Half Sigma

Space shuttle comments

The following comments, from blogger Jason Coleman, about the Space Shuttle program are common sentiments, but not ones I agree with (link to his post):

People need to accept this, because we need to get off this rock for a number of reasons, too many for this post, and these pioneers know how dangerous it is, and they analyze the acceptable risks. The media needs to back off and let us move forward, get the shuttles flying again (even if we lose another one in a few years), and keep our space program moving forward.

It's been too long since we've seen a video of intrepid American asronauts pushing the envelope of manned exploration of the heavens. For me, the site of the shuttle roaring off the pad is an affirmation that humans as a species are moving forward. I can't wait to feel that way again.

If people want to risk their lives flying into space that’s fine with me, but I don’t buy into the idea that the space shuttle program is actually accomplishing anything.

It’s not clear why we “need” to get off this rock. Sure, it would certainly be cool if we could fly around the galaxy, but the real world isn’t Star Trek. There is no evidence that visiting other star systems will ever be something that’s technologically feasible.

Flying the same two decade old space shuttles into low orbit four times a year is hardly “moving forward.” Big deal, we put a man into low orbit in the 1960s. Heck, we sent men to the moon in the 1960s, but 26 years later the best we can muster is low orbit.

The space shuttle program is kind of like the pyramids of Egypt. One Pharaoh built a huge pyramid at Giza, much the way that Kennedy sent men to the moon. Both are accomplishments that the world will remember forever, even though they were dead ends as far as moving forward. The Great Pyramid didn’t lead to the Egyptians building skyscrapers. In the same manner, it may be thousands of years before genuinely useful space travel becomes practical.

Just as all the Pharaohs who followed in the footsteps of Cheops wasted a lot of resources building big monuments even though none were ever again as grand as the Great Pyramid, all of the U.S. presidents after Kennedy have to send men into space even though what Kennedy accomplished can never truly be duplicated.

(Also see Rand Simberg's post.)

Remote work a good idea? I say no.

This pro-remote work post makes me think of a recent episode of the Apprentice. One team decided to save time by having a telephone conference with the client instead of meeting in person. Donald Trump was very mad at this behavior. He said you should never pass up the opportunity for a face to face meeting.

I thought about this a lot, and I have to put myself in Donald Trump’s camp. Work is not about doing the work, it’s about marketing the work. After all, we are moving to a marketing economy. People simply don’t pay attention to a voice over the telephone as much as they do to a person in front of them. If no one you work for is paying attention to you, don’t expect to get promoted. Don’t expect to accomplish anything that requires you to get other people to help you.

Jesus is a get out of jail free card

According to an article in today’s Washington Post, HealthSouth Corp CEO Richard Scrushy was acquitted because he was heavily into Christianity.

The acquittal of former HealthSouth Corp. chief executive Richard M. Scrushy in Birmingham yesterday suggests that jurors in the case embraced the defense portrayal of Scrushy as a deeply religious son of the South.

. . .

During the trial, Scrushy appeared on a morning television show in Birmingham called "Viewpoint" in which he and his wife read Bible verses. He began preaching in fundamentalist churches and invited pastors to the trial. Several jurors said in pretrial questionnaires that they attended church.

So there you have it, being religious not only has benefits in the afterlife, it helps you in the here and now.

Is there a single honest person in the world?

Someone with the title of "assistant superintendent in charge of exams and answer sheets" is the last person you'd expect to be responsible for encouraging people to cheat on tests, but Isben Jeudy was caught giving his son Jerrell the answers to a New York State Regents' Exam. NY Times.

As for the father, he had been praised as having a promising career and had planned to assume a new job next week as a principal in the Uniondale district. But now that is in doubt.

"People were absolutely amazed" by the case, Superintendent Grishman said in an interview.

He added: "This guy was absolutely the last guy you would expect to be anything other than straightforward and honest. He was a gentlemen who should be up for superintendent in a few years, too bright to do something so stupid."

Everyone's a cheater. Trust nobody. (And read my post on the economics of cheating.)

Isben Jeudy: SHAME ON YOU.

Annual physicals a big waste of money

Research shows that “there's no evidence annual physicals for healthy people are useful.” Yet the vast majority of doctors give them anyway, with “65 percent of primary care doctors think[ing] they are necessary.”

This demonstrates several things about healthcare:

(1) Spending more money on healthcare doesn’t make us healthier if it's spent useless physicals and tests.

(2) Doctors make money when they see patients, so why are we surprised if they encourage people to pay for useless visits and tests?

(3) Doctors actually have no clue about what’s going on in medical research, and like most Americans lack the ability to think logically. Depend on your doctor to diagnose your symptoms if something is wrong with you, but don’t believe a word they say when they have general advice on what’s healthy. (For example, doctors are still giving bad advice about what's the correct weight.)

Ten Commandments everywhere

Within hours of yesterday's Supreme Court decision allowing a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol, Christian groups announced a nationwide campaign to install similar displays in 100 cities and towns within a year.

"We see this as an historic opening, and we're going to pursue it aggressively," said the Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, director of the Washington-based Christian Defense Coalition, which organized vigils outside the Florida hospice where Terri Schiavo died this year.

Washington Post.

This is the Supreme Court’s fault for making fuzzy “rules.” Christian groups now see this as a cat and mouse game where they can win a “victory” if they can sneak in some more religious statuary in public places.

The People want their religion!

It’s constitutional to put the Ten Commandments in a park, but unconstitutional to put the Ten Commandments in a courthouse. Makes sense? Only to Justice Breyer (who went one way in the first case and the other way in the second case).

But instead of examining the minutiae of the decisions, lets step back and get a holistic view of the issues. A lot of politicians and other people running our governments really really really want to show how the government endorses Christianity. The voters seem to like it when politicians do this. Since everyone “knows” that God gave us the Ten Commandments, isn’t it only proper that the Government remind us of it?

Don’t politicians have anything more important to do? Well, besides spending hundreds of millions of dollars to erect new sports stadiums, no they don’t seem to have anything more important to do. What’s more important than saving people’s souls? (If people don’t believe in Jesus, their souls will go to Hell).

Superstitious nonsense? Only to 5% of the population.

* * *

In this post, Eugene Volokh explains how the Ten Commandments have nothing to do with American law. Duh! Of course they don't. That was just a made up so the Ten Commandments could hang on the wall and save people’s souls.

Bad oil advice from the NY Times

Oil is over $60/barrel today, and I notice that yesterday there was an editorial in the NY Times with some pretty bad recommendations, which is very dangerous because policy makers are reading this garbage.

The national security of the United States is already at risk because the nation depends on imported oil for nearly 60 percent of its daily needs. That will only grow as demand increases and domestic supplies dwindle.

This implies that the U.S. has some sort of moral failing, when in fact our use of oil is simply a natural result of our country having a large population and the strongest economy in the world. Because we were the first country in the world to develop our own oil resources, our oil production peaked in 1970.

Much of that oil comes from volatile countries in the Persian Gulf region, and the American money flowing there does nothing to encourage either more-balanced economic development or democracy. The rest comes from other parts of the world - often the most unstable parts.

Oil comes from unstable countries because the stable countries develop strong economies, increase their oil use, and become oil importers. But where the governments are run by dictators who stay in power until the next dictator kills them off, the economies stay poor, so they have no domestic uses for their oil.

The antidotes are simple. Americans need to use far less oil than they do now, which means requiring more fuel-efficient vehicles and finding an alternative to refined oil to power cars and trucks.

Bad bad bad! Someone needs to pick up an Economics textbook. When prices rise, demand falls. Price levels will take care of everything if the government will only stay out the market.

The word “requiring” is a dangerous suggestion which implies that the government needs to determine who is “allowed” to use fuel and who isn’t. There is also the implication that billions of taxpayer dollars have to be wasted researching technologies which may be dead ends. We need to remember that billions of dollars let us put a man on the moon, but it did not enable us to do it inexpensively. After tens of billions (or maybe hundreds of billions) of dollars wasted on space research, it’s still not practical to send humans into space.

But the NY Times editorial fails the mention the most important thing our government should be doing, which is to allow the use of nuclear power again. I say “allow” because our policies make it clear that nuclear power is not favored. After the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station fiasco in which billions of dollars were spent to build a power plant that was then closed and never used, no private company is going to build a nuclear power plant again unless the regulatory environment is changed, and that requires government action.

IQ and health

Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen mentions an academic article which shows that IQ predicts better health:

Large epidemiological studies of almost an entire population in Scotland have found that intelligence (as measured by an IQ-type test) in childhood predicts substantial differences in adult morbidity and mortality, including deaths from cancers and cardiovascular diseases. These differences remain significant after controlling for socioeconomic variables.

How is it that liberals can continue to get away with saying that “IQ tests measure nothing but how well one does on the test,” when we see that IQ does such a great job predicting so many things?

It’s not clear to me why IQ causes increased life expectancy. Tyler Cowen assumes it’s because smart people do a better job self-diagnosing their own symptoms and following doctors’ instructions. I’m sure this is a part of it.

But we know that IQ is a biological trait determined by our genes. Maybe the same genes that cause higher intelligence also have other biological effects which lead to greater longevity?

There seems to be an inverse correlation between IQ and weight. Smart people are more likely to be skinny and stupid people more likely to be fat. Is this strictly a social class issue (it’s not classy to be fat), or is there some sort of biological connection? (Note that being a little overweight actually makes you healthier.)

Link: visit the web page of Linda Gottfredson who authored the article “Intelligence predicts health and longevity, but why?” along with many other interesting papers about intelligence.

Big money in online poker

Today’s NY Times article about PartyGaming is pretty interesting.

A giant in the online gambling business, PartyGaming is an often-overlooked megasurvivor from the dot-com crash of the late 1990's. As hundreds of profitless commercial sites disappeared into the digital ether, PartyGaming's popular gambling sites - like PartyPoker.com - soared, with revenues and profits growing exponentially year after year.

This week, the company will go public in what is expected to be the largest offering in years on the London Stock Exchange, one that will make billionaires out of its ragtag assortment of founders and major stockholders - including a California lawyer who earned her first fortune in online pornography and phone-sex lines. All told, as much as $9 billion is expected to be raised, with all of the cash going to private shareholders selling portions of their stakes.

But there will be no Wall Street investment houses lapping up fees in the giant deal, no victory dances in the offices of American corporate lawyers. That is because PartyGaming, based in Gibraltar, has no assets in the United States, and its officers or directors could risk being served with a civil suit - or an arrest warrant - if they came to the United States on business.

This article demonstrates two points:

(1) You can make lots of money by providing people with a service that they want, and people really want to gamble.

(2) The old laws don’t work so well in the new internet age, but our lawmakers have yet to wise up to that fact. Just as law enforcement is unable to prevent people from downloading music files, they are unable to prevent people from playing online poker.

Babes don’t join fringe movements

This post from March by Will Franklin posits the theory that political movements need babes to succeed. There are lots of pictures.

Without actually reading the whole post, my thought is that attractive women don’t join fringe movements. After all, good looking women gain so much benefit from the status quo, why would they want to change anything? That’s why at the Libertarian party or at an atheist rally, all the women in attendance are ugly, if you see any women at all.

So if a movement of any sort has hot babes in it, then this means that it is somewhat mainstream and not merely a fringe movement. And of course, a mainstream movement has a much greater chance of success than a fringe movement.

(Steve Sailer brought this post to my attention this morning, and he has a depressing comment about how the Muslim birthrate in Lebanon exceeds the Christian birthrate.)

The Incorporation Doctrine

Given some of the strange comments to my previous post about the Kelo v. New London decision, this is as good a time as any to write about the Incorporation Doctrine.

Most people who haven’t attended law school are unaware that the Bill of Rights was not intended to apply to the states. It was only intended to apply to the federal government. It begins “Congress shall make no law...” and that’s exactly what it means. Congress means Congress and not state legislatures. The theory was that the people of each state counted on their own state constitutions to protect their rights. The worry was that a federal government would become too powerful and start violating people’s rights. (The people who worried back then were right, the federal government did indeed become too powerful and many of the specific words of the Constitution designed to protect the rights of states have subsequently been ignored.)

The above view was confirmed by the Supreme Court in Barron v. Baltimore (1833).

The comments to my previous post mention the Fourteenth Amendment a lot. Unfortunately, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Interstate Commerce Clause have become the two black holes of the Constitution. The Supreme Court has used the Interstate Commerce Clause (in Article I Section 8) as a justification for giving Congress the power to do whatever it wants. And the Supreme Court has used the Fourteenth Amendment as a justification to allow the Court itself to do whatever it wants.

It doesn’t say anywhere in the Fourteenth Amendment that the Bill of Rights is “incorporated.” The drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment weren’t stupid; if they wanted the Amendment to mean that they would have written it in plain English. After the Amendment was ratified in 1868, nothing much changed. In Hurtado v. California (1884), the Supreme Court held that the Grand Jury provision of the Fifth Amendment does not apply to the states, and strangely enough this is still good law today. Most states have done away with the requirement that all criminal prosecutions must be preceded by a Grand Jury indictment.

It was only in the twentieth century, and primarily the post-FDR era of the twentieth century, when the Supreme Court invented the doctrine of “incorporation,” and then proceeded to discover that various provisions of the Bill of Rights were incorporated and applied to the states. There was certainly no original intent for this doctrine.

Takings and the "public"

Professor Bainbridge, Tyler Cowen, Logical Meme and Orin Kerr (just looking at blogs on my blogroll) all have a negative reaction to today’s Supreme Court decision of Kelo v. New London (which holds that the town of New London, CT is allowed to take some private homes so that the land can be used for a new privately owned development).

I just don’t get the reaction. First of all, it’s a local government and not the federal government that’s doing the taking. The Constitution places greater restrictions on the federal government than it does on state governments. The Bill of Rights was never even intended to apply to the states. The very same Fifth Amendment where the takings clause is found also talks about Grand Jury indictments, but most states don’t require a Grand Jury indictment.

The plain words of the Fifth Amendment read, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” This clearly implies that takings of private property are perfectly constitutional so long as there is “just compensation.” People are taking too narrow of an interpretation of the word “public.” By the very nature of government action, a taking is for the benefit of the public. Whether the property is ultimately transferred to private developers doesn’t change the public nature of the action. The government is certainly allowed to sell its property to the private sector.

If people are complaining that these takings of private property are unfair, then that’s related to whether the compensation is just. If the developers are making big profits from the development, then perhaps it would be just if some of those profits were shared with the original property owners. But this issue is separate from whether local governments should be allowed to take property in the first place.

UPDATE

Read my post on the Incorporation Doctrine.

Anti-Islam constitutional Amendment

It seems that the most controversial thing I said recently was that we need a constitutional Amendment to allow Congress to restrict the practice of Islam. So let me explain my reasoning in greater detail.

First of all, Islam is a false religion. Anyone who is Christian, Jewish, atheist, or anything else other than Muslim can agree that Islam is not the truth, and the Koran is not the word of a divine being but rather something that Mohamed made up himself (or maybe he had some help).

Too many people irrationally believe that all religions are good and all religions endorse peace. This is ridiculous. As a philosophy created by human beings, a religion can be just as evil as any other philosophy, such as Nazism, Pol Pot-ism, etc. Islam is right up there with the world’s most evil philosophies.

Defenders of Islam will predictably say “most Muslims don’t think like that.” First of all, I am really not sure exactly what most Muslims think. Secondly, “most” is hardly a very all-inclusive word. As Muslims become more religious, they become more dangerous (unlike the really religious Catholics who become nuns or monks, or the really religious Jews who become Hasidic). If even just 1% of Muslims turn bad, then for every million Muslims there are 10,000 potential terrorists.

This idea will probably have the most negative reaction from liberals, but liberals are being hypocritical here. Liberals have supported laws against hate speech. Islam is like hate speech, but worse because it’s organized hate speech.

Other Western nations have begun to take steps to reign in Islam. In France, Muslims are banned from wearing headscarves in schools and other public establishments. I think this is too little too late for France where the Muslim population is soaring. But even this small sensible step taken by the French would be forbidden by the U.S. Constitution. This is why we need a constitutional Amendment.

Dahesh Museum of Art

The Dasheh Museum of Art, located in midtown Manhattan, is dedicated to displaying mostly 19th century European academic art.

The concept is great. Much beautiful artwork has been ignored and forgotten because of the leftist movement to discredit art in which the artists demonstrate genuine talent. The leftist likes art that anyone could do, because the leftist thinks it’s unfair to untalented artists to glorify those with talent.

Ignoring the mysterious issue of “Dr. Dahesh” who seems to be a real weirdo (albeit a weirdo with good taste in art), my problem with this museum is that there is hardly any museum at all. Most of the museum is dedicated to a gift shop and a café. The actual gallery is a tiny hallway in the basement. It’s hard to overstate exactly how small the gallery is. This museum is simply not worth the $9 cost of admission.

For only an extra dollar you could visit the New York Historical Society instead, which features an impressive collection of 19th century art, including famous paintings like William Beard’s “The Bulls and Bears in the Market.”

Flag burning Amendment: unconstitutional?

According to the AP:

By a 286-130 vote, House members approved the amendment — as they have six times before — after a debate over whether such a ban would uphold or run afoul of the Constitution's free-speech protections.

Hello???? The whole purpose of the amendment is to change the Constitution’s free speech protections to allow Congress to pass laws prohibiting flag desecration. A constitutional Amendment can’t be unconstitutional because it undoes another amendment!

The mystery here is whether the journalist from AP is a moron, or if the morons in Congress actually debated this. (Hat tip: Jurispundit.)

* * *

And my thoughts on the Amendment in question: don’t our politicians have anything better to do? Since when has flag desecration been such a big problem? It’s just a piece of cloth. Has anyone ever won any converts to their cause by burning a flag?

* * *

We do need a constitutional Amendment to fix one problem with the First Amendment. The free exercise of religion. A dangerous, anti-American religion called Islam is gaining adherents in our own country. We need a constitutional Amendment to give Congress the authority to restrict the practice of Islam.

Biggest bubble in history

According to an article in The Economist magazine, the current global housing bubble is the “biggest bubble in history.”

Are children brats?

You seldom come across a female who expresses her dislike of children, but Christy breaks the mold here:

Now experts believe you can get a good idea of who will become a criminal at around the age of 3-4 years old. I for one am not surprised. This summer I'm living in the Chicago suburbs and have been subjected to screaming little monsters everywhere I go, I'm glad someone else sees the criminal potential in these brats.

I wish I could meet a girl like Christy!

One thing I hate about children is that they scratch DVDs. When I rent DVDs from the local video rental store, which is in mostly child-free Ballston, I have never had a problem. But when I was renting them from a Blockbuster in Old Town Alexandria (where there are more children living), they would always have scratches and would skip on me.

Politics and genes

An article in today’s NY Times reveals that our genes have a strong influence on our political beliefs. This isn’t news to me, but it’s news to the NY Times which, until not too long ago, avoided running any articles about how variation in behavior and intelligence are genetically influenced.

I really wish that more people would truly try to comprehend the importance of this point. Your political beliefs, which you cherish and defend, are not based on logic but on an accident of biology. Most people, instead of using their intelligence to logically determine the best policies (such as school vouchers for example), use their intelligence to try to justify the conclusion already reached based on illogical emotion genetically programmed into their brains.

Taking a huge leap away from anything written in the article, my own theory is that there are two significant personality factors that influence our political beliefs. The first is what might be called “the tendency towards liberalism,” or perhaps “the preference for distributive justice over procedural justice.” The more liberal you are, the more concerned you are with inequality of outcomes, and the more guilt you feel (if well off) about all the poor people of the world. (But poor people are usually too busy worrying about their own poverty to feel much guilt about other people’s poverty.)

The second important personality factor is religiosity. This is the emotional tendency to illogically adhere to a religion. For people born in the United States, religiosity almost always results in a strong adherence to Christianity. And of course, people who strongly adhere to Christianity also strongly support political views that promote “Christian values.”

Christianity and liberalism tend to be at odds with each other because many of the Christian values are opposite to liberalism. Many people who are strongly liberal but also have a high amount of religiosity will channel their religiosity into weird non-Christian religious-like beliefs such as vegetarianism or UFOs.

Because liberals have fewer babies than non-liberals, future generations will be less liberal. That’s good news. But the bad news is that because smarter people have fewer babies, future generations will be stupider.

RELATED POSTS

Guilt, religion, and politics

Don’t blame the lobbyists

Critical Mastiff has a post in which he recommends ending the tax deduction for mortgage interest, a position I agree with 100%.

But what's more interesting in his post is his brief comment about lobbyists:

[Author Jonathan Rauch] takes great pains to avoid demonizing the lobbyists; after all, they are only acting rationally, given the high costs for a single group not to lobby Washington when everyone else is. If you don't get in on the action, you're left screwed.

Lobbying is yet another example of rent seeking behavior, behavior designed to benefit the entity doing the behavior even though it has a negative impact on the economy. Because people are greedy, they will engage in rent seeking behavior whenever it’s advantageous to do so.

So yes, it’s not fair to demonize lobbyists for doing what everyone else is doing: trying to make money and increase their status. We need to blame the system that allows people to make big money performing tasks that don’t add anything to the economy.

Marketing to women. Logical?

At WonderBranding, Michele writes:

When approaching the topic of marketing to women, stop thinking feminine. Instead, focus on the logical

This advice surely flies in the face of what seems to work. For example, no serious photographer would ever use a Kodak camera, digital or otherwise, but Kodak has been very successful marketing their cameras to women by creating feminine cameras. If you visit this link, you will see all the pretty colors that the Kodak cameras come in.

Gay vague

New York Times journalist David Colman tries to coin a new word: gay vague. This refers to when you can’t tell if a man is gay or not.

I haven’t decided yet if this is a real trend, or if the NY Times needed a filler article and they know these kinds of article are popular. It reminds me of the “man date” article from a month or so ago.

* * *

Sorry for the light posting, I’m in New York City and using a dialup connection. I could never maintain a blog with just a dialup connection. I’ll be back on my high speed connection on Monday.

Did a New York Times article use deceptive statistics?

In my post about David Cay Johnston’s NY Times article about the top 0.1 percent, I wrote:

People will criticize the article and say it reads more like an editorial, and it does. It also uses some deceptive statistics that are designed bolster the point of the writer rather than shed any light. I give a big thumbs down to deceptive statistics. They are especially uncalled for considering that the non-deceptive statistics, like the one quoted above, are so illuminating.

David Cay Johnston didn’t like my characterization of his statistics as “deceptive.” He left a long comment on my blog. Most of his comment explains where he got his statistics from, which misses entirely the point of my comment. I didn’t say anything in the article was untrue, I was expressing my dissatisfaction with some of the statistics which were cherry-picked to overemphasize his point.

Johnston wrote in his comment, “For example? You don't cite a single example of a supposedly deceptive statistic.” The nature of blogs is that we don’t write huge essays all the time, it’s not what people want to read, nor do I have the time. But to set the record straight, this is probably the part of the article that made my deceptive statistics radar go off:

One way to understand the growing gap is to compare earnings increases over time by the vast majority of taxpayers - say, everyone in the lower 90 percent - with those at the top, say, in the uppermost 0.01 percent (now about 14,000 households, each with $5.5 million or more in income last year).

From 1950 to 1970, for example, for every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162, according to the Times analysis. From 1990 to 2002, for every extra dollar earned by those in the bottom 90 percent, each taxpayer at the top brought in an extra $18,000.

Using absolute dollars to compare rich and poor is an immediate red flag because it easily distorts the true picture. Furthermore, from the quote above, it’s hard to even understand exactly what he’s writing about. I presume he’s comparing the change in the arithmetic average income of the bottom 90% to the arithmetic average income of the top 0.01%, but he never tells us what these averages are nor how much they changed.

Imagine if, in 1950, the average for the top 0.01% was 200 times higher than for the bottom 90%. In that case, the top 0.01% earning an extra $162 for every extra $1 earned by the bottom 90% would mean that the bottom 90% were actually catching up, yet the way it’s phrased it appears that the top 0.01% are pulling away.

What about the $18,000 figure? Well, suppose that during a period of time, incomes were nearly flat, with the bottom 90%’s income increasing by 0.01% but the top 0.01%’s income increasing by 1%. Hardly a very big deal, only a 1% increase in income, but if the 0.01% started out with 180 times as much income, then the scenario above would equate to that $18,000 figure.

Now my numbers above are just made up to illustrate a point, but the point is that these comparisons from the article are meaningless because they tell us very little about the differences between the two groups, yet they give the appearance of the better off group being outrageously better off.

At the end of his comment, Johnston seems to be asking for an apology:

If you don't have an example of unethical conduct -- and that is what you accused me of -- but rather blogged without carefully thinking first then a corrective post would be the honorable response.

I don’t see why I need to apologize for accusing him of “unethical conduct,” because I never said he was unethical. Deceptive statistics are used all the time in the MSM (as well as the blogosphere), so they seem to be an accepted practice. Nor do I need to apologize for not “carefully thinking.” Even if true, it’s the nature of blogging that you can’t carefully think about everything you write, but in this case my original impression of the article most certainly does stand up to closer scrutiny.

How Starbucks keeps the poor from getting rich

It’s in today’s Washington Post:

She just graduated summa cum laude, after three years of legal training that left her $115,000 in debt. Part of that debt, which she will take a decade to repay with interest, was run up at Starbucks, where she buys her lattes.

It’s too bad she didn’t read my essay Law school: the big lie. There’s no way a law degree from a state school (Michigan and Virgina excepted) is worth $115,000. But she could have saved a few thousand by cutting the latte habit:

[A] five-day-a-week $3 latte habit on borrowed money can cost $4,154, when repaid over 10 years.

Photographers harrassed

This audio clip from NPR gets me mad. Photographers have been arrested by police for taking pictures from public places, something they have the legal right to do.

In one case, a photographer was surrounded by multiple police cars and helicopters, as if he were a dangerous murder suspect.

These sort of Gestapo-like behavior on the part of law enforcement should have all Americans outraged, but instead there is nothing but complacency.

If real terrorists were taking pictures, they’d use something small and discreet, they wouldn’t be using a big camera and tripod, nor would they be photographing at dawn or dusk (the favorite time of day for photographers). The point here is that it is impossible to prevent terrorists from taking photos, legitimate photographers are the only ones who will be visible enough to be spotted.

Please utilize all doors

This evening, while boarding the Metro, the conducter announced "Please utilize all doors of the train. Please utilize all doors of the train."

I thought this was pretty funny, because it was right out of Paul Fussell's book on Class. He says the middle class like to use big words because small words just don't seem important enough. So the conductor misuses the word "utilize" where he meant "use."

But a train conductor job is surely high prole at best, not middle class. Is the conductor trying to affect the manners of the class above him? Or has living in Washington, DC, where our government goes out of its way to use big words, acronyms and the passive voice, infused the conductor with the need to mimic governmentese?

How adolescent height affects labor market outcomes

To compliment my previous post about how a candidate’s physical appearance affects election outcomes, I figured this is a good time to republish this post from my old blog. I hope you enjoy this oldie but goodie:

June 25, 2003

I came across an interesting bit of economic research while surfing the web today. It’s a paper by Nicola Persico, Andrew Postlewaite, and Dan Silverman of the University of Pennsylvania (that’s my alma mater) entitled “The Effect of Adolescent Experience on Labor Market Outcomes: The Case of Height.”

It’s long been known that, especially for men, being taller correlates to earning more money. A big deal has been made about the fact that the taller candidate usually wins the presidential election. In 10 of the last 13 presidential elections, the taller candidate won. (Maybe the reason why the Bush Gore election was so close is because Bush was the shorter candidate. If Bush had been taller than Gore, he probably would have won by a landslide.)

I and others have wondered why exactly it is that businesses prefer to hire tall people. Well, it turns out that actual adult height isn’t what’s relevant. It’s really adolescent height that matters. When adolescent height was added to the analysis, adult height no longer had a statistically significant impact on earnings. The only reason why the correlation between adult height and earnings exists is because adolescent height is a good predictor of adult height. But if you’re a late bloomer, and you don’t start growing until after the age of 16, the economic benefit of being tall isn’t going to accrue to you.

The explanation that the authors of the paper give for this phenomenon, and it’s an explanation I agree with, is that adolescent height has a strong impact on social and athletic success in high school. It’s these social skills and self esteem acquired during the formative years that lead to success in the business world later on in life.

The sad thing here is that the person who’s nerdy and un-athletic in high school is actually screwed for life, and won’t ever catch up.

Here’s a link to the research paper: http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/~persico/research/Papers/short.pdf

May the better (looking) candidate win

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution mentions the study in which people were asked to judge the competency of a picture of a political candidate unknown to the participant, and “the candidate perceived as more competent was the winner in 72 percent of the Senate races and 67 percent of the House races.”

I think that Randall Parker, aka the FuturePundit sums it up really well when he says “[d]emocracy is flawed because humans are shallow and superficial.”

Kaptain Kapital thinks this isn’t a big deal. “Once again scientists tell us something we already know.”

I disagree with the Kaptain, I say that it is a big deal because this is one of those things that people secretly know but they pretend not to. Quantifying human behavior is always an interesting endeavor.

If we combine this observation with another related observation that the taller candidate is more likely to win, we might come up with a good election predictor based on height plus perception of competence.

Canadian oil sands

There’s a front page article in today’s Washington Post about Canadian oil sands. I guess with OPEC meeting today and oil prices over $55/barrel, oil is suddenly a hot topic.

People who refuse to believe in the Peak Oil theory (read my Peak Oil post) often point to Canadian oil sands as an example of how we will never run out of oil. But if you read the Post article, there is nothing especially comforting there. Current oil sands production is “about 1 million barrels a day,” and production is expected to triple by the year 2020. An extra 2 million barrels a day brought online gradually over a period of 20 years is not going to make a very significant change in world oil production.

According to the EIA, “worldwide oil demand is projected to reach 121 million barrels per day by 2025, requiring an increment to world production capacity of about 44 million barrels per day over current levels.” Obviously the 44 million barrels are not going to come from Canadian oil sands. In fact, if certain Peak Oil experts are to be believed, there is little chance that the world will ever be able to produce 121 million barrels per day.

Beating the dead horse of federalism

From today’s NY Times:

A states'-rights challenge to enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, pending at the Supreme Court for more than a year, failed Monday when the justices, without comment, refused to hear it.

The appeal had attracted widespread attention as the most potent of several efforts around the country to make the case that Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce did not extend to protecting animal or plant species that lack commercial value and that live in only one state.

One must remember that denial of certiorari does not mean the Court is ruling against the appeal on the merits. The Court receives far more petitions for certiorari than it is able to grant.

Nevertheless, it sounds to me like a pretty good set of facts to make a point about federalism. How is it possible that that the power to regulate commerce between the states also gives Congress the power to protect local plant and animal species that lack commercial value?

It’s clear that the principle that Congress has unlimited power to do whatever it wants will remain the law of the land for many years to come, even though the Constitution says something very different. What’s the point of having a Constitution if everyone is just going to ignore the parts they don’t like?