Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Month: November 2010

  • Is the Social Security Trust Fund a Liberal Own-Goal?

    The Social Security trust fund is one key rhetorical crux of our budget debates. (I’m punting on Medicare here for the moment; it’s obviously the elephant in the room.) Liberals think of the trust fund as a big national savings account. They point to the trust fund’s promises to future retirees, their multi-decade contributions to…

  • Steve Martin: Atheists Just Sing the Blues

    “Nobody ever wrote a tune, for godless existentialism.” Related posts: Shakespeare Authorship (sigh): They’re At It Again Galbraith Translates “Trickle Down”: Eat Shit

  • Murray, Manzi, McCardle, and Coastal Elites: Who Knows What?

    Undoubtedly spurred by Charles Murray’s recent (and reliably predictable) op-ed, Megan McArdle comments on Jim Manzi’s anti-elitism: extremely well-educated people from a handful of metropolitan areas, few of whom have ever, say, been responsible for a profit and loss statement, or tried to bring a gas station into compliance with local and federal EPA regulations. You don’t…

  • The Deadweight Loss From Taxes: Anti-Taxers Don’t Care

    Anti-tax zealots are wont to point to the problem of “deadweight loss” when trying to demonstrate how awful taxes are. The rule/theory of deadweight loss says that a tax in general makes us all worse off than we would be without taxes, because a certain amount of production and value simply disappears as a result…

  • Why Would We Rather Be Wrong than Perceive Ourselves as Being Wrong?

    Why would we rather perceive ourselves as right than be right? Why does believing ourselves to be right feel so good? People hate being wrong. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. If we’re wrong about the world out there, we’re less likely to survive and produce grandchildren. You’d expect being wrong to feel bad,…

  • Midterm Democratic Losses: It’s Not (Quite) As Bad As It Seems

    Ah, the consolations of philosophy. If you look at the last sixty years, you see  that in bad economic times, the incumbent presidential party always loses seats in the midterm. It’s to be expected. No matter whether it’s fair, the incumbent party gets the blame. Political scientist Douglas Hibbs predicted before the election that structural…

  • Why Non-Correlations Tell Us More Than Correlations Do

    Most readers here will know the problem with correlation and causation: post hoc ergo propter hoc (it came after therefore it was caused by). It’s one of the classic logical fallacies. Suppose you find that people with good teeth have higher lifetime incomes. Are the good teeth the cause? Or is there some other factor…