GOD.EXISTS, to be short or long?

Last November, in looking at Bryan Caplan's new book, Myth of the Rational Voter, I mentioned Pascal's Wager in the form of the GOD.EXISTS contract. Chris Masse picked up on it here, and we went a few rounds between us, Jason Ruspini, and Alex Forshaw.

Newsweek recently hosted a debate between Sam Harris, Atheist, and Rick Warren, Biblical Christian. Here is how it ends (again, with a form of Pascal's Wager):

WARREN: Can you have spirituality without a spirit?

HARRIS: You can feel yourself to be one with the universe.

WARREN: OK, then why can't you just take the next step? Because right now you're talking in extremely nonrational terms.

HARRIS: There's nothing irrational about it. You can close your eyes in meditation and lose the sense of your physical body, totally. Many people draw from that the metaphysical conclusion that "I'm just spirit, and I can transcend the body." That's not the only conclusion you have to draw from that experience, and I don't think it's the best conclusion.

WARREN: You're more spiritual than you think. You just don't want a boss. You don't want a God who tells you what to do.

HARRIS: I don't want to pretend to be certain about anything I'm not certain about.

Rick, last thoughts?
WARREN: I believe in both faith and reason. The more we learn about God, the more we understand how magnificent this universe is. There is no contradiction to it. When I look at history, I would disagree with Sam: Christianity has done far more good than bad. Altruism comes out of knowing there is more than this life, that there is a sovereign God, that I am not God. We're both betting. He's betting his life that he's right. I'm betting my life that Jesus was not a liar. When we die, if he's right, I've lost nothing. If I'm right, he's lost everything. I'm not willing to make that gamble.

I am still a buyer of GOD.EXISTS (and SPX, too). The former requires more faith, the latter, more reason. In any case, there are sellers of both, and folks who are long one while short the other. How about you?

Closing in on the God Particle

(via Drudge)

The 40-year hunt for the holy grail of physics – the elusive “God particle” that is supposed to give matter its mass – is almost over, according to the leading scientist who first came up with the theory.

Peter Higgs, whose work gave his name to the elusive Higgs boson particle, said that he was more than 90 per cent certain it would be found within the next few years.

The Higgs boson was the professor’s elegant 1964 solution to one of the great problems with the standard model of physics – how matter has mass and thus exists in a form that allows it to make stars, planets and people. He proposed that the universe is pervaded by an invisible field of bosons that consist of mass but little else.

As particles move through this field, bosons effectively stick to some of them, making them more massive, while leaving others to pass unhindered. Photons, light particles that have no mass, are not affected by the Higgs field at all.

The mysterious boson postulated by Professor Higgs, of the University of Edinburgh, has become so fundamental to physics that it is often nicknamed the “God particle”. After more than 40 years of research, and billions of pounds, scientists have yet to prove that it is real. But Professor Higgs, 78, now believes the search is nearly over.

A new atom-smasher that will be switched on near Geneva later this year is virtually guaranteed to find it, he said. It is even possible that the critical evidence already exists, in data from an American experiment in Illinois that has yet to be analysed fully.

Yesterday, the Times reported on the computing grid project to support the Large Hadron Collider referenced in the link above, which could eventually replace the current Internet with a much higher capacity network.

Morning IM chat with my favorite broker

Favorite Broker: got your card - thanks - very nice picture and letter
me: ha
Favorite Broker: i'm serious
me: i'm about halfway done

Favorite Broker: a little too much "God" in there, but very nice nevertheless
Favorite Broker: for me
me: pascal's wager
me: can't have too much
me: can have too much of a wrong interpretation

Favorite Broker: what confuses me is how does pascal's wager relate to you?
Favorite Broker: you don't appear to be hedging your bets - you believe
me: it relates to anyone
Favorite Broker: as far as i can tell 100%

me: its more game theory than a single trade
me: you need to look at upside/downside of each node in the space
me: how do you stop out if you're wrong? that's the point, you can't

Favorite Broker: i eat odd numbers of large vegetables
Favorite Broker: been doing it since i was young
Favorite Broker: i still do it

me: yes, you are too superstitious right now to look at the wager
me: maybe someday
Favorite Broker: the wager, as it applies to those who doubt his existence leads to superstition

me: i agree with one thing [warren] buffet said yesterday: if the doctor said eating only asparagus and broccoli would extend my life by a year, i wouldn't do it
me: it's ok to doubt. but to be balanced, you need to doubt your doubts

me: i'm glad you're not drunk; it's so much harder when you are
Favorite Broker: how do you know i am not drunk
Favorite Broker: that was a bad joke
me: b/c you are trying to build your business, which means sober until the close, and then drink enough with other professionals so that everyone reveals more of their true self
Favorite Broker: lol

me: there are behavioral studies
me: drinking enhances trust
me: a teetotaler has something to hide, apparently

Favorite Broker: to you, god exists, there is no doubt. right?
me: of course there is doubt, on a certain level
me: what happens where emprics end?
Favorite Broker: clearly, but its pretty close to 100% right?
me: that's where faith begins
me: data and science are part of the visible realm, and then there needs to be some type of lens for the invisible realm. induction complements deduction

UPDATE: Scott Adams in a similar oeuvre:

A Muslim, a Christian, and a crazy guy walk into a room. The one thing you can know for sure is that at least two out of three of them organize their lives around things that aren't real. And that's the best case scenario. Atheists would say all three have some explaining to do. And atheists are the minority, which is the very definition of abnormal.

Quote of the day

Atheism not only keeps the guilt, but it also keeps the confusion.

From Douglas Wilson, responding to Christopher Hitchens. Or, as WuzzaDem cleverly nicknames him (scroll to bottom), Xopher Hitchens.

Still No GOD.EXISTS contracts listed. (Nor GLOBAL.WARMING contracts, either--I'm dead serious about those).

Did a former Soviet leader

just buy some GOD.EXISTS?

Maybe he's a reader of this blog.

UPDATE: Seems like he might have bought a long time ago.

UPDATE: No, he's just come out and said:

Over the last few days some media have been disseminating fantasies — I can't use any other word — about my secret Catholicism, citing my visit to the Sacro Convento friary, where the remains of St. Francis of Assisi lie. To sum up and avoid any misunderstandings, let me say that I have been and remain an atheist.

Wow, GOD.EXISTS actually trades

here.

Previous discussion here.

The Pit is better if there are fewer smart people in there

How can I say such a thing? I didn't, Scott Adams did. And he's pretty smart. Read the whole thing, especially his finding that Mensa geniuses are losers. Here's an excerpt:

In prior posts I’ve mentioned how much I’d like to see political polls that are limited to the smart, well-informed people. I have to confess, I thought I was stating a universal truth along the lines of “it’s better to have good health than poor health.” It seemed to me that being smart and well-informed was almost the same thing as being wise. Who doesn’t want the benefit of wisdom to inform their choices?

I was surprised at how many of my readers rushed to support the high quality of decisions made by stupid, uninformed people who are guided by superstition.

Some people accused me of being an elitist trying to assign a higher value to my own smarty-pants decisions. That’s a perfectly reasonable assumption, and I would have made it myself if I were in your Birkenstocks. But the truth is that I want to know the opinions of people who are both smarter and more informed than me. Why would I limit the quality of my advice to people who don’t know any more than I do?

And yes, I agree that Carter was "smarter" than Reagan, in the academic sense. I do not think that Reagan would have flourished at the Naval Academy. But Adams and I seem to agree that Reagan was a whole lot more effective.

UPDATE: It looks like Adams and I have another thing in common: we both have bought some GOD.EXISTS, as Adams concludes with "Alternately, we can keep voting for the guy with the best hair while waiting for the Rapture. That might work too." Check out the latest rounds at Midas Oracle: Jason Ruspini chuckles, Chris Masse celebrates, and Alex Forshaw is maybe a little more testy than me.

Redemptive Cynicism

Or Cynical Redemption, perhaps? Chris Masse has spurred me to engage my brain on voting, and I think the best thing I've read in a long time is what Glen Whitman said about Bryan Caplan's Irrational Voter. Caplan says:

But why are there some areas – like politics and religion – where irrationality seems especially pronounced? My answer is that irrationality, like ignorance, is sensitive to price, and false beliefs about politics and religion are cheap. If you underestimate the costs of excessive drinking, you can ruin your life. In contrast, if you underestimate the benefits of immigration, or the evidence in favor of the theory of evolution, what happens to you? In all probability, the same thing that would have happened to you if you knew the whole truth.

In a sense, then, there is a method to the average voter's madness. Even when his views are completely wrong, he gets the psychological benefit of emotionally appealing political beliefs at a bargain price. No wonder he buys in bulk.

And Whitman reflects:

Bryan focuses on economics as an area in which voters are particularly likely to be wrong, and he shows this by contrasting the opinions of voters and professional economists. I find the argument compelling – but then again, I’m an economist. Besides, as I argued in the post linked earlier, economists may be less vulnerable to psychological rent-seeking because their training imbues them with an awareness of trade-offs and a tendency to balance competing goals (since nearly any goal is subject to diminishing returns at some point). Thus, Bryan may be biasing the case in his favor by choosing an area in which the experts are less susceptible to the sort of bias we should be concerned about.

Arguably, one aspect of voters’ irrationality is their credulity about the claims of supposedly public-minded experts. As Bryan’s colleague Don Boudreaux points out, a candidate’s being “pro-teacher” is quite different from the candidate’s being “pro-education.” Similarly, “pro-union” does not necessarily mean “pro-worker.” Yet voters will often conflate the two. Although I agree with Bryan’s overall perspective, I wonder if his deference to the opinions of experts might exacerbate a prominent source of voter error.

You might call it Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle; I call it baggage. Voter baggage. We all have post-modern 3D Xray glasses on now.

That said, I think that Caplan's antireligious bias may cost him more than anything he is able to measure, at least, according to Pascal's Wager. In sum, Pascal reasons that a Bettor should Buy GOD.EXISTS and definitely not Sell Him. The downside of expiring the contract at 0 is very small (i.e. you aren't going to Heaven, no biggie), compared to the huge upside of ending up in the money--and the huge downside if you are caught short (i.e. you spend eternity surrounded by hot brimstone).

I have 3 words for trading futures contracts, and the same 3 words for the eternal soul:

Risk Adjusted Returns

By another Way: For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?

"Scientifc consensus" is achieved

through censorship (via Drudge):

At the beginning of this year there was a BBC show with four experts saying: “This is going to be the end of all the ice in the Arctic,” and hypothesising that it was going to be the hottest summer ever. Was it hell! It was very cold and very wet and now we’ve seen evidence that the glaciers in Alaska have started growing rapidly – and they’ve not grown for a long time.

I’ve seen evidence, which I believe, that says there has not been a rise in global temperature since 1998, despite the increase in carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere. This makes me think the global warmers are telling lies – carbon dioxide is not the driver.

The idiot fringe have accused me of being like a Holocaust denier, which is ludicrous. Climate change is all about cycles, it’s a natural thing and has always happened. When the Romans lived in Britain they were growing very good red grapes and making wine on the borders of Scotland. It was evidently a lot warmer.

If you were sitting next to me 10,000 years ago we’d be under ice. So thank God for global warming for ending that ice age; we wouldn’t be here otherwise.

People such as former American Vice-President Al Gore say that millions of us will die because of global warming – which I think is a pretty stupid thing to say if you’ve got no proof.

And my opinion is that there is absolutely no proof that carbon dioxide is anything to do with any impending catastrophe. The ­science has, quite simply, gone awry. In fact, it’s not even science any more, it’s anti-science.

There’s no proof, it’s just projections and if you look at the models people such as Gore use, you can see they cherry pick the ones that support their beliefs.

To date, the way the so-called Greens and the BBC, the Royal Society and even our political parties have handled this smacks of McCarthyism at its worst.

Global warming is part of a natural cycle and there’s nothing we can actually do to stop these cycles. The world is now facing spending a vast amount of money in tax to try to solve a problem that doesn’t actually exist.

And how were we convinced that this problem exists, even though all the evidence from measurements goes against the fact? God knows. Yes, the lakes in Africa are drying up. But that’s not global warming. They’re drying up for the very ­simple reason that most of them have dams around them.

So the water that used to be used by local people is now used in the production of cut flowers and veget­ables for the supermarkets of Europe.

One of Al Gore’s biggest clangers was saying that the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan was drying up because of global warming. Well, everyone knows, because it was all over the news 20 years ago, that the Russians were growing cotton there at the time and that for every ton of cotton you produce you use a vast amount of water.

The thing that annoys me most is that there are genuine environmental problems that desperately require attention. I’m still an environmentalist, I’m still a Green and I’m still campaigning to stop the destruction of the biodiversity of the world. But money will be wasted on trying to solve this global warming “problem” that I would much rather was used for looking after the people of the world.

Being ignored by the likes of the BBC does not really bother me, not when there are much bigger problems at stake.
I might not be on TV any more but I still go around the world campaigning about these important issues. For example, we must stop the dest­ruc­tion of trop­ical rainforests, something I’ve been saying for 35 years.

Mother nature will balance things out but not if we interfere by destroying rainforests and overfishing the seas.
That is where the real environmental catastrophe could occur.

"Llet's ignore stuff that we don't want to hear": yeah, that's scientific.

Quotes of the day

Trees grow.--Allan Meltzer

In other words, growth is the natural state of economies, so optimism usually is rewarded.--Gregory Zuckerman

The 1990's had its best return decade ever, averaging 17.6% returns, and the equity return premium was often estimated around 6%. Now, it's generally thought to be around 2-3%. --Eric Falkenstein

Goldman Sachs has threatened the UK Treasury with plans to move up to 20 per cent of its London-based staff to Spain in a standoff over tax and bonuses.--Simon Evans

Indeed, in extremis, liquidity can sometimes be a bad thing, insofar as excess liquidity in one area of the markets (most likely Treasuries) can act as a super-magnet, unhelpfully pulling risk capital from everywhere else.--Felix Salmon

Sometime in the next several weeks, Tishman Speyer Properties, the global real-estate empire run by father-son duo Jerry and Rob Speyer, along with their investment partner BlackRock, will default on the mortgage at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. And just as the transaction was the biggest real-estate deal in American history, the collapse is liable to be similarly epic.--Gabriel Sherman

If hot means being able to burn other people's money, I guess [Donald Trump]'s correct.--Carl Icahn

Tae Kwon Do is a massive money-making venture posing as a martial art.--Tony Woodlief

... we had crises before there was moral hazard--really, really dreadful crises, crises far worse than the one we're having now. I just don't see how you can look at the 1930s and name the FDIC as the decade's biggest financial problem. Or this decade's biggest financial problem. The closest our era came to a really devastating financial crash along the lines of the 1929-1933 period was in the total unguaranteed institutional money market funds. Nor do I find the central story of how the FDIC induced this moral hazard very compelling. Supposedly, ordinary depositors don't bother to check the soundness of their banks because they don't actually have skin in the game. --Megan McArdle

Now, what do all of these cities have in common beyond their egregious poverty level rates? They all have had since 1989 and continue to have, Democrat Party mayors… with Cleveland having had the Democrat mayor incumbent for the shortest period, since 1989, while Newark and Milwaukee now go back for nearly one hundred years of Democrat “rule.” Detroit, with the highest poverty rate has had a Democrat running the city government since 1961. We’re not casting aspersions here; we are simply drawing correlations.--Dennis Gartman

I may be a dining room table, but Krugman doesn't have a leg to stand on.--Bryan Caplan

Maybe we should try some other path of change besides the Big International Summit?--William Easterly

If we're not careful, we could let our institutions, things like tenure and hierarchical structures and peer review, slowly morph over time so that old guys control more and more of what's going on and the young people have a harder and harder time doing something really different, and that would be would be a bad thing for these processes of growth and change. I'd like to see us keep thinking about how we could tweak our institutions to give power and control and opportunity to young people.--Paul Romer

What did Padme say?: "So this is how liberty dies, to thunderous applause." By the way, did I mention that the Jedi are genetically superior supermen with "enhanced blood"? That the rebels' victory party in Episode IV borrows liberally from Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will"? And that the much-maligned ewoks make perfect sense as an antidote to Jedi fascism?--Tyler Cowen

There is no excuse for trying to hide the medieval warming period statistically, or diminish the credibility of critics. It isn't simple talk, and more than a white guy can say they use the N-word casually but that means nothing: everyone knows that someone who talks that way isn't credible on racial issues. Talking about coalitions, and hiding conspicuous trends, is pure slanting data to one's predisposition. If someone shaded beta-return data from the 1970s because they were not relevant to the CAPM ,that would be conscious fraud. Luckily in economics we are all looking at the same data, so no one would even try to do that, but if they did, it would be a big, black stain. There is no good excuse for what they said in those emails.--Eric Falkenstein

... it's undeniable that the film [Avatar] ... is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?--Annalee Newitz

The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short. Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality. This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.--Ross Douthat

What are you doing talking about sodomy? You shouldn’t even know what that is! Why do people have to know your views about that?--Robert George's mom

People have lost their grip on the true reasons for marrying, so they are unwilling to make all the sacrifices real marriage requires. --Robert George

Quotes of the day

My more liberal friends argue, based on Keynesian principles, that we need dovish fiscal policy as well. They often argue for short-run fiscal expansion coupled with long-run fiscal contraction. The problem is that fiscal policymakers cannot bind their future selves. It is hard to make commitments to future fiscal contraction credible, especially as short-run actions expand the budget deficit.

...

My more conservative friends argue, based on monetarist principles, that a dovish monetary policy risks future inflation. In my view, however, there are bigger risks than inflation just now. They include prolonged high unemployment and meager growth.--Greg Mankiw

People talk about Main Street vs Wall Street. It should be Main Street vs the Beltway.--David Friedman

Professors are terrible at evaluation. Their method of judging student work is very simple: How close is it to what I would have done? The better you can imitate the professor, no matter what the class, the higher your grade.--Seth Roberts

In short, education becomes little but a vast public subsidy for private ambition. ... The result is a spiral of credential inflation; for as each level of education in turn gradually floods with a crowd of ambitious consumers, individuals have to keep seeking ever higher levels of credentials in order to move a step ahead of the pack. In such a system nobody wins. Consumers have to spend increasing amounts of time and money to gain additional credentials, since the swelling number of credential holders keeps lowering the value of credentials at any given level. Taxpayers find an increasing share of scarce fiscal resources going to support an educational chase with little public benefit. Employers keep raising the entry-level education requirements for particular jobs, but they still find that they have to provide extensive training before employees can carry out their work productively. At all levels, this is an enormously wasteful system.--David Labaree

Today Lipitor, the world's best selling drug and Pfizer's single most profitable product, loses patent protection and goes generic. If Lipitor (generic name atorvastatin) holds true to form for other generic transitions, Pfizer can expect to lose much of its market share and the price of atorvastatin will eventually plummet by as much as 80%. But while everyone is celebrating the "birth" of yet another cheap generic from an expensive blockbuster, it would be good for policymakers and the press to pause and reflect on where generic drugs come from.

...

The stork doesn't bring them to your local pharmacy. They are often the products of years or even decades of enormously expensive and painstaking research by innovative (and yes, profit-driven) companies.

...

What is the proper response to Lipitor going generic? Thank God for blockbuster drugs.

...

Because without those drugs we wouldn't have the tremendous health gains from statins and other widely used drugs to treat stroke and hypertension - or the cheap generics that the health care system gains once those drugs lose patent protection.--Paul Howard

A corporate CEO's pay is determined by how well he or she manages two entities: the company; and the board. If you manage your board well, you can manage your company poorly and still make a lot of money. Conversely, I thought that Leland Brendsel managed Freddie Mac pretty well, but several years after I left he got ousted by the board in an accounting "scandal" that consisted of holding down accounting earnings to more closely reflect economic earnings. His successor, Richard Syron, managed the board well, but he was a disaster for the company--and for the whole financial system.--Arnold Kling

... I see [Adam Smith's] two preeminent works amounting to a unified theory, a blueprint for a more stable and sustainable version of capitalism; a conscious capitalism. The Wealth of Nations presupposed actors in the capitalist system operating on the moral framework he laid out in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. The free market has no conscience of its own: it is made up of billions of people transacting. Though Smith asserts that each of these people are guided by their self interest, he presupposes that each of the actors in the marketplace are guided by some internal morality and an awareness of one's place within the broader context of his community — locally and globally.

...

The current version of capitalism is not the one envisioned by Smith at all. He was seeking to create a system defined by efficient allocation of resources driven by self-interest, but guided by self-restraint. This is conscious capitalism.

...

The current version of capitalism's guidance from self-interest in the corporate world is evidenced in the legal duty to maximize shareholder value, which opens directors up to a lawsuit from their shareholders if they make a decision that fails to make the highest possible profit for their shareholders. Thus, the duty to maximize shareholder value handcuffs directors that want to make decisions that seek to create benefit for people and planet as well as financial returns.
There is debate whether this duty exists, but it is such a dominant perception among directors that it is the practical reality. In order for corporations to be free from the shackles of maximizing shareholder value, the fiduciary duties must be broadened.--Kyle Westaway

Westaway's thoughts on Adam Smith really inspired me, but I was sorely disappointed when he put his hope on legislating forward. Let's look at the track record, Kyle!--Cav

Earlier this year, some very smart people in Washington even suggested that states, which cannot place themselves in bankruptcy, be allowed to do so to solve their pension and employee compensation problems. One argument repeated over and over by advocates of this option was that a bankruptcy judge would void onerous union contracts and pension obligations. In Greek theater, critics once called this the "deus ex machina" ending, where a god in a chariot descended on the stage and untangled all of the complications of a plot that the playwright couldn't resolve in any other way.

...

But there is no deus in municipal bankruptcy law; instead, parties involved must do exactly what they have failed to otherwise do, which is to sit down and negotiate their way to a settlement with the judge serving as a referee. And elected officials who somehow think that bankruptcy will give them political cover when they have to cut services and raise taxes are just kidding themselves. Taxpayers rarely blame the consequences of a municipal bankruptcy on the judge.--Steven Malanga

If you wouldn't object to China sending products to the United States for free, then on what basis would you object to currency “manipulation” that allows you to purchase undervalued Chinese imports at a huge discount and great bargain?--Mark Perry

If you're married, and you have a wife, and you really love your wife, is it good enough to only say to your wife 'I love her' the day you get married? Or should you tell her every single day when you wake up and every opportunity?--Tim Tebow

Image links here, here, here, here and here.

Quotes of the day

We are living in the first truly global civilization. That means that whatever comes into existence on its soil can very quickly and easily span the whole world. But we are also living in the first atheistic civilization, in other words, a civilization that has lost its connection with the infinite and eternity. For that reason it prefers short-term profit to long-term profit. What is important is whether an investment will provide a return in ten or fifteen years; how it will affect the lives of our descendants in a hundred years is less important. However, the most dangerous aspect of this global atheistic civilization is its pride. The pride of someone who is driven by the very logic of his wealth to stop respecting the contribution of nature and our forebears, to stop respecting it on principle and respect it only as a further potential source of profit.--Vaclav Havel

The church is an institution and it’s incredibly corrupt obviously, but that’s because it’s full of dysfunctional people and people who are hurt and battered and abused. It’s very normal in any institution to have that kind of level of dysfunction. That’s unfortunate. I find it very difficult, I find church culture very difficult you know; I think a lot of churches now are just fundamentally flawed. But that’s true for any institution you know, that’s true for education, universities and it’s definitely true for corporations because of greed, and I think part of faith is having to be reconciled with a flawed community. But the principles, I don’t think the principles have changed. They can get skewed and they can get abused and dogma can reign supreme, but I think the fundamentals, it’s really just about love. Loving God and loving your neighbour and giving up everything for God. The principles of that, the basis of that is very pure and life changing.--Sufjan Stevens

In the 20th century, immigrant Hollywood directors made hyperpatriotic movies that defined American life but found after fame and fortune they were still outsiders. In [The Social Network], Zuckerberg designs a fabulous social network, but still has his reciprocity problem. He is still afflicted by his anhedonic self-consciousness, his failure to communicate, his inability to lose himself in the throngs at a party or the capacity to deserve the love he craves. Many critics have compared this picture to “Citizen Kane.” But I was reminded of the famous last scene in “The Searchers,” in which the John Wayne character is unable to join the social bliss he has created. The character gaps that propel some people to do something remarkable can’t be overcome simply because they have managed to change the world.--David Brooks

I made baseball as much fun as doing your taxes!--Bill James, on an episode of The Simpsons

Art Laffer famously presented his idea that tax revenues are at first increasing, then decreasing in tax rates, on a cocktail napkin, when arguing about the president Gerald Ford's tax increase (ie, 1974). This too is a good idea. This too, is an empirical issue, as we can be either at a point where revenue is increasing in the marginal rate, or decreasing. Even if the curve is increasing, its slope is important, especially because maximizing government revenue is not the same as maximizing societal welfare. Yet Art Laffer will never win the Nobel prize. His idea is as insightful, and has the same empirical limitations, as the modeling of labor search on unemployment or any of the other econ Nobels. This latter work has the imprimatur of 'science' because it generates lots of complicated models. The models are no more predictive or instructive than the Laffer curve, just they lend themselves to infinite amounts of rigor so it can then it looks like physics, which is the end game (looking like physics). Rewarding formalism that is no more precise than a Laffer curve has been really bad for understanding economic systems. The Laffer curve is marginalized by economists for its unpretentious honesty, whereas the dynamic general equilibrium search models are more misleading as to how precise they are or can be. This makes economics less fruitful.--Eric Falkenstein

Finance is like wine in that while experts talk about sophisticated concepts the basics are simple things like clean barrels and clean data. Getting economists back to simple stuff, basic data analysis that corrects for various omitted variables, is the best way to find important economic truths. It's the data, not the process, that matters more. There simply aren't many economic equations, not enough to make the field a science, so it's more of seeing empirical tendencies, as almost everything is 'an empirical issue' with theoretical offsetting effects. Many thought that powerful techniques could avoid these issues, and in fact those concentrating on these adjustments were considered not as productive as those doing yeoman's work with the data. The scientism of economics that Hayek warned about has been very counterproductive to economics.--Eric Falkenstein

Let me give you an idea of how unqualified I am to be president. First, I'm not good at remembering names. Or faces. Or countries. My staff meetings would be a whole lot of "Maybe we should bomb what's-his-face's country. You know, the one that grows the coconuts. Or maybe they manufacture tractors. I remember that their leader had a funny hat. Make it happen." I'm not charismatic. If I were to stop at diners as part of my campaign, people would ask me for coffee. It would be one bad photo op after another. I can't ask people to sacrifice their personal interests for the greater good. It feels evil. I couldn't force myself to spend time doing useless tasks such as visiting victims of natural disasters or working on a peace plan for the Middle East. I would argue that napping would be a better use of my time. And I would make matters worse by showing research to back my point. I wouldn't be able to get through an entire press conference without saying "Blow me." I would declare war on Pakistan because I like truth in labeling. Obviously I couldn't last a full term in office, much less get elected. But that doesn't stop me from imagining that someday the American flag will have my face where the stars used to be. Imagine big. You might surprise yourself.--Scott Adams

Family trees revealed Obama and Palin, the former Alaska Governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, are 10th cousins through common ancestor John Smith, according to Ancestry.com Inc. Smith was Obama’s and Palin’s 12th-great- grandfather. Smith, a Protestant pastor, was an early settler in Massachusetts and was criticized by the ecclesiastical community for supporting Quakers, said Anastasia Tyler, a genealogist for the website. Obama and Limbaugh are 10th cousins once removed through shared connections to Richmond Terrell, a Virginia settler who came to America in the mid-1600s, Tyler said. Palin and Obama have ties to Bush, both through links to Samuel Hinckley. Maybe leadership “runs in the family,” the website said, because Hinckley’s son, Thomas, became the governor of Plymouth Colony before it united with Massachusetts.--Traci McMillan

Why is the foreclosure machinery of our nation’s largest banks suddenly grinding to a halt? ... When a mortgage is securitized, the investors in the mortgage bonds don’t get assignments or notes. The investment vehicle doesn’t get the assignments or notes either. Instead, the physical notes are typically sent to a document repository company. The transfer of interests is noted in an electronic database. But during the height of the housing bubble, investment banks were churning out mortgage bonds in such a frenzy, sometimes the assignments never got executed and mortgage notes never got delivered. Keep in mind that this was during the years when lenders were giving out low-doc and no-doc mortgages. It was inevitable that the fast and loose and slightly documented culture would not stop at the mortgage originator but stretch all the way through the process. For most mortgages, the note probably still exists somewhere. One problem that has arisen, however, is that some of the original mortgage lenders have gone under or been acquired by a larger bank. This can make tracking down the notes difficult, if not impossible.--John Carney

I don't know the ins and outs of the loan, I just sign documents.--Litton Loan mortgage supervisor based in Houston

But I’m drawn to the possibility that [Barney] Frank actually made the problem [of affordable housing] worse by driving up the price of housing via all the government programs and subsidies he championed. Frank is not the only cause of the problem, just one of the least repentant. You can add President Bush and Clinton and other enablers. But no one should believe that Barney Frank or Barney Frank aided by colleagues and their staff in the Congress can remake the mortgage finance market without a lot of unintended (and destructive) consequences.--Russ Roberts

Consumer sovereignty reflects the fact that the ultimate measure of any economy's success is how well it provides for people's needs and desires -- how much access it affords to the particular combination of goods and services (including leisure) that each of us uniquely desires in order to make his or her life as rich and as meaningful as possible. Opponents of free trade are quick to reply, "Yes! -- and that's why free trade is bad. It destroys jobs and, thus, denies people the income to buy the things they want." This reply has an air of superficial plausibility (which, no doubt, is why a recent poll reported in The Wall Street Journal finds Americans' support for free trade to be abysmally low). But scientific truth in this matter, as in all other matters, is not determined by polling or established by popularity. The very jobs that Americans today think ought to be protected from foreign trade are jobs that were either created by foreign trade or made attractive by foreign trade. ... among the very reasons that losing a particular job to trade is so traumatic is that that job is made so attractive by trade. Of course, each of us would love to have our own job guaranteed while we simultaneously exercise the consumer sovereignty that enables us to enjoy a high standard of living. But to guarantee your job requires a sacrifice of some of your neighbor's consumer sovereignty -- just as a policy that guarantees your neighbor his job requires a sacrifice of some of your consumer sovereignty. The only fair policy -- and the only one that ensures long-run prosperity for all -- is a policy in which no one's consumer sovereignty is ever sacrificed.--Don Boudreaux

A steep decline in trading activity is expected to weigh on profits at the biggest U.S. investment banks—Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley—when they report quarterly results next week. Analysts have been slashing estimates on the investment banks since the summer as businesses such as fixed-income trading, once the driver of profits, dried up. "Mounting anxiety stemming from a waning economic recovery and uncertainty over the midterm elections left clients paralyzed and trading desks fell silent during the [third] quarter," wrote Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Brad Hintz in a recent note to clients.--Liz Moyer And Brett Philbin

Many mining experts point out that, while more hazardous than most jobs, mining safety has increased considerably over the decades. Today, they say, workers are more likely to be hit by a car on the way to work than killed while descending deep into the earth to extract iron ore, coal, and precious metals. The mindset in the past was that “you might get killed,” says Michael Nelson, an associate professor and chair of mining and engineering at the University of Utah. “Fifty years ago, a guy died, and everyone said, 'That´s too bad.' And the company would send a check to the widow.” But in the past ten years the mentality has shifted so much that no accident is acceptable, he says, reflecting changes in societal expectations, worker rights, and the very high costs of fatalities today, including settlements and wrongful death lawsuits. The chance of survival in the wake of a tragedy has also increased. Rescues in a coal mine in Shanxi, China this year, in a gold mine in the Philippines in 2008, and in 2002, in Pennsylvania´s Quecreek Mine, are all examples that have provided lessons for the industry. ... The job entails inherent risks anywhere it is done. For 2010, there have been 59 mine-related fatalities for the coal and metal/non-metal sectors in the US, including 29 killed in an accident in West Virginia in April. Standards have increased greatly over the years, though. The number of deaths in the US stood at 3,242 in 1907 compared to 18 in 2009, according to the Mine Safety and Health Administration.--Steven Bodzin

Quotes of the day

At Saddleback Barack Obama learned this: If you want to be president in the U.S., nothing on God's green earth is ever above your pay grade.--Daniel Henninger

... the Socratic method doesn’t really teach you to “think like a lawyer.” At best, it teaches you to think like a litigator.--Steve Bainbridge

Dick Cheney, Dark Lord of the Sith, gave 75% ($6,869,655US) of his 2006 income to charity.--Shannon Love

You know you’re in trouble when the most interesting new character is Jabba the Hutt’s uncle.--Roger Ebert, on "Star Wars: The Clone Wars"

I have a sneaking suspicion that if there were a way to make movies without actors, George Lucas would do it.--Mark Hamill

The film [WALL-E] was a not-so-subtle call to replace our current state with another way of living; to focus on the simple and the natural instead of complicated consumerism and life-absorbing technological advances. ... was this was really coming out of Disney studios — purveyor of all things luxurious and commercial?--Philip Johnston

Thus Obama was against a bill even NARAL could not, figuratively speaking, find it in its heart to oppose. Because, as one poster explains, it would not want to be thought to oppose the protection of live infants. Being thought to oppose the protection of infants is, after all, a very bad thing.--Tom Smith

* * *

... the U.S., acting unilaterally and with virtually no fanfare, sharply cut back its stockpile of nonstrategic nuclear warheads. As far back as 1991, the U.S. began to retire all of its nuclear warheads for short-range ballistic missiles, artillery and antisubmarine warfare. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, not one of these weapons exists today. The same authoritative publication estimates that the number of tactical warheads in the U.S. arsenal has dwindled from thousands to approximately 500.

Russia has also reduced the size of its tactical nuclear arsenal, but starting from much higher levels and at a slower pace, leaving it with an estimated 5,000 such devices -- 10 times the number of tactical weapons held by the U.S. Such a disparity would be one thing if we were contending with a stable, postcommunist regime moving in the direction of democracy and integration with the West. That was the Russia we anticipated when we began our nuclear build-down. But it is not the Russia we are facing today.--Gabriel Schoenfeld

Quotes of the day

Socialism only works in two places: Heaven where they don't need it and hell where they already have it.--Ronald Reagan

Innovation is terribly important; it is why we are rich. We know innovation is caused by economic activity, but if we knew which activities more promoted innovation, we’d want to subsidize them. Three recent papers suggests we should prefer many small industries each dominated by a few firms, and prefer private research in processes of capital intensive industries, especially chem/drug and comp/electronics. ... R&D spending is more effective for process over product, private over public, and basic over applied.--Robin Hanson

I'm not arguing for any change in the laws. I'm just arguing that [people who walk away from their mortgage obligations are] jerks. And I'm arguing that they're jerks precisely because I don't want any change in the laws that makes it harder to default on your mortgage.--Megan McArdle

Right-wing economists aren’t arguing that those specific policies [such as universal healthcare] explain the difference, but rather that America is richer because it has been more capitalist for a long time. Has it been more capitalist since 1820? It is a long time since I read Tocqueville, but my impression is that the answer is yes. The statism of Europe took many forms. There were trade barriers between German states. The French government has always been more interventionist. UK was pretty capitalist in 1820, but then it was also pretty rich. For a while Europe could use the destruction of WWII as an excuse, and indeed when I was young they were growing faster than us in a “catch-up.” But it is obvious they have plateaued about 25% below us. ... Here’s why growth rates are misleading. Once you move to the technological frontier, it is hard to grow faster than about 2% per capita. But poorer countries can grow much faster as they borrow advanced technology. --Scott Sumner

My attitude is this: if you are getting attacked by Krugman, you must be doing something right--Eugene Fama

The pattern during the last 100 years has been for countries with functioning economies to grow faster the lower they start. If [Matthew] Yglesias was an trained economist he would know all this. Conditional Convergence is one of the most robust relations in growth theory. [Paul] Krugman knows this, but Krugman is a liar, he just wants to maximize his ideological argument at any given point, deceiving his readers if he has to. That's why Krugman has not explicitly made the claim that growth rate and levels are unrelated, he just ignored the levels altogether. He knows that writing what you wrote would make him look foolish to other economists. While Krugman knows what he is doing (he just doesn't care), my guess is that Yglesias is honest in his argument, following Krugman where Krugman himself carefully does not step. Matthew Yglesias is left standing with his naive post on growth theory, his just reward for trusting Paul Krugman.--Tino

Nobody in the Bush administration ever displayed more economic ignorance [than President Obama's press secretary Robert Gibbs], but [Paul] Krugman was all over those guys every time they came close. Now he lets it slide. So let me do his job for him: When the domestic demand for a product increases, the law of comparative advantage tells you to import more of it, not less. If it is in fact true that “the type of demand for these components is only going to increase” then American manufacturers might want to start producing them, but American consumers will certainly want to import more of them, and any attempt to circumvent that is a good way to make Americans poorer. ... For goodness’s sake—if Barack Obama or Robert Gibbs discovers that he really likes bananas on his Cheerios, is his first thought that he’d better start growing bananas, or is his first thought that he’d better figure out where to buy them? That’s the kind of question Paul Krugman used to ask. I miss him.--Steven Landsburg

President Barack Obama is trumpeting a new White House estimate that his top economist calls ’stunning’: His stimulus plan has already created or saved up to 2 million jobs,” the Associated Press reported. The net job loss last year was 4 million, the worst since 1940. Barack Obama is now the first president since Herbert Hoover to show a net loss of jobs as president. Obama is saying it would have been a job loss of 6 million, which would mean 11% unemployment without the stimulus. A year ago, he said without the stimulus, unemployment would peak at 9%. Other “stunning” results thanks to the awesome administration include:

• The New England Patriots lost by only 19 points to the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday. Without the stimulus, it would have been a 33-0 shutout.
• The low temperature in Poca this morning was 20. Without the stimulus, it would have been 10.
• The national debt today is $12.3 trillion. Without the stimulus, it would have been $11.9 trillion.

Oops.--Don Surber

Now, let me get this straight.....We are going to pass a health care plan written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn't read it but exempts themselves from it, to be signed by a president that also hasn't read it and who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his taxes…all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that's nearly broke. What could possibly go wrong?--anonymous

Ordinarily, if one out of every 22 California drivers had a license to drive any way he chose, there would be demands for more police power to protect Californians from the potential carnage. But until the newspaper series, law enforcement officials and legislators had remained mum. The reason, of course, is that the scofflaws are law enforcement officials and legislators. ... Bigger government means more government employees. Those employees then become a permanent lobby for continual government growth. The nation may have reached critical mass; the number of government employees at every level may have gotten so high that it is politically impossible to roll back the bureaucracy, rein in the costs, and restore lost freedoms. People who are supposed to serve the public have become a privileged elite that exploits political power for financial gain and special perks. Because of its political power, this interest group has rigged the game so there are few meaningful checks on its demands. Government employees now receive far higher pay, benefits, and pensions than the vast majority of Americans working in the private sector. Even when they are incompetent or abusive, they can be fired only after a long process and only for the most grievous offenses. It’s a two-tier system in which the rulers are making steady gains at the expense of the ruled. The predictable results: Higher taxes, eroded public services, unsustainable levels of debt, and massive roadblocks to reforming even the poorest performing agencies and school systems. If this system is left to grow unchecked, we will end up with a pale imitation of the free society envisioned by the Founders. --Steven Greenhut

Presidential economic advisor Christina Romer was the lede-off guest on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos Starring George Stephanopoulos. And, charmingly, Romer is a lousy liar — maybe the only one inside the Beltway. ... Here’s about 11 minutes of her being “grilled” by Stephanopoulos on Sunday’s show. (Sorry for not embedding the video, but ABC doesn’t allow that for reasons unknown.) Anyway — watch her body language. When someone is speaking, their head usually either nods up and down or moves back and forth, depending on what they’re saying, and where they’re trying to place emphasis. Romer’s head is all over the place. I swear, most of the time it’s moving in figure eights. To me, that means she has no clue what she expects you to get out of what she’s saying, because she knows it’s total crap. Having to go out there and spread huge fields of manure for your boss — doing terrible damage to the country in the process — is a nasty job.--Stephen Green

[Jonathan Gruber] is being treated as a supreme authority. In theory, that is because his skills are exceptional. Instead, I suspect that, on the contrary, his success has less to do with how he uses his critical thinking functions than how well he has repressed them. In short, he is paid to tell progressives and politicians what they want to hear. ... I think that there is still a high probability that we are on a path to a system in which a political elite ruthlessly rewards its friends and punishes its enemies, leading to a society with much less innovation and much more corruption. I do not foresee gulags and mass murders, but there is plenty of potential for moral rot in cronyism, and that I do fear lies ahead.--Arnold Kling

Here’s a forecast: Mr. Blankfein will not end his career with a high government position [unlike his predecessors who led Goldman Sachs].--Floyd Norris

My daughter called me from school one day and said, ‘Dad, what’s a financial crisis?’ And, without trying to be funny, I said, ‘This type of thing happens every five to seven years.’ And she said, ‘Why is everyone so surprised?’--Jamie Dimon

Results released today from the Impact Study show that children’s gains from participating in Head Start, documented in a 2005 installment of the study, do not last through the end of 1^st grade.--Lisa Guernsey

Barack Obama has exploited his youthful stint as a Chicago community organizer at every stage of his political career. As someone who had worked for grassroots “change,” he said, he was a different kind of politician, one who could translate people’s hopes into reality. The media lapped up this conceit, presenting Obama’s organizing experience as a meaningful qualification for the Oval Office. This past September, a cell-phone video of Chicago students beating a fellow teen to death coursed over the airwaves and across the Internet. None of the news outlets that had admiringly reported on Obama’s community-organizing efforts mentioned that the beating involved students from the very South Side neighborhoods where the president had once worked. Obama’s connection to the area was suddenly lost in the mists of time. Yet a critical blindness links Obama’s activities on the South Side during the 1980s and the murder of Derrion Albert in 2009. Throughout his four years working for “change” in Chicago’s Roseland and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods, Obama ignored the primary cause of their escalating dysfunction: the disappearance of the black two-parent family. Obama wasn’t the only activist to turn away from the problem of absent fathers, of course; decades of failed social policy, both before and after his time in Chicago, were just as blind.--Heather MacDonald

At the dark heart of [Robin West's] thinking is the notion that home-schooled children are imprisoned. No sports teams, no church activities, no Boy and Girl Scouts, no summer jobs, no sleepovers with friends. Thus will abuse go undetected, self-esteem unnurtured. Worse, these children become part of an unthinking Republican army. Which pre-empts, of course, the ability of professors like West to turn them into soldiers for the unthinking Democratic army. Which is why we need regulation. Forced testing and immunizations. Home inspections by state regulators. I propose a deal, Professor West. I’m happy to have my sons enrolled in school, should they fail a standardized test, so long as the public schools commit to testing teachers, and firing the ones who fail. I’m happy to let inspectors assess our home curriculum, if we can do the same to the hodgepodge of theories and dry-as-dust, dumbed-down, modernized materials that get bandied about under the guise of pedagogy in public schools. If you’re nice, we might even let you borrow some of our classroom materials. Finally, when my kids are older, I’ll match them up against any precious little free-thinking high-school radicals you perceive as unshackled from the lockstep conservative brainwashing you imagine goes on under my roof, and we’ll have ourselves a debate on philosophy, theology, and politics. If your kids win, I’ll pay your Georgetown salary for a year. If my kids win, you resign.--Tony Woodlief

In short, whenever [Pat] Robertson breathes out a sentence with the word “God” in it, I’m pretty certain he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.--Tony Woodlief

Is mathematics invented or discovered?--Steven Landsburg

...I cannot imagine any way to explain the existence of the Universe without the prior existence of the natural numbers. (This is more or less the same reason some people give for believing in God.) It seems to me that the most compelling question in philosophy is why anything exists at all. Any satisfactory answer has to start with something that must exist.--Steven Landsburg

Quotes of the day

One hundred fifty years ago today, Col. Robert E. Lee was offered the command of the United States army. ... But after the attack on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for 75,000 men, Virginia, Lee's home state, seceded. ... To many people today, it would see strange that Lee would turn down such a command and follow the apparently hopeless fate of the Confederacy. Although he was born and raised in Virginia, like Winfield Scott, he had spent much of his life serving the United States of America all over the continent. He disagreed with slavery, and believed that secession was unwise. ... It came down to his view of state sovereignty. Lee viewed himself as a Virginian more than an American. He would follow the choice of his state even though he personally disagreed with it. He viewed his service to the South not as a fight against the Union, but as a defense of Virginia.--Joshua Horn

Higher prices of foods mainly hurt the poor since poor countries and poorer families within a given country spend a much larger fraction of their incomes on foods than do rich countries, and then richer families within a country. For example, the share of national income spent on food is over 40% in India, less than that but still large in China, and under 15% in the United States. If families were spending 40% of their income on food, a 30% increase in food prices would raise by 12% the income they would need to maintain the same level of consumption of all goods. By contrast, a family spending only 15% of its income on food would only need a 4.5% increase in their income to maintain the same consumption basket. This simple arithmetic explains why the current rapid price increase in foods and other commodities, and past large increases in these prices, often caused great distress among poor families of Africa, Asia, and elsewhere in the world. ... during the current sharp run up in food prices, several food-exporting countries, such as Russia and Ukraine, have banned, or greatly restricted, the ability of farmers to export their produce. This lowers the price of food to urban consumers in these countries, and thereby helps the urban poor. However, such bans reduce the prices received by poor farmers of these countries. This reduces their incentives to raise their production of food, and makes these farmers worse off. It also raises the cost of food to families in food-importing countries, and thereby hurts the poor in these countries. Since farmers in developing countries are generally much poorer than those who live in cities and other urban communities, the poor may overall be made worse off when countries greatly restrict their food exports. ... An income subsidy approach has the advantage of allowing prices of foods and other goods to be determined by the forces of supply and demand. As a result, it encourages famers to grow more food when food prices rise, and also encourages poor (and other) consumers to reallocate their spending away from foods that rise most in price, and toward other foods and consumer goods.--Gary Becker

... many grand issues remain unresolved at the frontiers of physics: What is the origin of inertia? Are there extra dimensions? Can a Theory of Everything exist? But even at the undergraduate level, far back from the front lines, deep holes exist; yet the subject is presented as one of completeness while the holes—let us say abysses—are planked over in order to camouflage the danger. It seems to me that such an approach is both intellectually dishonest and fails to stimulate the habits of inquiry and skepticism that science is meant to engender. ... If Newton’s laws are at the bottom of everything, then one should be able to derive the second law of thermodynamics from Newtonian mechanics, but this has never been satisfactorily accomplished and the incompatibility of the irreversible second law with the other fundamental theories remains perhaps the greatest paradox in all physics. It is blatantly dropped into the first days of a freshman course and the textbook authors bat not an eyelash. ... the “God is a mathematician” viewpoint is one of selective perception. The great swindle of introductory physics is that every problem has an exact answer. Not only that, students are expected to find it. Such an approach inculcates our charges with an expectation that is, in fact, exactly contrary to the true state of the world. Vanishingly few problems in physics have exact solutions and a physicist’s career is one of finding approximations and hopefully not being too embarrassed by them. ... The equation that governs the behavior of any quantum system, Schrödinger’s equation, is as deterministic as Newton’s own, but as many people know, quantum mechanics predicts only the probability of an experiment’s outcome. How a deterministic system, in which the result is preordained, abruptly becomes a probabilistic one at the instant of measurement, is the great unresolved mystery of quantum theory, and yet virtually none of the dozens of available quantum textbooks even mention it. ... Physicists have indeed gone further than other scientists in describing the natural world; they should not confuse description with understanding.--Tony Rothman

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.--Albert Einstein

You want to repeal health care? Go at it. We'll have that debate. You're not going to be able to do that by nickel-and-diming me in the budget. You think we're stupid?--President Obama

Donald Trump has advocated for massive tax increases that display a stunning lack of knowledge of how to create jobs. His love for a socialist-style universal health care system and his alarming obsession with protectionist policies are automatic disqualifiers among free-market conservatives. This publicity stunt will sputter and disappear just as quickly as the ‘The Apprentice’ is losing viewers.--Chris Chocola

If the man who really should be the mayor, the next mayor of the city of New York, the great police commissioner Ray Kelly, chooses not to run, and if my former adversary [Eliot Spitzer] does run as an independent in 2013, I will run for mayor of the City of New York.--Dick Grasso

I want my son to watch "The Natural" someday, hear Roy Hobbs say, "Some mistakes you never stop paying for," and know that it's not just words in a movie. I want my son to know that you haven't lived until you've fought back, that you haven't won until you've lost, that you can't understand what it's like to relish something until you've suffered, too. I want him to understand that it's the 21st century, that we sit around picking our heroes apart all day, that we expect them to be superhuman at all times, that we get pissed off when they aren't, that it's hypocritical if you really think about it.--Bill Simmons

[Edward Wilson's] new argument, in a nutshell, amounts to a frontal attack on long-accepted ideas about one of the great mysteries of evolution: why one creature would ever help another at its own expense. Natural selection means that the fittest pass down their genes to the next generation, and every organism would seem to have an overwhelming incentive to survive and reproduce. Yet, strangely, self-sacrifice exists in the natural world, even though it would seem to put individual organisms at an evolutionary disadvantage: The squirrel that lets out a cry to warn of a nearby predator is necessarily putting itself in danger. How could genes that lead to such behavior persist in a population over time? It’s a question that bedeviled even Charles Darwin, who considered altruism a serious challenge to his theory of evolution.--Leon Neyfakh

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--Thomas Jefferson et al

We don’t think of love as a strength, but as a compromise of strength. And we certainly don’t think of the value of love in affecting mass, social change, and yet Napoleon realizes he and his work will be forgotten and other leaders will flicker and fade while the work of Christ carries on. And why? Because Jesus loved his men, and charged those men to take his message of love to the ends of the earth. I am wondering whether or not we think of the great commission as a duty, a charge, or a joyful expression of love?--Don Miller

Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, Louis XIV strove in vain to secure this. They conquered the world, yet they had not a single friend, or at all events, they have none any more. Christ speaks, however, and from that moment all generations belong to him; and they are joined to him much more closely than by any ties of blood and by a much more intimate, sacred and powerful communion. He kindles the flame of love which causes one’s self-love to die, and triumphs over every other love. Why should we not recognize in this miracle of love the eternal Word which created the world? The other founders of religions had not the least conception of this mystic love which forms the essence of Christianity.--Napoleon Bonaparte

For three months, the Arab world has been awash in protests and demonstrations. It's being called an Arab Spring, harking back to the Prague Spring of 1968. But comparison to the short-lived flowering of protests 40 years ago in Czechoslovakia is turning out to be apt in another way. For all the attention the Mideast protests have received, their most notable impact on the region thus far hasn't been an upswell of democracy. It has been a dramatic spike in tensions between two geopolitical titans, Iran and Saudi Arabia. This new Middle East cold war comes complete with its own spy-versus-spy intrigues, disinformation campaigns, shadowy proxy forces, supercharged state rhetoric—and very high stakes.--BILL SPINDLE and MARGARET COKER

Can one person controlling an identity, or a group of identities, really shape social architecture? Actually, yes. The Web Ecology Project’s analysis of 2009’s post-election protests in Iran revealed that only a handful of people accounted for most of the Twitter activity there. The attempt to steer large social groups toward a particular behavior or cause has long been the province of lobbyists, whose “astroturfing” seeks to camouflage their campaigns as genuine grassroots efforts, and company employees who pose on Internet message boards as unbiased consumers to tout their products. But social bots introduce new scale: they run off a server at practically no cost, and can reach thousands of people. The details that people reveal about their lives, in freely searchable tweets and blogs, offer bots a trove of personal information to work with. “The data coming off social networks allows for more-targeted social ‘hacks’ than ever before,” says Tim Hwang, the director emeritus of the Web Ecology Project. And these hacks use “not just your interests, but your behavior.” A week after Hwang’s experiment ended, Anonymous, a notorious hacker group, penetrated the e-mail accounts of the cyber-security firm HBGary Federal and revealed a solicitation of bids by the United States Air Force in June 2010 for “Persona Management Software”—a program that would enable the government to create multiple fake identities that trawl social-networking sites to collect data on real people and then use that data to gain credibility and to circulate propaganda.--Andy Isaacson

My experience with my blank book, What Every Man Thinks About Apart From Sex, has lessons for all of us. It shows that if you have a clear idea, you deliver it well, and then shout about it loudly (and with the right tools), you can make anything happen – you could even get a blank book to the top of the bestseller charts. One small step for an Ideas Man, one giant leap for publishing.--Shed Simove

Perhaps [Henri] Matisse did suffer from fear and loathing like the rest of us, but there is no trace of them in his work. His studio was a world within the world: a place of equilibrium that, for sixty continuous years, produced images of comfort, refuge, and balanced satisfaction. Nowhere in Matisse's work does one feel a trace of the alienation and conflict which modernism, the mirror of our century, has so often reflected. His paintings are the equivalent to that ideal place, scaled away from the assaults and erosions of history, that Baudelaire imagined in his poem L'Invitation au Voyage.--Robert Hughes

Photo links here and here.

Quotes of the day

We could tie the payoffs to executives not just to the value of common shares but to the long-term value of a broader basket of securities. So, for example, instead of giving executives 3 percent of the value of the firm’s common shares, you could give them, say, 1 percent of the aggregate value of the common shares, preferred shares and bonds.--Lucian Bebchuk

Bebchuk's proposal is an improvement over the current system, but would most likely incent executives to inflate their balance sheets, which would not be usually in the interest of the shareholders or bond holders. Can't completely duck the principal-agent problem.--Cav

Faces of brown-eyed men were rated more dominant than those of blue-eyed men, even when their eyes weren't brown.--JR Minkel

While Obama enumerated the steps his administration has taken to clean up the oil and prevent it from fouling the Gulf coast, he was virtually silent about the complaints state and local officials have consistently voiced—that the cleanup effort is slow, inefficient, and confused by multiple agencies whose activities are inadequately coordinated. He failed to acknowledge these difficulties and to offer specific remedies for them. Indeed, the speech was marked—and marred—by its paucity of compelling specifics.--William Galston

Consider the purely hypothetical case of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The traditional libertarian would argue that regulation is unnecessary because the tort system will hold the driller liable for any damage. But what if the leak is so vast that the driller doesn’t have the resources to pay? The libertarian would respond that the driller should have been forced to post a bond or pay for sufficient insurance to cover any conceivable spill. Perhaps, but then the government needs to regulate the insurance contract and the resources of the insurer. Even more problematically, the libertarian’s solution requires us to place great trust in part of the public sector: the court system. At times, judges have been bribed; any courtroom can be influenced by the best lawyers that money can buy. Andrei Shleifer and I have argued that the early regulations were appealing precisely because of a sense that the courts couldn’t be counted upon to protect private property.--Edward Glaeser

The President’s War on Fossil Fuels will reinvigorate an intense policy debate on the future of energy and environmental policy in America. He may be successful in bending the Congress to his will, as he did with health care. He may fail. I prefer another path that is simpler, faster, more unifying, and more targeted at the problem that is in the forefront of our consciousness this summer. I think it would be good for America to unite and say, “We worked together to prevent that problem in the Gulf from happening again.” It is easy to do so, and I wish the President would choose that path instead.--Keith Hennessey

My view of the bailouts is that they are primarily to save French and German banks. All the talk about "saving the Euro" is a smokescreen. I find it ironic to have an EU official warning about the collapse of democracy. The eurocracy is a very undemocratic organization, chronically in conflict with popular opinion. The bailouts are unpopular, and quite properly so. Any official who claims that that the bailouts should be undertaken in the name of democracy is a poseur.--Arnold Kling

... the market is now more worried about a Spanish government default than a default from either Banco Santander or a major telecom company.--Tyler Cowen

On the one hand, colleges generally protect students who abuse alcohol from being arrested or otherwise punished for vandalism and violence that results. In that sense, college students are treated as children not responsible for their actions. On the other hand, colleges do not impose curfews or consequences for students who abuse alcohol. In that sense, college students are treated as adults entitled to freedom from supervision. As to health insurance, you know that my solution is real health insurance, not prepaid health plans. With real insurance, claims would only be made by people in the top 5 percent of health care expenses. As a result, twenty-somethings would face low premiums and most would be able to afford their own health insurance.--Arnold Kling

Human cooperation is powerfully productive. Still, in this example, simply collecting all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle is not by itself a very valuable achievement. The puzzle must eventually be put together properly to justify the effort spent on finding all the scattered pieces. Think of each jigsaw-puzzle piece as a unit of information that is potentially useful for making the economy work successfully. One piece might be information that deposits of iron ore exist in a certain location in Australia. Another piece might be information about which mining engineers are especially skilled at designing an operation for extracting this ore from the ground. A third piece is information about how best to transport the ore to a smelting plant. A fourth piece is information on how to make a crucial part for the engine of the truck that will transport the iron ore. A fifth piece is how to design the roads on which that truck will be driven. Clearly, the number of pieces of information that must be found and used for iron ore to become, say, a steel girder in a skyscraper is mind-bogglingly immense. It is a number far larger than the mere 1 billion pieces of the jigsaw puzzle in my example. It's beyond foolish to expect any one person (or small group of persons) to find all these pieces of information necessary for the production of steel girders (and steel automobile bodies, steel sheeting for ocean-going tankers, stainless-steel dental tools ... the list is long). Not only is the mere finding of each piece of information too difficult to entrust to a small group of persons; so, too, is the task of putting these pieces together in a way that yields useful final products.--Don Boudreaux

Fast-forward several centuries, and Henry the Lion’s would-be heir is Paul Romer, a gentle economist at Stanford University. Elegant, bespectacled, geekishly curious in a boyish way, Romer is not the kind of person you might picture armed with a two-handed flanged mace, cutting down Slavic marauders. But he is bent on cutting down an adversary almost as resistant: the conventional approach to development in poor countries. Rather than betting that aid dollars can beat poverty, Romer is peddling a radical vision: that dysfunctional nations can kick-start their own development by creating new cities with new rules—Lübeck-style centers of progress that Romer calls “charter cities.” By building urban oases of technocratic sanity, struggling nations could attract investment and jobs; private capital would flood in and foreign aid would not be needed. And since Henry the Lion is not on hand to establish these new cities, Romer looks to the chief source of legitimate coercion that exists today—the governments that preside over the world’s more successful countries. To launch new charter cities, he says, poor countries should lease chunks of territory to enlightened foreign powers, which would take charge as though presiding over some imperial protectorate. Romer’s prescription is not merely neo-medieval, in other words. It is also neo-colonial.--Sebastian Mallaby

In a sense, Britain inadvertently, through its actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we’ve undertaken in the last century.--Paul Romer

Modern societies deny men and women the experience of solidarity, which football [soccer] provides to the point of collective delirium. Most car mechanics and shop assistants feel shut out by high culture; but once a week they bear witness to displays of sublime artistry by men for whom the word genius is sometimes no mere hype. Like a jazz band or drama company, football blends dazzling individual talent with selfless teamwork, thus solving a problem over which sociologists have long agonised. Co-operation and competition are cunningly balanced. Blind loyalty and internecine rivalry gratify some of our most powerful evolutionary instincts. The game also mixes glamour with ordinariness in subtle proportion: players are hero-worshipped, but one reason you revere them is because they are alter egos, who could easily be you. Only God combines intimacy and otherness like this ... The sport is a matter of spectacle but, unlike trooping the colour, one that also invites the intense participation of its onlookers. Men and women whose jobs make no intellectual demands can display astonishing erudition when recalling the game's history or dissecting individual skills. Learned disputes worthy of the ancient Greek forum fill the stands and pubs. Like Bertolt Brecht's theatre, the game turns ordinary people into experts. This vivid sense of tradition contrasts with the historical amnesia of postmodern culture, for which everything that happened up to 10 minutes ago is to be junked as antique. There is even a judicious spot of gender-bending, as players combine the power of a wrestler with the grace of a ballet dancer. Football offers its followers beauty, drama, conflict, liturgy, carnival and the odd spot of tragedy, not to mention a chance to travel to Africa and back while permanently legless. Like some austere religious faith, the game determines what you wear, whom you associate with, what anthems you sing and what shrine of transcendent truth you worship at. Along with television, it is the supreme solution to that age-old dilemma of our political masters: what should we do with them when they're not working?--Terry Eagleton

Yale Fan is going to Harvard.--Gabe Deleon