Category: Religion
Division of labor in the Babylonian Talmud
This reminds me of Leonard Read’s "I, Pencil," but of course it came much earlier:
Ben Zoma once saw a crowd on one of the
steps of the Temple Mount. He said, Blessed is He that discerneth
secrets, and blessed is He who has created all these to serve me. [For]
he used to say: What labours Adam had to carry out before he obtained
bread to eat! He ploughed, he sowed, he reaped, he bound [the sheaves],
he threshed and winnowed and selected the ears, he ground [them], and
sifted [the flour], he kneaded and baked, and then at last he ate;
whereas I get up, and find all these things done for me.And how many labours Adam had to carry out before he obtained a
garment to wear! He had to shear, wash [the wool], comb it, spin it,
and weave it, and then at last he obtained a garment to wear; whereas I
get up and find all these things done for me. All kinds of craftsmen
come early to the door of my house, and I rise in the morning and find
all these before me.
Credit goes to Stephen Dubner.
What I really think of the new popular economics books
I recently published an article in the Swiss arts magazine Du on the wave of popular economics books. Yes I am an economist but I am also interested in the implicit philosophies and theologies of these books. My piece is in German and not on-line but here are a few bits from it.
About Freakonomics I wrote:
The implicit theology of Freakonomics is that of original sin. The book is full of stories of liars: “people lie, data don’t” can be taken as the book’s motto…
Levitt and Dubner seek to puncture naïve optimism. It is the reader who needs reforming, and the proposal is to drive naivete out of our systems. We must recognize original sin (recall the bite into the apple on the book’s cover), give up on utopian dreams, and stick to what can be proven by science. That means an acceptance of ongoing human depravity, but Freakonomics goes further. It preemptively protects us against encountering that depravity and lying in our own lives. We have been warned, and we need no longer fear disappointment from our encounters with the real world.
It should come as no surprise that Dubner – the one who actually wrote the book – also penned an entire book about his personal theology. Dubner is ethnically Jewish but his parents had converted to Catholicism and raised him as a Catholic. Over the course of his life he rediscovered his Jewish heritage and religion and chronicled that process in his fascinating Choosing My Religion: A Memoir of a Family Beyond Belief. It is theology, Dubner’s main obsession, which gave him the background to write a popular economics book that touched so many Americans.
And how about Tim Harford?
Harford’s voice is always gentle, sometimes cynical, and usually whimsical and reassuring in his language. He points to the ironies of life. He is hardly one to deny that people lie, but such peccadilloes are a sideshow rather than the center of his moral universe. We still can make our way in the world and carve out a small piece of personal happiness and perhaps a small bit of virtue as well. Harford often reminds us that hedonism has its place in human affairs; his latest book opens with a discussion of the prospect of “a rational [you-know-what].”
In other words, Harford serves up British secularism rather than American original sin. Harford’s “Dear Economist” column…views human foibles as inevitable yet endearing; in Harford’s world no judgment is ever too harsh or too one-sided.
As an economist, Harford seems more interested in “invisible hand mechanisms” than are Dubner and Levitt. Freakonomics informs us that what appears to be ordinary is in fact full of corruption. Harford’s Undercover Economist is keener to show that the apparently corrupt can, at the macro level, lead to entirely acceptable and indeed sometimes humane results.
There is much more, here is one final bit:
Popular economics books reveal their true colors most clearly when they talk about sex. In Freakonomics sex is not holy but rather sex and reproduction lead to the birth of criminals…For Harford sex is a slightly naughty pleasure, and a pleasure to be mocked, but at least it is a real pleasure; this American reviewer again cannot help seeing the British tinge of his work.
The Economics of Religious Innovation
Here’s a story from the WSJ about a temple in Hyderabad, India that capitalized on the growing IT industry.
Hoping to capitalize on all the activity, technical colleges
sprouted up in the city’s outskirts near Mr. Gopala Krishna’s temple. Students
started trickling by on their way home from school; many complained about their
failed attempts to secure U.S. visas. That gave the priest an idea to sell the
students on the deity by giving him a new persona, "Visa God." Mr. Gopala
Krishna counseled the students in English, then told them to walk around the
temple 11 times to get their wish. "I used to say, ‘Go, this time you’ll get
it,’" he recalls.Soon, Mr. Gopala Krishna started seeing dozens — then hundreds
— of new visitors a day. In 2005, some local newspapers wrote about the Visa
God, just as new U.S. visa restrictions were taking a toll. Mr. Gopala Krishna
and his relatives also launched a Web site and a newsletter called Voice of
Temples, with features like a primer of sample prayers for help in visa
interviews.…Now devotees of the Visa God say they have to reach the temple by 6
a.m. to avoid the daytime rush.
Where do our beliefs come from?
We all like to think that our beliefs come from rational thinking, deep experience and good judgment. But suppose that you had to predict someone else’s beliefs, let’s say their beliefs about taxes, welfare, regulation….economic policy of all kind. Let’s put some money on it, the better your predictions the more money you make.
I will give you one piece of information to improve your predictions. Either I will tell you whether the person whose beliefs you must predict is an economist or a biologist or I will tell you whether the person whose beliefs you must predict is American or French. Which piece of information do you want?
What does this say about where beliefs come from?
Addendum: Suppose I asked you instead to predict the types of arguments that the person will use to justify their beliefs. Now which piece of information do you want? What is the role of education in determining beliefs?
Laissez-Faire Marriage
Should the state be involved in marriage? Writing in the NYTimes professor of history Stephanie Coontz notes:
The American colonies officially required marriages to be
registered, but until the mid-19th century, state supreme courts
routinely ruled that public cohabitation was sufficient evidence of a
valid marriage. By the later part of that century, however, the United
States began to nullify common-law marriages and exert more control
over who was allowed to marry.By the 1920s, 38 states
prohibited whites from marrying blacks, “mulattos,” Japanese, Chinese,
Indians, “Mongolians,” “Malays” or Filipinos. Twelve states would not
issue a marriage license if one partner was a drunk, an addict or a
“mental defect.” Eighteen states set barriers to remarriage after
divorce.
It’s no accident that the state began restricting and intervening in the marriage contract at the same time as it was restricting and intervening in economic contracts. It was of course the evil Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who dissented in Lochner v. New York and who also upheld forced sterilization laws in Buck v. Bell (writing that "three generations of imbeciles in enough.") Economists don’t like to talk about social externalities but the connection between economic and social regulation is very clear in the progressives.
I think it’s time to restore
freedom of contract to marriage. Why should two men, for example, be denied the same rights to contract as are allowed to a man and a woman? Far from ending civilization the extension of the bourgeoisie concept of contract ever further is the epitome of civilization. Our modern concept of marriage, for example, is simply one instantiation of the idea of contract.
People will claim that this means a chaos of contracts for every form of marriage. This is wrong factually and also conceptually misguided. Factually, we already allow men and women to adjust the marriage contract as they see fit with pre-nuptials. Moreover, different states offer different marriage contracts with some offering more than one type. Partnerships of other kinds have access to all manner of contractual arrangements without insufferable problems.
More importantly, the chaos of contracts argument is fundamentally misguided. The purpose of contract law is to give individual’s greater control over their lives. To make contract law a restraint on how people may govern themselves is a perversion of the social contract. To restrict people from accessing the tools of civilization on the basis of their sexual preference is baseless discrimination.
It is time to restore
freedom of contract to marriage, Laissez-faire for all capitalist acts between consenting adults!
Thanks to Daniel Akst for the pointer.
Pascal’s wager and religious diversification across children
Justin Wolfers of the Wharton Business School spoke on Pascal’s Wager, saying that if one believes in religion then the greatest risk is choosing the wrong one. And how to hedge against such a risk? Mr. Wolfers advises the following: Have lots of children and bring each one up under a different faith. That way, if people don’t get into heaven themselves, at least they will have maximized the chances that one of their children will.
Here is the link. God may hold this sort of maximizing behavior against you, but surely not against your kids…
Markets in everything
I call this one: "Price-discriminating monopolists appeal to the weak-willed" edition. Let’s say you want to attract the religiously minded parts of the individual. What might your prices look like?
When Larry Pinczower switches on his cellphone, the seal of a rabbinate
council appears. Unable to send text messages, take photographs or
connect to the Internet, his phone is a religiously approved adaptation
to modernity by the ultra-Orthodox sector of Israeli life.More than 10,000 numbers for phone sex, dating services and the like
are blocked, and rabbinical overseers ensure that the lists are up to
date. Calls to other kosher phones are less than 2 cents a minute,
compared with 9.5 cents for normal phones. But on the Sabbath any call
costs $2.44 a minute, a steep religious penalty.
Or maybe there is no weakness of will, but rather the high prices signal the religious loyalty of the phone owner. Here is the full and fascinating article, and thanks to Zev for the pointer.
Why is it not $10 a minute for a call on the Sabbath? Might too high a price signal the person is excessively weak-willed?
The economics of polygamy, continued
(Some) economists, every now and then, look for reasons why polygamy cannot be efficient. How about this?:
Over the last six years, hundreds of teenage boys have been expelled
or felt compelled to leave the polygamous settlement that straddles
Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah.Disobedience is
usually the reason given for expulsion, but former sect members and
state legal officials say the exodus of males – the expulsion of girls
is rarer – also remedies a huge imbalance in the marriage market.
Members of the sect believe that to reach eternal salvation, men are
supposed to have at least three wives.
Here is the longer article, which has several interesting parts.
The theology of popular economics
Once I pick up a popular economics book, I ask myself: what is this book’s implicit theology? (How would you in this regard classify Freakonomics? Undercover Economist? Steve Landsburg?)
That is one of the best first questions to ask about any non-fiction book.
I view Discover Your Inner Economist as largely Thomist and more Catholic than anything else.
It is suggested that people are capable of simply doing the right thing, although we should not necessarily expect them to do the right thing.
It is suggested that a unified perspective of faith and reason, applied in voluntarist fashion, can indeed give people better and more complete lives.
It is suggested that not everything can be bought and sold, yet markets have a very important role in human life.
The chapters on food, or the seven deadly sins, are too obvious to require explanation.
The book is highly cosmopolitan, and it is suggested that acts of will and understanding can open up the sacraments to us. The possibility of those sacraments lies right before our very eyes, and they are literally available for free. Except the relevant sacraments are those of culture, and not of the Roman Church.
I am not a Catholic or for that matter a believer, but as I tried to solve various problems in the exposition, the argument fell naturally into religious ideas. Religion has so much power over the human mind, in part, because its basic teachings about life are largely true. Furthermore classical liberalism is far more of an intellectual offshoot of Christianity than most non-Christians are keen to admit. (Muslims and Chinese often see this more clearly.)
So when I realized that Inner Economist had this strongly Thomist philosophic flavor, I was greatly comforted.
In this post the Episcopalians ponder their Inner Economists.
I hope to write more soon on political philosophy in Discover Your Inner Economist.
Discover Your Inner Ecumenicist
I loved this blog post, it is wonderful when a reader sees what you are getting at:
So how can Cowen’s approach be applied to questions of faith? ReligionWriter contends that for many people, religious observances present problems similar to those of Cowen’s art museum. We want to enjoy the experience, and it’s part our self-image to believe we find going to the church or synagogue or mosque meaningful and fulfilling. Yet who has not yawned their way through a sermon or prayer at one time or another? How do you keep your mind from wandering from the divine service to thoughts about grocery shopping later in the day or your next work assignment?
Applying Cowen’s logic, the first and probably most difficult step is admitting that we don’t always enjoy religious services and observances as much as we would like to think we do.
The conclusion?
Next time you look for a book on religious inspiration, don’t walk too quickly past the economics section.
I’ll write more soon about the implicit theology in Discover Your Inner Economist.
The most absurd sentence I read today
I am proposing that the Son and the Father Singularities guided the worlds of the multiverse to concentrate the energy of the particles constituting Jesus in our universe into the Jesus of our universe.
That is from Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Christianity.
But wait, there is competition for the honor:
If Jesus indeed rose from the dead using the mechanism described in Chapter 8, namely electroweak tunneling to convert matter into energy, and if indeed this was done with the intention of showing us how to use the same process, then we ourselves should be able to learn how to turn matter into either electromagnetic energy or neutrinos within a few decades.
You choose…
Choosing my Religion
My mother and I still exchanged presents, of course, I would send her picture frames or a vitamin encyclopedia; she’d send me the New Testament on cassette or a book called Jesus for the Jews.
That is from Stephen Dubner’s Choosing My Religion, which Natasha wants to seize from me for her own reading. Here is Dubner’s earlier post on the book.
What would Muhammad say about put-call parity?
Mahalanobis explains how Islamic mortgages are being created using put-call parity. Islamic finance expert Mahmoud El Gamal sums up the situation nicely:
…I have shown in detail how to synthesize a forward from salam and a credit facility characterized as murabaha or tawarruq, depending on preference and cost. From forwards, we can then synthesize everything. That is a theorem.
Near Death Experiences and State-Space Consistency
Tyler (and Ryan) ask, Should near death experiences change your life? The answer is no. The reason, however, may surprise you. It’s not because NDEs are unimportant it’s because they are very important.
Recall that a rational choice-plan is time-consistent, you should not plan today to make choices for tomorrow when you know today that you will renege upon those choices tomorrow. Eating cake today because you will diet tomorrow is not a rational choice if you will not in fact diet tomorrow. Time-consistency does not require that you always follow through on today’s plans – new information arrives which may cause you to rationally change your plans – but it does require that you expect to follow through on today’s plans which means that if no new information arrives then you should follow through.
The same idea explains why if you are rational you should not change your life if you experience an NDE. NDEs are not new information. You know that you are mortal, right? You know that you could die today. You know that experiences like Ryan’s are not uncommon. Thus, if you are rational you should not change your life if you experience an NDE.
Do I advise, therefore, that Ryan get on with his life as before? No, not at all. My advice is not for Ryan, it’s for everyone else; Choosing rationally requires that you choose today so that if you have an NDE you will not change your life.
The fact that many people who have an NDE do change their lives is evidence that most people do not choose rationally. Thus the ways in which people who have had NDEs change their lives is important information for the rest of us who want to choose rationally.
Do you recall the secret to happiness offered by Gilbert, the one you almost certainly will not accept? It is to accept that your own anticipations of what you will do and feel if certain things occur is not as good a guide to what you will actually do and feel as are the actions and feelings of other people who actually have experienced those events. Thus, if near death experiences tend to make people more giving, caring and less fearful of change then this is how you should act today.
Long-time readers will know that I take the idea of reflective equilibrium quite seriously.
Muslims in Europe
Philip Jenkins notes:
…while they’re going to grow, by American standards
Muslim minorities in Europe are not going to be that huge. The other
big issue is that when people talk about Muslim minorities, they
automatically assume that everyone of Muslim background is going to
continue to be a dyed-in-the-wool, hardcore Muslim in Europe.
There’s
a lot of evidence that they’re not. If you look at Algerian people in
France, they have a strong sense of ethnic identity, but there’s quite
a low level of religious observance. They look like Episcopalians more
than anything. Now obviously, there’s a small and potentially very
dangerous hardcore of quite extreme Islamists, and you’d have to be a
fool to ignore that. But the majority of people are very happy to
assimilate to some kind of French or Dutch or German identity.
He also says this:
The Middle East in the last 15 years is going through the
great demographic transition and that is one of the great facts in
world politics. What it should mean is that in about 15 years these
countries should be vastly more stable. The next 15 years could be a
very rocky ride, but the long-term trend is to underpopulation
Thanks to Jeremy Lott for the pointer.