Author: Ramsi Woodcock

Categories
Monopolization

A Standard Flight

Once, we standardized the price, and let the airlines compete on the product. That was nice, but elitist, because the standardized price was high.

Now, we standardize nothing, except safety. Because the consumer notices only price, the airlines compete on headline fares, to fool the consumer, and debase the product to maximize profit.

The solution is to standardize the product, and let the airlines compete on price. Federally-mandated minimum standards for leg room, food service, customer service, and so on.

Categories
Philoeconomica Quantity World

The Discreteness of Death

Death is a discrete phenomenon. It is a creature of units. Vegetation relies on sunlight for life. A plant can die, however, only because it is a unit of vegetation. When the amount of light falls from 3.481 to 2.377 on some scale, there is death only because each plant requires a minimum of 0.05 of light, or 0.3, or 0.4.

So, why? Why this discreteness?

Categories
Philoeconomica

Ecoan

Suppose that you are indifferent between two fountain pens and one pencil and one fountain pen and a hundred pencils. But at current prices you need more wealth to buy a fountain pen plus a hundred pencils than to buy two fountain pens and one pencil. Are you therefore poorer if you are forced to give up 99 pencils in exchange for a fountain pen?

Categories
Monopolization

Not a Curse

Bigness is billions of human beings working together to make each others’ lives better, in perfect harmony and love. What’s wrong with that? I’m with Galbraith, not Brandeis.

Categories
Civilization Despair World

Left Nowhere

The opposition Labour Party is riven by its own divisions. Its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, tends to be skeptical toward Britain’s global role.

The transatlantic left’s isolationism is a huge problem. And uncharacteristic. But that’s what happens when you make everything a matter of principle.

Categories
World

Irresponsibility

Biden: “They seek a return to a world where the strong impose their will through military might, corruption or criminality — while weaker neighbors fall in line.”

How can you be in politics that long and not think military might has something to do with our global influence? I mean, the only country that has taken out the government of another by arms in the last 20 years is us. It’s one thing to think our power is a force for good, but quite another to think we don’t exercise power. We want to run the world and enjoy the dignity of the meek. That’s not a good basis for negotiation with the rest of the world. No, no. I don’t think we can do business along those lines.

 

Categories
World

Self-Determination as Imperial Policy

I am much concerned these days with self-determination as a bad thing in American foreign policy. By self-determination I mean the notion that we should support whatever groups wish to be free. The Kurds in Turkey. The Tibetans in China, and so on.

By a very fortunate coincidence, the more we promote freedom of this kind the weaker our enemies become; at an extreme the world entire consists of us plus an infinity of finely divided completely free groups. It is a commonplace that the larger the number of independent decisionmakers the harder it is for them to do anything together as a group. The collective action problem. It is for this reason that we don’t rely on victims to organize to solve environmental problems (we have the EPA instead) and for which we chose to form the United States and then killed hundreds of thousands of people in order to preserve them.

We tend to treat the promotion of self-determination as a selfless act of foreign policy, but it is not. Another name for it is the sowing of division, a very old tool of empire. A really selfless bit of policy would be for us not only not to encourage self-determination but instead affirmatively to promote the empires of others.  But that would be folly, for we would simply be creating the wolves that one day would turn upon us!

But wait, the definition of a selfless act is one that is against interest. If we don’t feel threatened by the promotion of self-determination abroad, that means it cannot be self-less. In our bones we know the promotion of self-determination to be a power play, a mode of domination all the sweeter in that it allows us both to dominate and to carry the mantle of selflessness.

Categories
Meta Miscellany World

Infinity

Nine are enough.

Categories
Civilization Meta Philoeconomica Quantity

The Illiteracy of the Literate

The complex feelings of lawyers and humanist scholars with respect to quantitative subjects, and particularly the quantifization of the social sciences, ought to give them greater empathy for the illiterate and uneducated. The humanist scholar is to the scientist as the illiterate are to the literate.

The illiterate view books with distrust, for books are used to undermine their most heartfelt positions in ways against which they are unable to mount a defense. But this is precisely how the lawyer feels when her nuanced doctrinal argument is demolished by a mathematical model of the economy that shows that regardless of the substance of the legal rule, the same economic outcome will obtain.

“It’s just mathematical mumbo jumbo,” says the lawyer. “These economists don’t know how things work in the real world.” But what the lawyer cannot do is to beat the economist at her own game. She can’t show that the economic model cannot withstand close scrutiny; all she can do is try to delegitimize the entire method. But the illiterate levy the same charge on the literate: “it’s just book learning,” they say. They cannot defend themselves in writing; but they can try to delegitimize writing itself.

It is particularly bitter for the humanists that they have been socialized to occupy the power position. For millennia, since the invention of writing, they have been the ones who use their learning to lord it over others. But now these merely-literates, these innumerates, must know what it means to be crushed by ideas. A very bitter position indeed.

I do not mean to say that the mathematicians have any better claim on the truth. But if the humanists think the mathematicians don’t, then it should perhaps worry the humanists to think that maybe they don’t either, in relation to the illiterate. Or maybe we are marching forward, after all, from one stage of intellectual progress to the next!

Categories
Miscellany

An Intuitively Sufficient Statistic

You have a set of samples and you are interested in learning something about the probability distribution from which they are drawn. That something is the parameter of interest. It might be the mean. If you do something to the samples, add them together, for example, then you might lose some piece of information that they contain regarding the parameter. But you also might not. Whether you lose information or not by manipulating your samples depends on what you do to them.

For example, if you are sampling from a binomial distribution for which success has value 1 and failure value 0, then adding up the results of the samples won’t destroy information about the mean of the distribution (i.e., the probability of success). That’s because the mean is expressed in the number of successes, rather than their order. You know just as much about the mean of the distribution if your first nine samples are successes and your tenth a failure as if your first is a failure and the next 9 successes. In other words, when you add up the results, you lose information on the order with which the successes occurred, but the mean does not determine that order, and so you don’t lose any information relevant to determining the mean.

When the mean increases, the sample results change because you end up with more successes. So a statistic that counts successes changes too. Both the sample and the statistic change in the same way. That is what happens when a statistic is “sufficient.”

That’s why for a sufficient statistic the probability of drawing a particular sample, conditional on a particular result for the statistic, is independent of the parameter. As the parameter changes, both the sample and the statistic change in the same way. So their relationship to each other remains constant regardless of what happens to the parameter. In a sense, the sufficient statistic transforms the sample, instead of altering it. So any change to the parameter doesn’t change the relationship between the samples and the statistic. Sample and statistic are just different ways of expressing the same thing about the parameter.

The sample conditional on the statistic is just the ratio of the probability of the sample to that of the statistic. This means that if the statistic is sufficient, the probabilities of the sample and the statistic must both be products of the parameter, so that the parameter will cancel out and therefore have no effect on this conditional probability.