The Slippery Slope

March 27, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 10 comments

Here’s a simple model of the slippery slope.  You have to adopt a position on an issue and defend your position to yourself and your critics.  The spectrum of positions ranges from the left-most extreme to the right-most extreme and you have to decide whether to take one of these extreme positions or some moderate point in the interior.

Defending a moderate position is a delicate balancing act.  It’s a very special set of utility functions which attain their maximum right at that point, and you need to convince your critics that the right utility function happens to be one of those.  Any slight perturbation of a utility function in that set will push you to the left or right so your critics have an easy task.  And once you’ve lost the first battle your credibility is damaged.

The easiest positions to defend are the extreme ones.  At an extreme position you have a binding constraint.  To defend your extremist position it is enough to say that you are such an extremist that you would like to move even farther to the right if that were possible.  The set of utility functions that have an optimum somewhere to the right of the right boundary is a large set.  You can perturb such a utility function and the extremist position will still be optimal.

The same logic explains why a few special interior positions can be robust to the slippery slope.  Think of a kinked budget constraint.  A large set of utility functions achieve their optimum at a kink.

RES Tourists

March 27, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 8 comments

In January, I posted and tweeted this:

7c6d61820d512c87789bf13a5fd16876da6d7004

which is the SHA1 hash of the following text, my prediction of the 2012 RES tour party:

Today is Thursday January 5 2012 and here are my predictions for the 2012 Review of Economics Studies Tour.  Last year I made my predictions after having interviewed all of the top candidates.  This year I am making my prediction only after reading job market papers and letters of recommendations and before actually meeting the candidates in an interview setting.  The interviews begin tomorrow morning.  We can compare my results and decide whether the interviews are informative or not.

Gabriel Carroll
Melissa Dell
Arun Chandresekher
Michal Fabinger
Paulo Somaini
Briana Chang
Treb Allen

As with last year I make these predictions not because I have tremendous confidence in them but simply as an experiment to see how easy it is to predict job market outcomes well in advance.  This year I am fairly confident that I will get at least 3 right.  4 is my expected value.

You can verify this by visiting this web site, copying and pasting the prediction text and generating the SHA1 hash.  If you are curious how it works, here is Wikipedia.

And here is the actual list of RES tourists selected this year:

Saki Bigio – NYU (going to Columbia GSB)
Gabriel Carroll – MIT (going to Stanford?)
Melissa Dell – MIT (Going to Harvard Society of Fellows)
Nathaniel Hendren – MIT (Going to Stanford ?)
Matteo Maggiori – Berkeley (Don’t know where he is going.)
Paulo Somaini – Stanford (Coming to Northwestern????)
Joe Vavra – Yale (Going to Chicago Booth School of Business)

As you can see I got three out of seven.  Which I must say looks like a pretty poor score but hindsight is hard to shake and I made this prediction  wild guess after only having read recommendation letters and job market papers.  I take this as evidence that the face-to-face interviews (that happened in the days after I made this prediction) convey a lot of information.  I am pretty sure I would have gotten two more if I made the prediction two days later.

More generally I would say that my miserable performance both last year and this pretty much dispells the cynical view that job market stars are minted before the market opens.  If you don’t believe me, next year you try it.

Consider The Equilibrium

March 26, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment

Professional line standers.

The word “Intrepid” is on Hans Scheltema’s business card, and it’s more than just the name of his business. The professional line-stander prides himself on sticking it out, in all kinds of weather, on behalf of the lawyers, lobbyists and others willing to pay for a place in line at big events, such as arguments before the Supreme Court this week on thefederal health-care overhaul.

But even a guy with supreme stick-to-itiveness has his limits.

On Sunday afternoon, after holding down spot No. 3 outside the Supreme Court for the better part of the day, he hired a homeless man to fill in for a few hours. Scheltema, 44, who had taken over Sunday morning for a guy who had held the spot since Friday, wanted to go home to recharge — both himself and his BlackBerry.

Economists On Opposing Sides of Health Care Law

March 25, 2012 in art of office politics, economics | Tags: , , | by | 18 comments

The big event of this week in the U.S. will be the Supreme Court discussion of the Affordable Care Act aka “ObamaCare”, a supposedly derogatory nickname now embraced by the Obama campaign. At the heart of the fight is the so-called individual mandate which requires everyone to purchase health insurance. A related and important argument is that additional provisions, such as requiring coverage for individuals with preexisting conditions, become prohibitively expensive without the individual mandate. This is because, without the mandate, healthy individuals will not buy insurance till they become sick and this drives up costs of insurance companies. So, if the individual mandate is struck down, the argument goes, the court should also strike down the requirement that insurance companies cover individuals with pre-existing conditions.

I am not a lawyer but the main argument for canceling the individual mandate turns on whether the federal government has the right to penalize an individual if they do NOT take a certain action. There is plenty of precedent for taxing “action” but can the federal government tax “inaction”? Many amicus briefs have been filed but there are two key ones by economists.

David Cutler, who worked in the Obama administration, has filed one with many co-signatories (including Akerlof, Arrow, Maskin, Diamond, Gruber, Athey, Goldin, Katz, Rabin, Skinner etc.). They say there is no such thing as inaction. A conscious decision to forego healthcare is an action and hence under the purview of existing law. Foregoing insurance also affects outcomes largely by shifting costs to others and hence is not a neutral decision.

The other side of the argument is filed by Doug Holtz-Eakin with co-signatories inclusing Prescott, Smith, Cochrane, Jensen, Anne Krueger, Meltzer etc.) First, they argue that if an individual does not want to buy converage it must be because the costs outweigh the benefits. Second, they argue about the numbers, claming the costs imposed by the uninsured on the insured (“cost-shifting”) are far below the $43 billion estimated by the Government Economists and are more like $13 billion.

The first part of the Holtz-Eakin argument is, to me at least, odd. Uninsured individuals can get healthcare for free in the emergency room. Hence, they can get the benefits of healthcare  -or at least healthcare in extreme circumstances – without the costs. So, of course for them the benefits are outweighed by the costs because they get the benefits anyway. The argument by Holtz-Eakin presumes that the individuals are not free-riding and so their private decisions fully reflect the costs and benefits but they do not. Then, the second part of the argument which admits there is cost-shifting going on basically makes the point I am making – if there is cost-shifting, there is free-riding and then individual’s decisions do not fully internalize costs and benefits.

There has to be a better argument against the individual mandate than this. I looked at Senator Rand Paul’s brief. The precedent for this case is a 1942 case involving an Ohio farmer who was exceeding his quota of wheat production. Footnote 6 caught my eye:

So infamous is the case, it has been set to music, to the
1970s tune of “Convoy”:
“His name was farmer Filburn, we looked in
on his wheat sales. We caught him exceeding
his quota. A criminal hard as nails. He said,
“I don’t sell none interstate.” I said, “That
don’t mean cow flop.” We think you’re
affecting commerce. And I set fire to his crop,
HOT DAMN! Cause we got interstate
commerce. Ain’t no where to run! We gone
regulate you. That’s how we have fun.”

Will this convince Justice Kennedy or is it cow flop?

Find all briefs here.

Externalities Everywhere: Free-Rider Problem in Afghan Security

March 23, 2012 in art of office politics, economics, teaching | by | 2 comments

As the Americans and British pull out of Afghanistan, the Chinese and Indians are standing by to move in and extract its mineral wealth. But:

Dr Richard Weitz, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at Hudson Institute said: “From our perspective, China should have done more in terms of security. From their perspective, they didn’t need to; they could free-ride, we were going to do it anyway. They didn’t see any point because all they would do is incur a lot of sacrifice and antagonise the Taliban and the global terrorist movement, and they’d rather let us incur that.”

Why aren’t Western countries going in there themselves?

Peter Galbraith, former deputy head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, said: “Western companies are exceptionally timid when it comes to operating in places where there is even the remotest hint that it might be a little risky, and the Chinese are not and are willing to go to these places. And the Chinese have business practices that Western countries … let’s just say that Chinese generosity towards local officials exceeds that of what Western companies are capable.”

I guess some might argue trade is good for Afghanistan and hence for us if trade leads to a stable prosperous economy. But as I have made it to Chapter 4 of Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail, I worry that Afghanistan will adopt “extractive political institutions” and all this trading will lead nowhere except a Swiss bank account.

Reverse Coase Conjecture A Thing Of The Past In Bordeaux Wine?

March 22, 2012 in Uncategorized | by | Leave a comment

Bordeaux wine producers used to release their stock en masses In the past,

“Price,” he [Chris Smith, a wine investor] says, “is a function of supply and demand, and the traditional story of wine investment is that supply of any particular wine can only reduce over time as bottles are opened and drunk.”

With prices going up over time,

the decision made by Bordeaux châteaux, more or less from the 2006 vintage onwards, to hang on to much more stock than was the case in the past (from almost nothing to a full two-thirds of a particular harvest) has changed the game…..

If all of the stock of a particular vintage, though, is either held by private investors or retained by the châteaux, the traditional narrative falls apart, and top Bordeaux ceases to be what The Wine Investment Fund calls “the only asset class with a perfect inverse supply curve”…

The ‘lower risk approach’, Smith insists, is to continue to invest in pre-2005/6 vintages within his fund’s ‘universe’ of 35 châteaux. Those are the wines which are being guzzled. Guzzling is essential.

Interesting article

The Biological Origins of Crying In Your Beer

March 21, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | Leave a comment

The case of drosophilia:

In the study, male fruit flies that had mated repeatedly for several days showed no preference for alcohol-spiked food. On the other hand, spurned males and those denied access to females strongly preferred food mixed with 15 percent alcohol. The researchers believed the alcohol may have satisfied the flies’ desire for physical reward.

Dogmatic Doesn’t Have To Mean Closed-Minded

March 21, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 13 comments

Over the course of your life you have to decide your position on a number of philosophical/social/political issues. You are open-minded so you collect as much data as you can before forming an opinion. But you are human and you can only remember so many facts.

There will come a time when the data you have collected make a very strong case for one particular position on issue A, say the right-wing position. When that happens you are pretty sure that there is never going to be enough evidence to overturn your position.

That’s not because you are closed-minded. That’s because you are very open-minded and based on the weight of all the evidence you collected and processed as objectively as a person can do, you have concluded that its very likely that this is the right position on A. And the fact that this is very likely the right position on A does not just imply but is indeed equivalent to saying that you attach very low probability to the future occurrence of strong evidence in the other direction.

Now that means that there’s not much point in collecting any more information about A. And indeed there’s not much point in remembering the detailed information that led you to this conclusion. The only reason for doing that would be to weigh it against future evidence but we’ve already established that this is unlikely to make any difference.

So what you optimally, rationally, perfectly objectively do is allow yourself to forget everything you know about A including all the reasons that justify your strongly-held views on A and to just make an indelible mental note that “The right-wing position on A is the correct one no matter what anyone else says and no matter what evidence to the contrary should come along in the future.”

The reason this is the rational thing to do is that you have scarce memory space. By allowing those memories to fade away you free up storage space for information about issues B, C, and D which you are still carefully collecting information on, forming an objective opinion about, in preparation for eventually also adopting a well-informed dogmatic opinion about.

Brain Scan Studies And Multiple Hypotheses Testing

March 20, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 1 comment

Here is an excellent rundown of some soul searching in the neuroscience community regarding statistical significance.  The standard method of analyzing brain scan data apparently involves something akin to data mining but the significance tests use standard single-hypothesis p-values.

One historical fudge was to keep to uncorrected thresholds, but instead of a threshold of p=0.05 (or 1 in 20) for each voxel, you use p=0.001 (or 1 in a 1000).  This is still in relatively common use today, but it has been shown, many times, to be an invalid attempt at solving the problem of just how many tests are run on each brain-scan. Poldrack himself recently highlighted this issue by showing a beautiful relationship between a brain region and some variable using this threshold, even though the variable was entirely made up. In a hilarious earlier version of the same point, Craig Bennett and colleagues fMRI scanned a dead salmon, with a task involving the detection of the emotional state of a series of photos of people. Using the same standard uncorrected threshold, they found two clusters of activation in the deceased fish’s nervous system, though, like the Poldrack simulation, proper corrected thresholds showed no such activations.

Biretta blast:  Marginal Revolution.

Are Drycleaning Services Better in Koreatown?

March 19, 2012 in economics, gossip | by | 1 comment

In my search for examples for a paper, I found:

The context of our analysis is the laundry services industry because it is well suited for analyzing both
vertical integration and social networks. Each store makes two make-or-buy decisions: one for
drycleaning and another for laundry. These are the primary services offered by a store, and whether or
not they are produced in-house can easily be revealed. Furthermore, the industry has long been associated
with ethnic concentration, such that in the southern California region where we focus our analysis,
Koreans currently own more than 2,000 cleaners….

The greater concentration of Koreans in Koreatown and the communication between them suggests
that “word-of-mouth” (or reputation effects) will spread faster within this area. An upstream cleaner
supplying a Korean cleaner in Koreatown recognizes that their conduct can affect their reputation
with their other Korean customers in Koreatown….Therefore, while a network of Korean cleaners outside Koreatown could yield some
network effects, we expect these to be smaller. Our analysis therefore concentrates on the network effects
of Koreatown relative to other small networks of Korean cleaners or the lack of networks.

This is from Gil and Hartmann, Airing Your Dirty Laundry

Statistical Discrimination And Toiletries

March 19, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | 2 comments

Hotels provide you with two different media with which to cleanse your corpus after a long day of giving talks and going for coffees:  plain old soap and then a substance packaged under various labels whose modal variant is something like bath and body gel.

The soap is delivered in the form of a solid bar and the bath and body gel is poured out of a plastic vessel like the shampoo that it’s usually paired with. Now I generally prefer to shower with a liquid detergent, (Lever 2000 is my go-to solvent, it’s hard to resist the industrial counterpoint to the traditional fay branding and the pitch on the squeeze bottle is “for all your 2000 parts.”  My lifelong project is to count my 2000 parts one shower at a time) but I never reach for the shower gel in a hotel.

The reason ultimately stems from the fact that there are two choices available to begin with, but lets work backward to that.  The proximate reason is that shower gel makes me smell like a geisha at a tropical fruit stand.  Not that I have any objection to that smell, indeed it’s exactly how I would like a geisha to smell, especially when I am in the mood for a refreshing snack. It’s just not a smell that I personally wear very well.  On the other hand, you can usually count on hotel soap to smell like soap or at least something more manly than the bath gel.

Liquid/gelatinous soap doesn’t have to smell girly, viz. Lever 2000, but in hotels it always does. What gives? As usual when pondering the deepest puzzles of lavatory accoutrements, the answer can be found in the theory of labor market discrimination.  The little bottle of shower gel is like a job market applicant.  It is sitting there asking you to try it out on your body.  And indeed you will only really discover its cleansing qualities when you are fully awash in its lather. Whether you want to take that risk depends on how you expect it to smell, not on how it actually smells. This is just the theory of statistical discrimination where the true quality of a worker matters less at the hiring stage than what the potential employer expects based on her demographic characteristics.

Once we arrive at an equilibrium in which everyone knows that the shower gel is for her and the soap is for him, everyone who opts for the gel is expecting a girly fragrance.  Just as in the theory of statistical discrimination this feeds back to the initial investment decision of the applicant, in this case the decision of how to scent the product.  There’s no choice now but to make it as attractive as possible for the sub-market appearances have restricted it to.  Thus the girly scent, and thus the expectations are confirmed.

Sordid Links

March 16, 2012 in Uncategorized | by | Leave a comment

  1. The poetry of Ally Sheedy.
  2. I haven’t seen The Lorax, but I am pretty sure that this review summarizes what I would think about it.
  3. Interactive demo of the Lytro camera ex-post focus feature.
  4. You may think that underwater re-animated dissected frogs legs activated by a midi-connected drum pad will repulse you but you will never know for sure unless you click this link.
  5. The Smiths’ This Charming Man using only Super Mario noises.
  6. Christopher Walken reads Where The Wild Things Are.

Manu Delago on the Hang Drum

March 16, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 3 comments

This is a beautiful instrument, invented only 10 years ago.  I want one.  For more music from Manu Delago, including tour dates with Bjork (!), visit his web site.

Scalzi on Contracting With Externalities

March 15, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | by | Leave a comment

On E-book collusion:

Once Apple made it known it would accept agency pricing (but not selling books at a higher price than other retail competitors), the publishing companies didn’t have to act in concert, although one of them had to be willing to bell the very large cat called Amazon by moving to the agency model.

I’ve long had a personal hypothesis — not based on any inside information, but simply my own read on the matter, I should be clear — that the reason it was Macmillan that challenged Amazon on agency pricing was that Macmillan is a privately held company, and thus immune from being punished short-term in the stock market for the action. Once it got Amazon to accept agency pricing, the other publishers logically switched over as well. This doesn’t need active collusion; it does need people paying attention to how the business dominoes could potentially fall.

Again, maybe they all did actively collude, in which case, whoops, guys. Stop being idiots. But if they did not, I suppose the question is: At what point does everyone knowing everyone else’s business, having a good idea how everyone else will act, and then acting on that knowledge, begin to look like collusion (or to the Justice Department’s point, activelybecome collusion)? My answer: Hell if I know, I’m not a lawyer. I do know most of these publishers have a lot of lawyers, however (as does Apple), and I would imagine they have some opinions on this.

John Scalzi is an author, blogger, and apparently a pretty good economist too.  Read the whole thing.

When Should Gingrich Endorse Santorum?

March 14, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 2 comments

Observers cite the possibility of a brokered convention as the only reason for Newt Gingrich to remain in the race for the Republican nomination. If Mitt Romney cannot accumulate a majority of committed delegates prior to the convention, then Newt’s delegates give him bargaining power, with the possibility of throwing them behind Rick Santorum or even forging a Santorum/Gingrich ticket.

But why wait for the convention? If Gingrich and Santorum can strike a deal why not do it right now? There are tradeoffs.

1. If all primaries awarded delegates in proportion to vote shares there would be no gain to joining forces early. Sending Newt’s share of the primary voters over to Rick gives him the same number of delegates as he would get if Newt collected those delegates himself and then bartered them at the convention. But winner-take-all primaries change the calculation. If Santorum and Gingrich split the conservative vote in a winner-take-all primary, all of those delegates go to Romney. Joining forces now gives the pair a chance of bagging those big delegate payoffs.

2. Teaming up now solves a commitment problem.  If both stay in the race and succeed in bringing about a contested convention, the bargaining will be a three-sided affair with Romney potentially co-opting one of them and leaving the other in the cold.

Those are the incentives in favor of a merger now.  Working against is

3. A candidate has less control over his voters than he would have over his delegates. Newt endorsing Santorum does not guarantee that all of Newt’s supporters will vote for Rick, many will prefer Romney and others would just stay at home on primary day.

Gingrich and Santorum are savvy enough, and there is enough at stake, for us to assume they have done the calculations. Given the widespread belief that any vote for Rick or Newt is a really an anti-Romney vote, they surely have discussed joining forces. But they haven’t done it yet and probably will not, and this tells us something.

The huge gain coming from points 1 and 2 can only be offset by losses coming from point 3. Their inability to strike a deal reveals that the Gingrich and Santorum staffs must have calculated that the anti-Romney theory is an illusion. They must have figured out that if Gingrich drops out of the race what will actually happen is that Romney will attract enough of Gingrich’s supporters (or enough of them will disengage altogether) to earn a majority and head into the convention the presumptive nominee.

Newt and Rick need each other. But what they particularly need is for each to stay in the race until the end, collecting not just the conservative votes but also the anti-other-conservative-candidate vote in hopes that their combined delegate total is large enough come convention-time to finally make a deal.

It Is Best To Be Good At Just One Thing

March 14, 2012 in art of office politics, economics | by | 3 comments

 

A Generalist is good at many tasks, a Specialist only good at one. Demand for the output at each task fluctuates so it is good to have someone who can perform many tasks so “supply can match demand”. So, the Generalist is better for the firm than the Specialist.

But the Generalist’s life is hard – she is taking on a lot of risk. What will she be working on next? And she is the same rank as the specialist so she gets the same rewards. Better to coast on the tasks she likes least and work hard on one. More predictability and a better idea of what task to get better and better at performing.

So, generalists should disappear in the long run and the firm will just have specialists. Unless they can think of some way to reward generalists.

The Irony of Replication

March 13, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 2 comments

So there was this famous experiment and just recently a new team of researchers tried to replicate it and they could not. Quoting Alex Tabarrok:

You will probably not be surprised to learn that the new paper fails to replicate the priming effect. As we know from Why Most Published Research Findings are False (also here), failure to replicate is common, especially when sample sizes are small.

There’s a lot more at the MR link you should check it out. But here’s the thing. If most published research findings are false then which one is the false one, the original or the failed replication? Have you noticed that whenever a failed replication is reported, it is reported with all of the faith and fanfare that the original, now apparently disproven study was afforded? All we know is that one of them is wrong, can we really be sure which?

If I have to decide which to believe in, my money’s on the original. Think publication bias and ask yourself which is likely to be larger:  the number of unpublished experiments that confirmed the original result or the number of unpublished results that didn’t.

Here’s a model. Experimenters are conducting a hidden search for results and they publish as soon as they have a good one. For the original experimenter a good result means a positive result. They try experiment A and it fails so they conclude that A is a dead end, shelve it and turn to something new, experiment B. They continue until they hit on a positive result, experiment X and publish it.

Given the infinity of possible original experiments they could try, it is very likely that when they come to experiment X they were the first team to ever try it. By contrast, Team-Non-Replicate searches among experiments that have already been published, especially the most famous ones.  And for them a good result is a failure to replicate. That’s what’s going to get headlines.

Since X is a famous experiment it’s not going to take long before they try that. They will do a pilot experiment and see if they can fail to replicate it. If they fail to fail to replicate it, they are going to shelve it and go on to the next famous experiment. But then some other Team-Non-Replicate, who has no way of knowing this is a dead-end, is going to try experiment X, etc. This is going to continue until someone succeeds in failing to replicate.

When that’s all over let’s count the number of times X failed:  1.  The number of times X was confirmed equals 1 plus the number of non-non-replications before the final successful failure.

Won’t Be News To Sandeep

March 13, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 3 comments

Alcohol makes you smarter.

That alcohol provides a benefit to creative processes has long been assumed by popular cul- ture, but to date has not been tested. The current experiment tested the effects of moderate alcohol intoxication on a common creative problem solving task, the Remote Associates Test (RAT). Individuals were brought to a blood alcohol content of approximately .075, and, after reaching peak intoxication, completed a battery of RAT items. Intoxicated individuals solved more RAT items, in less time, and were more likely to perceive their solutions as the result of a sudden insight. Results are interpreted from an attentional control perspective.

For reference, 0.75 .075 BAC is 3 drinks an hour for someone who weighs 150lbs. In related news, here are spiders on LSD.

Security for Israel and Iran

March 12, 2012 in Uncategorized | by | 4 comments

Charles Krauthammer has accused President Obama of not being seriously concerned about Israel’s security because the President seems disinclined to make hard military threats against Iran.  It is surprising that Mr. Krauthammer could make such accusations when he is calling for aggressive military brinksmanship that would expose Israel to the gravest strategic risks.

Game theory teaches us the importance of looking at any potential conflict from the perspectives of all the parties involved.  If Israel’s security depends on Iranian decisions, then anyone who really cares about Israel must try to look at the international situation from Iran’s perspective as well.

There are good reasons why Iranians should prefer not to have nuclear weapons.  First, as Thomas Friedman has noted, Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons could provoke other neighboring countries to get their own nuclear weapons, to preserve the regional balance of power. The resulting regional proliferation of nuclear weapons would make everyone in the region less safe.  Second, if Iran had nuclear weapons then Iranians would face risks of nuclear retaliation to a terrorist nuclear attack against Israel, even if the terrorists might have gotten their nuclear weapon from somewhere else.  These are two very significant reasons why Iranians could become less secure by acquiring nuclear weapons.  So what could be the advantages of nuclear weapons for Iran?

One potential advantage is that nuclear weapons might open some opportunities for profitable expansionism, perhaps taking control of some weak oil-rich neighbor in a moment of political instability.  If Saddam Hussein had had nuclear weapons when he invaded Kuwait in 1991, he might have been able to hold Kuwait by threatening that any counter-attack would escalate into a nuclear war.  Such potential for opportunistic expansionism would diminish, however, as other countries in the region acquired their own nuclear capabilities to defend the status quo.

The more important advantage is that nuclear weapons could make Iran immune to foreign invasion.  This is a serious concern that needs to be recognized.  In the past decade, the United State has invaded two countries that border Iran.  American politicians and public opinion leaders have regularly insisted that the possibility of military action against Iran should be “on the table.”  Keeping it “on the table” means making it something that Iranians have to worry about.  And as long as they have to worry about even a small chance of an American invasion which could have been deterred by nuclear weapons, the people of Iran, even opponents of the current regime, have at least one very significant reason to want their country to acquire nuclear weapons. (Or at least to create some ambiguity about their nuclear capability.)

So when prominent critics of President Obama, such as Mr Krauthammer, call for America to threaten military action against Iran, they are actually reinforcing Iran’s political determination to get its own nuclear arsenal.  If they were truly concerned about security for Israel or anyone else in the region, they would not be so eager to make such dangerously destabilizing threats.

Once we recognize the potential motivations for a country like Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, we can begin to look seriously for deterrent policies that address these motivations.  A more effective way for America to deter Iran from getting nuclear weapons would be to (1) announce that America would offer broad military security agreements to Iran’s neighbors if Iran acquired nuclear weapons and (2) offer real American friendship to Iran if it complies with international standards of nuclear nonproliferation.  A rapprochement between American and Iran would open up the possibility of cooperation for shared interests in stabilizing Afghanistan and Iraq, and it would eliminate Iran’s only real reason to make trouble for America’s ally Israel.

Although they have no common border, the security of Israel and the security of Iran have come to depend on each other.  Efforts to assure the security of both nations deserve bipartisan support in America.

The Neuroscience of Choking

March 12, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 1 comment

How can a guy who never misses a field goal miss an easy one at a crucial moment?

Still, a semiconsensus is developing among the most advanced scientists. In the typical fight-or-flight scenario, scary high-pressure moment X assaults the senses and is routed to the amygdala, aka the unconscious fear center. For well-trained athletes, that’s not a problem: A field goal kick, golf swing or free throw is for them an ingrained action stored in the striatum, the brain’s autopilot. The prefrontal cortex, our analytical thinker, doesn’t even need to show up. But under the gun, that super-smart part of the brain thinks it’s so great and tries to butt in. University of Maryland scientist Bradley Hatfield got expert dart throwers and marksmen to practice while wearing a cumbersome cap full of electrodes. Without an audience, their brains show very little chatter among regions. But in another study, when dart throwers were faced with a roomful of people, the pros’ neural activity began to resemble that of a novice, with more communication from the prefrontal cortex.

When I was in the 6th grade I won our school’s spelling bee going away.  The next level was the district-wide spelling bee, televised on community access cable.  My amygdala tried to insert an extra `u’ into the word tongue and I was out in the first round.

Thoughts Left Lying Around

March 11, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , | by | 3 comments

  1. If you have a blog and you write about potential research questions, write the question out clearly but give a wrong answer.  This solves the problem I raised here.
  2. When I send an email to two people I feel bad for the person whose name I address second (“Dear Joe and Jane”) so I put it twice to make it up to them (“Dear Joe and Jane and Jane.”)
  3. If you have a rich country and a poor country and their economies are growing at the same rate you will nevertheless have rising inequality over time simply because, as is well documented, the poor have more kids.
  4. Are there arguments against covering contraception under health insurance that don’t also apply to covering vaccines?
  5. The most interesting news is either so juicy that the source wants it kept private or so important that the source wants to make it public.  This is why Facebook is an inferior form of communication:  as neither private nor fully public it is an interior minimum.

Suitably Sordid Links

March 9, 2012 in Uncategorized | by | 2 comments

  1. How to make Siri curse like a sailor.
  2. Thick As A Brick 2?
  3. Dr. Seuss’ adult book.
  4. Time for TED.  (If you click on only one Sordid Link this season, this should be the one.)
  5. Justin Wolfers tweeted a funny joke.
  6. Self-synchronizing metronomes.

Dave King

March 9, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | Leave a comment

He plays drums, he has a blog,

i am in a world title fight with a mid life crisis and im kicking its fu#$%$ing ass. i weigh 171lbs (4 lbs less than when i graduated from high school with a 1.9 grade point average) which means i’m trim and ripped and i drive a 1976 mercedes benz with a little more than a little rust on it because i drive it in minnesota winters and its only really worked for a little while but i look like a pbs, nova, paper chase watching mother fucker in it. I WILL ASK THIS ONLY ONE MORE TIME!!! DOES ANYONE WANT TO WRESTLE ME??? ive been watching college wrestling late at night on cable and wait………does anyone say “cable” anymore?? side note: i want to bring back the innocence of motel signs that say “free HBO” on them. I think it would be funny if i stood outside a courthouse with an old motel sign that said free HBO and just check out the reactions. you know…as in HBO should be let out of jail. IM SURE I CAN GET A GRANT FOR THIS. THIS IS POST MODERN.

and there is a new movie about him, called King For Two Days.  I think the title means that it follows him for two days but not necessarily that the movie is two days long, although I haven’t checked to be 100% honest with you.

Hidden Talents Of Frontera Grill Chef Rick Bayless

March 8, 2012 in vapor mill | Tags: , | by | Leave a comment

I Think This Means Al Roth is Moving To Stanford

March 8, 2012 in Uncategorized | by | 3 comments

He posted this to his Market Design blog.

A different shade of red:

Cincinnati Notes

March 8, 2012 in Uncategorized | by | 2 comments

Chinese make up 0.43% of the population of Cincinnati and they have a Panda Express.  That’s like putting a Wienerschnitzel in Singapore.

Singapore Notes

March 7, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 7 comments

The population of Singapore is 85% Chinese and they have a Chinatown. That’s like putting a Honkytown in Cincinnati.

Teller, Neuroscientist

March 7, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 1 comment

Teller as in Penn &.  He’s out to teach neuroscientists a thing or two about deception.

I’m all for helping science. But after I share what I know, my neuroscientist friends thank me by showing me eye-tracking and MRI equipment, and promising that someday such machinery will help make me a better magician.

I have my doubts. Neuroscientists are novices at deception. Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.

I remember an experiment I did at the age of 11. My test subjects were Cub Scouts. My hypothesis (that nobody would see me sneak a fishbowl under a shawl) proved false and the Scouts pelted me with hard candy. If I could have avoided those welts by visiting an MRI lab, I surely would have.

In the article he ticks off a list of mental shortcuts that the magician exploits for his tricks.  You should read it. Visor visit:  Jacob Grier.

Ant Alert

March 6, 2012 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 3 comments

I was having coffee outside and I saw ants crawling on my feet so I moved to another table.

Then I rewound my stream of consciousness about 30 seconds and I was able to recall that in fact there was a little more going on than that. I was daydreaming while sipping my coffee and I felt ticklishness on my toes and ankles. That made me look down and that’s when I saw the ants.

Now the fact that I had to rewind to remember all of this says something interesting. Had I looked down and not seen ants, i.e. if it turned out it was just the precious Singapore wind blowing on my cozy bare feet, then this episode would never have penetrated my conscious mind. I would have gone on daydreaming without distraction.

The subconscious mind pays attention to a million things outside of our main line of being and only when it detects something worth paying attention to does it intervene in some way. There are two very common interventions. One is to react at a subconscious level. I.e. shooing a fly while I go on daydreaming. Another is to commandeer consciousness and force a reaction. I.e. pay attention to an attractive potential mate passing by.

Both of these involve the subconscious mind making a decisive call as to what is going on, what is its level of significance, and how to dispense with it. It’s all or nothing: let the conscious mind go on without interruption or completely usurp conscious attention.

But the ant episode exemplifies a third type. My subconscious mind effectively said something like this :”I am not sure what is going on here, but I have a feeling that its something that we need to pay attention to. But to figure that out I need the expertise and private information available only to conscious visual attention and deliberation. I am not telling you what to do because I don’t know, I am just saying you should check this out.”

And so a tiny slice of consciousness gets peeled off to attend to that and only on the basis of what it sees is it decided whether the rest has to be distracted too.

Commitment and Self-Control: iPad vs Kindle

March 6, 2012 in economics, teaching | by | 3 comments

From the NYT,

People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.

E-mail lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away…

“The tablet is like a temptress,” said James McQuivey, the Forrester Research analyst…. “It’s constantly saying, ‘You could be on YouTube now.’ Or it’s sending constant alerts that pop up, saying you just got an e-mail. Reading itself is trying to compete.”

My (quite old) Kindle loses battery power rapidly if you attempt to use its wireless capabilities and its browser lacks the capability to access webmail or surf the web comfortably. So, you have only one option – use it to read. Fewer options are better is you lack self control. Far sighted readers who easily fall prey to Twemptation should stick with the Kindle over the iPad.