Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

Heather Macdonald “God and Man and Human Suffering”

If a believer wants to tell me, “Stop trying to fit God
into your little human categories. He is bigger than
anything you can know, he owes you nothing, not justice,
not kindness, not love. He is not ‘sweet,’ he is not
‘sentimental,’ in Mr. Novak’s words. He is God,” I would
accept that. But I keep hearing from believers that he is
just, and kind, and loving, precisely the human categories
that we most cherish.

(more…)

The end of the year is a good time to be thinking about making donations, both for self-discipline and for tax purposes. Here are a few charities I like.

1. Backstreet Missions, Bloomington help for the poor
2. Care-Net, help for unwed mothers
3. Project Gutenberg, web texts
4. Samaritan’s Purse, international relief
5. The Wayne Cave Preserve, buying a cave in Monroe County

Here is a story my brother sent me on the idea of randomly giving 1 voter a million dollar prize for voting, as encouragement to vote. (more…)

One part of game theorist Ariel Rubinstein’s website is “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 Hungarian Cafe.

From the New Criterion’s ” Proust regained,”
by Daniel Mark Epstein, on Proust’s work:

What the English lacks—beyond the inimitable music of the French —is a certain limpidity, and also, paradoxically, an architectural firmness and precision. Sentence by French sentence it is as if one were viewing, from the portal, an exquisite Gothic chapel made entirely of crystal, so that both the façades and interior structures may be seen at a glance.What the English lacks—beyond the inimitable music of the French —is a certain limpidity, and also, paradoxically, an architectural firmness and precision. Sentence by French sentence it is as if one were viewing, from the portal, an exquisite Gothic chapel made entirely of crystal, so that both the façades and interior structures may be seen at a glance.

And these enchanting sentences, with their lively variety of length, their perfectly balanced vectors of adventure, their suspensions and surprises always satisfyingly resolved, are congruent with the structure of the whole novel. They promise that no matter how arbitrarily the story seems to be moving that there will be, in good time, a payoff, that it will all, eventually, come out right in the end.

Is National Review still a conservative magazine? I’ve had the feeling for some time that the American Spectator has replaced it. Human Events certainly is more reliable. Some recent evidence is support by its authors for pornography and lesbian procreation (in the latter case, expressed as wishy-washy general disapproval with good wishes for each individual case): (more…)

I like to collect stories of very close elections. In 2006 the Montana statehouse race was close, John Gizzi tells us at Human Events.

…Before November 7, the Montana house was tied, with each party having 50 seats. Now, the breakdown is 50 Republican seats, 49 Democratic, and one Constitutionalist. The Republicans got their 50th seat only after a race in the 58th District (Laurel) ended in a tie between Democratic State Rep. Emilie Eaton and Republican challenger Krayton Kerns, and the hand recount of ballots, which was completed last week, gave Kerns the seat by three votes—and Montana Republicans rule of the state house by one vote.

These developments that yielded Republican rule of the Montana house came just days after a 25-to-25 tie in the Montana Senate was broken only when Republican Sen. Sam Kitzenberg switched to the Democrats, giving them control of the upper house of the legislature.

I found a good-sized clump of good oyster mushrooms on a standing tree near the Brown County border yesterday, and just tried one fried up. Good!

is about two things: 1. Israeli checkpoints delay women getting to hospitals and kills babies, and 2. the doctors are on strike because the Palestinian Authority has stopped paying them because the West is not giving aid. It’s amazing Palestinian propaganda, as you can see from the excerpts below. Why can’t the Israelis trust men with apparently pregnant women in their cars to go through checkpoints? (And why are the checkpoints there at all? Could it be to protect Western tourists in Bethlehem from the local people’s bullets and bombs?) Why doesn’t the Palestinian Authority or the Palestinian mothers use their own money for medical care instead of weapons? And the main question I thought of when I heard the article’s question: what would happen to a Jewish woman who tried to travel on a donkey through the West Bank with only a carpenter to protect her? (more…)

I just saw a reference to “propensity score models” for “the effect of treatment
on the treated” which it seems are used by
many economists. Sascha Becker at Munich has
the best explanation I
could find in quick search. I could not understand it by reading it, but by thinking
I think this is the situation: (more…)

I have my Good Things of 2006 list up on the website now.

Here’s a good set of questions about statistical significance:

Suppose that you conduct an experiment. You compare the means of your control
and experimental groups using a t-test, and find t = 2.7, p = 0.01.

1) You have absolutely disproved the null hypothesis (that is, there is no
difference between the population means).
true false

2) You have found the probability of the null hypothesis being true.
true
false (more…)

The Daily Mail has more news on the sad state of Christianity in Britain:

A Daily Mail survey of about 5,500 cards sold in well-known High Street stores, including WH Smith, Clinton Cards and Hallmark, found fewer than 70 – just over 1 per cent - had images linked to the Nativity.

Despite the vast majority carrying the word ‘Christmas’ - about 2,920, or 54%, of them on the front - many wished only ‘Seasons Greetings’ and others did not have a message.

Hundreds of cards avoided any image linked to Christmas at all – including fir trees, baubles, snowmen or Santa Claus.

NOT visissitude or viscissitude or visciscitude, I write, for the sake of those googling different spellings. From Merriam-Webster:

vi·cis·si·tude
Pronunciation: v&-’si-s&-”tüd, vI-, -”tyüd

Function: noun
Etymology: Middle French, from Latin vicissitudo, from vicissim in turn, from vicis change, alternation — more at WEEK
1 a : the quality or state of being changeable : MUTABILITY b : natural change or mutation visible in nature or in human affairs
2 a : a favorable or unfavorable event or situation that occurs by chance : a fluctuation of state or condition <the vicissitudes of daily life> b : a difficulty or hardship attendant on a way of life, a career, or a course of action and usually beyond one’s control c : alternating change : SUCCESSION

Mrs. Rasmusen and I were talking in the car about the problem of what to do at a 4-way stop when you arrive at almost the same time as another car to your right, but just a bit earlier. It’s a good practical example of the importance of common knowledge, the difference between both people knowing a fact and both people knowing that both people know that both people know…

If it were common knowledge that I got there first, I would start again and cross the intersection first. But suppose I’m not sure that the other driver saw that I arrived first. He might then cross first, thinking he had the right of way, and I would want to cross second in that case.

It could easily happen that both of us know that I arrived first, but since we don’t know that each other knows, we hold back– and nobody crosses.

After we both see that neither of us is crossing, we realize that something is wrong. I’d have to think harder than I have time for to analyze the resulting game, but we can rule out certain possibilities such as “The other driver believes that he arrived first and that it is common knowledge that he arrived first.”

I’m asking for suggestions as to what theologians I should think about reading.
I just had a rude (though not vulgar) comment that said I should read the following: (more…)

An important question is whether social planners should use the market rate of interest as the discount rate, zero, or something else. Let’s put aside the question of risk (which has NOT been well addressed in economics), and suppose the cash flows are all riskless. Our setting will be:

Generation 1 will live until X years from now. Then generation 2 will live for X years.

At the start, generation 1 is investing 100 in capital that will be left to generation 2, at an interest rate of 5%. This rate of return is constant for more or less capital. Suppose that rate of return yields back 160 after X years. (more…)