Ear Rational Thoughts

Baseball, home runs, steroids

The top 500 individual single-seasons for home runs all time, summed per year, normalized to standard deviations (from the 1920-1994 period). The red lines are the years 1995 (the year after the strike) and 2007 (the first year of HGH testing). All of the years in this period are between 4 and 8 standard deviations above the mean (note that the data are slightly non-gaussian so the mean and stddev are slightly inaccurate).

Steve Jobs' Influence

I was thinking about how great Steve Jobs is, and it dawned on me that you can really see his influence most when you compare the industries he's in to those he's not. In an industry that Steve Jobs is in, you can take any 5 year period and the technology you have at the end of the period would look magical to people living at the start. In industries he's not in, things might change slowly, but nothing seems even remotely magical.

Think about computers from 1979 compared to the Macintosh (1984) [just watch the tape of his Macintosh release – the crowd's reaction is the reaction you have when you watch a really good magician]. Or PCs in 1997 (when he returned to Apple) to 2002 (in 1997 computers were all white boxes; in 2002, think of the iMac), or from 2002 to 2007 (original iMac to the slick iMac with the flat screen). Or think of cartoons in 1990 when he was running Pixar to 1995 when Toy Story was released. Or music in 1999 (compact discs) to 2004 (iPod + iTunes) to 2009 (iPod touch). Or cell phones in 2003 to 2008 (iPhone). Or the iPad to the (what to compare it to? a book? a magazine? a laptop?).

Then think about PCs from 1986 (when he left Apple) to 1996 (when he returned). They're basically the same over that 10 year period (they just got incrementally faster). Or any 5 year period before 2001 in music technology. Sure you had LPs going to tapes going to CDs, but no one would regard that as magical, it was just more convenient each time. Or take a VHS player to a DVD to a blueray. Sure the picture improves, but it's just the same thing with a slightly higher SNR. Or even phones over any 5 year period before 2008. Cell phones evolved slowly from useless bricks to the Blackberry between the early 80s and the mid 2000s, but at no point in there was a 5 year period where you couldn't predict what the phones would look like 5 years later.

Really, over the last 30 years, nearly all of the magical things we now have came from Steve Jobs (I would put the Internet as the one thing he didn't directly work on, although that arguably took longer than 5 years). The world keeps evolving at a decent clip, but it's really just from Steve Jobs that you get those "holy crap, I never thought I'd see something like that" moments. I wonder if we'll ever get those again.

How really, really awful science is in medicine

First, the Atlantic has a really terrific post on how really, really awful science is in medicine.

80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.

... He zoomed in on 49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years... Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated.

... How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all. ...

It goes on and on. Medicine is just not in the least bit scientific. At all. It's really, really sad.

The cost of health care isn't a factor

Capre diem on the cost of care: "But almost 21 million of those uninsured are between the ages of 18 and 34, which is 41% of all uninsured.... At least in Michigan for young adults between the ages of 18 and 30, insurance is available for as little as $49.30 per month through ..., which is about the same monthly cost as a cell phone."

Some links on government

Robin Hanson on bike helmets. The summary, even with a great increase in helmets "Cyclist head injuries didn’t obviously fall a lot, and non-head injuries rose a lot."

Shannon Love on elite leftists. "Elitism isn’t defined by who benefits, elitism is defined by who decides."

A. Barton Hinkle on our obligation to government. His thesis seems to be that it's very difficult to come up with an explanation for our obligations.

Kevin Williamson on the legitimacy of the state: "If you’re not willing to have somebody hauled off at gunpoint over the project, then it’s probably not a legitimate concern of the state."

Jeff Jacoby has a pull-no-punches piece on public sector unions:

Total federal civilian compensation in 2008 averaged $119,982—more than twice the $59,908 in wages and benefits earned by the average private-sector employee.

... But a fourth advantage is more significant than any of these: government labor unions can reward politicians who give them what they want and punish those who don't. As a result, negotiations in the public sector have an inherent bias toward higher salaries, more lavish benefits, and more inflexible work rules. "This is because public unions can organize politically and influence elections," Lowenstein remarks in While America Aged, which is to say, they can vote their bosses out of office. This gives them direct clout over the people who determine their benefits. By contrast, the [United Auto Workers], for all its muscle, cannot vote the CEO of General Motors out of a job.

David Brooks on money in politics: "But there’s no evidence to suggest that campaign spending has the outsize role that the candidates, the consultants and the political press often imagine."

Don Boudreaux on liberal's ideas: "modern “liberalism’s” ideas are about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas – each one individually chosen, practiced, assessed, and modified ... – with a relatively paltry set of ‘Big Ideas’ that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced not by the natural give, take, and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people but, rather, by guns wielded by those whose overriding ‘idea’ is among the most simple-minded and antediluvian notions in history, namely, that those with the power of the sword are anointed to lord it over the rest of us."

Some links on housing

David Leonhardt on the bears in housing:

If you believe housing resembles a luxury good, then you’ll end up thinking house prices will rise nearly as fast as incomes in the long run and that houses today aren’t terribly overvalued. If housing is a staple, though, prices will rise more slowly — with general inflation, as food tends to.

Then a graph from Scott Sumner

Some links on capitalism

Arnold Kling on jobs:

Instead, to say that nobody knows how to create economic activity is to self-marginalize. Politicians do not want to hear that at all. They want to hear that there is an Output Gap, and their spending can help to fill it.

David Henderson:

Somewhere along the way, during the last 50 years, the critique of capitalism changed from condemning its failure to spread the wealth to condemning the very opposite. Suddenly the great sin of capitalism was that it was producing too much, making us all too materialistic, fueling economic growth at the expense of other values, spreading middle-class decadence, and generally causing society to be too caught up in productivity and too focused on the standard of living.

Don Boudreaux on fair trade: "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"

xkcd on capitalism

Robin Hanson on Opinions

Robin Hanson:

Signs that your opinions function more to signal loyalty and ability than to estimate truth:

1. You find it hard to be enthusiastic for something until you know that others oppose it.

2. You have little interest in getting clear on what exactly is the position being argued.

3. Realizing that a topic is important and neglected doesn’t make you much interested.

4. You have little interest in digging to bigger topics behind commonly argued topics.

5. You are less interested in a topic when you don’t foresee being able to talk about it.

6. You are uncomfortable taking a position near the middle of the opinion distribution.

7. You are uncomfortable taking a position of high uncertainty about who is right.

There are more, all of them spot on.

On pensions

First, Bryan Caplan:

While the ratio of folks over 65 to younger adults (OADR) will almost double in 45 years, the ratio of disabled to healthy adults (ADDR) will hardly change at all.

Then Arnold Kling:

Pension plans operated by state governments on behalf of their employees are underfunded by an estimated $452 billion according to official reports, with total liabilities of $2.8 trillion and total assets of $2.3 trillion in 2008. However, many economists argue that even these daunting liabilities are understated. Current public sector accounting methods allow plans to assume they can earn high investment returns without any risk. Using methods that are required for private sector pensions, which value pension liabilities according to likelihood of payment rather than the return expected on pension assets, total liabilities amount to $5.2 trillion and the unfunded liability rises to $3 trillion.

Locovores

Two posts on the locovore movement.

First, Steven Landsburg picks apart the emphasis on counting joules:

... The implicit recommendation seems to be that when you’re choosing a tomato, you should care about all the energy costs.

... And here are some other things you should care about: How many grapes were sacrificed by growing that California tomato in a place where there might have been a vineyard? How many morning commutes are increased, and by how much, because that New York greenhouse displaces a conveniently located housing development? ...

Budiansky ignores all that to focus strictly on energy consumpion. But the quality of our lives depends on a lot more than energy consumption, so Budiansky’s narrow-minded computations are strictly loco.

How, then, could one ever hope to do the right computation? How can we possibly gather enough information to compare the opportunity costs of land, fertlizers, equipment, workers, transportation and energy costs (among many others) and reach a conclusion about which tomato imposes the fewest costs on our neighbors?

Well, it turns out there’s actually a way to do that. You do it by looking at a single number that does an excellent job of reflecting all those costs. That number is known as the price of the tomato.

The Rational Optimist continues the commentary:

[The book describes] the lives of six North Koreans in the city of Chongjin before they defected to the south. They lived free from the evils of consumerism, ... . They had few possessions at all, let alone SUVs. Their pets needed no grooming, because they had been eaten. And they lived as locavores off the land, in all its organic purity, recycling their waste so that the local farmland stank of ‘night soil’. ...

... North Koreans learned to swallow their pride and hold their noses. They picked kernels of undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals...on the beaches, people dug out shellfish from the sand and filled buckets with seaweed.

Sounds like the ideal way of life as preached by much of the western environmental priesthood, does it not? Yet between 600,000 and 2 million died of hunger. The wildlife was devastated. Pollution was terrible.

...

There is something terribly wrong with the standard litany we recite about the environment. It just is not true that extravagant western lifestyles come at the expense of nature. The more I see of the world, the more persuaded I am that human prosperity is actually good for wildlife, because it leads to investment in things that boost biodiversity. ... Things that make it unnecessary to use the local forest as a source of fuel, the local valley as a source of food and the local stream as a dump for waste. Things that value a moose as something other than a meal.

The oft repeated recommendation of the environmental movement that we live more locally, live off the land, live with fewer choices, fewer inputs, fewer resources and fewer possessions would in fact result in devastation not just for human life but for wildlife too. Going back to nature would be a disaster for nature.

H/T Don Boudreaux for both.