Category: Science

The atomic bombs were the product of an industrial effort which cost just under $2bn ($20 bn in 1996 dollars).  One billion dollars to destroy a city which would have been destroyed at minimal additional cost by one conventional raid represented an awful lot of ‘bucks per bang.’  Another way to look at it is that it cost $3bn to manufacture the 4,000 or so B-29s which were used exclusively in long-range operations against Japan, including as atomic bombers…Another index was that the total cost of the atomic bombs was the equivalent of making one-third more tanks or five times more heavy guns.

That is intriguing but it misses two points.  First, the cost of making subsequent atomic bombs is lower.  Second, atomic bombs have superior signaling power about the willingness to destroy.  That excerpt is from David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900.

Apparently, even real frogs will jump out of slowly heated water.

That is from Robin Hanson.  You are not encouraged to experiment at home.

When Nobel Laureate and University of Chicago economics professor Robert Fogel found his desk becoming massively piled he simply installed a second desk behind him that now competes in towering clutter with the first.

That is from A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, by Eric Abramson and David Freedman, an intriguing defense of…um…mess.  Here is my previous post on this topic.

Most of the really important parts of our lives — who we love and how, how we live and why, why we lie and when — have yet to yield their secrets to real evidence.

Here is more.  Here is a full directory of optimistic prognostications.  Arnold Kling comments on same.

Bruce Charlton asks:

What is the worst designed everyday object?

Bruce Charlton answers:

My vote would go to the standard, hard plastic, hinged CD case.

Its functionality is terrible at best, and it breaks way too easily;
especially the hinge – upon which functionality depends.  And I have
hundreds of them!

That was my answer too.  I am also frustrated by the prevalence of non-sharp knives, although perhaps this is best for the children.  Do you all have other answers?

According to Patric Bach and Steven Tipper of Bangor University, the mere sight of Wayne Rooney
[a soccer player] inhibits the control you have over your feet.  Apparently, looking at
Rooney automatically triggers football-related activity in the movement
control parts of your brain, leading to the paradoxical effect of
impairing your own foot control.  By contrast, Bach and Tipper found the
sight of the British tennis player Tim Henman impairs observers’ hand
control, but not their foot control.

Here is the full story.

Here is the link.  The pointer is from Chris Masse.

Elsewhere, from my Indiana hotel I found Dwight Lee on whether money can buy happiness, and Brad DeLong on Milton Friedman.  Jane Galt won’t go see Borat, I prefer the skits, most of all Bruno talking to the pastor.  And here is an NYT article about a free market think tank in Kenya.

Young children aged between two and four years believe that you only
have to hide your head to become invisible – if your legs are on view,
it doesn’t matter, you still can’t be seen.

That’s according to Nicola McGuigan
and Martin Doherty who say this is probably because young children
think of ‘seeing’ in terms of mutual engagement between people. It
explains why kids often think they can’t be seen if they cover their
eyes.

Here is further discussion.

The explanation [of chevron deposits] is obvious to some scientists.  A large asteroid or
comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the world’s population,
smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at
least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated
Indonesia nearly two years ago.  The wave carried the huge deposits of
sediment to land.

Most astronomers doubt that any large comets
or asteroids have crashed into the Earth in the last 10,000 years.  But
the self-described “band of misfits” that make up the two-year-old
Holocene Impact Working Group say that astronomers simply have not
known how or where to look for evidence of such impacts along the
world’s shorelines and in the deep ocean.

Scientists in the working group say the evidence for such impacts
during the last 10,000 years, known as the Holocene epoch, is strong
enough to overturn current estimates of how often the Earth suffers a
violent impact on the order of a 10-megaton explosion.  Instead of once
in 500,000 to one million years, as astronomers now calculate,
catastrophic impacts could happen every few thousand years.

Here is the full story.  I should add there are reports that a tidal wave (not nearly of this size) may hit Japan today.  Here are our posts on asteroid deflection as a public good.

Ogi Ogas is a doctoral student in cognitive neuroscience at Boston University.  He got a spot on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and used his knowledge of neuroscience to win $500,000.   And no, none of the questions were about neuroscience.

Hat tip to Paul at Truck and Barter.

1. Stern never says what discount rate he is actually using.  I find
this bizarre, to say the least.  One account from the FT estimates he uses a
figure between 2 and 3 percent.

2. The correct rate depends on a society’s rate of investment.  If
government regulates, taxes, or otherwise pulls resources from the
private sector, we need to estimate how much of these resources would have gone
into investment and how much would have gone into consumption.  Stern
never does this.

3. The resources that would have gone into investment should be
discounted by the (risk-adusted) rate of return on investment.  This will be much higher than two or three percent, although of course it does not apply to the entire gross upfront cost.

4. The resources that would have gone into consumption are harder to discount, especially if we are comparing those resources across
the generations, and if the change in question is "large"
rather than "small."  I tend to favor a very low or zero discount rate in these settings, if only because there is no pure time preference across the
generations.  (Before you are born, you are not sitting around impatiently, waiting, unless of course you are a character in Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird.)  In any case this is predominantly an ethical question, and no correct answer follows directly from examining marginal analysis and market prices. 

If the change is "small" for the affected people, in the precise sense of not much affecting their marginal utility of wealth, we should discount by the market rate of interest, adjusted for risk, taxes, transactions costs, etc.  I don’t find Stern very clear on such matters. 

5. Since the Chinese save and invest more than do Americans, the
correct social discount rate should be higher for China than America. 
If the Chinese are earning ten percent a year on savings of fifty
percent, that gives a rough discount rate of about five percent.  Don’t
tell me that US and A is saving zero percent a year (no way), but we are saving less than the Chinese.

All other things equal, that means we should invest more to stop global warming than should the Chinese, and that is not even considering our higher income. 

6. Stern argues that if the environment is worsening, this might
justify a negative discount rate for some environmental amenities.
This is theoretically possible, but with substitutability between
environmental and non-environmental goods, it is unlikely.

7. Cost-benefit analysis works best for small changes which can be
evaluated at market prices.  I don’t think it tells us much about
evaluating the costs of, say, one hundred million poor "climate-change"
refugees.  Under my ethical views, which refer to a notion of property rights, the true costs of those refugees are
higher than market prices/incomes will indicate.

8. Lower discount rates don’t always make global warming costs more important.  Say the rate of discount is zero.  This implies that one-time adjustment costs fade into insignificance, compared to ongoing gains from economic growth.

9. For this entire exercise, the results are very very sensitive to
the choice of discount rate.  Some of this requires ethics, not just economics.  Stern
notes this clearly, but the relevant caveats don’t seem to find their
way into his final presentation of the estimates.

The bottom line: Stern avoids many of the common mistakes in
this area.  He stresses that a multiplicity of discount rates is required.  But his treatment of discount rates is far from transparent and it is in some regards incorrect.  That said, the "mistakes" slant the analysis in both directions, rather than confirming any prior that global warming is a significant economic problem.

The other bottom line: I do understand, and accept, the case for doing something.  But I don’t yet see how this report adds to that case.  Maybe I’ll read on.

Here is a critique from The Economist, and here.  Here is Cass Sunstein on the study. 
It also seems the report
relies on excessively high estimates of econoimc growth.  Here is one critique of the science.  Here is a detailed Bjorn Lomborg critique.  New Economist blog points to these supporting materials.

How much is communication of information the main purpose of speech?  I can think of other reasons to speak:

1. We talk to signal loyalty, or disloyalty.

2. We talk to bond with others.

3. We talk because we are not very self-aware and we need an audience if we are to learn our own thoughts or make up our minds.  Clark Durant points to Hamlet.

4. We talk so people may judge us, leading to efficient sorting.

5. We talk to see who will leave the room.

6. We talk because we are restless, nervous, or bored.  Speech may relieve anxiety, or give the pretense of doing so.

Of course it depends on context, but I’ll put information communication at no more than fifteen percent of our chatter.