What does Google prediction spit out when you type the word “why” on Google search? Here’s what we got when we tried this little experiment from our home in Orlando, Florida at approximately 2am EST on 7 December 2014: Continue reading
Hat tip to SirSilencer via reddit.
You can see the most common scores in such sports as basketball, football, and baseball in Philip Bump’s fun Wonkblog post here. Mr Bump writes: “Each sport follows a rough bell curve … Teams that regularly fall on the left side of that curve do poorly. Teams that land on the right side do well.” Read more about Gaussian distributions here.
In light of the recent egregious examples of rigged grand juries, we want to revisit Walter Olson’s perceptive post dated 21 August 2014 on the “culture of petty fines” in places like Ferguson, Missouri. Here is an excerpt:
Race is one reason for constant police hassle in towns like Ferguson. Revenue is another. In a Cato post …, I note that court fees are the second biggest source of revenue for the small city, and that the Ferguson municipal court last year issued three arrest warrants and presided over 1.5 cases per household. As a result, many residents of the town “wind up interacting constantly with law enforcement because of a culture of petty fines” — enough to make for tense relations between the community and the police even aside from the racial divide …
In other words, policemen and judges in many cities are exploiting poor people to finance the budgets of local governments. (Recall that Michael Brown was initially hassled by Officer Darren Wilson for jaywalking, while Eric Garner was suspected of selling “loosies” or untaxed cigarettes.) These forms of petty police harassment need to stop. Leave us alone already!
Is Jadeveon Clowney a bust? Although the lackadaisical and injury-prone Clowney was the overall #1 pick in the 2014 NFL Draft, he has played in just four regular season games this year, with seven tackles and zero sacks. He’s now on injured reserve and won’t play any more games this season. Yet Mr Clowney still has his defenders. Tania Ganguli, for example, writes that it is “unfair” and “inaccurate” to call a player a bust for going on injured reserve. Isn’t this line of reasoning, however, an example of the sunk cost fallacy? The Houston Texans not only squandered their first-round draft pick; they also gave Mr Clowney a fully-guaranteed $22.2 million contract, including an up-front $14.5 million signing bonus. But all this is in the past and does not change the fact that Clowney had a terrible rookie season and is unlikely to live up to his hype.
The Texans should have taken heed of this sign.
That is the title of this excellent essay by Viktor Vanberg and the late James Buchanan, which was recently reprinted in Daniel Hausman, editor, The Philosophy of Economics, Cambridge U Press (2008), pp. 378-398. Here is a picture of the book in which the essay appears:
In brief, Vanberg and Buchanan argue against equilibrium analysis and highlight the role of choice and creativity in markets. Here, for example, is one of our favorites sentences from their paper:
“The market economy, as an aggregation, neither maximizes nor minimizes anything. It simply allows participants to pursue that which they value … within the constraints of general ‘rules of the game’ that allow, and provide incentives for, individuals to try out new ways of doing things. There simply is no ‘external,’ independently defined objective against which the results of market processes can be evaluated.”
In other words, standard econ concepts such as “general equilibrium” and “perfect competition” are not only nonsense — non-existent and imaginary entities like the luminiferous aether in Newtonian physics — such notions also neglect the critical role of creativity and human choice in our lives. In addition, we appreciate Vanberg and Buchanan’s emphasis on the role of the ‘rules of the game’ in their creative conception of markets. Rules are a necessary condition for the process of exchange; simply put, without rules there are no markets. Ideally, then, such rules should be designed to encourage positive-sum exchanges and entrepreneurial risk-taking, while penalizing theft and other forms of banditry.
The increasing problem of overcriminalization (of private citizens and businesses, that is — policemen and regulators almost always get a free pass) has been noted before. In summary, overcriminalization threatens our economic liberties and undermines the rule of law. Matt Kaiser, moreover, describes overcriminalization as a reverse or negative lottery. He writes (emphasis by us):
It’s been said before, but probably bears repeating: we have more than 4,000 statutes in the United States Code that provide for criminal punishment — 215 of these relate to false statements alone. There are more than 300,000 regulations that allow for criminal enforcement, according to former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. As … Judge [Alex] Kozinski has said, in light of this ballooning of federal criminal law, “most Americans are criminals and don’t even know it.” The … federal criminal justice system is basically a lottery that all of us are entered in that no one wants to win.
You can read the well-drafted, five-page complaint filed by Judy Huth against Bill Cosby for yourself. Ms Huth’s complaint alleges three causes of actions or legal claims: (1) sexual battery, (2) intentional infliction of emotional distress, and (3) negligent infliction of emotional distress. Here are some technical and procedural questions for my law students: Are these tort claims (dating from the 1970s) now “stale“? If so, could the District Attorney still bring criminal charges against Cosby after so many years? Also, could Cosby’s lawyers remove this complaint to federal court?
Happy Lawsuits!
“On some shelf in some hexagon [within the Library of Babel], it was argued, there must exist a book that is the cipher and perfect compendium of all other books *** How was one to locate the idolized secret hexagon that sheltered [this perfect book]? Someone proposed searching by regression. To locate book A, first consult book B, which tells where book A can be found; to locate book B, first consult book C, and so on, to infinity … It is in ventures such as these that I have squandered and spent my years.” (English translation by Andrew Hurley; emphasis added by us; image below courtesy of Kristofer Porter.)
“En algún anaquel de algún hexágono (razonaron los hombres) debe existir un libro que sea la cifra y el compendio perfecto de todos los demás [libros en la Biblioteca de Babel] *** ¿Cómo localizer el venerado hexágono secreto que lo hospedaba? Alguien propuso un método regresivo: Para localizar el libro A, consultar previamente un libro B que indique el sitio de A; para localizar el libro B, consultar previamente un libro C, y así hasta lo infinito … En aventuras de ésas, he prodigado y consumido mis años.”
Jorge Luis Borges, “La biblioteca de Babel” (1941).
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