Half Sigma

Iran decision tree, level four, after Iran gets nukes

Other nations have obtained nuclear weapons and the world did not come to an end. China, India, Pakistan which is a Muslim country, and even North Korea which is part of George Bush's "Axis of Evil." So why is it a big deal if Iran gets them as well?

First of all, the world is not a safer place on account of Pakistan and North Korea possessing nuclear weapons. These countries haven't used them yet, but Korea is governed by a dictator with mental problems, and Pakistan's government isn't so secure.

Even though Pakistan is a Muslim nation, the government is run by the military. Normally we think of military governments as being bad, but actually it's a good thing in Muslim countries. Armies tend to be secular meritocracies and the generals are usually capable of rational decision making. Musharraf probably doesn't want to die in a nuclear exchange.

The problem Pakistan owning nuclear weapons isn't so much that the current government will use them, but that a future less rational government, run by religious zealots, might used them. The other problem is that nuclear technology seems to be leaking out of Pakistan, and out of North Korea as well. And that technology is leaking in the direction of Iran.

The more countries that have nuclear weapons, the more likely that one may eventually be used, and the more likely that terrorists may acquire one and set it off in the United States. The nuclearization fo the world's nations is a very bad trend. And Iran has already stated that they wish to help Sudan also become a nuclear power.

But Iran is especially worrisome because the government isn't run by rational people, but by religious zealots who believe that it's their mission to destroy Israel and destroy the United States who they call the Great Satan. It's one thing to legitimately worry about a country that says they only want to defend themselves. But for a country that publicly states over and over again that it wishes to destroy us, and who believe that dying in battle against us means ascension to Paradise, then we really ought to take these words at face value and not assume that they don't really mean it. Jewish people in Germany believed that Hitler wasn't serious about his anti-Semitic statements, but they found out that he was very serious indeed.

I am open to arguments why we should trust the Ayatollahs of Iran more than we should trust Hitler. Please try to convince me otherwise.

Here is my sobering list of possiblities for what happens when Iran obtains nuclear weapons:

(1) Launch first strike against Israel. Iran has already stated that they think Israel should be wiped off the map. The benefit of this tactic is that it's a sure thing to hit Israel with a ballistic missile. The drawback, from Iran's perspective, is that Israel has submarines with nuclear warheads so will surely launch a counterstike that destroys the country. But this may be considered acceptable losses to religious fanatics. 25% probablity.

(2) Give a nuclear bomb to terrorists who will bring it into the United States and detonate it in a populated city such as New York or Washington DC (for symbolic purposes). This will surely punish us good for being the Great Satan. The benefit of this tactic is that Iran might be able to maintain plausible deniability and thus avoid a nuclear counterattack. But the problem here is that it's not so easy to smuggle a bomb across the world, and it may be intercepted U.S. counterintelligence. If Iran only has enough enriched uranium to build a single bomb, and the goal is to actually detonate it, trying to smuggle it into the U.S. is a risky strategy. 10% probability.

(3) Iran invades southern Iraq (after we've withdrawn) in order to unite the Shiites, and then invades Kuwait as well because they have a lot of oil and Saddam has already proven that Kuwait is an easy target. Iran will say that this is to punish Kuwait for cooperating with the Great Satan. Then Iran will brandish its nuclear weapons and threaten to use them if attacked. 35% probability of this or a similar miltary excursion.

(4) Iran peacefully does nothing with its nuclear weapons. 30% probability.

Given the high probability that very bad things will happen with Iran obtains nuclear weapons, it is my belief that we shouldn't allow it to happen.

Angry atheists

Blogger Brent Rasmussen has an excellent response to Rabbi Marc Gellman's Newseek article on "angry atheists."

I couldn't have responded any better myself.

UPDATE

Atheists have a lot to be angry about. In his article, Gellman writes:

Perhaps their atheism was the result of the tragic death of a loved one, or an angry degrading sermon, or an insensitive eulogy, or an unfeeling castigation of lifestyle choices or perhaps something even worse.

This is an implication that atheists all have some sort of emotional or psychological issues otherwise they wouldn't be atheists. Then Gellman wonders why atheists are mad at him.

Gellman is unable to comprehend that most atheists are atheist because they don't think that the religions make any sense. Someone who is "atheist" because he is mad at God isn't really an atheist at all.

Iran decision tree, level three, no sanctions

If there are no sanctions, or if there are sanctions but they have no significant effect positive or negative, then here are the possiblities in the next level:

(1) Nothing happens and Iran gets nuclear weapons. This is the most likely outcome because the U.S. is afraid to act and no other country has the power or desire to stop Iran. 55% probablility.
(2) Israel attacks Iran. 10% probability.
(3) Secular Iranians overthrow the religious government, and then voluntary end the WMD program in exchange for U.S. aid. It hasn't happened since 1980, why is it suddenly going to happen just in the nick of time to save us? Highly unlikely. 2% probability.
(4) U.S. led attack on Iran. 33% probability.

Iranian decision tree, level two

After Iran refuses to give up its nuclear ambitions, there are two possible actions:

(1) Economic sanctions against Iran. 25% probability.
(2) No economic sanctions. 75% probability.

Why aren't any other possiblities included at this level? Because the way I see it, there's a good chance that the sanctions won't accomplish anything, in which case we face the same decision possibilities as if sanctions never happened in the fist place. But it's also possible for sanctions to go horribly wrong, which is why I think they probably won't happen.

The Iranian decision tree, top level

The U.S. and her allies want Iran to stop its nuclear weapons research. Iran has three options here:

(1) Cave in to pressure and stop the research.
(2) Pretend to cave in while secrectly continuing the research.
(3) Ignore the pressure and carry on.

Based upon Iranian public statements, and my guess of how Irananian leaders think option (3) will play out, I think there's a 90% chance that Iran will choose option (3), and 10% chance of option (2), and a close to 0% chance of option (1).

Therefore, future posts in this series will explore what happens after Iran ignores the UN Security Council or whatever other pressure we put on them.

Demand for gasoline is price inelastic

Via Instapundit, there's an opinion piece in Forbes about how high oil prices are not causing a drop in demand, at least not in the United States (although the author doesn't mention the foreign angle).

As I previously mentioned in my blog (in a post about the minimum wage), the demand for gasoline, like the demand for low wage labor, is price inelastic, which means that rising prices have barely any effect on demand. So if you read my blog, you don't have to read anything else because you already know what's going on.

Demand inelasticity (as well as supply inelasticity) contributes to the huge swings in prices. So if people want to know why prices are so high, the answer is inelasticity of both supply and demand. This is not an especially unusual situation for commodities. For example, the price of silver has more than tripled since November, 2001.

Newsweek article about Iran

I pretty much agree with this Newsweek article about Iran, except to the extent that it implies that we shouldn't take any military action.

The article basically has two points:

(1) The Iranian people aren't waiting for us to liberate them, nor are they about to revolt against their current government. On the one hand this means that an attempt to use our military to turn Iran into a secular Western democracy will be doomed to failure. On the other hand, it also means that it's a bad strategy to hope that a pro-democracy movement is going to overthrough the government and solve our Iranian problem for us. If we don't want a bunch of religious nuts to control a nuclear arsenal, then we have to take action now.

(2) If we attack Iran, Iran might retaliate against us using terrorism, including the use of "martyrs" willing to give up their lives. I believe this is highly likely. I take Iran's statements that they will retaliate at face value. The Newsweek article doesn't mention the threat from Iranian missiles which I also find quite credible. I wrote about this in my post Can Iran hurt us militarily?.

Saddam Hussein was probably the worst military strategist the world has ever known. Iran will be a tougher military target. We need to assume that Iran will make effective of use of asyMMetric warfare via Martyrs and Missiles, the two M's of asyMMetric, and that Iran will attack first and not wait for us to just bomb them without a fight.

However, my warning for people who are afraid to attack Iran is that fear now will only make Iran and all future enemies that much bolder.

Photos from Thailand

Googling for something else I accidentally came across the website of Yoonki Kim, a Korean who lives in Thailand.

Yoonki is a fantastic street photographer, and because he uses 35mm film and mostly 50mm and 35mm prime lenses, his photos have a look about them that you just don't see with digital cameras.

He also has the following observation about photography:

I recommend stay not-married if you want have freedom to waste money doing stupid (and unproductive) things like photographs.

I highly recommend that you check out his website.

A draft? What a dumb idea.

Some guy named Paul Kane gets an op-ed piece published in the New York Times advocating a draft:

THE American public needs to be prepared for what is shaping up to be a clash of colossal proportions between the West and Iran.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt masterfully prepared Americans before the United States entered World War II by initiating a peacetime draft under the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940.

Now, President Bush and Congress should reinstitute selective service under a lottery without any deferments.

This single action will send a strong message to three constituencies in the crisis over Iran's nuclear intentions — Iran, outside powers like China and Russia and Americans at home — and perhaps lead to a peaceful resolution.

Iran's leaders and public will see that the United States is serious about ensuring that they never possess a nuclear weapon.

This has to be one of the dumbest op-ed pieces I've ever seen in the NY Times. Iran already knows we have enough firepower to demolish the country several times over, and that's without even using our nuclear arsenal. A bunch of untrained conscripts who don't want to be in the military would only get in the way of the guys who know how to fire the weapons.

Iran is banking on the assumption that we don't have the political willpower to kill massive numbers of civilians or take even the smallest amount of military losses. And of course Iran is justified in these assumptions. There is a big outpouring of angst about our losses in Iraq when in fact we've only lost 2,380 soldiers since the war began. In comparison more than 16,000 are murdered each year in the United States. Where's the outrage about that? If Iraq is a war zone, why isn't the U.S. also a war zone?

The only reason we'd need more manpower is to permanently occupy Iran, which would be an incredibly dumb idea given how bad the Iraqi occupation is going. Simply bombing them back into the stone age sounds like a much better plan. (And despite Iran's supposedly advanced research in nuclear energy, they are already pretty close to the stone age. Iran is incapable of manufacturing most of the components of a nuclear program on their own. They can't even manufacture their own aluminum tubes to make centrifuges. A country that can't manufacture aluminum tubes has no business having nuclear weapons.)

Obviously the motivation behind recommending a draft has nothing to do with Iran, but rather the left wing belief that it's unfair that well off upper middle class kids don't have to risk their lives in combat. But our army isn't designed to be fair, it's designed to be an efficient fighting force that can perform its missions with a minimum loss of American life, and I'll take that over some bogus left-wing definition of "fair" any day.

Is Tide the best laundry detergent?

I few days ago, I blogged about how I had no idea as to which laundry detergent was the better. (See my post on perception vs. reality in marketing.)

So I attempted to do some research, but unfortunately, I still don't know. There's hardly any information on the internet about laundry detergents. I spent a significant amount of time doing Google searches but came up blank. This is in stark contrast to the digital camera market where a review of the new Canon EOS 30D takes up 30 web pages. If only I could find a single web page devoted to tests of a laundry detergent.

I am certain that the consumer is getting ripped off on laundry detergent. This is because (1) the market has oligopolistic competition (Proctor & Gamble has near monopoly power); (2) there is asymmetric information (the consumer has no clue what the difference is between products); and (3) the demand curve is price inelastic. That box of Tide which I bought for $5.27 at Duane Reade probably only cost P&G a few cents to manufacture.

Despite the illusion that there are many brands of of laundry detergent, there are really just four brands. P&G brands include Ivory, Era, Gain, Cheer, and of course Tide. Tide alone comes in dozens of different varieties and sizes. The goal here is to grab all the shelf space and crowd out any competitors.

I've blogged before about how competition causes higher prices. If P&G didn't have to spend so much money on marketing in order to maintain its near-monopoly, it could probably sell Tide for half the price and still make the same amount of profit.

Unilever is the next biggest competitor with two brands, Wisk and All.

Then there's a new player in the laundry detergent business, Phoenix Brands. What, never heard of them? That's because they knew how difficult it is to break into an oligopolistic market with huge barriers to entry, so they bought all the brands from Colgate-Palmolive, including Fab, Dynamo, and Ajax.

There's a final independent brand, Arm & Hammer. I've been using this brand because someone (my mother) gave me a free jug of the stuff, but my clothes don't seem especially clean so this stuff must suck.

This leads me to the recommendation part of the post. I am pretty sure that no brand works any better than Tide. Now read what I said very carefully. I'm not saying that I'm sure that other brands are worse, I really have no idea, but the scanty evidence I could find on the internet indicates that Tide is the gold standard. If some other brand came up with an advertising campaign demonstrating how they are better than Tide then I'd recommend that other brand, but you will notice that no brands attempt to compete in this market through comparison. Obviously they have an oligopolistic gentleman's agreement not to rock the boat.

I also recommend that you used powdered detergent instead of liquid. Not only does the powdered stuff cost a few cents less, there is some evidence that powders work better. I have no idea why this is the case. I can only assume that the powders contain some chemicals that become unstable after they are dissolved in liquid. The Tide website says that liquid Tide is better for grease while powdered Tide is better for all other dirt. Because most of the dirt on your clothes is the non-grease kind, and you can always pre-treat a grease stain with some liquid product, I don't see any reason not to make the powdered detergent your regular detergent.

If powdered detergent works better, why is liquid more popular? Because consumers think it's easier to use and consumers have no idea that powdered is better. Probably P&G doesn't want consumers to know because it gets to dominate more shelf space with both liquid and powdered versions of all its detergents.

With tax, that $5.27 box of Tide costs me only 38 cents per load. I'm already paying three dollars in quarters for every load, what's an extra 38 cents? This demonstrates why the demand for detergent is price inelastic. I used to use whatever detergent I found at the lowest price, but now that I've done more research I realize that it's worth paying an extra twenty cents per load to make sure that I'm using the best stuff.

Does the world need a Sony DSLR?

Sony is stepping into the Digital SLR market with the introduction of it's new "alpha" system.

While the guys at Pentax are probably scared, I'm not sure that Canon, Nikon, or even Olympus have much to worry about. Sony is joining the DSLR game pretty late, and needs to score a big grand slam home run in order to catch up.

Now if Sony can come out with a DSLR that has dust protection like the Olympus E-500, a high megapixel count like the Nikon D200, the low noise of Canon, and an assortment of Carl Zeiss lenses, all at an affordable price, then that would be something.

Why am I blogging about digital photography? I don't know, guess I just need to mix it up.

Young people receive money from parents

From today's NY Times:

AT 23, Jason McGuinness lives a postcollege life in Manhattan that is very nearly typical. He works as a media research analyst, making about $30,000 a year. Sharing a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor of a walk-up building with a roommate on the Upper East Side, his portion of the rent is $1,100 monthly.

$1,100 is about as cheaply as you can live in Manhattan. Jason's walk-up apartment is surely tiny and crappy. Yet still, how can a guy making only $30K per year afford it? Read on:

...like many of his peers — educated, employed, urban-dwelling young adults — he receives monthly assistance from his parents, in the form of a $300 check and the payment of his cellphone bill.

...

"Everybody I know is supporting their children in some way," said Gail Horowitz, Mr. McGuinness's mother, a vice president of the Zlokower Company, a public relations firm in Manhattan. Unlike young adults who "boomerang" back home to live with their parents — the subject of the recent comedy "Failure to Launch" — these young people live independently. But they need help to make ends meet, or put another way, to maintain a middle-class way of life.

And why is this happening?

Dr. Schoeni said his study suggests that extended education, the exploration of career options and delayed marriage are the causes of the long transition to self-sufficiency. Parental support "is not the driver of a delayed transition, it is a response to it," he said.

I believe that extended education does indeed play an important role. I don't buy into the delayed marriage argument. Just as likely the cause and effect works the other way, the inability of young people to support themselves independently discourages them from getting married.

But also, Dr. Schoeni misses a crucial point. As I expalained in previous blog posts, the income earned by young people is declining relative to older people, and this is especially true for young men.

At the same time that income is falling, the cost of housing has risen substantially, and the amount of student loan debt carried by the typical college graduate is at an all time high. This explains why young people need financial support from their parents.

What distinguishes the upper middle class from the lower middle class is that the latter's parents can't afford to give them support so they have to live at home. In this new era, social mobility is declining because living at home means that those young people are denied employment and social opportunities that could raise their social status. The cost of college education rising faster than inflation also leads to a decline in social mobility.

Are Americans really not saving any money?

According to the official government definition of the "savings rate," Americans aren't saving any money, leading journalists to write stuff like: "According to the U.S. Commerce Dept., consumer spending last December increased at a rate more than double the rate of income growth. This buying frenzy helped push the savings rate for the year down to the lowest level since the Great Depression."

How about this hypothetical example: suppose that between April 15 2005 and April 15 2006, through prudent management of my finances, I had socked away $10,000. But then I do my taxes and discover that I had $25,640 of realized short term capital gains because of my prudent investing activities. However, the combined federal and New York state tax rate on that is more than 39% (or something like that) so I owe $10,000 in capital gains taxes.

So how much money have I saved? According to the government I've saved nothing because capital gains are ignored as disposable income, but capital gains taxes are considered to reduce disposable income. However, the way I see it, I saved $10,000, which might be a pretty high percentage of my disposable income. A more aggressive way of looking at it is that I actually saved $25,640, because that's money I could have spent but chose not to.

It should therefore be no surprise that the soaring stock and real estate markets have resulted in a lower "savings rate."

NY Times criticizes McDonalds

There's an article in today's New York Time about McDonald's profitable turnaround. Unfortunately, the writer devotes about half the article to criticing McDonald's for making people fat. Obviously, the writer of the article hasn't been reading his own paper. In the past two years, we've learned that fatty foods don't hurt your health, it's actually healthy to be overweight, and one's weight is mostly genetic and there's no obesity epidemic.

AP says college graduates are moving to cities

The Associated Press reports that college graduates are moving to cities:

College graduates are flocking to America's big cities, chasing jobs and culture and driving up home prices.

Though many of the largest cities have lost population in the past three decades, nearly all have added college graduates, an analysis by The Associated Press found.

The findings offer hope for urban areas, many of which have spent decades struggling with financial problems, job losses and high poverty rates.

However, as I wrote in my blog post on why Republicans should like cities, the cities need to fix their education problems if they want to retain families. The AP article echoes my sentiments:

But cities need good schools to keep people from fleeing to the suburbs once they become parents, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Frey pointed to Washington, a city with lagging public schools but impressive education levels among adults.

"D.C. is like a revolving door," Frey said. "These young people move in and then they move out when they want to have kids."

Perception vs. reality in marketing

Don Boudreaux quoted a comment of mine:

We live in a marketing economy, and companies prosper not by having better products, but by creating the PERCEPTION that they have better products

and had this to say:

Half Sigma’s comment is whoppingly at odds with reality.

If Half Sigma’s claim were correct, then the quality of products widely available today would be little changed from that of products widely available in the past.

First of all I stand by my comment, and further add that it was a praphrase of something I previously wrote about employees of consulting firms:

For a consulting or contracting company, it’s much more important to create the perception of having the best employees than to actually have them. The most profitable company would have the perception of having the best employees, but would actually have the worst, and thus lowest paid, employees. The only problem is that maintaining such a perception is difficult if the employees are really that bad. But the point, nevertheless, is that perception trumps reality.

The same logic applies to all companies. For a consulting or contracting firm, the company's product is its employees. The perception of the best product is more important than actually having the best product. And of course I've already conceded that if the product is really awful then it's difficult to maintain a perception of being the best.

Based upon corporate behavior, companies obviously agree with me. Otherwise they wouldn't spend so much money on marketing. For example, I previously estimated that the drug company Pfizer spends twice as much money on marketing as it does on R&D and manufacturing combined. If highly skilled medical doctors are unable to determine the best drug to prescribe without the help of a college cheerleader, surely a consumer is completely bewildered.

Think about the last time you bought laundry detergent. Do you really have any idea which brand is better? I don't. I recall reading once that Tide has been improved a lot and has various patented ingredients, but this may only mean that P&G spent millions of dollars shmoozing journalists to get articles like that written. Tide certainly costs a lot more than other brands. Is it worth the extra money? I have no idea. Probably the extra price for Tide is just paying for the marketing overhead. All I know for sure is that my clothes never come out perfectly clean like I see on TV ads.

Don Boudreaux wrote about products improving over time, and that's an entirely different issue. One could easily be a wise guy and point out that the current version of Microsoft Word seems worse than the version from 1993, but I certainly agree that manufactured items, espcially high tech items like computers and electronics, have improved substantially in my lifetime. But that really has nothing to do with the proposition that perception trumps reality. The relevant comparison is of two products being sold today, not the comparison of a product sold today to a product sold in years past.

Ethical gold?

I've been investing in gold for years, but I've never heard of ethical gold until reading about it in the NY Times. Ethical gold is either recycled or mined "responsibly."

These changes are partly coming about, people in and out of the jewelry industry say, because gold mining's environmental and social impacts have become impossible to ignore, especially in developing countries where political protests, corruption and displacement of indigenous peoples have often accompanied mining.

People who think they are helping the environment by buying ethical gold do not comprehend basic economics. Buying gold from any source increases demand and thus increases the price of gold, and higher gold prices encourage more mining operations.

Furthermore, I dispute the assertion that gold mining hurts developing countries; just the opposite, it pumps money into countries in Africa that have few other exportable products.

Message to liberals: you do not help the planet by wasting money on overpriced luxury items. If people really feel bad about their gold purchases harming the environment, they should fix the problem buy not buying gold. Better yet, they can take the money they saved and donate it to charity.

Young people of both sexes relatively worse off

The chart below shows the mean income of two age ranges, and the ratio of the younger to the older age range:

	25-34	45-54	Ratio
1974	28368	34707	0.82
1979	27587	33272	0.83
1984	26294	33003	0.80
1989	28619	39878	0.72
1994	28110	42086	0.67
1999	33332	46298	0.72
2004	31987	45179	0.71

Source: U.S. Census Bureau Historical Income Tables.

As we see, the younger generation was comparatively better off in the 1970s making over 80% of the income of the older generation. In the 2000s, their relative income declined to around 70%.

This explains why private school tuition is being increasingly paid for by grandparents.

Median income for young men is declining

A few days ago, I blogged about the fact that more young men were living with their parents.

I found a table at the U.S. Census historical income data website that explains it. The median income for young men (aged 25-34) has been declining. In 2004 dollars (adjusted for inflation using the CPI-U-RS), the median income was $35,126 in 1974, but thirty years later in 2004 the median income declined to $30,984. That's a decline in real income of 12%.

Furthermore, the cost of housing has increased faster than inflation, so relative to housing prices the median income of young men decreased by an amount much greater than 12%. No wonder why more young men are living with their parents!

I know this chart is amazing. It seems contrary to the popular notion that we are better of now than we were thirty years ago during the 1970s, a decade of economic malaise. Well not the case for men aged 25-34! Nearly all of the gains in income have gone to women. Women of all ages have seen their salaries increase subsantially since the 1970s.

This is a topic I will surely blog about more.

Is there anything to "affordable family formation"?

Steve Sailer is writing about affordable family formation again:

Across the country, Republican performance correlates closely with a state's level of "affordable family formation" because the GOP's family values orientation appeals most to voters with families. The huge increase in California's population, including the Hispanic baby boom triggered by the 1986 illegal alien amnesty, drove up the cost of buying a home and devastated the public schools. This drove many family-oriented voters out of the state, and kept others from getting married and having children. The Total Fertility Rate of white women in California dropped 14% between 1990 and 2000.

Is there anything to this?

If you read my blogs, you will recall that I've previously explained how laissez-faire zoning laws in "red states" reduce housing costs in those states, while in "blue states" excessive regulation and zoning significantly increases the cost of housing.

Furthermore, I've previously written about how liberals are less likely to have children.

Steve Sailer seems to think that we can create more conservatives if we can just get liberals to have children. I doubt this because one's political disposition is somewhat genetic and somewhat influenced by one's parents, so getting liberals to have more children will only create more liberals. However, conservatives can take comfort that liberals will eventually die out. Liberals should be a lot more alarmed than they are.

I agree with Steve that middle class parents don't want their children to attend school with poor children. This is a topic in my post on why Republicans should like cities; a major reason why middle class families abandoned cities is because of the unavailability of public schools free of poor children.

And now, let's ponder the economic incentives related to getting married and having children. Economic considerations do alter people's major life decisions. It's common to hear about couples putting off child bearing until they can afford it. And the high cost of housing has resulted in increasing numbers of young men being forced to live at home with their parents. Surely this contributes to people getting married later than ever before.

Although I suspect that liberals are naturally predisposed towards having less children, the problem is exacerbated by the high cost of living in blue states. Most couples living in cities in blue states have to move out of the city in order to afford a residence with extra rooms for children and to obtain free public education that is deemed of an acceptable quality (acceptable quality meaning no poor children in the school). Some of these people will forgo the expensive blue state and move to a red state with affordable housing. Thus the red states gain in population, and because a good chunk of the gain comes from couples with children who are more likely to be conservative, the red states remain conservative while the blue states become even more liberal.

This creates a virtuous circle, because Republican policies in red states make them less expensive for families encouraging more families to move there, making them even more family friendly. At the same time there is a vicious circle for blue states, because the most conservative voters leave, making the laws even more hostile towards affordable housing and public schools suitable to middle class tastes.

After the 2010 Census causes Congressional districts to be reapportioned, the increasing population of the red states (on account of both immigration from blue states and the more numerous children of Republicans reaching the age of 18 and becoming new Republican voters) will grant Republicans a solid majority in Congress and the Electoral College. The 2008 election may be the last one in which a Democratic candidate is competitive.

NY Times says behavior is genetic

There's an article in the NY Times about how impulsivity is a genetically influenced personality trait.

Of course I've known all along that human behavior is powerfully influenced by genes, but it's nice to see that that NY Times has finally figured it out!

Let science investigate religion

Last week, the newspapers reported on a study which showed that prayer didn't help recovering heart patients. The Wall Street Journal has a brief three paragraph editorial that I don't get:

Amen Corner
April 3, 2006; Page A16

If you had a glass or two of red wine over the weekend or managed to fit in a 30-minute workout, chances are you were responding, at least in part, to medical advice based on scientific research about how to maintain a healthy heart.

Now along comes a new study on cardiac health that even its authors caution against making too much of. The research, released last week, found that heart-surgery patients showed no benefit when strangers prayed for their recovery. Patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications -- perhaps because they were alarmed that they were ill enough to be in anyone's prayers.

We don't presume to know what this study proves, other than perhaps that science is not an especially effective means by which to study God. Other research -- not to mention the everyday experience of just about every medical professional -- has shown that prayer can be beneficial for the sick. In any event, no scientific study is likely to stop people from praying for those who are ill, or stop the sick from offering up prayers for their own good health. To which we say, Amen.

I thought the study was pretty interesting. People are putting in a lot of effort to pray for people, and they believe their prayers are helping. This proves that prayer has no measurable effect. People should know when what they are doing is useless. Why should a whole realm of human activity, religion, be somehow off limits to scientific investigation?

Has anyone considered that they were praying to the wrong god? Maybe Hindu, Taoist, or Jewish prayers would have worked? There are many religions in the world, and for the most part they conflict with each other such that only one religion can be correct. Maybe science can figure out which religion is the true religion and which ones are false.