The Ambrosini Critique

• This picture is astounding:
  

  (h/t information aesthetics)

• Micheal Mandel at Business Week is off by 3 orders of magnitude.
• I just noticed a video clip I uploaded a couple years ago has over 8,000 views. I can’t get my head around this number. My random toying with a video editor resulted in the wasting away of 217 hours. This experience made me realize I’ll never get my head around the fact millions of people that have watched chubby kid singing the Romanian song (or its derivatives) and the machinima Internet is for Porn song (or its derivatives).

IQ is heritable and now gnxp reports whether or not you vote is heritable.

Now, you may be asking yourself “Wait a minute, how can there be a gene for voting!?” Its pretty clear there’s no “voting” gene.

If you asked that question here, but you didn’t ask the same question of yourself regarding IQ, you fail the internet, i.e. start here.

(I do wonder though if there might be anything gained from disentangling phenotypes [in this case, conscientiousness, group orientation, gregariousness, etc] from observed behaviors [in this case, voting]. Do we just assume fitness weights of the phenotypes just integrate out or might there interesting interactions at this level that effect the heritability of behaviors? Suppose you only vote if you’re conscientiousness or group oriented. Selection works on these phenotypes, but not on voting behavior. Is it possible to get a joint distribution of the phenotypes such that voting doesn’t appear to be heritable from a statistical pov, but in fact is from a causal pov?

I’m pretty sure I mucked up this parenthetical… that’s why its a parenthetical.)

Professor Clark is in good company at this new group blog.

Here Clark critiques Bill Gates’ idea, Creative Capitalism:

Bill Gates has two major points. First the profit motive fails to provide goods such as vaccines needed by the poor of the Third World. Second the solution to this is not government action, and not private philanthropy. The needs are too great. Instead we need corporate action.

Despite Bill Gates’ abundant good intentions, I have to dispute both propositions.

1. As Michael Kinsley points out, much of modern capitalism is characterized by firms with high fixed costs – for research and development, for production facilities – but low production costs. Think computer software, think computers, think drugs, think airplanes. This production structure, however, mostly favors Third World consumers.

True, they have little to spend. But such goods cost little to deliver to them once developed in the high income countries, because of the low cost of producing more units. And the poor get served because the good old-fashioned profit motive says make a buck wherever you can. This works unless the good sold cheaply in such markets can find their way back to US markets and undercut prices there. But companies are good at erecting barriers to this flow.

It is only when the goods the Third World desires differ from those of rich country consumers that we get a problem. Though Bill Gates gives a list of such goods—anti-malarial drugs being prominent—it is actually a short list. For a whole range of goods—clothing, cars, cell phones, electronics, computers, entertainment—the goods bought by the poorest overlap enough with those bought by the rich that there is little problem. They are indeed well served by selfish capitalism.

The cellphone is a great example…
[...]
2. A second problem with the Gates proposal is that is assumes that the poor of Africa do not know their own best interests. Only corporate America can discern this.
[...]

Short Clark: “There’s not many goods for which this idea makes sense (i.e. goods that people in poor countries demand, but that aren’t produced cheaply in the rich countries) and for those that it does the profit motive will take care of things.”

Ms. McArdle says:

I think that a state which commits cold-blooded murder is a brutalized state, and I have a visceral horror at the idea of putting a man in a cage and declaring to him the day that he will die. The process of executing criminals damages the moral fiber of all who are engaged in it, including the voters, a cost far in excess of the benefit to be gained from either deterrance or retribution.

Why does she feel the need to speak for the rest of us on what damages our moral fiber? Moral fiber can’t be observed and its a pretty subjective thing. If I don’t think my moral fiber is being damaged, but Megan does, who’s right?

Besides, I’m pretty sure executioners don’t see it her way or at least they’ve weighed the moral cost of doing their deed against its (monetary) benefits and found executing to be in their best interests. Who is she to tell them their preferences are wrong?

If executioners can do this calculation, then the rest of us can. It may be for Megan the costs are greater than the benefits to such a degree that she’s willing to move to a jurisdiction without capital punishment. For some of us, there may be no moral cost just emotional benefits of revenge killing or maybe we feel the deterrence effect of capital punish outweighs the moral costs.

There’s an interesting third group of people for which the moral costs do outweigh the benefits of executions, but not by so much that its worth it to take on the fixed costs of moving to a different jurisdiction. There’s probably quite a few people who don’t like the death penalty but don’t think its worth it to move to Canada. It seems the extent of the political economic market is a problem for these folks. The market, perhaps due to policy restrictions (i.e. the monopoly of current governments), just doesn’t provide enough varieties of jurisdiction.

The funny thing is Megan actually fits in this third group. The cost to her outweigh the benefits but she’s not willing to pay for a change in jurisdiction. Apparently, she finds it more cost effective to try and brow-beat the rest of us into changing our moral preferences.

Like many stupid questions, this one was surprisingly deep.

— Tim Harford

(If you’ve noticed the dearth of SofEVs lately and you miss them, check out my Tumblr site. If you haven’t been missing them, well, then screw off.)

Steve Sailer thinks so:

America’s most storied universities publicly espouse leftist egalitarianism. But that’s just a politically correct smokescreen to distract from their status as the winners in a brutal competition with other colleges for the highest IQ students and professors…
… The prestige of Harvard and the other apex predators at the lofty pinnacle of the American educational pyramid means that the vast K-12 bottom has been infected with Harvard’s values (such as abstraction and abstruseness) and rhetoric (equality uber alles)…but not, alas, Harvard’s brains. Most of the K-12 educators, much less their students, aren’t smart enough to get the joke. They don’t understand that the IQ elitists of America are pulling the wool over their eyes when they rattle on about their purported liberal beliefs about how everybody should go to college.

They don’t understand it’s all a big pyramid scheme. The Harvard professors’ graduate students become the UCLA professors whose graduate students become the Cal State LA professors whose students become the schoolteachers who browbeat their more gullible pupils into believing that everybody should go to college, no matter how obvious a waste of money and time it will turn out to be…

(h/t Fey Accompli)

Demetrius was wont to say that there was no difference between the
speech and words of the foolish and ignorant, and the noises and
rumblings of the wind in an inflated stomach. Nor did he say so
without reason, for he saw no difference between the parts whence
the noise issued; whether their lower parts or their mouth, since
one and the other were of equal use and importance.

— Leonardo Da Vinci

Everyone knows physicists are the smartest of them all. Thus, prefixing your field’s name onto the word “physics” provides automatic doubleplusgoodness. At least it means you can publish economics in physics journals. Example:

Rising cost of oil ‘due to speculation’ – [E]conophysicists Didier Sornette of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and Wei-Xing Zhou of the East China University of Science and Technology, together with Ryan Woodard of ETH Zurich, claim that speculation must have driven some of the escalation in oil prices. They have found evidence for a “bubble” — an indicator of speculation — in prices since 2003, when the cost of an oil barrel was four times lower than it is today.

Bubbles are a controversial topic in academic finance because there is no clear way to define them. However, Sornette’s group says it can pin them down by examining the precise rate of growth in prices.

In an economy without speculation, the price of commodities tends to grow by a fixed percentage every year; this is an exponential rate of growth. But when an economy is influenced by speculation, the percentage increase can grow too. This gives rise to a power-law growth or, as the researchers call it, a “super-exponential growth”.

Sornette’s group has looked at three different models to see if oil prices exhibit super-exponential growth…The researchers found that all three models fitted the oil-price data well, implying that the growth has indeed been a bubble (Physica A submitted; preprint at arXiv:0806.1170v2).

Could it be that there is no financial speculation, but that the demand for oil from China and India is growing super-exponentially, like a bubble? Sornette’s group cites figures on world oil supply and demand from the International Energy Agency that suggest this cannot be the case. Sornette told physicsworld.com that he is “99% certain” speculation is influencing current oil prices.

Sornette group first came up with his theory of super-exponential growth as a symptom of economic bubbles in 1996. In 2005, they used it to predict the burst of the US housing bubble.

Basically, prices have been going up really fast and the authors have noticed this pattern in prices is associated with speculative bubbles when supply and demand aren’t changing much. To say oil prices have gone up due to speculation, they have to rule out large shifts in supply and demand.

The authors make the decent assumption that supply — by which, I think they mean oil coming out of the ground — doesn’t change that fast. Their job, they say, is to show demand didn’t change that much. Given small changes in demand and small changes in supply, the price increases must be due to speculation. They use demand and supply data from some non-publicly available source to assess the speed of demand shifts. Its not clear what these data are, but, charitably, they must be quantity data where the difference in supply in demand is the change in inventories. So they’re using quantity data to assess demand shifts. They don’t find big changes in quantity, so they assume small shifts in demand.

In other words, they ignore elasticities. Apparently, its ok to ignore behavioral responses in econophysics. I guess this is understandable given physicists don’t have to worry much about they budget constrained, preference maximizing behavior of quarks.

The problem is if supply (or demand) for oil is inelastic, even small changes in demand (or supply) will induce large changes in price and the authors method for determining the existence of speculation goes out the window. I’m guessing both demand and supply for oil are inelastic so it could be both demand shifts caused by China and supply shifts caused by speculators inducing the large price increases. Given the huge rise in demand and the fact that inventories are finite (thus limiting the effect of speculators), it seems more likely the price changes are due to the former rather than the latter.

UPDATE: Rapture is near… I’m really liking the bloggy version of Paul Krugman.

… if you were curious about my MBTI.

Apparently, I bumble along and have flashes of insight, I should marry a ExTJ and I “may be extremely caustic and insulting to others”.

Herbert was talking about young men with poor education (i.e. high school or less). So here you go:

There’s a definite decrease in wages of this group. Here’s unemployment of the same group:

UPDATE: This group of people has been about 1/3 to 1/5 of a percent 3-5% of the total population through this period with a maximum in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Also, this group includes college freshman, a group that has seen substantial growth as a percent of the total population since 1960.