Marginal Revolution

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Sentence of the Day - French Edition

Unexpected violence broke out in Lyon when a march of about 2,500 Turks protesting against a memorial to Armenian victims of a 1915 massacre in the then Ottoman Empire crossed paths with the anti-CPE demonstrations.

(From Reuters regarding today's huge protests in France against the new bill allowing firms to fire young workers in their first two years of empolyment if they don't work out.)

John Rawls, anti-capitalist

This is from his correspondence:

The large open market including all of Europe is aim of the large banks and the capitalist business class whose main goal is simply larger profit. The idea of economic growth, with no specific end in sight, fits this class perfectly.  If they speak about distribution, it is most always in terms of trickle down.  The long-term result of this — which we already have in the United States — is a civil society awash in a meaningless consumerism of some kind. I can’t believe that is what you want.

So you see that I am not happy about globalization as the banks and business class are pushing it.  I accept Mill’s idea of the stationary state as described by him in Bk. IV, Ch. 6 of his Principles of Political Economy (1848). (I am adding a footnote in §15 to say this, in case the reader hadn’t noticed it). I am under no illusion that its time will ever come – certainly not soon – but it is possible, and hence it has a place in what I call the idea of realistic utopia.

For more see CrookedTimber.  The real question is how much this should cause us to downgrade his moral philosophy.  I say "a lot."  I used to think there was some deep argument of consilience behind "maximin," but now I am ready to classify it as a simple mistake, akin to a person who doesn't understand what drove the flow of traffic across the Berlin Wall in one direction and not the other. 

Philosophical implications of inflationary cosmology

Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this conclusion for ethical theory and for the doomsday argument. In the infinite universe, we find that the doomsday argument applies only to effects which change the average lifetime of all civilizations, and not those which affect our civilization alone.

Got that?  Here is the paper.  Here is brief background.

It seems if you count all possible universes (or call them parts of our multiverse, whatever) as normatively relevant, none of your actions matter in consequentialist terms. 

As to how our world, and our decisions, matter at the margin, we delve into the murky waters of infinite expected values.  With an infinity of alternatives out there, our little add-on doesn't seem to make any difference for the grand total.  Why should even you raise the average outcome across universes?  (TC yesterday: "No, Bryan, we are not leaping up Cantorian levels of infinity, it is just one version of you getting another Klondike bar.")

One option is that only our universe, or some other "in-group," matters.  The other universes cannot count for less, rather they must count for nothing.  I recoil at such a thought, but it does avoid the mess of infinities.  Alternatively, we might embrace some version of Buddhism. 

On the bright side, philosophic talk about modality is no longer so problematic but rather refers to facts about other existing universes.  Since that problem threatened to bring morality to its knees anyway ("what do you mean, you "could" have done something different?  You did what you had to do."), maybe I don't feel so bad after all.  And who should care if I do feel bad?  The other me feels fine.  Infinity has its benefits, and there are many worse problems.

You should lower your probability that God exists, since the Anthropic Argument will dispense with the Argument from Design.  Only the ordered pockets of the multiverse can wonder about why we are here and why things seem to run so smoothly.

That's a lot to swallow in one day, but it seems the probability of all those propositions just went up.

Addendum: Have I mentioned that inflationary cosmology and its implications fit my crude, pathetic intuitions?  Since we have a universe, I feel it must somehow be a kind of cosmic "free lunch."  And once you open the door for free lunches, why stop at just one?  There is no good reason to rely on our locally-evolved common sense intuitions when doing philosophic cosmology.

Fluctuating inflation field

This is cosmology, not monetary policy.  Guth's theory of inflation has just received a big boost from the data.  Here is Andrei Linde's portrayal of how an inflationary field fluctuates.  Here is a slower version with higher resolution.  Here is Linde's home page, which has many other time wasters.

Addendum: Best sentence I read today: "Galaxies are nothing but quantum mechanics writ large across the sky," by Brian Greene.

Dubai market falling

...the Dubai Financial Market Index shed 81.18 points or 11.7 percent to close at 611.86 points. It has so far dropped 40 percent from its end-2005 close and down 57 percent from its all-time high.

Is Ski Dubai like buying corporate naming rights to a sports arena, namely a sign of trouble?  Here is the link, check out the blog, and thanks to jck for the pointer.  Try this post on whether psychologists are better market speculators than economists.

Caught my eye

1. Incentive pay to make the buses run on time in Chile.  Addendum: See also this paper.

2. A review of the new Judith Harris book.

3. Markets in everything: a torso goes for $3,000.

4. James Surowiecki defends pricing neutrality for the Internet.

5. $1000 prize for repressed memory evidence before 1800.  Or was it all just made up?

6. The Dutch show a movie of naked women and homosexuality (tulips too) to potential Muslim immigrants, to make sure they understand the Netherlands is about tolerance.  In Iran only a censored version of the movie -- without nudity and homosexuality - is shown.

7. Europe's free riders, and why the Euro may be headed for trouble.

Could Steve Levitt get into a top Ph.d. program today?

Read the debate.  Steve says U. Chicago would nix him for lack of undergraduate mathematics classes.  He believes that Harvard or MIT "might still take a chance on me today." 

I am a strong believer in having at least one top school -- Chicago once played this role -- which accepts virtually everybody and lets competition sort them out in brutal fashion.  I am also a strong believer in having more graduate students at top schools know economic history than real analysis.  I don't expect either of these wishes to come true anytime soon.

Male reproductive rights?

With the suit, NCM hopes to establish that a man who unintentionally fathers a child has the right to decline financial responsibility for that child, a right based on the same principles laid out in the 1973 case that made abortion legal...

The NCM has been looking for an appropriate plaintiff for this case for more than 10 years. It finally found one in Matt Dubay...who claims he and his ex-girlfriend did not use birth control because of her assurances that she could not get pregnant due to a medical condition. But the couple, who Dubay told Salon were together for about three months, did conceive, and Dubay's ex elected to keep the child, for whom he now pays $500 a month in child support, despite his contention that he was always clear about not wanting the child.

Save your moralizing, let's do tax incidence theory.  If you were a woman and wanted an unwilling father, or at least wasn't trying too hard to avoid one, what kind of guy would you pick?  Smart, not a criminal, tall, high-earning, and possibly nerdy.  You also would pick a flexible, mild-mannered guy, on the grounds that he might grow to like the idea of parenthood (there is some chance you will decide to keep him in the picture). 

If financial responsibility could be repudiated, these guys would find it harder to get quality sex.  This is a simple economic principal: change the terms at one end of a deal, and they shift back at the other end.  The ex-cons, who will take off in any case and are known to have this quality, would not be penalized.  They might get even more sex.

Now which of the nerdy guys will suffer the most from holding greater "reproductive rights"?  The risk-loving, sex-crazed nerds who like to sleep with strange women and are willing to chance paternity (just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?).  And the nerds who know they are sterile or vasectomized.  Did I mention the nerd who doesn't much mind a bit of financial (and other kinds of) servitude?  No longer will these guys be viewed as potential appealing "victims."

Who will mind this change the least?  The local dullard -- you went to high school with him but hoped you never had to marry him -- who wants to settle down with a wife and family, but otherwise faced competition from the smarter nerd tricked or lured into siring a kid. 

The bottom line: This change would be a tax on male nerd sex.  It would boost male nerd autonomy, but which of these do nerds need more?

No, one data point does not test a theory, especially when that data point is selected for purposes of national image.  Nonetheless here is a photo of Matt Dubay, computer technician.  Here is a video of Matt.  Prior to the paternity suit, Matt had owned his dream car, a 1998 Trans Am.

At the Bastille

As I arrived at the Bastille Metro a mass of students exited, marched across the 5 lane roundabout and sat down.  Chaos ensued.  Unfortunately for them the road was so wide they could manage a blockade only 2 to 3 students deep.  This was not enough as angry young french men with jobs drove their mopeds through the crowd kicking the students along the way.  Apparently the workers of the world are not united, at least not in France.  Unable to maintain their ranks the protest fell apart.  Today, however, some 40,000 students protest across France and the police presence in Paris remains strong. 

Here is my previous post describing the economics behind the protests.