Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

I upgraded to Wordpress 2 from 1.5 yesterday. The process was not too difficult and was definitely worthwhile, if only for small improvements that I can see. Those improvements include effective protection against comment spam. I haven’t turned on the plug-ins I had for those before. That means commenting is now slightly easier– no anti-spam code needed. Maybe I’ll add trackbacks to my post template again too.

Update: January 3: I can’t send trackbacks now, though, so maybe it was a negative after all to upgrade. Also, the best-sounding new feature– the ability to add categories while posting– doesn’t work for me, for unknown reasons.

Update: January 4. I found a discussion forum which confirmed that the trackback sending doesn’t work. People have other complaints too, and a number of people said that 2.0 is inferior to the old version. I agree now, but have found that it is quite difficult and dangerous to try to go back to 1.5, because it involve fancy work with database deletion and restoration using MYSQL. Fortunately, I was at least able, with much effort, to get 2.0 working again. Wordpress is not all that well designed, clearly. But it’s free, after all.

The Becker-Posner blog has had a discussion of capital punishment. I commented, and thought I’d post my comment here too: (more…)

I read in Marginal Revolution that in terms of mortality, the cost of one homosexual act has been estimated to be about $2000: (more…)

Charles Murray has a good article on Thomas Sowell in the December 19 National Review in which he applies his COnflict of Visions Constrained/Unconstrained idea.

(more…)

The prairie acreage at my parents’ farm was purposely burned, for proper growing.

Washington’s First Inaugural Address talks about the Invisible Hand, some 20 years after The Wealth of Nations was published– but he means God! Here it is:

(more…)

What is the doctrine of “Biblical Inerrancy”? I’d like to make sure, because my disbelieving it is the chief grounds for my not being a member of the church I attend. The general meaning of the doctrine is that the Bible is correct in every one of the factual or doctrinal statements it presents as true. That would not include hyperbole or stories presented as fiction (e.g. the Parable of the Vineyard), but it would include such things as whether Ahaziah was 22 years or 44 years old when he began to reign as king of Israel. I accept the Bible as generally trustworthy and have no trouble accepting miracles, but I am skeptical that it is accurate to every detail. If I come across a discrepancy in the years of a king’s reign, I am happy to account it to mistake, rather than try to come up with elaborate fixes. It is hard to tell whether this is the orthodox position or not, since before 1900 or so people did not seem to care about whether the Bible was accurate in minor details (there has long been discussion over whether passages such as the Creation Story were factual or metaphorical, but that is a different issue). I think, though, it means that I do not believe in inerrancy. (more…)

Does having daughters make the parents vote more to the left? Times via Tyler Cowen (see also Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science on a statistical problem of endogeneity of number of children) reports:

Professor Oswald and Dr Powdthavee drew their data from the British Household Panel Survey, which has monitored 10,000 adults in 5,500 households each year since 1991 and is regarded as an accurate tracker of social and economic change. Among parents with two children who voted for the Left (Labour or Lib Dem), the mean number of daughters was higher than the mean number of sons. The same applied to parents with three or four children. Of those parents with three sons and no daughters, 67 per cent voted Left. In households with three daughters and no sons, the figure was 77 per cent.

But it was the “switchers” who provided the most compelling evidence. By examining declared voting preferences for the period 1991 to 2004, Professor Oswald and Dr Powdthavee found that 539 people switched from Left to Right, and 802 switched from Right to Left. The most significant difference between these two groups of switchers? The voters who swung from Right to Left had borne, on average, more daughters.

Columbia Law School’s website is strange. Here is what the “Faculty” section lists:

FULL TIME FACULTY
VISITING FACULTY
EMERITI
ASSOCIATES-IN-LAW
ADJUNCT FACULTY
AFFILIATED CU FACULTY
FACULTY BY EXPERTISE
GRIEVANCE PROCEDURE
VISITORS, SCHOLARS, FELLOWS AND RESEARCHERS
FACULTY WRITINGS & ACTIVITIES

What is GRIEVANCE PROCEDURE doing here? It turns out that it refers to student grievances against professors. Are Columbia faculty so naughty that they need to be shamed in this way?

An interesting quote by Karl Popper on evolution and science:

I now wish to give some reasons why I regard Darwinism as metaphysical, and as a research programme. It is metaphysical because it is not testable. Karl Popper, Unended Quest (1992) pp.198-199

Popper is wrong, of course, but wrong in the same way that all the people are wrong who say that theistic evolution is not scientific, or that any explanation is bad if it is not testable.

I happened upon this
broker ad:

By Indiana Real Estate License Law, all real estate brokerage commissions are negotiable. Because I am a small company and strive to reduce overhead at all times, I can offer lower real estate commissions and still remain profitable. If you want your real estate sold, call me. If you don’t really care if your property sells or not, call my competitors, they are in the real estate listing business. I am in the real estate selling business.

For the year 2002 and until further notice, My Real Estate Commission will be 6% of the sales price. There is an alternative to this 6% Real Estate Commission. I have developed a buy down program for my real estate commissions. If you will pay 1% of the listing price in advance, I will reduce the real estate commission to 4%; this results in significant savings. To clarify this, you would pay, 1% of the list price in advance and the remainder of 3% would be due at the closing, when and if the property sells for a total of 4% and no the 1% is not refundable. You pay that to get the benefit of a greatly reduced real estate commission.

From Luther’s “Second Christmas Day” sermon (Sermons, vol. 1, p. 162):

One, however, might say: Yes, I would also gladly believe if an angel thus from heaven were to preach to me. … he who receives it because of the preacher does not believe in the Word, neither in God through the Word, but he believes the preacher and in the preacher. Hence the faith of such persons does not last long. … Moreover, all who believed Christ because of his person and his miracles fell from their faith when he was crucified.

These two ideas bear pondering. Can belief because of an angel’s person or supernaturalness be effective belief?

Tim Bayly has a good post on worshipping images, and on the Second Commandment.

Well, if verse four stands on its own, then the making of images and likenesses is forbidden regardless of the intent of the artisan. Orthodox icons, statues of Mary, stained glass windows, wayside crosses, paintings, pictures, movies, sketches of the human anatomy illustrating surgical manuals, and children’s dolls are all forbidden.

On the other hand, if verse four is to be understood as subordinate to verse five, then the artisan’s motive and the anticipated use of the image and likeness are primary. If the artisan doesn’t mean for the image to be worshipped, or to be an aid to worship (either public or private), and the anticipated use of the image is unlikely to grow beyond the artisan’s purpose, morphing into idolatry despite the artisan’s best intentions, then the image or likeness is not a violation of the Second Commandment because its use has no connection to idolatry.

I’ve posted my Christmas list of good things I came across in 2005, the list I’ve been excerpting here this past couple of weeks.

David Friedman’s blog has a good idea on why shacking up before marriage seems to result in greater likelihood of divorce after marriage: it reduces search for a compatible spouse.

For many people, cohabitation is much pleasanter than search. Not only does it result in a lot more sex, it also provides a range of emotional and practical support. If you are cohabiting with someone sufficiently well suited to you to make cohabitation workable but not to justify marriage, abandoning cohabitation in favor of continued search means giving up a current benefit in exchange for a distant and uncertain future benefit. So you may continue to cohabit, which means you are not searching–or at least searching much less. Lack of search means you don’t find a better partner, so you eventually marry the one you have.

“An Interview with Robert Aumann,” Interviewed by Sergiu Hart has this good long passage on behavioral economics. The heart of it is the observation that although people do Herrnstein “probability matching” when guessing in a lab, they always take what is probably the fastest route to work, rather than taking it 2/3 of the time and the alternative 1/3, as probability matching would imply. (more…)

In an interview with Pastor Rick Warren, “Myths of the Modern Mega-Church” (Monday, May 23, 2005) , he tells us what he thinks are the five biggest problems on the planet today, and that the Church ought to solve them. (more…)

We see again an example of a mainline church caring more about money than doctrine. It’s the Roman Catholic Church this time, which has excommunicated a priest and his congregation in St. Louis over a property dispute. Luthern apostate Richard Neuhaus has a short piece on it. He follows Archbishop Burke’s cowardly line that the people have excommunicated themselves (are they really going to forcibly prevent the Archbishop from giving them Commuion some Sunday in the cathedral?). What is noteworthy here, of course, is that the Archbishop will deny Communion to people in the congregation whose property he is trying to control while archbishops generally have no trouble giving Communion to people advocating abortion, or, indeed, to people with all kinds of wrong beliefs. I was surprised to see, in fact, that this might be the official position of the Roman Catholic Church. Archbishop Burke says (more…)

12. Miktex, a free latex typesetting program for math notation and tables better than Scientific Workplace. It processes straight from ascii input to PDF.