Marginal Revolution

Project Tuva

Bill Gates has bought the rights to Richard Feynman's lectures, The Character of Physical Law, and has put them on the web with lots of annotations.  Nicely done.

I liked Feynman's point about Newton's law of gravity being used by astrologers, "That's the strange world we live in, that all the advances and understanding are used only to continue the nonsense which has existed for 2,000 years."

Hat tip to Tierney Lab.

Assorted links

1. Thinking clearly about inequality, by Will Wilkinson.

2. China silly forecast of the day.

3. Inaugural issue of Rejecta Mathematica is out.

4. Markets in everything: the new Cheap Trick album is available on 8-track.

5. How to get your wallet returned if you lose it: carry a baby photo in there.

6. CIT battlelines.

The Increased Competitiveness of the US Economy

Deloitte has just released The Shift Index, a study of long-term trends in the U.S. economy.   Two interesting graphs follow which put some numbers on conventional wisdom.  The US economy has become much more competitive over time. We can see this in the economy wide Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, a measure of market concentration, which has halved in the latest forty years (click to enlarge) and also in the topple rate.

The topple rate is a measure of how the rank of large firms on return of assets changes over time.  The topple rate has increased by about 60% over the past forty years (ignoring the recent blip up).  What this means is that the firms on top are less likely to stay on top today than in the past - the recent blip up indicates the upheaval in firm rankings during the current recession.  Notice also that an increased topple rate implies an increase in stock market volatility which we have also seen over the long-run (not just in recent years).

As a result of increased competition and also, I believe, greater wealth and reduced interest rates, the economy wide return on assets has decreased by 75% (see the report).

If the return on assets has decreased but productivity and wealth are up then where has the wealth gone?  To consumers and the creative class.  Thus, increased competition in the economy has driven down the return to capital and at the same time has increased the return to the complementary input which is in greatest fixed supply, creative labor.  More data in the full report.

What does the Turing test really mean?

That is a new paper of mine, co-authored with Michelle Dawson.  There is much more to Turing's classic essay than meets the eye.  The famous "test" is not a standard for distinguishing human from machine intelligence but rather one step in an argument showing that such a distinction is not as important as we might think.  Turing cleverly shows why the supposed test is misleading and the real question is how to educate both children and machines, not how to distinguish them.  The summary statement of our paper is as follows:

...a potent and indeed subversive perspective in the paper has been underemphasized. Some of the message of Turing’s paper is encouraging us to take a broader perspective on intelligence and some of his points are ethical in nature. Turing’s paper is about the possibility of unusual forms of intelligence, our inability to recognize those intelligences, and the limitations of indistinguishability as a standard for defining intelligence. “Inability to imitate does not rule out intelligence” is an alternative way of reading many parts of his argument. Turing was issuing the warning that we should not dismiss or persecute entities which we cannot easily categorize or understand. 

If you read Turing's essay closely, you will find many underrated passages of interest, especially when read in light of his homosexuality (and also possible autism).  Here is the closing bit from our paper:

It is possible that Turing conceived of his imitation test precisely because he had so much difficulty “passing” and communicating himself. In social settings these facts were seen as disabilities but in the longer term they helped Turing produce this brilliant essay.

One brute fact is that a lot of human beings could not, themselves, pass a Turing test.  Could you?

Addendum: Here is my previous post, Toward a Theory of Raivo Pommer-Eesti.

Health care and them annie-mules, update

Anyway, when you look at the increase in spending per capita, health care spending per person rises by 350 percent, vet spending per dog rises by 335 percent, and vet spending per cat rises by 340 percent..  So on this one, I think the conservatives have the better argument, despite the flaws in the original evidence.

That is Scott Winship, here is more.  Little did the blogosphere guess that this topic would turn so popular.  I also liked the comment from the guy who wondered about the aging of America's pet population and whether illegal pet immigration might remedy the associated fiscal problems.