Bluematter.

Tony & Paul showing off their ingenious creativity

Best of National Geographic 2007

Economics vs Sociology and more, with Googlefight!

Last week's earthquakes visualized on Google Maps

The ocean's ugliest fish

For Lucas, the incident, which occurred in "the summer of 1965 or '66," was strategy. Strictly business. Because, as Lucas recalls, "when you're in the kind of work I was in, you've got to be for real. You've got to show what you're willing to do."

"Everyone, Goldfinger Terrell, Willie Abraham, Hollywood Harold, was talking about this big guy, this Tango. About six five, 270 pounds, quick on his feet . . . He killed two or three guys with his hands. Had this big bald head, like Mr. Clean. Wore those Mafia undershirts. Everyone was scared of him. So I figured, Tango, you're my man.

"I went up to him, asked him if he wanted to do something, some business. I gave him $5,000 worth of merchandise. Because I know he was gonna fuck up. That's the kind of guy he was. Two weeks later, I go talk to him. 'Look, man,' I say. 'Hey, man, when you gonna pay me?'

"Then, like I knew he would, he started getting hot, going into one of his gorilla acts. He was one of them silverback gorillas, you know, you seen them in the jungle. A silverback gorilla, that's what he was.

"He started cursing, saying he was going to make me his bitch and he'd do the same to my mama too. Well, as of now, he's dead. No question, a dead man. But I let him talk. A dead man got a right to say what he wants. Now the whole block is there, to see if I'm going to pussy out. He was still yelling. So I said to him, 'When you get through, let me know.' "

"Then the motherfucker broke for me. But he was too late. I shot him. Four times, right through here: bam, bam, bam, bam.

"Yeah, it was right there," says Frank Lucas, 35 years after the shooting, pointing out the car window. "The boy didn't have no head. The whole shit blowed out back there . . . That was my real initiation fee into taking over completely down here. Because I killed the baddest motherfucker. Not just in Harlem but in the world."

"After I killed that boy," Frank Lucas goes on, gesturing toward the corner on the other side of 116th Street, "from that day on, I could take any amount of money, set it on the corner, and put my name on it. FRANK LUCAS. I guarantee you, nobody would touch it."

This is from 'The Return of Superfly', a New York magazine story that led to Ridley Scott's 'American Gangster'. The film is OK, though not a must-see. The NY mag story is fantastic, I'm probably quoting its least interesting part. Here is a recent discussion between Frank Lucas and Nicky Barnes.

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Christmas lights decoration taken a bit too far

I am an innocent man, and something very wrong is taking place tonight. May God bless you all. I am ready.

This is from the last statement of L T Herrera, from a long, comprehensive list of last statements preserved by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. (via Pharyngula)

Excerpts from the opinion of the Supreme Court, delivered by Chief Justice Rehnquist, including a description of the case:

Petitioner Leonel Torres Herrera was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in January 1982. He unsuccessfully challenged the conviction on direct appeal and state collateral proceedings in the Texas state courts, and in a federal habeas petition. In February 1992--10 years after his conviction--he urged in a second federal habeas petition that he was "actually innocent" of the murder for which he was sentenced to death, and that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment and the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of due process of law therefore forbid his execution. He supported this claim with affidavits tending to show that his now dead brother, rather than he, had been the perpetrator of the crime. Petitioner urges us to hold that this showing of innocence entitles him to relief in this federal habeas proceeding.[Emphasis DC] We hold that it does not.

[...] In any system of criminal justice, "innocence" or "guilt" must be determined in some sort of a judicial proceeding. Petitioner's showing of innocence, and indeed his constitutional claim for relief based upon that showing, must be evaluated in the light of the previous proceedings in this case, which have stretched over a span of 10 years.

Once a defendant has been afforded a fair trial and convicted of the offense for which he was charged, the presumption of innocence disappears. [...] ("The purpose of the trial stage from the State's point of view is to convert a criminal defendant from a person presumed innocent to one found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt"). In the eyes of the law, petitioner does not come before the Court as one who is "innocent," but on the contrary as one who has been convicted by due process of law of two brutal murders.

And excerpts from the dissent, delivered by Justice Blackmun:

We really are being asked to decide whether the Constitution forbids the execution of a person who has been validly convicted and sentenced but who, nonetheless, can prove his innocence with newly discovered evidence. Despite the State of Texas' astonishing protestation to the contrary [...] I do not see how the answer can be anything but "yes."

The protection of the Eighth Amendment does not end once a defendant has been validly convicted and sentenced. In Johnson v. Mississippi, 486 U.S. 578 (1988), the petitioner had been convicted of murder and sentenced to death on the basis of three aggravating circumstances. One of those circumstances was that he previously had been convicted of a violent felony in the State of New York. After Johnson had been sentenced to death, the New York Court of Appeals reversed his prior conviction. Although there was no question that the prior conviction was valid at the time of Johnson's sentencing, this Court held that the Eighth Amendment required review of the sentence because "the jury was allowed to consider evidence that has been revealed to be materially inaccurate." [...]

Just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable, so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent. The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.

The opinion, and to a lesser extent the dissent, do a horrible job of expaining and addressing the issue at hand.

Society has a certain 'model' ('judicial proceedings') it uses to determine whether a person in guilty or innocent. The issue before the Court is really very simple: does the expected gain in the predictive power of the model as a result of utilising the previously unavailable information justify the cost - in a wide sense - of a re-trial (i.e. re-running the model)? Both the opinion and the dissent touch on this in an incoherent manner, and treat these considerations as peripheral.

Chief Justice Renquist's thesis basically consists of stating that re-trials are costly so we need to take into account the output of previous trials even when these did not utilise all available information ('once a defendant has been afforded a fair trial and convicted of the offense for which he was charged, the presumption of innocence disappears.') while Justice Blackmun is mainly concerned with asserting that utilising more information would be beneficial. In the end, there is no systematic attempt at stacking one against the other.

When will courts start thinking and arguing clearly? The wonderful lessons of economics - define a clear question, explicitly state your assumptions, reach a robust conclusion - must make their way to the hallowed halls of justice, where they will find a natural, welcoming home.

Kris-Stella Trump travels to Helsinki.

Andrew Gelman has more, the paper (free access) is here.

Matt Stuart capturing unique comic moments in London

Japan builds artificial high-tech beach near real beach

Close-up of Airbus A380 with Singapore Airlines

Future Scanner aims at peaking into tomorrow

Boasting in size, innovation and design: Future constructions

Hitchhiking across the US - Life is either a daring adventure or nothing (Full set)

This is amazing, and in fact it's exactly what we needed for a paper we are about to start writing (Indifference Merv, take notice):

The G-Econ research project is devoted to developing a geophysically based data set on economic activity for the world. The current data set (GEcon 1.3) is now publicly available and covers "gross cell product" for all regions for 1990, which includes 27,500 terrestrial observations. The basic metric is the regional equivalent of gross domestic product.

Here's the project's homepage, thanks to Netsmith for the pointer.

This paper (free access) is particularly interesting - it's also short and very readable:

Three applications of the data are investigated. First, the puzzling 'climate-output reversal' is detected, whereby the relationship between temperature and output is negative when measured on a per capita basis and strongly positive on a per area basis. Second, the database allows better resolution of the impact of geographic attributes on African poverty, finding geography is an important source of income differences relative to high-income regions. Finally, we use the G-Econ data to provide estimates of the economic impact of greenhouse warming, with larger estimates of warming damages than past studies.

Via The Big Picture.

Alex Tabarrok and Greg Mankiw have the right answer to the wrong question. The question is whether the rich pay a higher share of their income in taxes than the poor, and the answer is yes*.

Do you remember Robin Hood? He stole from the rich and gave to the poor; there is no account of the story where he is described as stealing from the high-earners.

The progressivity of income tax is not the *issue* at all. What really matters for people's welfare and purchasing power is wealth. Looking at the tax system as a whole, the rich pay a scandalously small proportion of their wealth in taxes, the poor a scandalously large one. (let me remind you that in the US 1% of households owns 38% of all wealth on last count, and that's not including intangible wealth such as human capital and access to corporate assets.) And still we have this ridiculous situation whereby people try to figure out how redistributive our society is by looking at the flow of purchasing power and ignoring the bloody stock.

Now, Robin, this is status quo bias.


*these numbers are computed in a way that makes the gap in the effective tax rates between the poor and the rich appear wider than is actually the case, but that's an issue for a different post.

Disclaimer: As is usually the case, this is all positive analysis, and descriptive - rather than policy prescriptive - (couldn't help the rhyme here) at that. I'm not saying the rich should be paying more and I'm not saying that they shouldn't. I'm not saying we should be looking to tax wealth rather than income either. And if the words 'consumption' and 'savings' sprung to mind as somehow justifying it all, well done, but this is not a post about morality.

I'm in Athens for the next few days, so I'll be doing some posting on Greece's economy, culture and politics.

The flag of Greece, which I like very much, has nine stripes. They represent the nine syllables of the phrase "Ελευθερία ή Θάνατος" ("Freedom or Death", " E-lef-the-ri-a i Tha-na-tos"), the five blue stripes for the syllables "Έλευθερία" and the four white stripes "ή Θάνατος". They also represent the blue of the sky and sea and the white of the waves and clouds. "Ελευθερία ή Θάνατος" was the war-cry of the 1821 revolution that led to the establishment of the modern Greek state, and it is the national motto.

Greece is home to the largest merchant fleet in the world. The fleet has a capacity of roughly 3.5 deadweight tons per each inhabitant of Greece. My namesake, Aghios Nikolaos (St Nicholas) is the patron saint of sailors.

Greece is a big defence spender. With the exception of Israel, it is the only liberal democracy (I was aching to say 'proper country', but refrained from doing so) that features in this list of the top 25 military spenders expressed as a percentage of GDP. This metric is an underestimate of the amount of resources Greece allocates to the military, as all able-bodied Greek males are still required to serve in the army for at least a year. I did not find it to be a pleasant or educational experience. The best way to see conscription is as a particularly inefficient tax, which in most philosophical systems would also not score well on fairness grounds. I find 'social engineering' arguments in favour to be very weak indeed.

Of course, a lot of military spending is about buying influence from the arms-selling countries rather than for strictly military purposes. The US, Russia and France are major providers to the Greek armed forces. My personal experience mainly revolved around toys from France, although I did not get to play with them in any notice-worthy way.

Another namesake, Nikos Kazantzakis, is more than enough reason to learn Greek. Willem Buiter is a fan. Contrary to popular belief (I blame Shakespear) modern Greek is fairly easy to learn, although I will admit it's not the easiest language to master.

This is cool, ultra geeky cool:


[embedded video]

HT Yet another sheep.

Secluded houses with inspirational beauty

Number gossip! The secret life of numbers

Global prices of gas as of July 2007

Visualization of who has the oil

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NEW YORK – Excitement swept the financial world Monday, when a blue line jumped more than 11 percent, passing four black horizontal lines as it rose from 367.22 to 408.85.

It was the biggest single-day gain for a blue line since 1994.

"Even if you extend the blue line's big white box back many vertical lines, you won't find a comparably large jump," said Milton Vogel, a senior analyst with Merrill Lynch. "That line just kept going up, up, up."

The Onion has the full story.

This is friggin amazing. It took me a couple of minutes to convince myself it is not a hoax (if it is, then they have spent a lot of money setting it up). Watch it:



[embedded video]

I can't believe their imagination gets them only as far as billboards.

Youtube has tons more videos, here is the website (one of the main reasons I can't quite get over my suspicions).

Party funding is in the news again, and once more the focus is on caps and bans, as well as increased taxpayer funding. What's missing from the debate is another possibility: why not tax 'unwanted' or 'undesirable' contributions and spending proportionately to the degree of their undesirability rather than ban them outright? Here's what I wrote back when there were about three people reading this blog:

I am no expert, but these are the main issues as I understand them:

1. Owing to their ability to make higher contributions, rich individuals and corporations disproportionately influence the political agenda and government decisions. On the other hand, small contributions by individuals are seen as beneficial, as they promote wider participation in the political process.

2. The bulk of campaign spending is socially wasteful, closely resembling an arms race. If there was a way to bring total spending down in a universally accepted manner, everyone would be better off.

3. The main approach in the UK and the US to rectifying problems 1 & 2 above is legislation that imposes more transparency (parties have to declare the contributions they receive) coupled with restrictions on the amount of money an individual or organisation can donate.

Here's a different idea. Why not tax campaign contributions to the extent they are deemed to be socially undesirable? I propose instituting the Undue Influence Tax (UIT), to be introduced as part of the 'Invigorating Democracy Act' and waged on individual donations (and to give it an extra bit of harmless spin, it should be paid by the political parties rather than the donors). It will start at 0% of the value of the contribution, jumping to 30% after the first $5,000 or so, 50% after $10,000 and reaching 95% beyond $50,000.

This will make 'buying' political influence much more expensive - and as we know, when the price of a good rises, quantity falls. It will increase the relative value of small contributions, making candidates reach more to 'the people', rather than the wealthy and large corporations. Suitably calibrated, it can rectify all the actual and perceived ills of the current campaign finance framework.

Furthermore, the UIT is a tax-man's dream. It could become the most popular tax in history, as it only affects a small number of citizens, while clearly contributing towards a greater public good - 'giving power to the people'. The revenue obtained should allow for cuts elsewhere in the tax system or increased spending on public services. There is no need for additional bureaucracy - parties already have to declare contributors' names and donations. Whatever the rate, avoiding the tax is an option only for candidates with a political death-wish. Finally, it can be introduced gradually and fine-tuned to desirable levels , without generating any distortionary behavioural effects.

I'm sure the membership of the (carbon) Pigou club would approve.

That's what I wrote back then, but it seems I have ignored another important benefit of using a tax approach. Since cross-party agreement is needed, moving from banning to taxing also means that the policy space becomes a continuum rather than a series of discrete choices where it's impossible to meet the other party 'in the middle'. Allowing variable tax rates in the policy space means that the probability a mutually agreeable compromise can be reached is much higher than when choice is restricted between binary 'ban-no ban' options.

This must be the most rambling and disjointed post that has ever appeared on Bluematter.; the reader would be well advised to scroll further down.

It is a fact that, at least ignoring second-order effects, the whole house market crash/ subprime crisis thing will have no long run effects on output. Concerns about the distribution of wealth apart (the current mess will lead to a massive redistibution from home-owners and loan issuers to the rest of society), there is no effect on anything other than how we value a single good: the land and the houses are still there and they are exactly the same as before; the only thing that is in fact different is that a house now buys fewer tomatoes than it used to.

In other words, there is nothing special about a house market crash or correction; it's just a change in the relative prices of different goods in the economy. In fact, to the extent that land is a capital good, society as a whole is better off: think how much better off we would all be if oil was free (ignoring pollution). If Saudi Arabia gets screwed in the process, we can always compensate them so that the advent of 'free oil' consitutes a pareto improvement.

Many economists reading this will argue that this is all well known; the long run is not the issue at all here and the reason everyone is so worried is the short run and the probability this will push us into a recession.

Now think of our approach to free trade and immigration. The parallels are striking: in the long-run, society is better off (again, ignoring the effects of redistibution), much as is the case with lower land prices. In the short-run, many people see part of their wealth (e.g. human capital) dramatically change in relative price terms. The only difference between freeing up trade and letting the housing market go to bust taking the homeowners with it is speed and numbers. The dismantling of barriers to trade or immigration has never been so rapid or universal so as to allow that many people to get screwed at the same time so that a recession ensues. (at least not at the national level; you can always look at the dying cities of Detroit or Buffalo in the States, the great industrial and mining towns of the UK and most farming towns in the Continent).

Economists are generally gung-ho when it comes to liberalising trade, while they tend to express concerns when they see falling asset prices. The difference between the two, however, does not amount to much other than the *natural* speed at which each occurs. I'm all for both, but the different approach has to be seen as a comment on the desirability of shock therapy when it comes to economic policy.

Economist's view links to videos of the Nobel Prize lectures in Economics. Here's how Roger Myerson started his:

The scope of economics has changed. Economics began with Xenophon's paper Oeconomicus more than two thousand years ago, in which a model citizen of ancient Athens goes out to the countryside, to his farm, to monitor and motivate the workers he has there to make sure they are working. Then he comes back into the city to participate in various political institutions that are necessary to maintain his political status so that he can keep owning his farm.

Agents' incentives and political institutions are central concerns of economics today as they were then; they weren't always. Sixty years ago or so Schumpeter saw Xenophon as somewhat marginal or outside the scope of economic inquiry.

Here's the full text by Xenophon in English (tranlated as 'The Economist') from Project Gutenberg. Here is a previous Bluematter. post on Xenophon's work.

I wholeheartedly agree with Myerson. But we have only scratched the surface so far: despite the recent focus on the importance of institutions, 'government' (and for that matter morality) remains an exogenous influence in the vast majority of economic models, which is a shame given we can potentially model the behaviour of the various political actors almost as well as that of market participants. This ommission wouldn't account for much if as a profession we were content with only commenting on small, closed systems ('this is how you should design your auction', 'this is how you can allocate hamburgers efficiently'). But we aren't, so academic economics' 'won't bother with politics' attitude is one of the main taboos we ought to overcome.

In other words, we are never lucky enough to be advising a benevolent dictator. We should finally stop pretending this is the case and approach the issue in the systematic way that is the hallmark and great pride of the profession.

Our second failing is more fundamental, and it relates to our inability - so far - to make information a more tangible, and better measurable, quantity. Related to this is our failure to view homo economicus as rational across all possible models of reality (rather than just the 'correct one'), and to develop a general theory of 'biases' (no, atheoretical statistics are not enough). This probably deserves a post of its own; stay tuned.

And another aside: I was struck to see how many empty seats there were at the lecture theater. No, I didn't expect tickets to be selling for thousands of Kronas at the black market, but I didn't expect this either.

Excerpts from a beautiful 20-year old essay by Robert Lucas, it's very short and do read the whole thing:

Economists have an image of practicality and worldliness not shared by physicists and poets. Some economists have earned this image. Others-- myself and many of my colleagues here at Chicago--have not. I'm not sure whether you will take this as a confession or a boast, but we are basically story-tellers, creators of make-believe economic systems. [...]

Well, that is why honest people can disagree. I don't know what one can do about it, except keep trying to tell better and better stories, to provide the raw material for better and more instructive analogies. How else can we free ourselves from the limits of historical experience so as to discover ways in which our society can operate better than it has in the past?

In any case, that is what economists do. We are storytellers, operating much of the time in worlds of make believe. We do not find the realm of imagination and ideas is an alternative to, or a retreat from, practical reality. On the contrary, it is the only way we have found to think seriously about reality.

In a way, there is nothing more to this method than maintaining the conviction (which I know you have after four years at Chicago) that imagination and ideas matter. I hope you can do this in the years that follow. It is fun and interesting and, really, there is no practical alternative.

HT to Yet another sheep.

Via Yet another sheep.

A reader emailed me these fascinating pictures:


And the big boy:

For the principles of economics:



HT Dani Rodrik.

The pictorial representation of break and entering is a nice touch.

I just made my first edit on Wikipedia, on the article on 'statistical power'. Here's the old text, with the deleted parts in bold:

There are times when the recommendations of power analysis regarding sample size will be inadequate. Power analysis is appropriate when the concern is with the correct acceptance or rejection of a null hypothesis. In many contexts, the issue is less about determining if there is or is not a difference but rather with getting a more refined estimate of the population effect size. For example, if we were expecting a population correlation between intelligence and job performance of around .50, a sample size of 20 will give us approximately 80% power (alpha = .05, two-tail). However, in doing this study we are probably more interested in knowing whether the correlation is .30 or .60 or .50. In this context we would need a much larger sample size in order to reduce the confidence interval of our estimate to a range that is acceptable for our purposes. These and other considerations often result in the true but somewhat simplistic recommendation that when it comes to sample size, "More is better!"

However, huge sample sizes can lead to statistical tests becoming so powerful that the null hypothesis is always rejected for real data. This is a problem in studies of differential item functioning.

Leaving the cost of collecting data aside, larger (appropriately collected) samples are ALWAYS BETTER. At the end of the day, if your sample is *too* large (for example if your statistical software restricts the amount of information you can load on it and you don't need the extra information anyways) you can always obtain a smaller random sample from your larger random sample. So, the 'more is better' recommendation is simple, but not simplistic.

The last paragraph reveals a fundamental misconception about statistical significance that refuses to go away. If the effect of an independent variable on the dependent variable is zero, using a very large sample will result to an estimated effect that is 0 to many decimal places; as the sample size increases further, the effect will approach *exactly* zero even more. NEVER USE STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE AS A PROXY FOR PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE. I have no clue whether large sample sizes have been seen as a problem in the past in studies of differential item functioning, but if that is the case then the researchers are idiots.

Here is another post on problematic applications of statistical significance.

This incredible 2007 paper by Satoshi Kanazawa published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology (free access - HT Crooked Timber) is the worst piece of academic work I have ever come across. It's so bad it's actually great*. So great in fact, that despite suffering from severe sleep deprivation I feel I have the moral duty to present an abridged version to you - lest you are too busy to read the whole thing and you miss out on a true gem of scholarly endeavour.

Below are selected, edited excerpts from the paper, arranged in such a way so as to preserve the flow of the reasoning and cover the main ideas expressed by the author. For the most part, I am quoting Kanazawa verbatim. My 'contributions' and comments appear in bold or in parentheses, marked DC.

Brace yourselves:


WHY YOU CAN’T GET A DATE ON A SATURDAY NIGHT
AND WHY MOST SUICIDE BOMBERS ARE MUSLIM


Abstract:

I discuss how one’s difficulty in dating might be connected to the current world war.

Introduction (DC: including the unavoidable drivel that signal the paper is written by a great antrhopologist):

Social and cultural factors impact human behavior only through the evolved human nature. The evolutionary psychological imagination reminds us that, in the words of inimitable Laura Betzig, “people are animals” (Betzig, 1997).

Amazing insight #1:

If you are chronically spending every Saturday night alone, despite valiant and persistent effort to find a date, then chances are there’s something wrong with you, at least in this area of life.

(DC: But don't despair brother!)

You may be comforted to know that you are not alone in your plight; there are losers like you everywhere in the world, and for the same reasons. (DC: yeah, you are all busy playing Super Mario Galaxy)

The root of the problem

Your personal troubles are not entirely your own doing; there are larger forces at work to keep you alone on a Saturday night. For example, if you consistently find yourself dateless, chances are you are a young man, not a young woman. On any given Saturday night, more young men than young women find themselves dateless.

This is because humans are naturally polygynous. The mathematical consequence of polygyny is most obvious in societies that sanction and practice (simultaneous) polygynous marriage, such as many African tribes and Muslim societies in the Middle East. If every married man has four wives, for example, it means that, given a 50-50 sex ratio, three-quarters of men are left mateless. A large majority of men in such societies are in the same situation as you are; they find themselves alone on a Saturday (and every other) night.

The more polygynous the society, the more young men face the distinct possibility of ending their lives as complete reproductive losers. Such is the mathematics of polygyny.

The problem

Thomas L. Friedman predicted that the first major war in the 21st century, after the end of the Cold War which characterized the latter half of the 20th, would not be fought between nations. It would instead be declared by what Friedman called “super-empowered angry men”.

In his September 13, 2001, NYT column, Friedman once again predicted that the events in New York and Washington two days earlier signified the start of World War III. Nearly six years later, we are still in the middle of World War III.

It appears that, for our current enemies, the murder and destruction is the goal, rather than means to political goals. Why? (whyyyyyy?) Why are our current enemies in World War III so different from traditional terrorists?

The diagnosis

While suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, when religion is involved, it is always Islam.

What distinguishes Islam from other major world religions is that it sanctions polygyny, and, as we saw earlier, polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status, who are most likely to be left without reproductive opportunities when older men of higher status marry polygynously. Polygyny therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates because they have little to lose and much to gain by doing so, compared to men who already have wives.

However, polygyny by itself, while it increases violence, is not sufficient to explain suicide bombings. The other key ingredient is the Koran’s promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam.

This creates a strong motive for any young Muslim men who are excluded from reproductive opportunities to commit suicide bombings. Now a vague promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven may not sound so appealing if they have even one real mate on earth, which monogamy in the context of a 50-50 sex ratio mathematically guarantees. However, for young, low-status Muslim men who are excluded from any mating opportunities because of polygyny among older, higher-status men, even such a vague promise in the afterlife begins to be appealing in light of their bleak reproductive prospect on earth.

My theory is cool, and I'm cool by association

Sometimes the evolutionary psychological imagination allows you to see things that few others do. On March 11, 2004, ten bombs exploded nearly simultaneously on four crowded commuter trains in Madrid, killing 191 people and injuring almost 1,800.

Within minutes of the explosions, the Spanish government publicly accused ETA for the terrorist act. And I immediately said to myself, “No, it ain’t ETA. It’s Muslim suicide bombers.” (DC: Kanazawa repeats this last sentence three times in the space of a paragraph)

(The kabalistic significance of the date -- that March 11 is the calendrical opposite of September 11 -- had not occurred to me or many others at first.)

Oh my research is so relevant to current events - approaching the grand finale

It is instructive to note that the Iraqi insurgents, who commit suicide bombings on a daily basis, have actually killed more than six times as many Iraqis as Americans (2,466 American troops vs. 6,004 Iraqi military and police personnel plus 10,131 civilians, as of January 29, 2007). It is as if the Iraqi insurgents are trying to eliminate as many of their intrasexual rivals (fellow Iraqi men) as possible, rather than killing American troops (the infidels and occupiers).

Conclusion

Maybe the Muslim suicide bombings are not “terrorist” acts, as the term is usually used. Maybe it has nothing to do with Israel or the American and British troops. Maybe it’s all about sex, as everything else in life is. Men do everything they do in order to get laid (Kanazawa, 2003). Maybe young Muslim men are no exceptions.

THE END

And in case you missed it, let me repeat this last, most fundamentalist (sic) of insights:

Men do everything they do in order to get laid (Kanazawa, 2003).

Amen.

*My theory is that this paper is meant as a joke, a sneaky critique of modern sociology/anthropology/psychology. Failing that, it may have been written to attract some publicity for Kanazawa's new book. At the very least, it's an active bid (pick me! pick me!) for the Ignobel prize. That said, Kanazawa has had other dodgy work published in the past. Who knows, maybe the world is going bonkers after all.

Forrest emails me with a comment on this amazing story:

These parents in the Czech Republic found out they had been given the wrong baby 9 months after the birth and switched back.

This got me thinking. I guess that if you find out pretty quickly (say after a day) that you have taken the wrong baby home, you’ll switch back. I also guess that if you don’t find out until the kid is 18, you probably won’t. So what do you reckon the tipping point is here?

Addendum: This story reminded me of one of my most cold-hearted posts on Bluematter.

[...] a fund manager owned by the ruler of Dubai made a “substantial investment” in Sony.

From The Economist.

If the previous post did not persuade you to stop wasting your time thinking about it, McMegan links to Jim Manzi who addresses the question. He concludes his well researched piece with this:

Do genetic differences accounts for any material portion of the difference in IQ scores by self-identified racial groups in the US? The only honest answer is that we don’t know. This, not political correctness is why the American Psychological Association’s formal consensus point of view on this question is stated without qualification: “At present, this question has no scientific answer.”

All right and proper, but that's not the right question to ask. What you really want to know is this: are 'black genes' leading to materially less intelligence than 'white genes'? And the answer is simple: IQ tests can't tell you that.

My understanding is that IQ scores say nothing about 'absolute' intelligence, they only provide a ranking. Or to use terminology more familiar to some of my readers, IQ scores only have an ordinal, not a cardinal meaning. It is very well likely that someone scoring 110 is only trivially more intelligent than someone scoring 90; what the difference between 110 and 90 actually means in terms of 'amount of intelligence' is anyone's guess.

OK, I hear you say, but don't we use quasi-cardinal interpretations for IQ scores? (e.g. isn't 'normal intelligence' supposed to lie between 90 and 109?) Quoting Manzi again:

There are statistically significant differences in IQ test performance between self-identified racial and ethnic groups in the US, and these differences have been sustained over long periods of time. The specific difference that is most widely discussed is the fact that in the US Non-Hispanic whites score, on average, about 15 points (~1 STDEV) higher than African-Americans. (Leaving aside the complication that it matters exactly how we define “long periods of time”, since, for example, there is circumstantial evidence that the black-white IQ gap may have been reduced substantially over the past several decades.)

So, 15 points is the maximum possible difference between the races. We also know with certainty that environment plays a role in determining intelligence, so the difference that can be attributed to genetics is a maximum of 10 points or so, with the actual difference (if it exists) likely to be much smaller. That's nothing: let me remind you that the average (and I think also median) person scores 100 by design, that 'average' or 'normal' intelligence is a 20 point band, and that in any case IQ is a flawed measure of 'intelligence' as used in everyday language (and a 'better than random' - but not by much - predictor of 'success' in life).

To bring the human element into this, my own results from several IQ tests are uniformly distributed across a 35 points range, and while I'm pretty good at arriving to answers to almost every IQ test type question thrown at me - questions that the average person won't answer at all - I take more time than the average person to do so (does that make me more or less intelligent?). And since the human element sells, I got more for you: here is a long list of highly successful and intelligent people who were very likely autistic, and here's the corresponding long list of people with dyslexia. What's the point? Intelligence is not a uni-dimensional variable.

And just to make sure, I should also mention the Flynn effect, quoting from this (excellent) paper (free access):

Since 1932 and probably prior to that, test scores have been increasing at a rate of 3 to 6 IQ points per decade, depending on the IQ test used. The preponderance of evidence indicates that scores are continuing to rise at a constant rate (Flynn, 2006b).

And since you apparently have to be a genius to read Bluematter., I won't even draw out the implications of the following observation on the likely (non)persistence of any currently observed differences amongst races (ala Manzi's circumstantial evidence):

There is at least one exception, however. The Scandinavian countries currently are showing little or no rise in their test scores (Flynn, 2006a). As large IQ increases were seen in Norway prior to 1968, Flynn suggests that Scandinavia might have experienced early increases that have since abated. This raises the possibility that IQ increases in other industrialized nations will also end.

So in IQ we have a metric with no cardinal interpretation, with a weak correlation to 'general intelligence' and an even weaker one to 'success in life', with the observed differences between races being pretty small and most likely diminishing even before controlling for environmental characteristics.

What's the issue again?

Now name one thing you would do differently - as a politician, as a citizen or as a human being. I'll be damned if you can come up with a single example.

I really, really can't understand what this debate is all about (other than in an immature 'I did not evolve from the apes' or 'I am really frustrated the earth is not at the centre of the solar system' kind of a way). Hell, even this debate is more relevant.

Now can we please, as a culture, move on?

Good news:

Measles deaths in Africa fell by 91% between 2000 and 2006, figures from the World Health Organization show. The drop, from an estimated 396,000 to 36,000, means the United Nations target to cut measles deaths by 90% by 2010 has been hit four years early.

But the WHO warned deaths were still far too high in South Asia, particularly in India and Pakistan.

The success follows concerted efforts to vaccinate all children against measles before their first birthday.

Overall global measles deaths fell by 68% - from an estimated 757,000 to 242,000 - over the six year period, a WHO report showed. WHO said the decline in measles deaths in Africa was made possible because governments had implemented robust immunisation programmes.

"This is a major public health success and a tribute to the commitment of countries in the African region," said Dr Margaret Chan, WHO director-general. "We need to sustain this success and intensify our efforts in other parts of the world, as there are still far too many lives lost to this disease."

A reader emails me:

When doing econometrics on quarterly time series data, if there are some key variables that are available only annually, is there merit in interpolating the annual data to create a quarterly series or should the variables be discarded? What is the general advice on interpolation?

As a general rule, you should not discard the annual data. As with any econometric problem, the question is: do the additional data contain potentially useful information? If the answer is yes, then the next step is to find the best way to disaggregate the annual observations into quarterly ones.

There are many ways to do this, and the most appropriate one will depend on the problem at hand. Also, keep in mind that determining the appropriate standard errors for your included variables, especially the disaggregated ones, can be a bit tricky in this setting.

Here are some relevant papers (only the first free access)

Also keep in mind that, depending on the problem you are facing, it may even make sense to aggregate variables – e.g. making annual variables out of quarterly ones. Yes, you shed information in that case, but an even more critical question to ask is whether your assumptions are satisfied (usually E(u|X)=0). In many cases, you would have reason to expect the error to be correlated with your dependent variables in a ‘quarterly’ model but not in an ‘annual’ model, in which case it would be most probably preferable to use the latter.