Practice Good Theory

“... You cannot resist an idea whose time has come. ”(Victor Hugo).  Actions flow from ideas. That's why  tyrants imprison intellectuals.That's why the Stasi monitored and controlled the spread of ideas. (Movie to see: " The Lives of Others ") Religious view of History: The ancients thought God was the prime-mover of history. It was the  unfolding of His plan. For polytheists, history might be a story played out between different Gods. Man could have a role: a King or a people could make God happy or angry, driving historical reward or punishment. God might give you a promised land, or send a plague. Religious guru Pat Robertson still thinks God rewards and punishes America from time to time! Deterministic views:  Secular historians are split. Some people see little pattern and lots of accidents, while others try to integrate history more broadly, seeing either nature or man as the driver. Jared Diamond argues that geography and the availability of domesticabl...

Two laws that disagree: The U.S. government budget has a deficit. This deficit adds to the debt. By approving the budget, Congress implicitly approves an increase in debt. However, the U.S. also has a debt-ceiling. Debt cannot go beyond this without Congressional approval, even if Congress has already approved a budget that pushes the debt higher. Why have two laws that can conflict? Secretary Lew says this does not make sense; but, he's wrong. The budget is only an approximate forecast, and that's all it can be. A budget might set some tax at 33% of income, but how much taxable income will people have? If it is less than forecast, the tax inflows will be less than forecast, and the deficit will be higher. Personal budget ceilings: Analogously, I might plan on buying ice-cream for the kids once a month, but the number of kids at practice varies. Across all sorts of expenditures, in some months I might blow my budget. So, I might have a second control: e.g. I will not le...

Gallup just released its poll of religion across states . To be classified as "very religious" the respondent has to say that religion is important in their daily live and also that they attend religious services almost once a week. So, these are "regular church-goers" and their cohorts across other religions. The non-religious say religion is not important. The "moderately religious" say religion is important, but don;t attend regular services. The bad news is that this year's poll slightly reversed the trend, moving slightly back toward religion (this is a poll of about 175,000 people). Check out the original link, above, for a listing of all the states from high to low. I took the top ten and the bottom ten states. For these, I checked out Dave Leip's excellent " Atlas of U.S. Politics ", getting presidential results for each of these states for 1996 through 2012. I wanted to visualize red-states and blue-states, and their correla...