Sedenion

We're leaving money on the table

2012-01-25T17:08:00.002-06:00

For example, if 1,250,000 visas (roughly 5,000 every business day) were sold annually at an average price of $12,000, the federal government would receive $15 billion in revenue.

My favorite $200 question

2012-01-17T15:58:00.004-06:00

Who wins Chomp on &omega³?

Fun with Zipf distributions

2012-01-14T15:29:00.002-06:00

Robin Hanson: 1 2 3. The last one is pretty speculative, but the table predicting inequality at given world population levels is qualitatively robust, regardless of your opinions about the likeliness of "Ems".

2011-12-30T12:31:00.000-06:00

Medicare cost growth by medical specialty.

2011-12-24T14:24:00.001-06:00

What it is like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics. (HT: MR.)

MITx

2011-12-20T06:00:00.000-06:00

Coming soon: the online teaching of MIT courses to people around the world and the opportunity for able learners to gain certification of mastery of MIT material.

2011-12-19T09:39:00.001-06:00

Hitchens on North Korea.

Maze algorithms

2011-12-13T06:53:00.000-06:00

Animated.

Technology to end debt?

2011-12-12T07:26:00.000-06:00

I'm intrigued by this:

Don't subsidize short-term debt with a tax shield and regulatory preference; tax it; or ban it for anything close to "too big to fail." Fix the contractual flaws that make shadow bank liabilities prone to runs.
Here we are in a golden moment, because technology can circumvent all the standard objections. It is said that people need liquid assets, and banks must borrow short and lend long to provide such assets. But now, you could pay for coffee with an electronic transfer of mutual fund shares. The fund could hold stocks, or mortgage backed securities. Nobody ever ran on a (floating-NAV) mutual fund. With instant communication, liquidity need no longer coincide with fixed value and first-come first-served guarantees.

I'm also skeptical. If debt were forbidden, then many people would buy insurance against taking a loss (maybe measured against a consumer price index) when they ~~make withdrawals~~ exchange equities for goods and services. What will be the cost of this insurance? How about the insurer keeps any gains from asset appreciation? Oops, we just created a bank. How do you prevent insurers from becoming banks in this world? It seems like severe regulation would be needed.

And why do we want to live in this debt-free world? You have to trade fractional mutual fund shares for coffee. That sounds like barter, like a big step backward. Can I pay taxes with any mutual fund shares, or do I have to pay taxes with Federal Reserve Mutual Fund shares? If the latter, then wouldn't coffee shop owners be wise to demand payment in Federal Reserve Mutual Fund shares? Are we banning banking or nationalizing it?

2011-12-11T07:23:00.000-06:00

Medical patents must die.

Bandwidth

2011-12-10T14:40:00.002-06:00

This makes we wonder what the bandwidth of a FedEx plane full of discs is.

Against medical credentialism

2011-12-09T07:00:00.000-06:00

At least let Texas nurses do what Oregon nurses can do.

Follow the green.

2011-12-08T07:00:00.000-06:00

Government-subsidized luxury cars.

Peace in our time

2011-12-07T07:00:00.001-06:00

I hope this is right:

So why is war less common now than in the first half of the 20th century? The simplest explanation, I would argue, is not Pinker’s multifaceted movement toward Enlightenment values. Instead, it’s now clearer that war doesn’t pay. In the past, most of the value of the potential conquest was in the dirt acquired: mines or cropland. War couldn’t hurt dirt. Conquering California in 1846, for example, did little damage to the place, which turned out to have gold in the ground.
Today, though, most of the asset value of a territory is in the buildings and people above ground, which are very easy to blow to smithereens with modern weapons. And if you don’t raze your enemy’s cities, they provide formidable makeshift fortresses for resistance to your invasion. You can’t win. The expected profit isn’t worth your trouble. You might as well stay home.

Target NGDP

2011-12-06T07:00:00.001-06:00

And target levels, not rates. This moral argument is also interesting.

45-byte executable

2011-12-05T07:00:00.000-06:00

Outputs the answer to everything.

Circular queues

2011-12-04T07:00:00.001-06:00

For fun and profit.

Creeping credentialism

2011-12-03T07:00:00.001-06:00

You'll need a master's degree to be fire chief.

TV in the first 2 years

2011-12-01T07:00:00.000-06:00

Don't waste money on educational videos for infants. It's ineffective at best (and might be counter-productive).

The 0- to 2-year age group has become a prime target for commercial educational programming, often used by parents convinced that it’s beneficial.
As screens proliferated, so did research. “There have been about 50 studies that have come out on media use by children in this age group between 1999 and now,” said Ari Brown, a pediatrician and member of the AAP committee that wrote the new report.
Those studies have found that children don’t really understand what’s happening on a screen until they’re about 2 years old. Once they do, media can be good for them, but until then television is essentially a mesmerizing, glowing box.

Late bloomers

2011-11-30T07:00:00.002-06:00

The average age at which physicists do Nobel-prize-winning work has crept up to 48 years. Will the age cut-off for the Fields Medal always be 40?

Archimedes

2011-11-29T07:00:00.000-06:00

Still publishing.

Runaway mitochondria

2011-11-28T07:00:00.000-06:00

Item 14,662 on the list of things to fix to save the brain from aging.

Choosing a major

2011-11-27T07:00:00.003-06:00

How much do you want to study? How harshly do you want to be graded? How much do you want to learn? How specialized do you want your job to be? How fast do you want your industry to grow?

Import more doctors

2011-11-26T07:00:00.000-06:00

We need them.

ROA vs ROE

2011-11-25T07:00:00.000-06:00

It would be better to judge bank CEOs by return on assets, not return on equity.

The wave function is real.

2011-11-24T07:00:00.000-06:00

Here's the arXiv preprint. Here's a very positive review.

Foolish faith in Basel Accords

2011-11-23T17:00:00.000-06:00

On Engineering the Financial Crisis. See also here. Regulations can and will be gamed; it's only a matter of time. The question is how to prepare for the next time. Of course, if the Next Time is actually Europe, 2012, then already it's too late.

Randall Munroe's latest research

2011-11-23T07:00:00.001-06:00

Self-recommending.

Complementary flavors

2011-11-22T19:32:00.000-06:00

A map.

Afghanistan

2011-11-22T17:04:00.002-06:00

Anthropologists say it's complicated. Less trivially, they say it's even more anarchic than it appears.

Western soldiers meet with village councils, or shuras, and work to strike deals with local elders; and the methods of counterinsurgency may well give them a greater capacity to do so. But what if the shura is largely ceremonial, with real power exercised behind the scenes? And what if the elders are not all they seem? What if they exaggerate their own authority, or seek to establish that authority through prominent meetings with easily impressed outsiders? What if the elders, like everyone else, are anxiously hoarding their power, refusing to take risks, and preparing for an unpredictable future in which it’s equally plausible that mullahs, militias or Kabul bureaucrats might each gain more power?

Arrested Development

2011-11-22T10:10:00.001-06:00

~10 new episodes in early 2013.

Traffic analysis

2011-11-21T17:00:00.006-06:00

License plate readers in DC are tracking all the cars they see, and keeping the data for 3 years. Welcome to the future. Would you prefer to live in (A) a small village where everyone knows your comings and goings, (B) a city where only Big Brother is supposed to know (until you misbehave), or (C) your personal underground bunker, off the grid?

Unfortunate economics jargon

2011-11-17T17:00:00.001-06:00

“Investment” and “personal consumption expenditure” probably do not mean what you think they mean.

2011-11-15T18:02:00.001-06:00

Pass the salt.

Ferrying past immigration laws?

2011-11-11T10:38:00.012-06:00

I would love for this to better expose to shame the current farce that is US immigration policy.

This is what Blueseed is attempting to do, but instead of gambling, they are taking the issues around not being able to get H1B immigration visas head on:
Blueseed aims to provide an alternative solution to the US work visa problem for Silicon Valley and allow professionals lacking a visa to legally work in close proximity to companies and investors from the Valley.
Blueseed plans to do this by providing living and office accommodations on a vessel anchored 12 nautical miles [or 13.8 miles] offshore from California (half an hour by ferry), in international waters outside the jurisdiction of the United States...
...I agree with Greg Anderson from ArticStartup, who wrote, "As an American citizen, I don’t know if I should feel really impressed or disappointed about Blueseed’s plans."
...While [Max Marty, director of Blueseed,] was in college in Florida, he made friends with amazing and talented people from around the world and after they graduated, they found it incredibly difficult to stay in the US. Most returned home where they started their professional careers, even though that wasn’t what they wanted.

More population pyramids

2011-09-30T20:28:00.003-05:00

From the UN. I was especially interested in the continent-wide/regional aggregates, which illustrate what is summarized on page here (PDF): between now and 2050, the developed world's total dependency ratio will increase from 0.5 to 0.7 while the developing world's total dependency ratio will decrease from 0.6 to 0.5. So, for the purposes of my retirement savings, investing in "emerging markets" and investing in US corporations that do business in those countries are the obvious (but risky) ways to attempt to "escape demographics".

From another angle, if US equities really trended up for decades because so many boomers saved and are now trending down because the boomers are starting to retire, then we could see a global version of this cycle: stocks around the world booming in 2050 as billions of people in Asia and Latin America, who will have much higher living standards than their parents have today, save for retirement. However, I have no idea what extent savers in Asia and Latin America will globally diversify their portfolios.

Decades after that, there would be another bust, provided you trust the UN's projections out that far, and don't expect peak oil, nuclear annihilation, climate change, the singularity, or whatever to economically swamp the effects of demography. Addendum: The demographics behind this hypothetical post-2050 bust will be "locked in" before 2050. The lock-in process starts next decade, as Phillip Longman points out:

Indeed, the U.N. projects that by 2025, the population of children under 5, already in steep decline in most developed countries, will be falling globally -- and that's even after assuming a substantial rebound in birth rates in the developing world.

Actually, annual world births already peaked in the late 1990s. The under-5 population is still growing mostly because of declining child mortality.

2011-09-30T13:41:00.001-05:00

A map of books of speculative fiction.

2011-09-29T12:14:00.003-05:00

Bad patents: an aggregate and an anecdote.

Teenagers

2011-09-28T21:14:00.003-05:00

Is the author of this article is arguing for more laid-back parenting, or is he sneakily arguing for parents to be pickier about their teens' friends?

In the game, you try to drive across town in as little time as possible... You save time—and score more points—if you drive through before the light turns red. But if you try to drive through the red and don't beat it, you lose even more time than you would have if you had stopped for it... When teens drive the course alone, in what Steinberg calls the emotionally "cool" situation of an empty room, they take risks at about the same rates that adults do. Add stakes that the teen cares about, however, and the situation changes. In this case Steinberg added friends: When he brought a teen's friends into the room to watch, the teen would take twice as many risks, trying to gun it through lights he'd stopped for before. The adults, meanwhile, drove no differently with a friend watching.

Smiles

2011-09-28T21:10:00.003-05:00

Would the world be a better or worse place if more people paid close attention (consciously, not just subconsciously) to the difference between real and fake smiles?

FDR's best economic policy...

2011-09-28T18:41:00.003-05:00

...was going off the gold standard. Many of his other economic policies were counterproductive.

In more normal times, great economies make great presidents, not the other way around. But in our time, Obama, thinking monetary policy ran out of steam in 2008, has not even tried recess appointments to the two vacancies on the seven-member Federal Reserve Board of Governors. If Obama is punished for the economy, he mostly deserves it. Obama managed some fiscal stimulus, but so did Hoover:

Hoover's budget strategy over his term of office was not to balance the budget. The budget ran a small deficit of -.06% of GDP in 1931, followed by a much larger deficits of 4.0% of GDP in 1932 and 4.5% of GDP in fiscal year 1933... During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt faced unemployment rates of 25% and continued the Hoover policy of budget deficits, running deficits no larger than 5.9% of GDP and more usually in the range of 3-4% of GDP through the 1930s. During the Great Recession, the U.S. economy experienced unemployment of nearly 10%, and has responded with fiscal stimulus on the order of 10% of GDP.

Fiscal stimulus fails if money stays tight.

Retractions

2011-09-26T22:39:00.003-05:00

I love this one and I expect to see more like in the future. However, the bigger problem is irreproducability in general, not fraud. There are structural causes for this problem, such as the statistical significance filter.

Mathematics is blessed from this point of view. My results can be reproduced every time someone reads them and understands the proofs. Only for a handful of famous problems are false proofs a major nuisance; even for these, the errors are found quickly.

2011-09-26T22:37:00.000-05:00

Our gold came from asteroids.

What are nuclear bombs good for?

2011-09-26T21:58:00.003-05:00

Why did Japan surrender? Very interesting---the scholarly claim reported is that Japan surrendered only because of the Soviet Union's entry into the war deprecated their strategy to try "to convince the Soviet Union, still neutral in the Asian theater, to mediate a settlement with the Americans. Stalin, they calculated, might negotiate more favorable terms in exchange for territory in Asia." Moreover:

The bomb - horrific as it was - was not as special as Americans have always imagined... The photos of charred Tokyo and charred Hiroshima are indistinguishable. In fact, more than 60 of Japan’s cities had been substantially destroyed by the time of the Hiroshima attack.

However, the journalist speculates a bit too carelessly at the end:

Hasegawa’s scholarship disturbs this simple logic. If the atomic bomb alone could not compel the Japanese to submit, then perhaps the nuclear deterrent is not as strong as it seems. In fact, Wilson argues, history suggests that leveling population centers, by whatever method, does not force surrender... If killing large numbers of civilians does not have a military impact, then what, Wilson asks, is the purpose of keeping nuclear weapons? We know they are dangerous. If they turn out not to be strategically effective, then nuclear weapons are not trump cards, but time bombs beneath our feet.

Sometime between 1945 and 1961, the stakes increased from the destruction of a few major cities to the destruction of all major cities. Mad or not, MAD worked: the Soviets withdrew their missiles from Cuba and Kennedy secretly agreed to withdraw US missiles from Turkey. Moreover, in a counterfactual 1945 in which Japan didn't surrender and we kept dropping nukes, the eventual result would have been a sparsely populated, poisoned Japan. At that point, surrender would be irrelevant.

Demographics and retirement

2011-09-26T21:08:00.004-05:00

You can't escape demographics. Except, that post ignores the distinction between global and national demographics. Globally diversified retirement savings might buy developed nations more time. For example, compare projected US and World population pyramids.

Electoral votes by congressional district?

2011-09-21T10:22:00.005-05:00

Which party would benefit on net if this idea was implemented in most states?

The hypothetical is that most states switch to a new scheme of awarding electoral votes for the president where 2 EVs go to the statewide winner & 1 EV is awarded to the winner of each congressional district in that state. It seems to me that this would help the GOP on average. Increasing voter turn-out is easier in urban districts than in rural ones, and on net this helps the Democrats in contests for state-wide majorities/pluralities. This new EV scheme would make state-wide vote totals much less important.

Nate Silver suggests that public disgust with gerrymandering influencing presidential elections leads to the abolishment of the electoral college in favor of an direct national vote for the president (e.g., national plurality, national majority with possible run-off election, or some other scheme that treats votes from different states equally). Unlikely! It only takes 13 states to prevent a constitutional amendment, but there are 33 states with below-average adult population. (I computed 33 from here.)

Also, states don't have to gerrymander forever. Several states already have independent redistricting commissions. EV-by-district could push more states towards this solution. Or maybe some big states would just keep gerrymandering, leading to a constitutional amendment that somehow restores the de facto status quo of awarding most EVs to the winners of state-wide pluralities. (The de jure status quo is that states can award choose their electors however and whenever they want, and electors vote however they want on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December.) Both of these seem more likely than the less populous states giving up their disproportionate power in selecting the president.

Let us also consider the robustness of election results. For example, Minnesota is typical in requiring a recount of a state-wide vote if the margin is less than half a percent. 2 out of the last 47 presidential elections had a national popular vote margin less than half a percent (1880, 1960). (1 out of 47 had a margin less than a quarter of a percent (1880); 6 out of 47 had a margin of less than one percent (1880, 1884, 1888, 1960, 1968, 2000).) If those had been direct elections, would expensive national recounts have been required? You might invoke the law of large numbers to argue for a lower threshold than 0.5% at the national level, but the law of large numbers is about random, uncorrelated errors. What recounts are really about is the fear of election fraud. Think about how the incentives of election officials in deep red Idaho and deep blue Massachusetts would change if presidential elections became direct.

In actuality, 2 of 56 presidential elections were disputed, but, thanks to the electoral college, the disputes were limited to a few states (FL in 2000; FL, LA, SC, and OR in 1876). If EVs were awarded by congressional district, disputed presidential elections would still be rare, and within this small set of disputed elections, most disputes would not require any state-wide recounts.

P.S. I dismiss purely moral arguments for "one man, one vote" because government should be a mere means to ends like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Having my vote and your vote weighted equally either promotes these ends or does not promote them.

The case for QE3

2011-09-20T16:01:00.002-05:00

A concise explanation with lots graphs (PDF slide show; hat tip: MR).

Health advice for us at desks

2011-09-14T10:33:00.008-05:00

No special furniture required. Just sitting is bad, but so is just standing. Therefore:

Sit to do computer work. Sit using a height-adjustable, downward titling keyboard tray for the best work posture, then every 20 [or 30] minutes stand for 2 minutes AND MOVE... just walking around is sufficient.

So, maybe pace back and forth in the office and write on the whiteboard. The trick is the frequency. I don't want a beep every 30 minutes, but perhaps a discreet blinking light in the corner of the screen. I'll have to experiment with this.

My biggest concern is loss of "flow." You know the movie trope, a montage of a hacker typing for hours? I do more scribbling on paper and whiteboards (and forego a soundtrack), but it's basically the same thing. I really enjoy having a big block of time to work on Just One Thing. (The great danger is the temptation to "work" for a long time on reading my favorite economics blogs or perfecting a blog post of my own.)

Unfortunately, it is not clear to me how important "flows" of an hour or longer are to my productivity, nor even how I could perform a self-experiment to find out. (Is there applicable large-N psychology research?) My subjective experience, which I should not naively trust, is that some problems are intricate and that I need a big block of time just to get all the moving pieces properly configured in my working memory. On the other hand, many flows have turned out to be inefficient ex post because of a wrong turn made early in the flow. One the third hand, it is not clear that breaks help detect wrong turns sooner. For an extreme example, it seems easy to dabble briefly in something every day and not notice a lurking error for many, many days.

2011-09-13T11:59:00.003-05:00

"Imagine a host talking to a panel of four pundits about someone about to roll a 6-sided die..." Scroll down and read the rest.

T/C and T/(C+T)

2011-09-12T20:38:00.004-05:00

...are better notions of a person's average tax rate than T/I or T/(I+T). Here T is tax, C is consumption, and I is income. Scott Sumner estimates that Warren Buffett has a 90% tax burden in the sense of T/(C+T). In the sense of T/C, it would be about 1000%. Sumner makes the case for C instead of I succinctly and eloquently at the end of the post:

Buffett’s consumption is the resources he takes out of the economy for his own personal enjoyment.
Taxes paid are what he contributes to the common good.

Faith is revealed belief...

2011-09-11T14:19:00.007-05:00

... and such locutions reveals my assimilation of economic jargon.

Inputs to teacher productivity

2011-09-10T11:33:00.006-05:00

Some strong negative results:

As with most previous research, we found no relationship between a teacher’s earning a master’s degree, certification, or years of experience and the teacher’s classroom performance as measured by student test scores. Though we found that some pedagogy course work was related to teaching effectiveness, the magnitude of the effect was mild: even very detailed information about the teacher’s preparation in college told us very little about how effective that teacher would be in the classroom.

If you want to teach, say, geometry to high-school students, it surely helps to know geometry. At my university, you can take a course with this description:

Selected topics from the foundations of Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries. Includes the study of spherical and hyperbolic geometries, as well as transformational geometry, with techniques from linear algebra. Intended primarily for students seeking secondary certification.

After that course, your understanding of geometry will go much deeper than it did in high school. However much or however little your future geometry students will benefit from your deeper understanding, my point is that this is an undergraduate course. From another undergraduate course description:

Selected topics from secondary school mathematics. Content, materials, and contemporary issues specific to teaching of mathematics at the secondary school level.

That course has a corequisite; from its description:

This course will focus on field-based supervision of elementary and secondary education pre-service teachers.

After taking such courses, why would I be surprised to learn that you won't help your students by getting a master's degree? There are diminishing returns to education. For an example from higher education, graduate students who just got their bachelor's degrees are assigned to teach lower-level undergraduate courses. As a math PhD student, I taught a trigonometry class and was a TA for calculus classes and for a linear-algebra-plus-differential-equations class. There were no graduate course prerequisites for these teaching assignments. My graduate courses were intended to make me a better scholar, not a better educator.

More surprising is the failure to detect a student test score benefit from more experienced teachers. There are diminishing returns to experience, but is 5 years of experience really no better than 0 years? If you follow the link, they note that most other studies indicate that "the benefit of that experience appears to plateau after the third to fifth year," which is more plausible than no effect at all.

As for the null result for certification, one plausible explanation is that teachers without certification were hired or kept on because they had otherwise better resumes or job performance than their certified competition. However, we must again ask for evidence.

2011-09-06T16:17:00.000-05:00

Faster please.

Time, heat, and origins

2011-09-03T11:58:00.002-05:00

Ten things everyone should know about time. I really like the list overall, but #9 would better titled "aging can be reversed, in principle" (as opposed to what will happen in practice, which is very speculative).

I feel compelled to give a more substantive clarification of #8:

8. Complexity comes and goes. Other than creationists, most people have no trouble appreciating the difference between “orderly” (low entropy) and “complex.” Entropy increases, but complexity is ephemeral; it increases and decreases in complex ways, unsurprisingly enough. Part of the “job” of complex structures is to increase entropy, e.g. in the origin of life. But we’re far from having a complete understanding of this crucial phenomenon. (Talks by Mike Russell, Richard Lenski, Raissa D’Souza.)

Yes, there are complex very-low-entropy configurations (human bodies) and there are simple very-low-entropy configurations (perfect crystals). However, complexity and entropy are not completely orthogonal. The very-high-entropy configurations of the gas molecules in my apartment is better described as random than complex. What complexity it has, such as macroscopic airflow patterns ornamented with turbulence, is due to the configuration not having as a high an entropy as it could. If my apartment was a closed system, without electricity coming in to power the fans and the air conditioner, and without food coming in to keep the residents breathing and moving, then all these patterns would decay, leaving nothing but random microscopic motion. On a grander scale, the heat death of the universe really would be the death of us all.

Evolution is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics because living organisms are not closed systems; they use energy to pump out their entropy into their surroundings. The author, in #9, makes exactly this point using the example of refrigerators, which take in energy and use it to pump entropy from the food inside them into the air outside them. (If evolution wasn't consistent with the second law, then, given the quality of the evidence for evolution, the better inference might be that the second law is wrong, not that the theory of evolution is wrong.)

In the context of the origin of life, "complexity comes" is actually a very bold scientific hypothesis. The second law is consistent with the earth transitioning from lifeless to full of life, but so far all estimates of the probability of such a transition are highly speculative. Even if we knew the probability, I don't think it would settle the question of our ultimate origin. If life is probable, a theist would say that God made the universe conducive to life. If life is improbable, an athesist would say that say that we're in one of the lucky universes.

Painter envy?

2011-09-02T14:34:00.004-05:00

Paul Halmos, 1967: Mathematicians are like painters.

Paul Graham, 2003: Hackers are like painters.

Hackers and mathematicians both wish the world understood them better. If I want someone to understand me better, I'll refer them to Halmos. If I want someone to give me money, I'll refer them to anything but Halmos.

Unit proliferation

2011-08-30T18:53:00.010-05:00

I have no praise for this mess, but I find its intricacies interesting. Different units of length developed for different applications in historically contingent ways. I find it equally interesting that, the French revolution not withstanding, units have continued to proliferate. For reasons completely orthogonal to idiosyncratic America, the SI just can't get to universality. For simplicity, just consider units of length used by modern scientists. We have (at least) angstroms, light years, Planck lengths, Bohr radii, astronomical units, and parsecs. All of these are convenient in certain contexts. All but the first of these also have appealing definitions (some theoretically appealing; some operationally appealing).

Advances in dentistry

2011-08-26T18:24:00.004-05:00

Peptide paint reverses tooth decay. I hope larger studies replicate this. Drinking all that acidic soda and coffee has yet to give me a cavity, but who wouldn't pay a little more for the dentist to reverse or more reliably prevent tooth decay?

Predictions from retrospections of predictions

2011-08-12T21:03:00.008-05:00

Look at the recent price histories of the following Intrade prediction markets:

Now look at recent consumer confidence.

My interpretation is that voters (in aggregate) will not punish Republicans for the debt ceiling game, but they will punish Obama for the economy (and maybe for the debt ceiling game too). Here is Mitch McConnell's corollary:

I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.

FOMC nominees Clarida and Stein?

2011-08-12T17:47:00.004-05:00

Good news:

Basically I see it as that Obama and Bernanke have chosen two academics — two guys who think monetary policy really works, or at least can really work. Odds are, they are Ben’s guys, and in my view that is good news. By the way, Clarida I believe is a Republican.

Nonpartisanship...

2011-08-10T15:27:00.003-05:00

...didn't work in the 1820s:

What happened, basically, is that without political parties, there were no clear upward paths to political advancement... Not only did the infighting undermine the efficacy of the executive branch, the lack of parties meant that not only did the president not face organized congressional opposition he couldn’t wield a bloc of congressional supporters either. There were no hierarchical ties of loyalty, no relationships of patronage dependency, just a lot of jockeying for position. Consequently, not a lot got done, and today we don’t really remember the Monroe administration for much of anything.

2011-08-10T15:25:00.000-05:00

Try to wrap your brain around this.

2011-08-07T15:14:00.002-05:00

While I'm complaining about monetary policy, let me mention the folly of interests on reserves. To the extent that our problems are of debt overhang, inflation is the most practical cure.

Unilateral helicopter drop

2011-08-06T15:42:00.002-05:00

The most interesting thing I learned from the recent debt ceiling game was a bit of formerly obscure law about platinum coins. As my readers know, I'm all for injecting a few trillion into the money supply. If Obama's supposed pivoting back to the jobs issue is to amount to anything, he should use the platinum coin option as leverage.

One explicit threat would be, "Senators, confirm Mankiw and Romer to the Fed board of governors, or I'll do my own monetary policy." Another would be, "Fed governors, I want QE3 yesterday. I've told the nice folks at the West Point Mint to help you out if you get too far behind schedule."

Coin seigniorage is actually a more credible threat than the Tea Party's threat of a US technical default. The Mint could immediately make a trickle of platinum coins with $10K face value, most to be sold to collectors, but some for the Treasury to deposit with its account at the Federal Reserve Bank. In this scenario, would explicit threats even be necessary?

That was fun, but in the real world, Obama accepts the opinion of many (most?) professional economists that looser monetary policy wouldn't work. Therefore, Obama doesn't really care whether misguided inflation hawks among Senate Republicans continue to prevent the confirmation of new Fed appointees.

20 TW reactor

2011-07-19T18:05:00.002-05:00

The interior of the earth is giving off energy at a rate of 44 TW; about half is radioactive decay.

Who has the power?

2011-07-09T16:11:00.001-05:00

Managers and think-tankers.

Reflections on Relativity

2011-05-24T15:14:00.015-05:00

Kevin Brown has written a wonderful book (and made it freely available on his website).

Since I already know a lot about the book's subject, I got the most out of the last chapter, where the author's mathematical and metamathematical depth are brought to bear on foundational physics questions. For example, given three spacetime events A, B, and C, it can be the case that A is close to B, B is close to C, yet A is not close to C. The most famous example of this is the twin paradox.

A: One twin leaves for a very high-speed trip to a distant star.
B: This twin reaches the opposite end of the galaxy after traveling at constant acceleration 9.8 m/s^2 (thereby simulating gravity) for 25 years. Also, the galaxy appears to have shrunk because he has reached the opposite end of it traveling at less than the speed of light in 25 years. So, his (subjective) measurement of distance traveled is less than 25 light-years. The twin's spaceship now changes the direction of its acceleration in order to head back home.
C: This twin completes his 25-year return trip to Earth. Total trip time: 50 years. Total trip distance: almost 50 light-years.

Upon return, the space traveler finds that his earthbound twin is long dead; about 200,000 years have passed on Earth! Moreover, from Earth's point of view, he traveled almost 200,000 light-years in distance, not almost 50 light-years. More to the point, from everyone's point of view, the Minkowski spacetime pseudo-distance sqrt((c*dt)^2-dx^2) from A to C is about 200,000 light-years, while the spacetime distances from A to B and from B to C are each 25 light-years.

In a more extreme version of the experiment, a photon leaves Earth, bounces off a planet in the Andromeda galaxy, and returns to Earth. From the galactic center's point of view, the round-trip elapsed time is 5 million years, and the net distance traveled is 2000 light-years (due to the sun's rotation around the galactic center). From the photon's "point of view," the elapsed time and distance are both exactly 0 for each leg of the trip, plus some very small amount of time and distance between the absorption and re-emission events on the distant planet. In Minkowski pseudometric, which all observers agree on, the spacetime distance from A to B and from B to C are both zero, while from A to C is almost 5 million light-years. Thus, even infinite closeness is not transitive in spacetime. (Technically, I shouldn't even talk about "the photon." There's no meaningful way to talk about whether the returning photon is "the same photon" as the one emitted.)

In fancier terminology, if we take the Minkowski pseudometric seriously, then shouldn't we model the universe with a non-transitive topology? This is discussed in mathematical detail in section 9.1.; here's a shorter version of the idea from section 9.9:

Indeed, even before the advent of quantum mechanics and the tests of Bell's inequality, we should have learned from special relativity that locality is not transitive, and this should have led us to expect non-Euclidean connections and correlations between events, not just metrically, but topologically as well. From this point of view, many of the seeming paradoxes associated with quantum mechanics and locality are really just manifestations of the non-intuitive fact that the manifold we inhabit does not obey the triangle inequality (which is one of our most basic spatio-intuitions), and that elementary processes are temporally reversible.

See also section 9.7, where Chaitin's theorem is applied to questions about determinism and predictability:

On this basis it might seem that we could eventually assert with certainty that the universe is inherently unpredictable (on some level of experience), i.e., that the length of the shortest Turing machine required to duplicate the results grows in proportion with the number of observations. In a sense, this is what the "no hidden variables" theorems try to do.
However, we can never reach such a conclusion, as shown by Chaitin's proof that there exists an integer k such that it's impossible to prove that the complexity of any specific string of binary bits exceeds k (where "complexity" is defined as the length of the smallest Turing program that generates the string).

Regrets

2011-05-20T19:40:00.003-05:00

Half of college grads regret their choice of major. If you're not going on to grad school, then here is relationship between major and employment.

A deceptive average

2011-05-12T12:02:00.000-05:00

I continue to learn from WeatherSpark. Based on the average, you might think Laredo is hot and humid. Actually, Laredo is usually hot and dry in the day, and as the day goes on, it gets hotter and drier until around supper time; it gets humid and cooler through the night. This I much prefer over hot and humid daytime climates.

In other news, thunderclouds are making it dark at lunchtime. The campus sidewalk lamps were just turned on, and months of waiting for rain are over. My office window is very distracting right now.

Making money at zero cost

2011-05-10T12:01:00.014-05:00

Last fall, I became convinced we need to get US nominal GDP back up to its trend level. Nothing has changed since then, except that my impatience with the Fed has overcome my blogging energy barrier.

Let's do a helicopter-drop style thought experiment. Congress raises the debt limit. The US Treasury sells the Federal Reserve Bank $3.1T in special, 999-year bonds. To "pay" for the bonds, the Federal Reserve Bank simply types "new account... balance: 3,100,000,000,000.00" into a computer. As always, the Fed remits all its profits to the Treasury, so the Treasury gets $3.1T in exchange for approximately nothing.

Each US citizen then receives a check for $10K. (More realistically, the payments are staggered: perhaps people get ten monthly payments of $1K, or some people get their $10K sooner than others, etc.) The US Mint will need to ramp up production in anticipation of temporary demand to carry more cash around (especially from the unbanked). Also, it'll cost a small amount to print and mail all those checks. However, the primary initial result of sending out all these checks is to flip bits on computers: a person deposits his check at his bank, and some number stored on a computer increments by 10,000.00.

Many people put their $10K into savings and keep it there for years. Most people spend at least some of it soon. Many spend all of it soon. For some things, the price responds to new demand only slowly. For other things, especially globally traded commodities, nominal prices in dollars quickly increase to compensate for the sudden jump in demand by Americans to trade dollars for things. (Increased American demand would also increase the real prices of some goods. This effect is harder to estimate, and could vary a lot by good.)

Nominal wages change very slowly (e.g., I only get a cost-of-living-adjustment once a year). Therefore, in the short term, American real wages decline. Aggregated over all US producers, labor is the biggest cost, so we expect short-term declining real costs for US producers overall. Pair declining domestic producer costs with a sudden increase in domestic demand, and US producers of domestic goods and services will have a big new incentive to expand production.

(There will be international effects too. US exporters have a new cost-side incentive to expand (but no new demand-side incentive). Foreign producers of US imports have a new demand-side incentive to expand (but no new cost-side incentive).)

This expanding production will be self-limiting (in the short term) because it will increase the demand for the inputs to production. This increase will drive up the real prices for many non-labor inputs until it is not profitable to expand any further. [Added: It's not just a supply-side limiting effect; even after a $3.1T shift income, demand still slopes down, so after an initial demand spike increases a price of a good/service, the price would still go down as producers expanded (until further expansion was unprofitable), even if producers did not experience increasing input prices.] However, with 9% unemployment, most US industries will not need to raise real wages to attract new hires. (McDonald's hired 62,000 people last month, out of 1,000,000 applicants!) Also because of high unemployment, for many pre-existing jobs, a real wage increase will not be necessary to retain the employee.

Bottom line: Printing more money right now would be a free lunch for the US economy. The caveat is that this is a statement about an aggregate net gain, not necessarily a net gain for everyone. Fixed-rate mortgage lenders are obvious potential losers, as are bond holders in general. Also, if have you job security, you might be more worried about my talk of declining short-term real wages (long-term real wages are much harder to predict) than about the plight of the unemployed.

It is certainly possible to print too much money. The slack in the labor market is finite; past some point printing more money will just increase all prices, including wages, without increasing production. Moreover, the Fed must credibly commit to keep nominal GDP near its trend level in the long term, not to push it higher. Otherwise, we risk high and unpredictable inflation that will impose real costs by making it hard to plan for the future and diverting business people's time toward more frequent price and wage adjustments. However, we're nowhere close to having too much money. Inflation is below 2%.

In which I am less cryptic

2011-05-09T19:54:00.002-05:00

...compared to my last post. US Monetary policy is too tight. QE2 worked. More is needed.

V? No. U? No, L.

2011-05-09T14:35:00.005-05:00

L as in "down, then sideways." When will I stop seeing charts like this? We need QE3.

Miscellany

2011-05-04T11:31:00.004-05:00

The autism diagnosis epidemic.

"For artists in general, the median salary was $34,800 (full-time artists earned more, but still about 15 percent less than other professionals)."

We find robust evidence that ozone levels well below federal air quality standards have a significant impact on productivity: a 10 ppb decrease in ozone concentrations increases worker productivity by 4.2 percent."

Evolutionary biology looks like neoclassical economics. (Skip down to "What evolutionary theory is really like".)

Recycling

2011-05-04T11:01:00.002-05:00

How can China consume half the world's iron ore production? Tim Worstall:

"The highest percentage of any metal resource that China consumes is iron ore, at a barely comprehensible 47% of world consumption."
...Note that the second largest US steel company on our list, Nucor... only make[s] new steel from old. Further, everyone does this to some extent, but in the western/industrialised world we’ve got to the point that no one, ever again, is going to build another blast furnace (yes, this is the generally accepted industry view).
...I’m pointing just at that 47% of world consumption number: this is an artefact of the way that the western (OK, industrialised) world is recycling steel rather than making new.

FICA as flat tax

2011-05-03T22:53:00.004-05:00

Karl Smith has a clever idea here (and more here): transition (more) toward a flat payroll tax by (1) uncapping the SS tax, (2) raising SS tax rates, and (3) cutting income tax rate. (The Medicare tax has already been uncapped.)

Now begin my criticisms. Smith argues that it's politically expedient to wait for SS taxes to produce a budget surplus before cutting income taxes, but that could result in an indefinitely long interim period of significantly top higher marginal rates. Would this be worth it in the long run? Even if the income tax really did wither away, what's to stop SS rates from being progressivized? For Medicare tax rates, this has has already begun (read the last two sentences of footnote c).

In the near-term, it actually looks more politically feasible to do (1), (2), and (3) simultaneously. For Obama to maintain at least the appearance of no tax increases for those making under 250K, he cannot allow (1) or (2) to happen without compensating income tax reductions (at least for incomes under 250K). The problem with this scheme is that these income tax reductions might get phased out above 250K, resulting in high marginal rates.

This is all rather pie-in-the-sky, but there is an important underlying fact that motivates people to come up with these schemes: the median voter doesn't know calculus. In particular, (s)he doesn't know what d(tax)/d(income) is, nor how d(tax)/d(income) differs from tax/income.

Population history

2011-04-27T13:06:00.004-05:00

The Great Leap Forward. The world population growth rate, which had been increasing, dived from 1.9% to 1.3%. Looking at absolute growth, instead of relative growth, you can draw a trend line over the dip and then directly interpret the area of the dip below trend as number of actual and potential lives destroyed.

In which I am pessimistic

2011-04-20T10:45:00.004-05:00

Steven Landsburg:

“Taxing the rich” cannot work unless you do it in a way that induces the rich to consume less.

In more detail, Landsburg correctly says that if a rich person responds to a tax by cuts in his investments and lending but no cuts in his consumption, then all his tax burden falls on the investees and lendees, which are generally not rich.

My take-away is that to the extent rich Americans invest in and/or lend to non-rich Americans, taxing rich American's income and/or wealth is a probably politically expedient, economically inefficient way to indirectly tax the middle class, while raising the same amount of revenue through, say, higher gasoline taxes would probably be much more direct, politically inexpedient, and much less economically inefficient. (Depending on what you expect the externalities of global warming to be, higher gas taxes might be more efficient than lower gas taxes. My personal guestimate is that higher US gasoline taxes might have a net expected benefit for the world, but probably not for the US.)

To the extent that rich Americans invest in foreigners, taxing the rich is even more politically expedient. Karl Smith:

The US government borrows cheaply from abroad. It uses that money to finance tax cuts for wealthy Americans. Those wealthy Americans use some of that extra income to invest in multinational companies, which then return huge profits to the United States.
On net the United States is richer for having done this. Though, I suspect that its has suppressed the wages for working class Americans.

The Feds will eventually raise much more revenue, in roughly the most inefficient ways possible, either before or (more likely) after a fiscal crisis strikes. Forget about a VAT. We'd be very lucky to get rid of either of the following income tax deductions: home mortgage interest and employer-provided health-insurance. Doing so would raise tons of revenue and actually reduce government distortion of incentives, but it would be a transparent tax increase falling most heavily on the upper middle class. Good luck with that.

To get to a VAT, first things have to get so bad that all other means of increasing federal revenue are even more unpopular, yet more revenue is still needed. Insert Churchill quote here.

Do you trust the Comodo Group?

2011-04-11T15:09:00.000-05:00

Catching up on my tech reading, I see that my web browser has been trusting Comodo as a certificate authority, but perhaps it should not:

The hacker, whose March 15 attack was traced to an IP address in Iran, compromised a partner account at the respected certificate authority Comodo Group, which he used to request eight SSL certificates for six domains: mail.google.com, www.google.com, login.yahoo.com, login.skype.com, addons.mozilla.org and login.live.com.

I have just taken appropriate action.

Turning a sphere inside out

2011-04-04T22:06:00.002-05:00

A video explaining Thurston's eversion. (HT: RJ Lipton) Wikipedia entry.

2-bit cerebroscope

2011-04-04T15:38:00.000-05:00

There's a Monroe bit and a Brolin bit:

Whenever the patient focused her thoughts on Brolin, the associated neuron fired more strongly. Cerf arranged the feedback such that the more this cell fired relative to the other one, the more visible Brolin became and the more the image of Monroe faded, and vice versa. The image on the screen kept changing until only Brolin or only Monroe remained visible and the trial was over. The patient loved it, as she felt that she controlled the movie purely with her thoughts. When she focused on Monroe, the associated neurons increased their firing rate, the cells for the competing concept, Brolin, dampened their activity, whereas the vast majority of neurons remained unaffected.

Exobiology

2011-03-22T23:35:00.002-05:00

I cannot resist joining the chorus of linkers to news of this major theoretical breakthrough.

Saturn fly-by video

2011-03-19T18:14:00.002-05:00

From real photos; no CGI.

Diagnosis and literacy

2011-03-15T14:33:00.003-05:00

Here's another excellent site for diagnosing common diseases. On the other hand, a lot of people aren't all that literate, so for them a doctor could add more value:

A 2006 study by the U.S. Department of Education found that 36 percent of adults have only basic or below-basic skills for dealing with health material. This means that 90 million Americans can understand discharge instructions written only at a fifth-grade level or lower. About 52 percent had intermediate skills: They could figure out what time a medication should be taken if the label says "take two hours after eating," while the remaining 12 percent were deemed proficient because they could search a complex document and find the information necessary to define a medical term.

I found this quote via Arnold Kling, who advises ignoring health insurance and improving literacy to improve health outcomes.

Pessimism on pilot programs

2011-03-14T19:19:00.004-05:00

The context is health care reform:

Here’s the problem. Both in health care and in education we have lots of examples of low-cost, high quality service. As in other bureaucratic systems around the world, excellence exists, and it’s often known about, acknowledged and even studied. It also tends to have three characteristics: (1) islands of excellence spring up in a sea of mediocrity and they tend to be distributed randomly—they’re not correlated with anything; (2) they almost always exist because of the effort, ingenuity, enthusiasm, energy, and vision of a few people involved in actual production, and almost never are the result of anything that’s happening on the demand side of the market; and (3) (most importantly) they tend not to have any objective characteristics that anyone else can copy.

I agree, and think of the issue in terms of Baumol's cost disease. To a first-order approximation, artisanal industries never increase their labor productivity until they are industrialized. The population-to-doctor ratio is about 390:1 in the US. It's about 300:1 in Europe, whose health care systems are admired by many in America. (On the other hand, doctors in Europe aren't paid as much.) Somalia has a 25,000:1 ratio; can they teach us about efficiency? The population-to-doctor ratio was about 700:1 in colonial America. In contrast, we went from most colonial Americans working on farms to less than 2% of Americans even living on farms today.

You might argue that a doctor that saved your life by prescribing you antibiotics was a lot more productive than a doctor that prescribed leeches to your distant ancestor. However, the modern doctor's value-added was merely his diagnosis of bacterial disease. Most literate people with an internet connection could diagnose most instances of dangerous bacterial disease, so the value-added was probably close to value of the patient's time saved by going to the doctor instead of the internet: small or negative. Some medical diagnoses are much more valuable, but keep in mind that doctors' wages, nurses' wages, and medical lab costs have increased a lot since colonial times.

And doctors still aren't that great at diagnosis. Like Alex Tabarrok, I would prefer to be diagnosed by a computer. Until I am diagnosed by a computer, I don't expect health care costs to get under control. Until my students are taught by a computer, I don't expect education costs to get under control. There are ways to achieve cost control without AI, but they are not going to happen.

2011-03-14T18:41:00.002-05:00

Remember: Recovery from the Great Depression was not due to fiscal stimulus; it was due to devaluing the dollar relative to gold.

Pyramid schemes?

2011-03-10T21:14:00.005-06:00

Sadly, Karl Smith seems to agree with Matt Yglesias that 401(k)s are as much pyramid schemes as Social Security:

The core issue, that Matt hints at, is that having an equity stake in the America’s future capital is not somehow more fundamentally sound than having an equity stake in America’s future labor.
International capital flows could mitigate this somewhat by allowing American corporations to seek out opportunities in other countries the drive down in the real rate of return could be avoided. However, at the same time international labor flows could solve the Social Security problem.

Or, Americans workers could just invest more in foreign corporations. Through Social Security, I have a claim on future American payroll tax revenue, but US GDP is roughly 1/5 of world GDP. Therefore, I have internationally diversified my individual retirement savings and other investments. If investing in the world economy is a pyramid scheme, then at least it's the biggest pyramid scheme available.

Alas, the Social Security Administration has yet to diversify; it only buys treasuries. Worse, most of my Social Security taxes aren't invested at all; they're used to pay current retirees (and, to a much smaller extent, pay the disabled, widows, etc.). Thus, even if the SSA is never abolished/privatized, a huge improvement would be to slowly diversify its $2.6T accumulated surplus (the "Trust Fund"). Hey, inflation is below-target, right? The Fed could start buying the SSA's treasuries, and the SSA could start buying equities. Another huge improvement would be to transition away from pay-as-you-go, but that transition would be a huge one-time cost---probably in the form of payroll tax increases. For the moment, monetizing the Trust Fund looks like an easier sell.

Educators' value added

2011-03-04T18:08:00.005-06:00

International comparison: Crude demographic disaggregation suggests that American schools add more value than Western European schools.

Interstate comparison: A similar disaggregation suggests that Texas schools add more value than Wisconsin schools.

2011-02-28T17:29:00.000-06:00

Yay---a bit more federalism:

Last year’s health-care reform law already allows states to propose their own frameworks for care, beginning in 2017. Obama, in a speech to the National Governors Association, said that he would support changing the law to allow that to happen three years earlier, in 2014

The devil is still in the details, of course. I want to know, will states be able to "deregulate the new health care exchanges, so that high-deductible, catastrophic coverage can be purchased as easily as comprehensive plans"? The case (A) for subsidizing the poor's health care and the case (B) for subsidizing insurance for the middle class against catastrophic medical costs are each much stronger than the case (C) for subsidizing the routine health care costs of the middle class.

WeatherSpark is awesome

2011-02-25T16:42:00.000-06:00

That is all. (HT: Aleks Jakulin)

In topology...

2011-02-16T21:36:00.002-06:00

...this is a sphere.

Some call this a "pathology."

I just call it awesome.

2011-02-11T10:03:00.002-06:00

Iraq is more corrupt:

The Saddam regime was bad, but it had reached a basically stable equilibrium. Once we got rid of that, the corruption became was he calls "entrepreneurial", with ministries competing with each other to extract bribes. And how do you best extract bribes?
You enact regulations for people to violate...
We're fixing the infrastructure, and the violence is declining. Instead, the major problem is creating political and social institutions that support a vibrant, entrepreneurial business culture. And that's not just absent now; it actively seems to be going in the wrong direction.

Where not to find meritocracy

2011-02-02T21:43:00.002-06:00

The hiring practices of the "very best law firm, investment bank, or consultancy." Steve Hsu has a nice discussion of the evidence.

Reading this led me to enjoy more posts from Hsu's blog, especially these two:

The origin of probability in quantum mechanics (compare with Penrose's program and with mangled worlds)
Random microworlds (not about quantum mechanics)

HSR: money hole edition

2011-02-01T16:46:00.003-06:00

At best, we can say that China built its high speed passenger rail network too soon. (Decades from now, building HSR might make economic sense if aviation fuel is impractically expensive and we have electric cars, trucks, and trains, but no electric commercial airliners.)

Nudging towards Ricardian equivalence

2011-02-01T15:17:00.004-06:00

I just got an email from the Texas A&M System Benefits Administration:

On January 1st all wage earners received a 2% raise, thanks to the recently passed tax package. The amount you usually contribute to the Social Security system, 6.2% of your first $106,800 of wages, is reduced to 4.2% for 2011. That 2% savings could be as much as $2,136 over the course of the year.
A fiscally-responsible New Year's resolution would be to take that extra money and put it to good use by:
- Increasing your TDA 403(b) or Texa$aver 457 contribution
- Increasing the amount you pay towards your credit card balances
- Depositing it directly into your savings or investment account

Remember this change is only for 2011. If you increase your spending, you will have to make a downward adjustment on Jan 1, 2012 when your Social Security withholding reverts back to 6.2%. A better solution would be to use this money towards a financial goal and keep your spending at its current level. [Emphasis added.]

Another statistics application

2011-01-29T13:54:00.000-06:00

Estimating Germany's tank production during WWII. "...After the war, the allies captured German production records, showing that the true number of tanks produced in those three years was 245 per month, almost exactly what the statisticians had calculated, and less than one fifth of what standard intelligence had thought likely."

Better than focus groups?

2011-01-28T15:33:00.003-06:00

Reagan polled his (postal) inbox.

Reagan had a rather statistical frame of mind (speechwriter Peggy Noonan said that the President's first drafts for speeches always included far more statistics than the public could put up with).
One of his more curious, but revealing habits, was that he had his White House staff provide him every Friday, with about 20 letters from citizens. On Monday, he'd give the staffers' his replies to send out. It was an odd system, but he felt that grappling with the idiosyncratic concerns of about 1,000 individual citizens per year provided a sample that kept him connected to the country.

I have no idea how effective this was. There's always selection bias to worry about. However, pollsters can partially correct for this, and perhaps Reagan's staffers did the same.

If you knew that Obama was polling his inbox the same way Reagan did, would you be more likely to send him an email? How willing are you to participate when a pollster calls you? Is there any tension between your last two answers?

More on the future of scholarship

2011-01-28T15:00:00.002-06:00

British academics are not happy about the idea of having to justify their research in terms of "impact". (I'm not happy about the idea either.) Meanwhile, Stanley Fish, provoked last fall by SUNY Albany's announced termination of its French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater programs, has suggested university presidents rebuke state legislators:

...drop the deferential pose, leave off being a petitioner and ask some pointed questions: Do you know what a university is, and if you don’t, don’t you think you should, since you’re making its funding decisions? Do you want a university — an institution that takes its place in a tradition dating back centuries — or do you want something else, a trade school perhaps? (Nothing wrong with that.) And if you do want a university, are you willing to pay for it, which means not confusing it with a profit center? And if you don’t want a university, will you fess up and tell the citizens of the state that you’re abandoning the academic enterprise, or will you keep on mouthing the pieties while withholding the funds?
That’s not the way senior academic administrators usually talk to their political masters, but try it; you might just like it. And it might even work.

Good luck with that. I think the future of "non-impact" research funding is with grants and donations from private foundations and individuals. The median voter hasn't acquired a taste for scholarship in any discipline. Even the median alum of a big state school probably cares a lot more about the performance of its football team than the prestige of its scholarship.