Hopefully Interesting

Well OK, saying that such and such a thing is really treading on unsteady epistemic grounds.  What does it even mean for a number to exist or not exist anyways?  One position that you can take is that things that can be directly measured, like a person's height, exist; but that things that can't be measured, like their height in inches plus their age, aren't things that really exist.  And though people tend to treat and talk about inflation as one of the former, it really matches the later category much more closely. The indomitable Google lists inflation as being "3: A general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money".  That's all well and good, but there's never any general level of prices that you can directly observer.   You always have to combine the increases and decreases in various prices with some system to produce something you can call a general level, and the process is actually very straightforward. First, there i...

Go to the  Wikipedia page on the bloodiest wars in history and look at it for a bit.  Everybody would expect WWII to be on there at the top.  Many people might not realize how many really bloody civil wars China has had, but it stands to reason that with the huge number of people who live there that this might be a significant number.  Most people also wouldn't be surprised that there were bloody conflicts centuries past which they haven't heard of in general.  But look down to conflict #14.  One of the bloodiest wars in human history ended less than a decade ago, and you probably didn't even know that it was happening. I certainly didn't appreciate it as it was happening.  I read the newspaper and knew that there was a war in the Congo, but I didn't have any sense of the scope of it, nor did I really know what the issues involved were.  Finding that list on Wikipedia, though, helped me to realize that I had overlooked ...

I recently saw an article  in Slate which was fine as far as it went, but which prompted me to deliver a bit of a rant at Hacker News about how we talk about income inequality in America, which I've cleaned up a bit and am also posting here. The first thing that annoys me about how most people talk about inequality in America is that people often just use one metric, and ignore all the others.  You could talk about: Total Compensation - including untaxed things like health insurance as well as paychecks and capital gains. Taxed income - which the SSA  confusingly refers to as "Total Compensation", which is income plus capital gains and bonuses but not things you don't pay taxes on. Pure income - your paycheck. Wealth -  how much you have in your bank account plus how much your house is worth. Private consumption - how much you spend each year on stuff for yourself, rent and food and fun things. Total consumption - private consumption plus whatever goods an...

The snow has melted, the Republican candidates are busy beating each other bloody, and with the looming presidential election my thoughts turn to daydreams about my ideal candidate.  This is mostly a blue sky exercise here, some of my beliefs are well outside the mainstream and I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for my favorite policies to be implemented.  But maybe I can do something to help persuade people that these are issues that they ought to care about, like by writing blog posts say. The most important policy issue I see in the US right now where thing aren't currently going the way I'd like is immigration.  It seems to me that we ought to be allowing much more immigration into this country, that this would give some net benefits to the US, and that it would be a huge boon for those allowed to immigrate. At one point the US let many more immigrants in than it does today.  But panic about foreign anarchists  and concern that too many immigrants we...