Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

This article by George Friedman makes the case for rebuilding New Orleans. It is worth reading, but while it makes the case that there ought to be a big city in southern Louisiana, it doesn’t really make the case that that big city ought to be below sea level where New Orleans is now. An excerpt:

The ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, the Port of South Louisiana is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products — corn, soybeans and so on. A larger proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 57 million tons, comes in through the port — including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.

It is often taken as obvious that God is omnipotent, but what evidence do we have for that? It seems to me something that cannot be determined. God is clearly much more powerful than we are, is able to perform miracles, create something from nothing, and so forth, but that is not the same as omnipotence. It seems likely that if God created the earth, He could destroy it too, but we don’t have a lot of information on the subject (ending it at Judgement Day is different from being able to end it at any time). (more…)

We had a good discussion of the old question of the meaning of intelligence at the law-and-econ lunch this week. Psychologists have found that there is an ability called “g”, which is most simply the ability to do well on IQ tests. This “g” is roughly speaking the same as “IQ”, though different tests have questions which better measure abstract reasoning ability. “g” is also correlated with a large number of performance measures, from reaction time to job performance to school performance to staying out of jail, and it is heritable.

Two questions we were discussing was whether “g” was real or not and whether it was the same as intelligence. These involve the question of what it means to exist, ontology. What does it mean to say that an abstract concept is real? (more…)

Rather cubist, n’est pas?

Articles in National Review by Murdock and Lowry reveal shocking incompetence and shamelessness on the part of Louisiana state and local officials who were in charge of hurricane preparations for New Orleans. (more…)

I just heard that I’m cited in Cooter and Ulen’s law and econ text for finding the story of how the philosopher Thales made money off his forecasting skill, and even leveraged it using a form of option and a cornering of a market. It’s great for teaching economics. Here’s the story from Aristotle’s Politics, for future reference. I’ve included the next story too, which is about how even the Greeks realized that monopoly was bad for the public welfare. (more…)

This map of New Orleans is from CCCarto.com and shows the maximum flooded area August 30 to September 1 (where flood level is defined as 3 feet above sea level). It shows how much of the city would be flooded if the water level were higher or lower, too. A different look is at
cctechnol.com, where you click on the map to find the biggest water depth at any point and the current water depth. The deepest spot I could find had 11.1 feet of water.

A reader sent Jay Nordlinger this picture some time ago.

Is it that the newspaper admires Joseph Stalin, or is it perhaps Enver Hoxha whose regime they wish to emulate? This is scary. By putting up a poster like this, the newspaper is telling people who know about Stalin that they approve of him, which means approving of the murder of millions of people. Moreover, this is not secret admiration, felt, but with guilt. The Capital Times wants to be associated with those crimes. If what a leftist admires is just socialized medicine or high taxes, he can allude to other regimes; what the Stalinist regime represents is socialism without sentimentality about human rights.

In an earlier post I talked about intelligent design and had a dialog with Dr. Pimple in the comments. One theme that came up was a common one in ID discussions– what is scientific? I find that theme misleading, actually, because it seems to me to be all about semantics, or perhaps rhetoric (if “scientific arguments” are supposed to be “good arguments”). What we are after is the truth, not science, if the two differ.

A prime example is this. Suppose you believe that God exists, believing this as firmly as that the earth is round. If you do, then you should rely on both of those facts in understanding the world. In particular, you should find the intelligent design argument irresistable. (more…)

Wesley Clark’s record as Clinton’s general was nothing to boast about even before Clinton fired him. Most notably, apparently only the insubordination of a British general saved Clark from responsibility for starting hostilities with the Russians. The story is in National Review.

Second, after the fighting had ended he ordered British General Sir Mike Jackson to block Russian troops from occupying the airport in Pristina, Kosovo. “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you,” Jackson replied. At least most Americans would have known Clark’s name had he managed to get NATO into a shooting war with Russia after the West had peacefully won the Cold War.

I was reading a post on infant mortality statistics at Three Hierarchies and decided to look up some numbers. A CDC report, “National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 53, No. 5, October 12, 2004″, page 12, says that U.S. infant mortality in 2002 was 7.0 per 1000 live births. Over half the deaths were in the first week. The rate for days 0 to 27 (“neonatal”) was 4.7 per 1000. The rate of 28 days to 1 year (“postneonatal”) was 2.3. The biggest causes of death are birth defects (20%) and low birth weight/early gestation (16%). The definition of what is a “live birth” matters a lot in thinking about comparisons between countries. (more…)

Mr. Steyn put things nicely when he said:

Up to the moment Saddam popped out of the spider-hole, the international jet set’s line was that deplorable as Saddam’s rule might be — gassing Kurds, feeding folks feet-first into industrial shredders, etc. — it was strictly an internal matter for the Iraqi people. The minute the old boy was in U.S. custody, the international jet set’s revised position was that gassing Kurds, feeding folks into industrial shredders and so forth were crimes against the whole world and certainly not a matter for the Iraqi people. Instead, we need a (drumroll, please) United Nations-mandated international tribunal.

National Review Online reported that the head of the Episcopal Church in America was ashamed of being an American. I guess it’s mutual: I’m ashamed of being associated, even if only by nationality, with the Episcopal Church in America. Maybe they could change their name to “The Episcopal Church Not to Be Associated with America”? I’ve boldfaced the main part of the quote:

… a statement made three months earlier by Frank T. Griswold, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in America. In an interview marking his fifth anniversary in office, Bishop Griswold indulged in a fit of pique over President Bush’s use of the term “Axis of Evil”: “I’d like to be able to go somewhere in the world and not have to apologize for being from the United States,” said Griswold, “Quite apart from the bombs we drop, words are weapons and we have used our language so unwisely, so intemperately, so thoughtlessly… that I’m not surprised we are hated and loathed everywhere we go.”

I was talking at lunch with a couple of missionaries to Kenya and a couple of Sudanese emigres. They noted that (a) In Kenya and Sudan, people are amazed that any church would even consider tolerating homosexuality in the clergy, and (b) the local Anglican Church in Kenya has gained tremendous respect from other denominations by its willingness to stand up to the Western episcopal churches.

How many of our intelligence agents are undetected employees of foreign powers? Instapundit said on January 2, 2004: (more…)

Democratic Underground, via Baylyblog, has the story of someone who would not help a woman and child stranded on the highway because their mini-van had a Bush sticker— and the cheering comments of other people who read that blog and think Bush supporters deserve no pity. (more…)

Pastor Whitaker of Evangelical Community Church jogs, and used that theme well in a sermon. That sounds too like “muscular Christianity”, but his theology was good. What I liked best was the story of Derek Redmond:

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This post responds to a few common misconceptions about evolution and intelligent design well expressed in a response to my post, Intelligent Design– Dennett Space Alien Example by Dr. Kenneth Pimple: (more…)

This law professors’ letter opposing Roberts for the Supreme Court didn’t attract much support. Look at the paucity of Harvard and Yale signatories, or even other schools you’ve heard of, except UCLA, which is well-represented. I wondered who Richard E. Humphrey of the Indiana University School of Law was, and it turns out he is a law librarian, not a professor. All this is a good sign for Roberts getting through. Of course, we aren’t sure he’s a conservative, either.

Someone suggested yesterday that maybe FEMA, the federal emergency people, ought to have known that the New Orleans and Lousiana governments were incompetent to write and carry out emergency plans. The photo above (from Drudge and Yahoo) may be evidence– why didn’t the local government think to move the buses during the several days before the hurricane hit?

I heard an interesting (old) tenure story. By the time it reached me,
it was definitely at rumor level, so I’ll take out all the names, but
I’ll report it because it illustrates an interesting voting tactic: (more…)