“Oh My Gosh You Idiots Are Afraid of a CLOCK?!”
One of the reasons I like economics is that you get inside of everybody’s head and try to explain their behavior as the outcome of rational (though perhaps gravely mistaken) choice. I also like novelists who merely describe what the various characters–even the “bad guys”–did and why, from their individual perspectives, without banging me over the head with moral condemnation about it.
OK so in this context, it doesn’t really work to post selfies of you holding a kitchen wall clock and saying, “I took this to work. #IStandWithAhmed.”
No, if you really want to do an apples to apples comparison, try to walk through the lobby of your office past the security guards with this inside your bag, and have it beep just as you pass them so they ask you to take it out:
Is it really so inconceivable that at a school–where all the faculty and staff have no doubt been subjected to countless drills on how to handle an active shooter situation etc.–a teacher would report this and they’d call the police?
It should go without saying that I don’t think the kid should’ve been arrested, and I’m sure he was treated worse because of his ethnicity and name. But all of a sudden half my Facebook feed has turned into bomb squad veterans on this one.
Excel Bask
This is for a colleague who’s visiting us here at the Free Market Institute…
He as data in Excel with Year in Column A, and then items of interest in B through M (or whatever).
Now, at the very bottom, after the last year, he wants to have a row that returns the *year* of the MAX value in each column.
So for example, if row 100 is the last Year of 2014, then row 101 would say, “Max in Year:” and then in Column B, it might say “1984” while in Column C, it might say “1977.” That means that if you look at Column B, the max value occurred in Year 1984, etc.
So, what’s the easiest way for him to get Excel to populate that bottom row?
The Wealth-Health Connection
Inefficient regulations can obviously make people poorer, but did you know they can kill? There is actually a whole literature on this. I summarize the key points in my latest IER post. An excerpt:
By analyzing consumer behavior, economists can come up with rough estimates of the implied “value of a statistical life” (VSL) that this behavior exhibits. To repeat, it’s not that someone flirts with certain death in exchange for $10 million.
Rather, it’s that a typical person might choose product X which costs $1 less than product Y, even though product X has a 4-in-ten-million chance of death compared to a 3-in-ten-million chance with product Y. In this hypothetical example, the person is willing to take on an extra 1-in-ten-million chance of dying, in order to save $1. This is the sense in which the person’s behavior implies a monetary value of a certain life (versus death) at $10 million.
A Tip From Jesus’ Brother
I liked this verse so much I put it on a weekly repeat on my calendar.
James 4:7: “Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.”
Google and Game Theory
Steve Landsburg has a really neat series of posts with a game theoretic brain teaser that has an unintentional flaw. If you have the time, I encourage you to not “cheat” by reading ahead; instead try to solve them in order, just by reading Steve’s posts and not the comments: First, second, and third. Then, after you’ve read his posts and done however much thinking you’re going to on your end, go ahead and read the comments, at least in the third one.
3 Stock Market Tips From an Economist
My latest at FEE. (They picked the title mostly for irony, I think.) You guys think you’ve placed me in a neat little anti-EMH box, don’t you? And then BAM I write something like this:
Suppose your brother-in-law says: “I’ve got a great stock tip! I found this company, Acme, that makes fireworks. Let’s wait until the end of June, and then load up on as many shares as we can. Once the company reports its sales for July, we’ll make a fortune because of the holiday numbers.”
Clearly, your brother-in-law would be speaking foolishness. Just about everybody knows that fireworks companies do a lot of business around July 4, and so the price of Acme stock in late June would already reflect that obvious information.
More generally, the different versions of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) claim — with varying degrees of strength — that an investor can’t “beat the market” without access to private information. The reason is that any publicly available information is already incorporated into the current stock price.
My blog is arguably a random walk at this point. You have no idea what I’m going to post tomorrow.
Hello, My Name’s Bob and I’m a Hypocrite
[EDIT: I’m trying to confine my thoughts to the narrow question of Christians taking stands on what they believe are matters of conscience, even though they are sinners according to their own value system. I am deliberately setting aside the question of what state officials should do in regards to marriage licenses. My own view on this is fairly nuanced–as opposed to my view on what Christian pastors of Bible churches should do, which is black and white–but I don’t want to distract from the more specific issue I’m discussing below.]
I’m working on zero sleep right now so this post may lack a solid thesis. But something is not sitting right with me regarding the reaction I’ve seen from many quarters to Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis. Let me fire off some observations before I slump over:
==> I don’t understand why they locked her up. Why don’t they just fire her? If a receptionist at Facebook said, “I refuse to make travel reservations for the investors coming here, because I can’t in good conscience aid the sale of our customers’ browsing habits…” they wouldn’t put her in a cage. They’d escort her from the building and have somebody else carry out management’s policies.
==> I totally acknowledge that it is UNBELIEVABLY awkward, ironic, and hilarious that this woman, who has become the Christian Right’s poster child for the protection of Biblical marriage, has followed the adage “practice makes perfect” in this regard.
==> This is total speculation on my part, but I think perhaps what drives some of these ironic cases is that the person feels really guilty about his or her own shortcomings in a particular sin, and so does a full court press to try to make up for it (perhaps without realizing that that is what’s driving it). In other words, I don’t think it would be news to Kim Davis that the Bible takes a stand against heterosexuals divorcing each other, and I don’t think she views herself as having a license (no pun intended) to do what she wants, whereas others are held to a moral standard.
==> No one on planet Earth is perfect. Anytime anybody voices support for moral living, that person is a hypocrite broadly construed. Yes, I could shake my finger at a triple murderer since I’ve never literally done that, but Jesus would say I’m missing the point. And in any event, I have lied before, so should I not teach my son that lying is wrong? Is a convicted murderer (after serving his time) not allowed to teach his kid that murder is wrong?
==> I know their actions often obscure this fact, but Bible-believing Christians are just about the one group on Earth whose official doctrines say they must NOT consider themselves better than anybody else. If she understands the New Testament, Kim Davis doesn’t think, “I’m so glad I’m not a sinner like those homosexuals over there.” No, the New Testament teaches that Kim Davis and Pat Robertson and I all deserve hell because it’s in our very nature to rebel against God and do evil. The reason we are saved is that God bestowed unmerited grace upon us because it suited His fancy. We in no way earned it.
==> I don’t think I’ve seen anyone come out and say it just in this way, but from some people I sense an undertone along the lines of, “It seems the loudest champions of Jesus are the most awful of people. Imagine my shock. *eyes roll*”
But if that type of observation resonates with you, I remind you that the Pharisees considered themselves righteous too, and scorned the common sinners who followed Jesus. But Jesus set them straight (Mark 2: 16-17):
16 And when the scribes and[a] Pharisees saw Him eating with the tax collectors and sinners, they said to His disciples, “How is it that He eats and drinks with tax collectors and sinners?”
17 When Jesus heard it, He said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”
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