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...

A downturn in the economy or the stock-market usually causes people to pause spending to see where the chips will fall. Even people/businesses who think their jobs/revenues are relatively secure become cautious. This caution, in turn, implies less sales for some businesses, creating a downward spiral. Only to a point, though: as it spirals down, business profits start to increase and personal savings increase too. Confidence starts to come back. Savings rate: The red circles in this chart show temporary increases in the Personal Savings Rate during recessions. Unfortunately, after each recession the personal savings rate started to decline once more. We see that the savings rate has flattened once again. This is the flip-side (and downside) of confidence. [Update (2017/June: This rate still remains mostly above the 5% mark] Retirement confidence: Compared to previous years, workers who are still employed are less confident that they will have enough money to live ...

Overview:   Slow economy, rocketing stock market ! Since the 2007-08 downturn, most measures of the economy have stabilized. Despite this, total-employment is still lower. The broadest GDP measure has been increasing very slowly. Meanwhile, house-prices have turned up for the last two years, and the stock market is at an all-time high. Corporate profits are high since GDP is growing slowly while firms have kept a reign on costs. In addition, companies have been buying back stock at above-average levels . This is different from the type of excitement that drove the dot.com boom, because it does not cascade into higher salaries and expenditures: quite the opposite. In the short/medium term, this does not bode well for employment numbers and wages. Here are some of the details: Employment: Though the unemployment rate has been falling, it is mainly because so many people (particularly younger folk) have given up looking for jobs . For the core age-range 25-54 years, employ...

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What do socialite Lois Pope and lawyer Tim Broas have in common? Someone is paying for Google-searches of their names. "Reputation" firms offer a few cents for each search. Some paid-search is legit (e.g. keeping tabs on where one ranks), but most is an attempt to "game" widely-used search-engines.. Fake everything: Other than search, "workers" will post fake reviews for books, and even for photo-portfolios put up by models. They will plagiarize articles and post them to a site that is pretending to be informative. Recently, a businessman was convicted for posting negative Yelp reviews about his competitor's business.  Another businessman  claims that Yelp offered to bury negative reviews for a fee. The New York attorney recently went after people posting fake reviews to Yelp, and other such sites. Even the Israeli government is paying  students for positive reviews. Wikipedia just cancelled 250 sock-puppet user accounts used by a paid PR firm....