Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

Spondylolisthesis - forward displacement of one vertebra on its lower neighbor.

A lovely word.

The item below actually does raise a serious concern about Senator Allen. Naming one’s child “Forrest” Allen is worse than naming him “Robert E. Lee” Allen or even “Jefferson Davis” Allen. General Forrest was, indeed, a brilliant general, a strong candidate for best general (at his level) of the Civil War. But he wasn’t some noble advocate of states rights. Besides helping found the KKK, he was a slave dealer and perpetrated the Fort Pillow Massacre, where black Union prisoners were executed. We do need some comment from the Senator on this.

According to DNC sources, some Webb staffers deployed to the campaign by the party have been mentioning to reporters that it’s “interesting” that Allen purportedly named his son, Forrest, after Nathan Bedford Forrest, a legendary Confederate general. But that isn’t their only point.

“Bedford was a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan, and these Webb supporters were working reporters to push the KKK angle and link it to Allen’s desire to have his son named after him,” says a DNC source. “This is opposition research our own staff pulled together. Some of us are uncomfortable with it, others here aren’t.”

Allen, who had dealt with a series of controversies related to race, religion and family heritage, has never commented on whom his son was named after, if anyone.

Some utility items don’t depend on monetary wealth, or depend on it in surprising ways. Consider your leg. Suppose you are a soldier with two legs and you earn $50,000 per year. With probability 0.5, your leg will be shot off in the Iraq war but you will survive the injury. You don’t need hospital insurance, because the army will pay for that. Let us suppose, too, that your civilian job is such that you will suffer no loss of income from having only one leg. Do you want to buy insurance against the loss of a year’s worth of utility from losing the leg? No. (more…)

From G604. Suppose you could invest in the stock of Apex, which yields either $0 or $3 with equal probability, or the stock of Brydox, which also yields either $0 or $3 with equal probability, but with independent probability. A share of stock costs $1, and you have $6 to invest. (more…)

Here are some notes on expected utility theory that I wrote up after a stimulating lunch. Suppose Jack might earn $100, $200, $300, or $400, with equal probabilities, an expected wealth of $250. His information partition is (100,200,300,400)– he can’t rule out anything.

Jack is very risk averse, so his utilities from known wealths are

U(100) = 0 - e
U(200) = 100 - e
U(300) = 120 - e
U(400) = 128 - e, (more…)

I blogged
earlier this month on standing and the
Geneva Convention. I see Marty Lederman,
with the apparent agreement of Justice Kennedy, saying

For one thing, Common Article 3 establishes domestic, not merely “international law,”
obligations. As Justice Kennedy explained in Hamdan, it “is part of a treaty the United
States has ratified and thus accepted as binding law.” Indeed, Common Article 3 is part
of the “supreme Law of the Land,” per Article VI of the Constitution, and a President who
takes his constitutional obligations seriously is bound to faithfully execute it– not
only as a matter of “international” law, but as a matter of U.S. law.

If this were true, we’d have a nice loophole in the U.S. Constitution. A President
who
wanted to, say, make stem cell research illegal, but didn’t control the House of
Representatives could sign a treaty with Botswana outlawing stem cell research by the
signatories. The Senate would ratify, and the President could then say he was forced by
law to block stem cell research in the United States. Right?

The idea of risk aversion is that people like to keep their consumption at a steady level rather than up and down. They prefer to consume $50,000 per year rather than $10,000 one year and $90,000 the next.

The conventional way to represent this is with a strictly concave utility function, such as

(A) U = log(C)

If the utility function is concave like this, then from any starting point a loss of $1 hurts more than a gain of $1 helps.

For decades it has troubled many economists that this theory doesn’t perfectly fit the facts of people’s behavior. No other theory of risk aversion has proven useful enough to be remembered, though, despite the hundreds of articles written on how to improve the theory. (more…)

I see that the Republicans are gaining the polls as the election gets closer, the pattern I describ ed in past posts about presidential elections. Maybe I should write that paper after all, and include midterm elections too. If someone else wants to, though, go ahead– just please cite me, and let me know if you’d like comments.

The idea of risk aversion is that people like to keep their consumption at a steady level rather than up and down. They prefer to consume $50,000 per year rather than $10,000 one year and $90,000 the next.

One caveat is that when I say “$50,000″ I mean $50,000 in constant dollars. It is obvious that we need to adjust for inflation. If all prices double, then I need to have twice as many dollars to maintain my consumption at the same level. What might not be so obvious is that we need to adjust for changes in *relative* prices. If the price of housing goes up, and that is what I consume most, then it doesn’t help me that the price of everything else has gone down. I need more dollars than before to maintain my consumption at the same level. (more…)

I have mentioned the 2002 Historical Atlas
of Jerusalem by Meir Ben- Dov before. Here’s a chronology of control (rounded to
the nearest century or so): (more…)

I’m leading a discussion of chapter 3, “Perversion, Pollution, and Disintegration” of Cornelius Plantinga’s Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin) . Here are some materials for thought: (more…)

We went camping last weekend in Brown County State Park on a day that mushrooms had sprouted. There were yellow boletes in huge numbers, probably edible, though we did not try any. There were also amanitas such as the yellowish one depicted.
What kind? There are HREF="http://pluto.njcc.com/~ret/amanita/sectaman.html">lots of them. Maybe
it’s amanita pantherina, or maybe amanita
gemmata. Poisonous, no doubt. Two-year-old Lily quickly learned to say “Poisonous mushroom!” whenever she saw a big white one.

This is, accidentally, a good picture in that it shows mushrooms at three ages. The big one in front has its cap flat, but behind it is a younger one with its cap pointy and an older one with its cap spread like a blown-out umbrella.

From NRO is another reminder that voting is valuable—on the order of $50-$80 per vote in this particular case in Rhode Island. (more…)

Via NRO, here is a very nicely arranged pdf file of correspondence between the Santorum campaign and the Pennsylvania Treasurer’s office. The Santorum campaign made a freedom-of-information act request, for things such as what investments were made by Treasurer Casey. The Office, apparently in flagrant violation of the law requiring the info to be sent in 5 days, said it would have to think about it 30 days first.

The Santorum campaign letters are a model for how one should write this kind of request— citing the statute, mentioning details of how soon a reply is expected, offering to pay up $1000 for xeroxing, and so forth.

Professor Sen was here today giving an econ workshop, but one on political philosophy, on the theme of what a theory of justice ought to be doing. He is very much in the liberal mainstream of Rawls, Scanlan, Dworkin, etc., though with a tinge of economics— he realizes that we have to make tradeoffs. I thought of a better way to set up the question I asked him, so I’ll set it out here.

In politics, we should start out, as with economic, on a small scale. Economics begins with the Robinson Crusoe economy, and then adds Crusoe’s servant, Friday, to create a market. We can’t talk about justice with just one person any more than we can talk about markets, so let’s start with both.

Crusoe and Friday have been out browsing all day. Crusoe has found 5 coconuts, and Friday has found 0. (more…)

I just came across what Pope Benedict actually said in his Moslems-Use-Jihad speech. His point is interesting, important, and wrong. (more…)

There was some web discussion recently by DeLong, Mankiw, and Cowen on whether it was bad for the US if the Chinese Yuan was undervalued. Let’s think about that. (more…)

In August, a Bloomington man hurt himself when he “ignited a mortar-style firework that he taped to an old football helmet and placed on his head,” as it says here. This illustrates an important point for public policy: some people are dumb enough that if we prevent them from hurting themselves on way, they will find another way, so much our our burdensome safety regulation isn’t going to help save lives in the long run. (more…)

I’ve had several comments to the effect that Transubstantiation being formally defined relatively late in the history of the Roman Catholic church (i.e., not in the first millenium) is no more important than the Trinity not being explained early. I don’t buy that argument. (more…)

The Geneva Conventions are a series of treaties between different countries. A nonsignatory such as Al Qaeda would thus have no rights under the treaties, unless, perhaps, under some clause that protected civilians from death or other injury. Even then, however, Al Qaeda would have no rights under the treaties, legally speaking, because it would have no standing–right? (more…)