey’s show, I just think he is very naive when it comes to the conventional faith in mutual funds, and of course I disagree strongly with his invective against whole life insurance. The other thing in this video touches on a pattern I noticed during the financial bubble–a lot of the women on CNBC etc. would timidly say, “Should we be worried about these trends?” and the cocksure guys would tell the ladies not to worry their pretty little heads, the big boys had it all under control. Riiiiiight.
* One last point on this “Can You Tax a Rich Man?” stuff: Landsburg quotes from Krugman’s textbook on the distinction between the statutory and economic incidence of a tax. I think that’s fine–I had the same idea–but strictly speaking these are not EXACTLY the same things. If the government levies a $5 per pack surcharge on the people selling cigarettes, the supply and demand curve elasticities could be such that the pre-tax equilibrium price of a pack goes up by (say) $4.75. In that case, even though the retailer is sending a check for $5 to the government for every pack of cigarettes he sells, he’s really only out 25 cents, with the consumer picking up the rest. However, in the case Landsburg was discussing, nobody is denying that the rich guy would be bearing the full monetary brunt of the tax. I.e. the rich guy is going to send in the $84 million to the IRS, and the rich guy isn’t going to raise his prices to be able to shift the tax onto somebody else. Rather, Landsburg was arguing that if the government uses that revenue windfall to increase its own usage of real resources, then those prices will rise and impoverish people other than the rich guy, who (by hypothesis) wasn’t consuming in the first place. So it’s the same spirit, but strictly speaking it’s not exactly the same type of analysis.
* Here’s one rich man that Landsburg wants to tax (not really).
* I don’t endorse this theory, but it’s worth considering. A guy posted at ZeroHedge says that we’re being set up for a deflationary crash.
* Alex Tabarrok points to yet another chapter in our collapsing rule of law.
* Glenn Greenwald busted Obama on the amazing about-face of the “official” reasons we’re in Libya. The flip flop on regime change was so fast it is truly amazing.
* Yet another fantastic blog post by Glenn Greenwald summarizing the two-tiered justice system in America. It’s this kind of post that makes you say, “Ah OK, this is why GG is so huge. That took a lot of work and boy he has to stay on top of this stuff 24-7.”
* If you’ve never thought much about the economics of fuel efficiency mandates (i.e. regulations saying cars and trucks need to get X miles per gallon by year Y), you might like this one I wrote a week or so ago.
* I spell out the problems with the “budget slashing” Paul Ryan plan.
* My interview with a radio host who knew a surprising amount about my career.
* I draw from the Herbert Hoover well yet again, but this time I make my point by quoting from the very article I am criticizing. Really, I think you should check out the absurd non sequitur the Salon writer made when “proving” Hoover relied on free markets and that’s why we had the Great Depression.
He Is Risen!
[UPDATE in the middle of the post…]
Today is Easter, the greatest holiday (holy day) in the Christian year. When I was a little kid, I used to think that was nuts–everybody knows Christmas is the best holiday! And then even when I got older, I didn’t understand why they called it “Good Friday,” since it seemed pretty awful.
Of course, the reason this day is so special, is that it marks Jesus’ triumph over death. It is the fulfillment of various prophecies, including Jesus’ own predictions about His fate. I love the story (and I use that term in a neutral sense–non-believers can at least appreciate it on its literary and symbolic merits) for many reasons, but one of them is that it shows the impotence of physical might. Here’s a Man walking around preaching the truth, and the authorities are threatened by Him. So they ultimately torture and murder Him. But so what? That doesn’t stop Him or His message. The truth is stronger than their clubs and nails.
In this post I want to make two claims:
CLAIM #1: Jesus’ resurrection is the most plausible explanation of the evidence we have.
In previous posts I have argued that it just doesn’t make sense to me that the followers of Jesus would know full well that He didn’t come back from the grave, and yet would tell people that He did, even though this lying would result in their own deaths (for some of them).
Scoffers thought this was a silly argument. After all, don’t we have countless examples of people being willing to die for causes in which we don’t believe? For example, what about the infamous Kool-Aid drinkers?
Yes, we do have such examples, but my argument wasn’t: “People were willing to die for Christianity, therefore it must be right.”
Rather, I was saying that I didn’t find it plausible that people would be willing to die for something that they knew was false. So if Jesus said He was going to be killed but then come back from the dead, and it turned out that His followers just stole and hid the body, then those followers would know he wasn’t God after all.
So I grant that people are willing to die for things I don’t believe in, and I grant that people are willing to defend things that deep down they know aren’t true (especially when doing so is advantageous to them), but I don’t think people are so eager to die for things that they don’t believe in.
As a final point on this, surely we can all agree that H.L. Mencken was no sucker when it came to organized religion. When I was an atheist, I eagerly read Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods, and I have to say I was underwhelmed. For one thing, Mencken conceded that the various books attempting to “blow up” (his phrase) Christianity had failed. (I resolved that I would do a better job in my own such book.) But what surprised me even more, was that Mencken himself thought the best explanation for the spread of Christianity was that this guy Jesus just so happened to have predicted his own resurrection…and holy cow it came true! This was consistent with Mencken’s explanation for medicine men and other shamans in earlier times. Mencken conjectured, for example, that if the floodwaters were rising, and some guy did a dance and the floodwaters receded, that people would think he did it, and then ascribe all sorts of authority to him.
Thus, by the same token, Mencken conjectured that this guy Jesus predicted his own death and resurrection, and by some fluke it actually happened. [UPDATE: See the comments below. Actually it’s more accurate to say that Mencken thinks Jesus was nailed to a cross, everybody thought he was dead, he was put in a sepulchre, and then he woke up and believed he had just fulfilled the prophecies. Because of that amazing occurrence,] that’s why we know about him today.
(NOTE: I read Mencken’s book many years ago, and it’s possible I am mischaracterizing his views. I’ve skimmed his discussion of the New Testament but can’t find the spot I have in mind, where I believe he says that he thinks Jesus really did come back from the dead.)
CLAIM #2: If you don’t think you need a divine savior, then something is wrong with you.
In the comments of previous posts, we got into the familiar argument over how a loving God could demand loyalty from all of us, at the threat of eternal hellfire. My response was that I think really what is going on, is that God says to us, “It’s totally up to you. I give you the choice to be with me forever in paradise, or you can reject My offer. Your actions towards others are important, but they don’t trump this crucial decision.”
So heaven is spending eternity in the direct presence of God Himself, whereas hell is spending eternity in the absence of God, knowing that you “chose poorly.”
The follow-up to my answer was a different argument, now saying, “That’s not fair. So a murderer gets to go to heaven, while a really nice agnostic goes to hell?”
So I have two things to say to this. First, note that it is indeed a different argument. At first, people were mad that God was too judgmental, but now they’re mad that He’s not judgmental enough. Supposing for the sake of argument that God exists, what is He supposed to do? If He creates us so that we exist as well, then that leaves the options of (a) Him being with us or (b) Him being separate from us, or (c) Him ending our existence. In my understanding, God is basically telling us that we don’t get to choose (c), but we do get to choose (a) or (b). That strikes me as both kind and very fair–true, we don’t get to choose not existing, but other than that, it’s up to us.
The second thing I want to say is that I disagree strongly that an agnostic who helps little old ladies across the street and doesn’t use the f-word is “a good person.” Yes, he might be good compared to most other humans, but he’s far from perfect. And until you contemplate the life of Jesus, and the standard He set for us (both in His commands and His actions), you don’t even realize how badly you are playing the game of life.
So this is why the most important “act” or “work” you can do in this life, isn’t to refrain from homicide (as I think many agnostics believe). Rather, the most important thing is for you to humble yourself and admit you have a problem. Then you can start improving, and ironically you will end up living a much better life (even according to conventional standards) once you do that.
I think in God’s value system, somebody who did something really bad, but has sincerely repented and understands just how bad it was, is a “better person” at this moment than the person who did a litany of lesser offenses, but now offers no apology for them and in fact is outraged at the very idea that a God might hold him in judgment. And I have to say that this seems eminently fair to me.
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