prior probability

Sunday funday! Animation by Natsumi Comoto (hat tip: Kottke).

Is Disney’s Star Wars strategy counter-productive? More details about Disney’s decision-making are available here. (Also, here is Wikipedia’s entry for diminshing marginal utility.)

Apparently not, as noted in this fascinating report by Michael Schulson on “The Physics (and Economics, and Politics) of Wheelchairs on Planes.” File under: Hmmm.

Another police chase (this one in South Florida) on busy highways led to the deaths of two innocent civilians, including Frank Ordoñez, a UPS driver and father of two children. Call me a “Monday morning quarterback,” but why didn’t the police just call off the chase as soon as the robbers hijacked the UPS van? After all, all UPS trucks have GPS tracking devices.

Update (4:26 PM): “Nineteen officers from five agencies fired into the UPS truck, and the number of rounds expended could exceed 200 …” File under: WTF? More infuriating details here.

Source: The Root

During the last ten years (2009-2019), I authored or co-authored the following five papers in which I explored a wide variety of popular culture artifacts (novels, movies, TV shows, urban legends, etc.) from a legal perspective:

1. Gödel’s loophole (2013) (Kurt Gödel’s alleged discovery of a logical contradiction in the U.S. Constitution).

2. Clones and the Coase theorem, with Orlando Martinez (2012) (Blade Runner).

3. Buy or bite? (2014) (vampires).

4. Finding Santiago (2015) (Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea).

5. Breaking Bad Promises (in progress) (Breaking Bad, Mexican narcocorridos, payday loans).

Enjoy!

As I mentioned in my previous post, my colleague Tyler Cowen presented a provocative thesis during his Kenneth Arrow lecture at Stanford last month. In brief, Cowen’s thesis is that the well-being, happiness, and welfare of future generations should count just as much as the well-being of current generations. To his credit, however, Cowen spent most of his lecture identifying several blind spots in his thesis. These blind spots can be reformulated as a series of five questions as follows:

1. When? How far into the future should we gaze? (This question can be formulated in different ways: What is the cut-off point? How many generations into the future should we take into account today?)

2. How? Is there a tried-and-true recipe for maximizing human happiness or well-being or “social welfare”? Also, how should we define these highfalutin values? Which takes us to the next question …

3. What? Even if we were able to define these values and discover a reliable recipe for maximizing them, what should we be maximizing–total or per capita human well-being? That is, should we try to maximize the total or aggregate amount of social welfare, or should we instead try to maximize the welfare or well-being of each individual member of a given society?

4. Who? Who are the members of this “given” society? Should we, for example, include animals in the social-welfare function?

5. I will conclude this post with an additional question of my own: Where? Where in the Devil should all this definitional and maximizing work take place? In one’s local city hall? At the State or federal level? At the United Nations?

For his part, Cowen’s humble reply to these thorny questions is, “I don’t know.” In other words, Cowen still has a lot of work to do …

In this post I shall summarize the three most original ideas or premises that my friend and colleague Tyler Cowen (George Mason University) presented during his thought-provoking Kenneth Arrow lecture on economics and ethics last month:

1. According to Professor Cowen, the social discount rate (SDV) should be zero. That is just a fancy way of saying that the well-being and happiness of future generations should count just as much as the well-being of current generations. (A formal statement of SDV is pictured below.)
2. At the same time, Cowen concedes that the optimal discount rate depends on one’s time horizon. The longer your time horizon is, the lower the discount rate should be, and conversely, the shorter your time horizon is, the higher the discount rate should be. (For example, if the world were to end tomorrow, we should throw a big party and enjoy ourselves today.)
3. As a result, for Cowen the key question in economics and ethics is the same: what is the relevant time horizon? To me, the most original idea in Cowen’s lecture was this statement: “The application of your moral argument is time dependent.” In other words, what is moral or ethical depends on your time horizon!

In addition, Cowen spent most of his lecture identifying the shortcomings or problems with his approach to economics and ethics. I will summarize these problems in my next blog post.

Source: Sanket Suman

In response to Tyler Cowen’s recent Kenneth Arrow Lecture at Stanford, I am reposting below my eight-part review and critique of Cowen’s important 2018 book Stubborn Attachments:

1. What moral or legal duties do we owe to future generations? (27 Nov. 2018);
2. Cowen’s axiom (28 Nov. 2018);
3. Cowen’s hedge (29 Nov. 2019);
4. An intertemporal golden rule (29 Nov. 2019);
5. Cowen’s six critical issues (part 1 of 2) (30 Nov. 2019);
6. Cowen’s six critical issues (part 2 of 2) (3 Dec. 2019);
7. Our critique of Stubborn Attachments (4 Dec. 2019);
8. An intertemporal golden rule: closing thoughts (4 Dec. 2019).

Cowen is one the most original economists and public intellectuals of our time, so I will have a lot more to say about Cowen’s recent lecture in my next few blog posts.

Image credit: Gaurav Awasthi

Following up on our previous post, check out this op-ed by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen explaining why we need a new science of progress. According to Mssrs Collison & Cowen, “there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up.” But what is “progress”? Collison & Cowen define progress broadly as that “combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries.” (What motivates their fetish with recent history? What about those advancements that occurred prior to 1800 AD?) File under: “hubris”?