Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

From Overcoming Bias via Bryan Kaplan comes a joke and some practical advice:

There is an old Jewish joke: During Yom Kippur, the rabbi is seized by a sudden wave of guilt, and prostrates himself and cries, “God, I am nothing before you!” The cantor is likewise seized by guilt, and cries, “God, I am nothing before you!” Seeing this, the janitor at the back of the synagogue prostrates himself and cries, “God, I am nothing before you!” And the rabbi nudges the cantor and whispers, “Look who thinks he’s nothing.”

Take no pride in your confession that you too are biased; do not glory in your self-awareness of your flaws… [W]e should not gloat over how self-aware we are for confessing them; the occasion for rejoicing is when we have a little less to confess….

Never confess to me that you are just as flawed as I am unless you can tell me what you plan to do about it. Afterward you will still have plenty of flaws left, but that’s not the point; the important thing is to do better, to keep moving ahead, to take one more step forward.

I came across this at the Rutgers auctions conference (more…)

I had an experience in class recently that bears on the issue
of how to teach and how to evaluate teaching quality. The question
arose of how to learn whether moderate drinking of red wine reduced
the number of heart attacks. I asked the class of twelve or so bus
econ seniors— an elite group within my elite business school– how
they would attack the problem.

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Bidders 1 and 2 want to buy 2 units at v1 and v2 per unit max. Bidder 3 wants 1 unit at v3. All three values are drawn from the [0,1] interval, i. i. d.

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Gale and Shapley (1962). They have the Marriage Problem (match boys and girls so that there is no boy and girl who would like to leave their current pair and form a new pair together) and the Roommate Problem (match boys so that there is no pair of boys who would like to leave their current pair and form a new pair together).

Let there be four boys. Everybody hates Delta. Alpha likes beta best, then gamma. Beta likes gamma best, than alpha. Gamma likes alpha best, then beta.

Then no pairing is stable, in the sense that there are always two boys who would like to split off and start a new room. Start with AB, GD. Then G and B will split off to create A, BG, D. But then both A and G would like to deviate, to give AG, B, D. But then B would deviate, to get AB, G, D, where we started.

The North Coast Times tells of the Pilgrim United Church of Christ in Carlsbad, California, which bills itself as “An Open and Affirming, and Inclusive Church with a Progressive Theology and a Commitment to Social Justice” (ht: Christianity Today weblog). The church told a registered sex offender to stay away from its Sunday services after he informed them of his status. I hope no conservative church would ever do that. It’s hard to imagine it happening at any church that cared about theology (which, I know, does exclude some conservative churches). (more…)

We had some discussion of the federal budget deficit at the Rutgers auctions conference I went to recently, and how putting various pieces of spending off-budget makes it hard to know what the budget is. A better measure than the official deficit, then, would be the change in the level of government debt held by the private sector. (A lot of federal government debt is held by the federal government itself, and we’d want to subtract that out, since if it increases, so do government assets by the exact same amount.) I looked the debt up in the Economic Report of the President (the latest one, I suppose) and calculated the Deficit column in the table I show here.

The biggest surplus, 290 billion, was just when Bush took office. Recession, war, and tax cuts then increased it, as well as increasing spending on health care.

I was looking for IQ, height, and income data. The PSID has height and weight and income, and the data is here. The Children of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (CNLSY) has test scores, but the kids are just up to teenage years now. Their parents, the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY) have scores and incomes. Professor David Armor of George Mason tells me that “The original NLSY sample was used for norming the military ASVAB test in 1980, and then starting in 1986 they began following children of the female sample.”

I wonder if IQ at age 5 is a better, or independent, predictor of income, compared to IQ are age 16.

Also, are height and IQ correlated? How about height and criminality, etc.?

I saw someone intelligent make a mistake based on not knowing this writing rule, so I looked up a source on it:

Use an in place of a when it precedes a vowel sound, not just a vowel. That means it’s “an honor” (the h is silent), but “a UFO” (because it’s pronounced yoo eff oh).

Most of the confusion with a or an arises from acronyms and other abbreviations: some people think it’s wrong to use an in front of an abbreviation like “MRI” because “an” can only go before vowels. Not so: the sound, not the letter, is what matters. Because you pronounce it “em ar eye,” it’s “an MRI.”

(http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/a.html)

Reading Peter Hitchens’s good A Brief History of Crime, I learned that in medieval England citizens were expected to own arms and use them against criminals. The 1688 Bill of Rights included a right to bear arms, which must have been the model for the similar provision in the U.S. Bill of Rights. Attempts to regulate guns were made in the 19th century but were defeated.

Much more important, though, is something I realized from reading this: ONLY RECENTLY HAVE STATES CLAIMED A MONOPOLY ON THE USE OF FORCE. Such a monopoly is not only not the essence of a state, but is a modern anomaly. What has been common, rather, is the requirement that people, and rulers too, use force only as prescribed by law. Someone could stab someone trying to murder him, or stab the murderer as he tried to escape. There was not a difference between citizen and policeman. Indeed, there were no policemen. People were supposed to help in the hue and cry to catch a criminal who attacked their neighbors.

This is completely sensible. Why should we care whether it is a policeman who shoots a fleeing criminal as opposed to a victim shooting him? Or a bystander? The effect is the same– justice is done. Of course, if someone shoots his neighbor for no reason, that is a crime, and he should be prosecuted. But that has nothing to do with shooting criminals.

I learned today that the idea of “Granger Causality” is not to learn whether variable A causes variable B, but to learn whether if variable A increases in period t we should forecast that B will increase in period (t+1). For example, we might run regressions on Health and Wealth across states:

Ht = alpha + beta*Wealth(1-t) + theta*H(t-1)

and

Wt = gamma + delta*Health (t-1) + mu*W(t-1).

If beta is significant, we’d conclude that Wealth Granger-causes Health. In fact, it may be that it is IQ that causes both Wealth and Health and as an omitted variable is responsible for beta being significant. That’s OK for Granger causality. If we see a state’s wealth increase, we should expect its health to increase. It’s OK to have a biased regression because of omitted variables.

We have to be careful not to think of this as real causality, though. If we kept all other variables the same, including IQ, but we increased the Wealth in a State, the Health would not rise. The reason that usually if we see an increase in Wealth we can predict an increase in Health is that an increase in Wealth is a sign of an increase in IQ, and it is the IQ that will increase Health.

Thus, Granger causality is useful only for positive prediction, not for normative policymaking.

People have been talking about whether Republicans will nominate as a presidential candidate someone who has been divorced, as McCain, Gingrich, and Giuliani were, and as Reagan was. The case of Reagan is rather different, though— it seems that the impetus for that divorce came from his actress wife, who couldn’t stay married afterwards either. A better question to ask of McCain, Gingrich, and Giuliani is whether voters will go for an adulterer who abandoned a wife he had tired of. The details are sordid in all three cases. See here for some unverified but plausible information on McCain.

Why anybody thinks candidates with such disgusting backgrounds could or should win the votes of women is beyond me.

In the United Provinces, Protestants are the third biggest religious group now, not all that far ahead of the Moslems, this article says:

According to official figures 41 percent of Dutch have no religion, 30 percent are Catholic, 12 percent Protestant, 6 percent Reformed Protestant and 6 percent are Muslim.

I’ve just updated my Libby and Materiality entry extensively, in the comments section, including there a chronology of the events.

A set of comments at National Review on Dinesh D’Souza’s thesis that Islamists have been successful because Islam is hostile to modern Western immorality shows how lost conservatism is. It’s not that the commentors–who include smart people like Victor Hanson and Stanley Kurtz– disagree with D’Souza; rather, they don’t even comprehend his thesis. His argument goes like this:

1. The Left won the Culture War in the Western World.

2. The Left’s immorality is now spreading worldwide, including to Islamic countries.

3. Mainstream Moslems are therefore now turning to the leadership of radical Islamists to fight back against infectious western decadence.

Thus, the Left caused 9-11. This is not moral causation, because it was not the intent of the Left to cause 9-11; it is just “efficient causation”, to use Aristotle’s classification. Or, if you like, it is somewhere in between: the Left wanted to spread its ideas around the World, and it sparked a war that it didn’t intend to cause.

The comments say that the Left is not to blame, which may be right (causing something bad doesn’t mean you are to blame for it), and that the Islamists are a bigger threat than the Left (which any conservative should think is false, as I have posted on before). Perhaps the problem is that many people categorized under “conservative” today are not conservative at all. They are foreign policy realists, or libertarians, or neoconservatives who approve of homosexuality, divorce, and pornography, and thus do not see the Left as a threat except to national security and to their pocketbooks. Naturally, such a person would not agree with D’Souza, and might even have trouble understanding his point, and why the Islamists are so angry.

Dinesh D’Souza, much attacked of late, is actually quite sensible in connecting 60′s radicals with present-day Islamists. His thesis is that Islam is turning to people like Bin Laden as a defense against decadent Western immorality, not because of Israel or an attempt to extend Islam. This makes sense, once you think about it. For hundreds of years Moslems were moderate and made no attempt to attack the West. This continued even after Israel was established. Since 1970, however, mainstream Moslems have turned increasingly to radical Islamism. This has occurred at the time that the West has become *less* Christian, not more. The obvious conclusion is that when Islamists say they are fighting Western decadence, the innovation of the 60′s, they are being truthful. Or, if you like, that they are saying this because they know it is what brings in recruits, because it appeals to the average Moslem.

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Via Organizations and Markets I found this book review talking about the history of economic thought: (more…)

One way to look at the quality of schools is to look at the test scores of the students. This is unsatisfactory because some schools have students who are smarter.

A second way is to compare the national-percentile levels of the students in 1st grade at that school with those at the 6th grade. This is a value-added measure. In this case, a school with students in the 99th percentile at 1st grade has nowhere to go but down– but it might go down, so the measure is still valuable for those schools. Also, we could measure either number of percentiles gained or lost, or fraction of the possible percentile gain or loss (that is, going from 90 to 95 the school either gains (a) 5%, or (b) 50%).

A third way is to compare a school only with schools with the same 1st grade percentile.

All three ways have their independent value.

How sad. Dinesh D’Souza has been making the point that traditional Moslems and American conservatives are natural allies, which is quite true, and almost obvious. He of course is careful to distinguish traditional Moslems from the Bin-Laden style radicals, who represent traditional Islam about as well as Trotsky represents traditional liberalism. But now I read this by D’Souza:

At one point Berkowitz accuses me of holding that “the cultural left presents a threat to America as grave as that posed by radical Islam.” What? The Left is as dangerous to America as al Qaeda, the radical mullahs in Iran, the jihadist insurgents in Iraq, and the worldwide network of radical Islam? Nowhere do I say this, and I challenge Berkowitz to substantiate his allegation.

Doesn’t D’Souza realize that the cultural Left is a far graver threat than radical Islam? Let us put aside the question of whether the culture Left will kill as many people in the future as it has in the past (remember Communism?). Suppose it will kill zero, and al Qaeda will kill 100,000 people. America minus 100,000 people is America almost entirely intact, indeed, perhaps even invigorated. World War III, with its much greater toll, did not come close to destroying America. But the aim of the Left is to eliminate most of what we think of as America. They repudiate the Founding Fathers as scientifically ingnorant, sexist, theocratic, racist, homophobic, and artistically backward. They dream of an entirely different world, one in which Christianity is drained of content, in which people are not allowed to say what they think about morality, science, or privileged minorities, in which what we eat and the things we buy are chosen by the government, not by ourselves, in which our earnings are taken by the Left and spent for us by them, not ourselves. Is this a real danger? Look at what’s happened already. And compare that with the petty successes of al Qaeda.

Woman X is much more attractive to men than Woman Y, though both are the same age and equally healthy. That is hard to explain evolutionarily except as sexual selection (as opposed to fitness selection). I suppose all sexual selection is surprising in this way, but this example bothers me. One thing is that in a monogamous species adultery is a threat. If I choose woman X for sexual selection, it is because her children will also be beautiful and will have more children than average. But she will especially tempting to other men, so her children may not be mine, whereas an ugly woman’s would have been.