Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

[Here’s a repeat of a 2003 post.] Someone asked me to post on the afterlife, writing,

In relation to your post on Assurance of Salvation, perhaps you can set out on your website a justification for believing in an afterlife at all. Like you, I, too, am a Christian, but when I consider such facts as the Earth is one little planet in a universe of hundreds of billions of planets, and the fact that apes share 99% of their DNA with us, etc., I can’t help but wonder sometimes if there is an afterlife at all. So, unfortunately, I’m a bit of a doubting Thomas and need additional assurances there is an afterlife. I look forward to any comments you may post.

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Ron Harstad from Missouri was here Friday, and a very stimulating talk with him has made me think a lot about auctions. The Revenue Equivalence Theorem says that most auction rules you’d imagine for an independent private value auction raise the same revenue for the seller. The buyer values being private means that if a buyer knew other buyers’ values, he wouldn’t change his own value. The buyer values being independent means that knowing his own value wouldn’t help him estimate the other buyers’ values. An example of an interdependent private value auction is one in which Bidder 2’s value is drawn from the uniform distribution on [0,10] and Bidder 2’s value is v1=v2+7. (more…)

I like this smile immensely. This lady is someone easy to love.

I’ve posted before on the idea that women considering abortion, and, indeed, anybody voicing an opinion on abortion policy, should be required to view fetuses at various stages of development. A first step in thinking about abortion policy is to look at late abortions, the least common (most are in the first trimester) but most disturbing. I found a good abortion statistics site, anti-abortion, but giving sources for its numbers. Here are some numbers. (more…)

Today at lunch we talked about optimal penalties for crime. The
focus in law-and-economics has been on deterrence, and a common
conclusion of the theory is that we should set the penalty to keep
deterrence the same by increasing the penalty and reducing the
probability of conviction. Gary Becker’s limiting result was that we
should have an enormous penalty and a small probability of detection,
deterring while spending little on police. (more…)

We ordinarily in economics take Pareto optimality as the most obvious and basic criterion: If we can make someone better off, and nobody else worse off, that is an improvement. But is that correct?

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In my church one December, a poem was read which was based on the idea that the shepherds tending their flock at Christ’s birth were taking care of special sheep whose lambs would be used in the Temple sacrifices. Bethlehem is near the Temple, so this has some plausibility. The idea seems to have sprung up as a way to make it plausible that shepherds were tending flocks at night in the middle of the winter, a strange time to be sleeping outside. But it looks like the idea doesn’t work.

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One of Amelia’s best efforts, I think. Could she possibly reproduce it? It is not in her usual style.

Tyler Cowen asks whether banning everyone with last names starting
between A and D from the shoe trade would matter, given that there
are enough E-Z people to provides lots of competition and talent. On
the other hand, “But what if Mr. Brown would have been the Steve Jobs or the Bill Gates of the shoe trade?” (more…)

II Corinthians 6 [+/-]2 Corinthians 6 [6:1]Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. [2]For he says, "In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you." Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation. [3]We put no obstacle in anyone's way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry, [4]but as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: by great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, [5]beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; [6]by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, the Holy Spirit, genuine love; [7]by truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; [8]through honor and dishonor, through slander and praise. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; [9]as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live; as punished, and yet not killed; [10]as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything. [11]We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians; our heart is wide open. [12]You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted in your own affections. [13]In return (I speak as to children) widen your hearts also. [14]Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? [15]What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? [16]What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, "I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. [17]Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, [18]and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty."
has the troubling “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers” passage. I have heard it quoted as a reason why believers should not marry unbelievers, which is important enough, but it seems to go much further, and prohibit business and social relations with unbelievers. Here is the passage: (more…)

I couldn’t sleep on account of a cold, so I got up and read a bit of math.
“Measure” is an extension of the idea of “length” or “size” to apply to sets of
points that aren’t made up just of intervals. An example of an interval is

A= “All the points from 0 to 1, inclusive, plus all the points from 2 to 4, not
including 2 and 4″ (more…)

I happened upon a good site for Latin quotations. Here are the best: (more…)

In the United Kingdom, the established churches do not receive state funding directly. I know land endowments were traditionally very important–were tithes important too? The state does fund religious schools, but does not discriminate by religion. In Belgium, the government collects a religion tax, but the taxpayer designates his religion, and this can include non-religion. The tax revenues go to the appropriate organizations: 79 percent to the Catholic Church, 13 percent to laic organizations, 3 percent to Muslims and 3 percent to Protestants. This I learn from the 2003 U.S. State Department report on religious freedom, which says of schools in the United Kingdom that:

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Mark T. Mitchell’s “THe Homeless Modern,” in The Intercollegiate Review, 41(1) 13-22 (Spring 2006) is quite good. Here are some items he quotes and items I found while looking for them. First, though, here is a quote of his own:

One of the fruits of a rationalistic epistemology is the demand that all knowledge be explicitly accounted for. That is, if all objects of knowledge are technical in nature, then they are knowable in the same terms, and these terms are capable of being rendered fully and explicitly.

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The IRS tax gap estimates, widely reported in the news today, are interesting. The total tax evasion is $345 billion, a noncompliance rate of 16%. Of that $27 billion is nonfiling, $33 billion is underpayment, and $285 billion is underreporting of income. (more…)

Mr. Stein’s book is very enjoyable. I’ve excerpted the best parts below, including the confession that Senator Scott’s reputation as the dumbest Congressman was a set-up, the desire of the current publisher of the New York Times that American soldiers be killed in Vietnam, Le Monde’s endorsement of the theory that Monica Lewinsky was under orders from Israel, and so forth. (more…)

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One part of game theorist Ariel Rubinstein’s website is "http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/univ-coffee.html"> “A Worldwide Guide for
Coffee Places where you can not only work but also think!” That’s where I
found the coffee picture from the "http://arielrubinstein.tau.ac.il/hungarian.html"> Hungarian Cafe.

Via Robert Walker and Carole Canfield, I was pointed to a story about Planned Parenthood’s annual report which says that the organization’s $766 million budget came about equally from taxpayer funding, donations, and clinic payments and it performed 227,385 abortions in 2002 . I imagine it is like a non-profit hospital, which can charge for medical services and receive government payments for them so long as the organization does not make too much profit overall. (more…)

In a sermon a while back Pastor Whitaker mentioned a story about Admiral Stockdale in Vietnam from the book Good to Great, by Jim Collins. I’ve boldfaced the key idea: that suffering as a prisoner of war was perhaps the best thing in his life, a source of utility and not disutility. (more…)

I found a good quote from a John Newman sermon on how we run into difficulties in religion because we want God to serve us rather than us to serve God: (more…)