Free Advice for Aspiring Authors
If you are writing a book dealing with banking, and during the first draft you put in numbers or claims that you need to verify before handing in the manuscript, don’t use “[CHECK]” as the note to yourself. Choose a different term, like “[VERIFY]”.
Quick Thoughts on Prince Jonathan
I stayed up late working on the book–it’s done today kids–and I forgot to do my Sunday religious post. So here it is, better late than never:
Yesterday my pastor discussed the story of King Saul’s son Jonathan, who took his armor bearer and walked into the Philistine camp. They double-handedly killed more than 20 Philistines who presumably were much better equipped. (Incidentally, I want to refer to the lad as Prince Jonathan, but that sounds odd. Did the Israelites have kings but not princes?) Here’s the postgame summary:
6 Then Jonathan said to the young man who bore his armor, “Come, let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised; it may be that the LORD will work for us. For nothing restrains the LORD from saving by many or by few.”
7 So his armorbearer said to him, “Do all that is in your heart. Go then; here I am with you, according to your heart.”
8 Then Jonathan said, “Very well, let us cross over to these men, and we will show ourselves to them. 9 If they say thus to us, ‘Wait until we come to you,’ then we will stand still in our place and not go up to them. 10 But if they say thus, ‘Come up to us,’ then we will go up. For the LORD has delivered them into our hand, and this will be a sign to us.”
11 So both of them showed themselves to the garrison of the Philistines. And the Philistines said, “Look, the Hebrews are coming out of the holes where they have hidden.” 12 Then the men of the garrison called to Jonathan and his armorbearer, and said, “Come up to us, and we will show you something.”
Jonathan said to his armorbearer, “Come up after me, for the LORD has delivered them into the hand of Israel.” 13 And Jonathan climbed up on his hands and knees with his armorbearer after him; and they fell before Jonathan. And as he came after him, his armorbearer killed them. 14 That first slaughter which Jonathan and his armorbearer made was about twenty men within about half an acre of land.
Now one of my favorite things is to speculate on how the “miracles” of the Bible were actually consistent with the laws of physics. The point is not to explain them away, the point is rather to see how clever the Lord is in doing something amazing without cheating. In other words, it is more impressive if Jesus walks on water, or feeds 5,000 people with a few loaves and fish, without having to say, “OK, let’s temporarily suspend the rules we initially imposed on atoms.”
Anyway, regarding this story, I think it is similar to the kung fu movies where the good guy takes on 50 bad guys. At first, you are thinking, “What the heck? Why don’t they all just rush him?” But they might not because they are the bad guys. In other words, the “smart” thing to do is wait in the wings and see if the guy fighting the intruder wins, before going up yourself.
In this particular story though, there is more to it. The Philistines must have been a little confused when two guys come up to fight all of them. They might have been looking over their shoulders for an ambush. And then, because they were literally inspired, Jonathan and his armor bearer slew the first few guys that approached them. That gave them more confidence, and started to really worry the Philistines. Can you imagine by the time you’re the 11th Philistine to go up against them, and what you had expected to be a hilarious bloodletting of these two insane Hebrews, has now resulted in 10 of your buddies getting killed in a few minutes? You would probably go up to them thinking, “Now I’m going to die,” and you would be right.
Last point: My pastor didn’t mention this, but I found it fascinating that Jonathan had come up with a test beforehand to determine whether God wanted him to proceed. I think that is very interesting, because a lot of time people will ex post rationalize something as being evidence of God’s endorsement of your enterprise.
To give an example: George Bush thought God wanted him to invade Iraq. But I wonder if he actually set up a test like Jonathan did–“If Saddam says such and such when I tell him to turn over the weapons, then we invade, whereas if…”–or if he just assumed that as events unfolded, they confirmed that he was in the right. And let me be clear: Even if the test had just been, “If Saddam doesn’t hand them over, then that is God’s green light,” it makes a huge difference whether Bush had said that to himself before making his official demand (or whatever).
Incidentally, I am just picking George Bush as a modern illustration of this, because I know he thinks in these terms. I am not accusing him (on this score) of hypocrisy, because I don’t live up to these standards very often myself. The reason is ultimately a lack of faith, and also an uncertainty about doing parlor tricks with God. E.g. if you are unsure about whether to take a job, you could say, “Well, I’m going to flip this coin, and if God wants me to…” But that seems a lot more flippant than what Jonathan did.
Now Krugman Wants to Repeat Smoot-Hawley Too
In his quest to rationalize repeating the exact policies followed by Hoover and FDR, Paul Krugman has now endorsed protectionism. That’s right, the Krugman who won his Nobel (Memorial) Prize for his work on trade theory now says:
The economic case against protectionism is that it distorts incentives: each country produces goods in which it has a comparative disadvantage, and consumes too little of imported goods. And under normal conditions that’s the end of the story.
But these are not normal conditions. We’re in the midst of a global slump, with governments everywhere having trouble coming up with an effective response.
As usual, the insanity relies on an externality argument:
And one part of the problem facing the world is that there are major policy externalities. My fiscal stimulus helps your economy, by increasing your exports — but you don’t share in my addition to government debt. As I explained a while back, this means that the bang per buck on stimulus for any one country is less than it is for the world as a whole.
And this in turn means that if macro policy isn’t coordinated internationally — and it isn’t — we’ll tend to end up with too little fiscal stimulus, everywhere.
I don’t see why we’re handling this particular externality differently from all the other ones spawned on a free market. Why doesn’t the government just subsidize subsidies?
Martin Weitzman: Do "Fat Tails" Destroy Cost-Benefit Analysis?
Over at Master Resource I sketch what’s going on with Martin Weitzman’s critique of standard models of uncertainty in the climate change debate. Some excerpts:
Weitzman argues that in this situation, standard cost-benefit analysis (CBA) breaks down. When some of the potential outcomes involve the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, not to mention the destruction of the world economy, Weitzman says that it is worse than useless to robotically assign a numerical value to these losses, and then discount exponentially at whatever rate one decides is relevant.
As one might expect, the alarmists in the climate change debate have seized upon Weitzman’s results, because they can use him to knock out the standard models which cannot be tortured into supporting the aggressive emissions cuts that the alarmists favor. The excitable Joe Romm’s discussion of Weitzman illustrates this perfectly…
…Basically, Nordhaus shows that Weitzman’s formal result isn’t as general as one might have supposed. In other words, Weitzman did not prove that anytime one has “fat tails” in the distribution, that CBA breaks down.
A Disagreement on the Efficacy of Government Regulation
Over at Env-Econ, some of the commenters were taking pot shots at the free market in the wake of the salmonella outbreak from the Georgia peanut butter plant. (Incidentally that is a factory I’m talking about, not a photosynthetic organism that secretes peanut butter.) I said:
Ah yes, I think we had this same argument with the tomatoes.
I oppose government regulations because (a) they waste taxpayer money and (b) don’t keep us safe. In fact they give a false sense of security and crowd out private certification mechanisms because people assume “the government is taking care of this.”
How can we distinguish my theory from your guys’? What happened here perfectly fits my worldview.
In contrast, your worldview would be better supported if we had no government regulation of food safety and then somebody got sick from tainted food.
I’ll try it a different way: Suppose for the sake of argument that I’m right. What better evidence could I find, to document I’m right, than to show that businesses (or Bernie Madoff) get away with ridiculous things even amidst the allegedly vital government regulation?
My favorite response:
Bob,
Have you ever thought to back test your theory by looking back on history before we had all this pesky regulation? Did you know there was a time when it didn’t exist? Are you aware that virtually all of it was AS A RESULT of far worse abuses of the public trust than this peanut fiasco? Your absurd assertion that regulation does not protect us can only be supported by willful ignorance of history. It is factually untrue and that’s not a matter of opinion. Homework assignment #1 read Updike’s “The Jungle”.
If I felt like it I could list literally hundreds of cases of regulation dramatically reducing public harm and with a little more work I could support ever assertion with statistics to prove it. Consider just the example of Airline safety. Look at the deaths per passenger mile flown, and try to explain that dramatic fall with anything other than FAA regulation and enforcement.
Murphy Mention at National Review
John Hood links to my Atlanta Journal Constitution op ed (via PRI) on the fallacy being stimulating consumption.
Talking Heads on NPR
I just heard Ky Risdall interview Megan McArdle and Felix Salmon on the financial crisis. I think I lost the use of polysyllabic words.
Salmon was cockily saying that nationalization was necessary, in the sort of “at least I’m the adult here who can make the hard choices” tone.
For her part, McArdle said something like, “The market needs to capitulate before things can get better. Until we hit rock bottom, stocks will keep falling. The paradox of capitulation is that if people think things will get better, they won’t.”
That’s not an exact quote, but it’s close. I would just like to say that if she actually believes that, then she is ensuring continued free fall of markets, because she is telling us when to expect recovery…thereby preventing recovery.
I actually did gain something from the interview. I had had the impression that the stock market tanked since November, but it actually has been fairly flat in the grand scheme of things.
One last comment: What was great about McArdle was that Risdall would ask her a specific question–like, “Felix says the banks need to take $4 trillion in writedowns, does that sound about right to you Megan?”–and she would answer like a politician, confidently giving an answer that was orthogonal (my vocabulary is coming back finally) to the question.
The Road to Serfdom: CA City Bans Smoking In Your Own Car
I am getting old enough so that the “slippery slope” warnings against government intrusions now have extra validity for me, because I actually lived through this stuff. I vividly remember when the government started cracking down on cigarettes in the 1990s, that “right-wingers” warned, “What’s next? Are they going to start regulating fatty foods? Once they ban smoking in restaurants, will they ban it in your house?” And of course the critics laughed and scorned such scare tactics, when all they were trying to do was save lives from an awful product.
Well, here’s a story about politicians wanting to tax soda to help you lose weight. (Oh, I guess they’ll spend the revenues that come in, but that’s just a minor detail. The point is, they’re here to help you.)
But check this out (HT2LRC):
Belmont is set to make history by becoming the first city in the nation to ban smoking on its streets and almost everywhere else.
The Belmont City Council voted unanimously last night to pursue a strict law that will prohibit smoking anywhere in the city except for single-family detached residences. Smoking on the street, in a park and even in one’s car will become illegal and police would have the option of handing out tickets if they catch someone.
The actual language of the law still needs to be drafted and will likely come back to the council either in December or early next year.
“We have a tremendous opportunity here. We need to pass as stringent a law as we can, I would like to make it illegal,” said Councilman Dave Warden. “What if every city did this, image how many lives would be saved? If we can do one little thing here at this level it will matter.”
The really sad thing is (for those of you who are also parents), our kids won’t know that this is unusual. Just like they will think there were always soliders with M-16s patrolling the airport.
Recent Comments