Quotes of the day

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Alles schläft; einsam wacht--Joseph Mohr

In the beginning God disclosed himself, and that self-disclosure was with God, and that self-disclosure was God.--Don Carson of John 1:1

If you believe, then unbelievable things can sometimes be possible.--Tim Tebow

Tebow. TEE-bow. Verb. To defeat an opponent while overcoming a major impediment. Ex.: Despite having a 102-degree fever, Lucy managed to Tebow her competition for the Miss America pageant through her great determination.--Peter King

Corn grits, cocoa, condensed milk, white bread and sugar. This was America's menu for the starving millions in Soviet Russia during the 1921-23 famine – one of the greatest human disasters in Europe since the Black Death. The famine relief was spearheaded by Herbert Hoover, whose biographers credited him with saving more lives than any person who has ever lived.--CYNTHIA HAVEN

... to the extent you measure poverty as a relative concept, you ensure that no public policy can eliminate what you call poverty.--Arnold Kling

So much for Obama's endlessly repeated promise that if you like the health insurance you have, you can keep it.--David Henderson

We have 37 Christmas trees here at the White House--37! That's a lot, right? Yes, that's a lot of trees. And we also have a 400-pound White House gingerbread house.--Michelle Obama

There is surely no such gulf between Marx and Keynes as there was between Marx and Marshall or Wicksell. Both the Marxist doctrine and its non-Marxist counterpart are well expressed by the self-explanatory phrase that we shall use: the theory of vanishing investment opportunity.--Joseph Schumpeter

North Korea has warned South Korea of "unexpected consequences" if it lights up a Christmas tree-shaped tower near their tense border.--BBC News

Many [New York Times reporters] them seem to have a congenital inability, or, at least, unwillingness, to distinguish between libertarians and conservatives. The differences are not small.--David Henderson

Everybody was laughing because when I signed my tax returns this year I had to get completely wasted.--Lady Gaga

Liberals are inclined to see progressive policies as the solution to family breakdown. Conservatives are inclined to see progressive policies as the cause of family breakdown. I think that the reaction of libertarians is to squirm with discomfort. You think that the liberals are in a bad position intellectually, but you are reluctant to affiliate with conservatives on an issue where they are so. . .umm. . .conservative.--Arnold Kling

Undergraduate tuition at New York University is around $41,000, but parents can be assured their bright young things are still getting The People’s Education, reports the student newspaper The Washington Square News. NYU plans to offer not one, but two classes on the burgeoning social movement known as Occupy Wall Street, so that the 1 percent may study the 99 at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.--Adrianne Jeffries

... the current price of a college degree is not just the balance of four years’ tuition; one must also consider the cost, to students and employers, of the ambiguity hanging over what the degree actually means.

...

One root of the problem is the fact that the college degree is issued by the same institution that is in charge of setting, and enforcing, the standards of that credential, says [Salman] Khan, who holds four degrees himself. This is tantamount to investment banks rating their own securities, he says. Meanwhile, the accrediting agencies that are in charge of making sure those “ratings” are legitimate do not currently focus on what students coming out of those institutions measurably know.--Steve Kolowich

I heard this morning that the non-euro members who did go along [with the new rules giving the EU greater power] did so mostly because they hope to join the euro. Talk about the triumph of hope over experience! This is like supporting the death penalty because you're hoping to end up on death row.--Megan McArdle

What “Anglo-Saxon economists” are doing is confusing their own ideology with reality. Economists tend to look at economic problems as involving incentives. Align incentives properly, and problems are easily solved. The tricky part is all in the figuring out how to get incentives properly aligned.

...

This turns a blind eye, however, to the role of ideological commitment. The strong commitment on the part of European central bankers to austerity may make the incentives irrelevant. All the incentives in the world might not matter because at some level the central bankers believe that the necessity for expansionary monetary policy is incommensurable with their other ideas about how the world works.

...

To put it differently, the monetary experts in Europe may just be too ignorant of the peril they are in thanks to their world view. We cannot count on Draghi and others suddenly taking a more rational approach to monetary policy. They can remain irrational longer than Europe can remain solvent.--John Carney

Over all the notion that the path to safety for banks is to turn them into a service business seems misguided, coming from a place of consumer-finance rhetoric rather than serious thinking about the purposes of a financial industry. The point of a bank is not to reduce credit card fees and clearly disclose mortgage terms, but to provide credit. And the idea that “focusing on the underlying economics of a transaction” can distinguish between a loan and a bond – or a residential mortgage and an RMBS – severely undersells the ingenuity of the financial sector.

...

Bair is probably right that the distinction between “prop trading” and useful activity drawn by the Volcker Rule does not prevent banks from doing all manner of risky things. It wasn’t really intended to: “prop trading” sounded sort of nasty, and people made money doing it, and we’d had a financial crisis, and a futile and stupid gesture was required, so presto, Volcker Rule. But that’s because clearly drawing that line is really hard, and replacing the line drawn by the Volcker Rule – in one sentence (“no prop trading”) or 300 pages – with another arbitrary one-sentence definition is equally unlikely to work.--Matt Levine

Players of an online video game called Foldit have helped researchers discover the structure of an protein-cutting enzyme produced by an AIDS-like virus found in monkeys. Scientists have struggled with the problem for a decade, but the gamers helped crack it in just three weeks.--Jacob Aron

... the bottom line is the bottom line, and the best way to get your boss to appreciate you more is to help him make more money for the firm.--Eric Falkenstein

In whatever it is that we try to do, grow trees, cure the ill, distribute food, keep the lights on or build houses, we would always prefer to do this in whatever manner it is that uses the least resources.

...

We don't say that using 5 tonnes of copper to wire a house is better than using 500 kg to do the same job. Well, we don't say it is better just because we're using more copper that is. So why would we say that having a retail sector that employed more rather than fewer people would be a good idea?

...

Quite, we shouldn't, for the claim is a claim that we should be using more of a scarce resource, labor, to get a job done, the distribution of consumer items. We should no more want to use more labor here than we should use more copper in wiring a house.--Tim Worstall

Image links here, here, here and here.

Quotes of the day

... you might say that for-profit education is a lot like subprime: At some point we’ll get to the rational solution. Just don’t count on it happening before the taxpayers are already staring at epic losses.--Mark Gimien

What underlie crises are bad investment decisions, and they are difficult to regulate away. Sharp and empowered regulators can do a lot to prevent intentionally bad decisions (e.g., fraud). But most investment errors are sincere. Humans are irrational, prone to bouts of foolish optimism. Regulators are humans, too. Worse, when regulators have wide discretion, market participants focus less on fundamentals than on trying to predict the regulators' actions.--aka 'HFM'

Liberals had hoped that Obama’s election marked the beginning of a long progressive era — a new New Deal, a greater Great Society. Instead, from the West Coast to Western Europe, the welfare state is in crisis everywhere they look. The future suddenly seems to belong to austerity and retrenchment — and even, perhaps, to conservatism. In this environment, the rage against Obama for not doing more, now, faster, becomes at least somewhat understandable. It’s not that he hasn’t done a great deal for liberals during his 18 months in office. It’s that liberalism itself may be running out of time.--Ross Douthat

So nightclubs routinely and frankly discriminate by gender and race. Country clubs have been sued for such discrimination; so why doesn’t anyone sue exclusive night clubs? It should be easy to document such discrimination – just video the front of the line and collect stats on features of folks accepted vs. rejected. Is it that we see such clubs as mainly about sex, where we are fine with discrimination and inequality, and not about business or careers, where we object much more?--Robin Hanson

A typical 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bath apartment in the capital now costs about $274,000. That's 22 times the average annual income of a Beijing resident. Unlike in the United States, where home buying traditionally takes place after marriage, owning a place in China has recently become a prerequisite for tying the knot. Experts said securing an apartment in this market signals that a man is successful, family-oriented and able to weather challenging financial circumstances. Put succinctly, homeownership has become the ultimate symbol of virility in today's China.--David Pierson

It turns out that the people in red who were cheering for North Korea in their soccer game against Brazil weren't North Koreans at all, but Chinese actors. According to Hunter Stuart in the Huffington Post, the North Korean government paid them to show up and cheer. It makes sense. If the North Korean government had let a few hundred North Koreans out of North Korea to go to South Africa, odds are that some of them would have defected from that Communist hellhole. Sure, the government could have threatened to kill or at least badly punish the families of the defectors, but they would still have had something else to worry about: that the North Koreans who were let out of their cage would see how other people live and would go back with those stories.--Bryan Caplan

Is FIFA Censoring the U.S. Non-Goal?--Courtney Knapp

But beauty and strangeness persist, theology persists, proving real life is elsewhere. Subjectivity is the ancient haunt of piety and reverence and long, long thoughts.--Marilynne Robinson

I've always been creative, but you can't assume a role without falsification. Even if the role is indistinguishable from your identity, you can't do it. That frightening to me.--Marilynne Robinson

It's easier to achieve acclaim in the workplace than the home, however, and so we fathers gravitate to the places where our cleverness or hard work will find reward, and abrogate our duties at home, and imagine that we are doing this all for our families, when really it is because we are cowards. The most intractable business problem, after all, is infinitely more solvable than a wayward teenager. And so do we become failures as we grasp for accomplishment.--Tony Woodlief

Over the last several years, talking to high school students about Raiders Night, a young adult novel of mine that deals with a football player and his driven dad, I’ve been struck by how regularly boys tense up when the subject of just why they play arises. Remarkably often, once you get past the easy answers -- the prestige of the varsity, the thrill of contact, the friendships, and the girls -- it comes down to seeking the love and attention of dad. When dad manages to use his son as an avatar in his obsessive sports dreams, that love and attention become a whip and a cage. Ask Tiger. ... But after so many decades in the Game, I think the father-son dynamic is more vivid and charged in sports because the relationship blooms in all its loving and violent forms at such a vulnerable time in a kid’s development. That’s why so many grown-ups adore or despise sports. Looking back, I wonder if I was the lucky one after all. When it came to sports, I experienced benign fatherly neglect. That’s undoubtedly one reason I’ve never had a decent jump shot. Fair enough. Thanks, Dad.--Robert Lipsyte

Team sport athletes were perceived as being more desirable as potential mates than individual sport athletes and non-athletes. It is suggested that team sport athletes may have traits associated with good parenting such as cooperation, likeability, and role acceptance, and/or these athletes may be better able to assert dominance in a team setting.--Evolutionary Psychology, 2008

Father's Day is a time to reflect on whether you want to be a parent—or want to be a parent again. If you simply don't like kids, research has little to say to you. If however you're interested in kids, but scared of the sacrifices, research has two big lessons. First, parents' sacrifice is much smaller than it looks, and childless and single is far inferior to married with children. Second, parents' sacrifice is much larger than it has to be. Twin and adoption research shows that you don't have to go the extra mile to prepare your kids for the future. Instead of trying to mold your children into perfect adults, you can safely kick back, relax and enjoy your journey together—and seriously consider adding another passenger.--Bryan Caplan

The "infinite monkey theory"

is flawed:

if a monkey hits keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time, it will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. ... After one month - admittedly not an "infinite" amount of time - the monkeys had partially destroyed the machine, used it as a lavatory, and mostly typed the letter "s".

I guess it's back to the typewrit, er, drawing board for Richard Dawkins et al.

Via Tyler Cowen.

Quotes of the day

Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled only $8,397 during [Scott] Fitzgerald’s lifetime. Today Gatsby is read in nearly every high school and college and regularly produces $500,000 a year in [Fitzgerald's daughter] Scottie's trust for her children.--William Quirk

Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea experienced great economic success: all have per capita GDP that is at least seven times higher than in 1960. ... The disastrous experience with public housing in the United States should give us pause about its implementation elsewhere. One can also find examples of public housing becoming sinkholes of corruption in African countries. Yet there is no gainsaying the fundamental success of Hong Kong and Singapore.--Richard Green

Perhaps us aid critics are just not as good as the medical critics. Or perhaps it is because we care so much more whether medicine really works than whether aid or military intervention really works?--William Easterly

I think there are three qualities that people believe are weaknesses, but which I believe are strengths: hypochondria, paranoia and megalomania.--Jacques Attali

Who single-sources a quote of a public figure praising slavery?--Megan McArdle

It’s superb. It highlights the essence of political discourse: dishonesty without lying.--Russ Roberts

I am not only against inflation but I am also against deflation. So, once again, a badly programmed monetary policy prolonged the depression.--F.A. Hayek

Let’s talk about the real world for a moment… we broke it. Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry. —Jon Stewart

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. And if you do notice what he’s really doing, he’s not spending your money just to waste it or give it to his friends. He’s doing it because he had to. He’s saving lives. The lives of America’s gallant men and women in uniform. Or America’s crippled children. Or to prevent the elderly from living lives of quiet desperation. Or to save the economy. Whatever. As long as you get sucked in, they don’t care what they say. Don’t get sucked in.--Russ Roberts

Bondholders are still going along with our apparently reckless spending plans on the assumption that we'll have to do something, eventually. I'm sure we will. But that "something" is going to be pretty ugly, and almost certainly done at the worst possible time, as Japan's case may end up illustrating. It may even be default, if we don't start acting like adults relatively soon. Sovereign debt risk seems to be back--and the debt is literally bigger than ever.--Megan McArdle

Purists will complain that we've sapped our language of its poetry by turning it into a blunter instrument. The purists are wrong. We're still poets. We've just traded sonnets for haiku. Today, the romance of our language is found in its smallest constructions, in its syllables and how they sound when we put them together, simply, quietly. Our words have white space around them. That's where we've become artists again.--Esquire

I don’t know how you guys walk around with those things.--Elaine Bennis

I wouldn't want to join a church that would accept me.--Malcolm Muggeridge

... a few years ago, University of Pennsylvania researcher Ian Blair discovered that vitamin C appeared to encourage the creation of substances that can harm DNA and thus cause cancer. This is hardly firm evidence that C is the latest surprise cancer agent, but it probably should give C junkies pause. Your doctor may still swear by the vitamin's efficacy and benignity, but if you want to err on the side of caution, cut back on C.--Jim Atkinson

You never learn anything from people who agree with you, and I like to learn.--Nemo J. Publius

For the past six years, I've been teaching students in the Centurions Program to draw a grid listing the four basic questions that most people ask about life: Where did I come from? What's my purpose? Why is there sin and suffering? Is redemption possible? Then, on the other side of the matrix, we list the various philosophies and prominent world religions. By examining how each view answers the four questions, we can determine which worldviews conform to the way things really are. This is the correspondence theory of truth—a thoroughly rational test.--Chuck Colson

Quotes of the day

I always point out that Michael Palin is very miffed that he is no longer the funniest Palin.--John Cleese

I know this call may be a little unusual. You and I have been trying to kill each other for years.--Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson on the phone with Dick Fuld

There's something in us that needs to believe that awful things must happen for a reason. And in some cosmic sense, they do--there are no uncaused causes running around the universe. But that doesn't mean that the reason they happened is that the person they happened to did something to deserve it.--Megan McArdle

In a Keynesian recession, you are temporarily laid off because of excess inventories and deficient aggregate demand. You wait to be recalled by your firm. This was true of recessions from the end of the second World War through the 1980 recession. Even the 1975 recession, which was a "supply shock" (higher oil prices, requiring some permanent readjustments), had a relatively low share of permanent job losses. In a Recalculation, you permanently lose your job and you have to find something else. The Recalculation model increasingly holds as we move away from an economy dominated by manufacturing.--Arnold Kling

If you look at your greatest nightmare—if something were to happen that would make you feel you had no reason to live—that's a god.--Tim Keller

Social customs define what’s taboo. Therefore, saying taboo language is uniformly sinful implies that our social customs uniformly align with God’s will.--Abraham Piper

Donors and recipients agree: Money flows from old to young. According to donors, parent-->child giving is almost ten times as big as child-->parent giving. According to recipients, parent-->child giving is over twenty five times as big as child--> parent giving.--Bryan Caplan

You're forgetting about Social Security and Medicare.--Devin Finbarr

If the issue is theirs, forgive, coach, and appropriately reposition. If the issue is yours, own it, and convert it into wisdom. Either way, you get better with every failure. And that’s a success.--Steven Furtick

As the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics--Robert Bernstein

Yes, we have to factor in the ”unknown unknowns” but that is true for anything we now do. We don’t really even know for sure what would happened without carbon abatement. It is even possible that those “climate cooling Cassandras” of the 1970s were fundamentally right. Perhaps if we remove the excess carbon we’ll slide right into an Ice Age. --Scott Sumner

Even though the logic of the temperature tax/subsidy is even stronger than second-best policies like carbon taxes, and even though the environmental movement strongly supports carbon taxes, I predict they will oppose this idea. I believe that many in the environmental movement are not utilitarians, and will be able to sleep at night putting a pristine environment ahead of the welfare of 2 billion rural Asians struggling to escape the grinding poverty of the countryside.--Scott Sumner

The new Rogoff and Reinhart book says that the four most dangerous words in finance are "This time is different." When investors start to think that "this time is different," they are ready to participate in a dangerous bubble. Perhaps the fallacy of "This time is different" also applies to regulatory reform. It may be dangerous to think that with a new round of regulatory reform we are going to see different results from past regulatory reforms.--Arnold Kling

Those who witnessed Japan's spectacular rise and fall in the 1980s should get a familiar feeling watching China these days.--Michael Auslin

Absence of evidence is not evidence of Absence

A review of Antony Flew's "There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind".

Quotes of the day

Capitalism without capital is nothing but an ism.--Jesse Jackson

To exist, you must have mass. Mass is equivalent to energy. Energy is nothing but a concept. Therefore, you are nothing but a concept, probably in a computer program designed by someone else. Atheists say God doesn’t exist. I say atheists don’t exist.--Scott Adams

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).

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?

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?