Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Asymptosis: always approaching

  • Does Having Kids Make You Happier?

    I can’t even begin to match the thinking and research that Bryan Caplan has done on the subject of kids and happiness (he’s writing a book titled Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids), but I can add my two bits, which generally support everything he says. Short story, the research generally says “no.” Over large…

  • To claim “objectivism” at 20 is predictable. To claim “objectivism” at 60 is plain idiocy.

    Apologies to Churchill for the ripoff. No apologies to Ms. Rand. I remember quite clearly at age 13 saying to my mother and my sister, “why can’t people just be objective?” Pretty amusing in hindsight. Related posts: We Should Make Janitors Work Longer Because Lawyers Are Living Longer Two Thirds of Tea Partiers Want to…

  • Teenage Moms and Welfare Incentives

    Bryan Caplan has done yeoman’s duty for us all by reviewing “all the major research on the response of fertility to economic incentives.” He finds a “striking contrast” between two types of literature: In the “birth subsidy” literature, researchers usually find fairly large effects in the expected direction.  In the welfare literature, in contrast, most…

  • Musings on Efficient Market Theory

    Justin Fox, author of The Myth of the Rational Market, is in an interesting interchange with Eugene Fama, patriarch of efficient-market theory. Which led me to some musings on the subject. I find that a great deal of the discussion of EM theory is befuddled because the discussors don’t distinguish clearly between different but related…

  • One Completely False Statement in Superfreakonomics

    Then there’s this little-discussed fact about global warming: While the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased. This “fact” is true…but only if you calculate forward from 1998–one of the two hottest years in history (2005 was hotter). It’s not…

  • Most Regressive Taxes? My Home State 🙁

    I’m finally getting around to following up on a graph I posted sort of in passing a while back, a graph that to my eyes makes a profound statement about our country and our economic system. It shows total taxes paid–local, state, and federal combined. People making $55-90K (fourth quintile, approx.) pay the same share…

  • The Problem with “Socialism”

    As an attack term, “socialism” packs a lot of wallop. But that’s mainly because it’s used to attack things that aren’t actually socialism. Socialism, defined: “various theories of economic organization advocating public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production.” But when attackers go after “socialistic” policies, they’re usually imprecating against something…

  • Socialism and Prosperity: Does One Cause the Other?

    Regular readers will find me beating something of a dead horse here, but I felt it necessary to respond to a recent post by Bryan Caplan, who continues to speculate on the putative negative economic effects of “socialism.” >”Lots of developed countries have some significant socialistic elements,” … would be an understatement. Every developed country…

  • Ratings Agencies and Real-Estate Appraisers: How Do You Keep ’em Honest?

    Megan McArdle points to an interesting suggestion from Joe Wiesenthal at Clusterstock: form a pool of say, ten certified ratings agencies. When an issuer wants a rating, they are assigned an agency by lottery. They can’t go shopping for the best rating. I’ve suggested exactly the same lottery-type system for real-estate appraisers. We’ve been hearing…

  • Global Warming Caused by Sex!

    More sex, more people. More people, more global warming. Pretty simple. If people would just stop having sex, we could solve the global warming problem! (Envision: Just-Say-No types happily twirling their fingers in their cheeks.) Right. But my tongue-in-cheek wise-guyism is spurred by something quite real: reducing unprotected sex worldwide could be the most cost-effective…

  • Best Line of the Week: Not-So-True Conservatives

    Okay, so the week happened to be more than two years ago. But it’s the best line of my week: The old formulation defined conservatism as the desire to protect traditional values from the intrusion of big government; the new one seeks to promote traditional values through the intrusion of big government. Related posts: Keynes:…

  • “More Investment Needed!” Oh, Really?

    Following up on posts here, here, and here questioning the supply-side orthodoxy that more money for the rich results in more investment, hence prosperity for all (see the long-discredited Say’s Law), I give you this (click for source): Between 2003 and 2008, US gross fixed capital increased by about 25 percent, a reasonable number during…

  • The American President: Why IQ Matters

    In a recent post I pointed out that Humans are Pathologically Nuts. In particular they’re forever playing obvious win-win games as if they were zero-sum or worse, and everybody loses as a result. Now I come across this study (PDF) showing that there’s a significant correlation between lower IQ and that very type of irrational…

  • Religious “Indoctrination”?

    I am really confused by Charles Blow’s confusion in the opening paragraph of his latest column: …most children raised unaffiliated with a religion later chose to join one. Indoctrination be damned. By contrast, only 14 percent of those raised Catholic and 13 percent of those raised Protestant later became unaffiliated. So kids raised unaffiliated feel…

  • Stunningly Bad Health Science Reporting

    Jane Brody reaffirms my astonishment at how bad science reporters are at their jobs. In the NYT Personal Health section, she tells us: The study found that, other things being equal, the men and women who consumed the most red and processed meat were likely to die sooner Which would be a very interesting finding…

  • Humans are Pathologically Nuts: Proof Positive

    I’ve often commented that if human beings are the (or a) result, it wasn’t a very intelligent designer. The most telling demonstration I’ve seen recently is a series of experiments conducted between 1959 and 1962, reported in wonderfully readable form in Morton Davis’s Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction. I recommend this book not only for…

  • True Conservative Values, and Torture

    In my earlier post I didn’t give Jim Manzi sufficient credit. He argues that a systematic government policy of torture (as distinguished from the torturous acts that Americans have engaged in over the centuries) is 1. a radical break with American tradition, and 2. because of 1, is quite possibly (I would say definitely) damaging…

  • “The Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture.”

    “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.” –Major General Antonio Taguba, USA (Ret.) Read the Report. Related posts: True Conservative Values, and Torture The Strategic Value of Torture Businesses Constrained by Lack of Investment? Oh, Maybe Not. Even Fox Sez…

  • Politicians Should Resist Equality and Prosperity!

    Alberto Alesina and Paola Giuliano give us what strikes me as the most boneheaded argument I’ve read in a very long time (hat tip Mark Thoma): The thirty years after the Second World War were the period of the “Great Compression” – a sharp reduction in income inequality (Piketty and Saez 2003). A few months…

  • The Strategic Value of Torture

    Jim Manzi discusses torture here. I find the discussion uncomfortably cold-blooded, but it has the accompanying virtue of clear-headedness and cutting to the crux (unlike those from his compatriot Johah Goldberg at The Corner). The important (extra-moral) question is not torture’s tactical value, but whether it achieves America’s strategic goals. That’s a damned good question–it’s…

  • More Popular than Republicans: China, Venezuela, and Legalized Marijuana

    You can see the polling data here, here, and here. Related posts: Congressional Republicans’ Approval Ratings in Freefall. Dems Hold Steady. Polling the Pollster Pollers: Obama Still Strong It’s Working: Pubs’ Polls Plummeting Why nominating Clinton would be a Very Bad Thing Everything Sez: “Obama Landslide.” What Gives?