Multiplying by drawing lines

Here is a cute little trick to multiply without knowing the multiplication tables.

The dangers of scientific consensus

From the Wall Street Journal, "The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease":

Our half-century effort to cut back on the consumption of meat, eggs and whole-fat dairy has a tragic quality. More than a billion dollars have been spent trying to prove Ancel Keys's hypothesis, but evidence of its benefits has never been produced. It is time to put the saturated-fat hypothesis to bed and to move on to test other possible culprits for our nation's health woes.

Interesting articles for various reasons

A few articles over the past few months that in the past I would have commented on:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/andrewlilico/100027182/inequality-isnt-a-problem-its-a-driver-of-progress/

http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2014/04/ideological-turing-tests-climate-and-minimum-wage.html

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303910404579489692798833528?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303910404579489692798833528.html

And this group of four:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/03/17/the-rise-of-secular-religion/

http://minx.cc/?post=347499

http://www.thisviewoflife.com/index.php/magazine/articles/why-sam-harris-is-unlikely-to-change-his-mind10

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-secular-religion-of-left.html

Do it for Denmark

Denmark is worried about its fertility rate, though at 1.73 it is huge compared to Poland (1.33) the Ukraine (1.30), South Korea (1.25), or Singapore (0.80). It never ceases to amaze me how little people know about fertility rates and what the implications of those rates are, but it is a narrative that the mainstream press suppresses.

Trickle down biology

Though few in number, they have an effect that affects the whole system for the better.

People still respond to incentives

Casey Mulligan is surprised that some economists seem to have forgotten that people respond to incentives, that if you penalize work, you get less of it.

Socialism to our south

The results of socialism in Venezuela are what anyone who understands economics expects, but some citizens still prefer to believe that bad results must come for bad people:

Each day the arrival of a new item at Excelsior Gama brought Venezuelans flooding into the store: for flour, beef, sugar. Store employees and security guards helped themselves to the goods first, clogging the checkout lines, and then had to barricade the doors to hold back the surge at the entrance.
“The store owners are doing this on purpose, to increase sales,” said Marjorie Urdaneta, a government supporter who said she believes Maduro when he accuses businesses of colluding with foreign powers to wage “economic war” against him.
“He should tell the stores: Make these items available — or else,” she said.

Socialism is always in trouble because of sabotage--a favorite theme in the USSR and China under Mao. It is unfortunate that some people cannot understand that people respond to incentives.

Most Venezuelans are too busy just trying to secure the basics. Residents from the country’s interior say the shortages are even worse outside the capital.
“There’s nothing to buy where we live,” said Maria Valencia, a preschool teacher from the oil-producing hub of Maracaibo, near Venezuela’s western border, while shopping at a government-run Bicentenario supermarket where products sold by recently nationalized companies carried little heart symbols and the phrase “Made in Socialism.”
Valencia and three family members had filled their cart with corn oil, four bottles each, the maximum. “This stuff is gold,” she said.
Shoppers here were more inclined to blame the scarcities on badly behaved countrymen whom they said were trying to profit from the situation.

And while the government is trying to run the economy, it is not doing a very good job with a basic function of government:

But if the president’s fiscal policies are anything like his response to rising crime, the country looks to be in trouble.
The Jan. 6 roadside killing of former Miss Venezuela Monica Spear in a botched robbery attempt jolted a country long-numbed by one of the world’s highest homicide rates and near-total criminal impunity. 

In democracy people get the kind of government that they deserve, which may be very different from the kind of government that they want. 

Read the whole thing in the Washington Posts here.

Antepenultimate

I have always liked the word "penultimate" because it seems so pretentious. Why not simply say "next-to-last"? But today I found an even more pretentious word: "antepenultimate". It means "next to next to last" or "two before the last." Now I just have to figure out where I can use it.

Shakeup at the Minneapolis Fed

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis may be the smallest of the 12 Reserve Banks, but in recent years it has earned the reputation of having one of the best research departments. That may be changing.

Reflections on What to Expect When No One's Expecting

Published in 1968, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb reignited Malthusian fears about the imminent collapse of civilization due to overpopulation. Selling over two million copies, it shaped perceptions for the past half century. Despite the fact that its alarmist predictions have been falsified by history, in the popular mind the threat of overpopulation still looms.

Jonathan Last has a very different message in What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster. He dismisses The Population Bomb as "one of the most spectacularly foolish books ever written." His concern is how nations will cope with shrinking populations. Throughout the developed world and even in some of the developing world, fertility rates have fallen below replacement. Women are averaging less than two babies in Europe, the Far East, and even parts of South American. Only in Africa and in some parts of the middle east are fertility rates still high, and even many of these have fallen.

Last faces several barriers to his message. First, many people do not understand what the fertility rate measures. The media focuses on crude birth rate or population growth, not fertility rates, and even when they discuss fertility rates, they often do not use that term. The fertility rate is an estimate of the average number of children a cohort of women will bear during their reproductive years. Because some children die before they reach adulthood, the replacement level of the fertility rate is usually given as 2.1, though it will be higher in poor countries with high child mortality. If a country maintains its fertility rate at the replacement level, it will eventually, with a long lag, stabilize population and have zero population growth. That lag is the second barrier to his message.

The relationship between fertility rates and population growth is not straightforward. Many people do not understand how population can continue to grow if the fertility rate is below replacement. To answer that question requires a bit of mathematical reasoning and math is hard for most people. Ignoring immigration and emigration, population increases when the number of births exceed the number of deaths. The people dying are mostly old people. The fertility rate tells us nothing about what old people are doing; it tells us what young women are doing. In a population that has had a high fertility rate, the number of old people will be much smaller than the number of young people. If the young people start having few babies with a fertility rate below replacement, the number of births may easily exceed the number of deaths because the old generation is small relative to the population.

However, if the fertility rate stays below replacement long enough, the age structure of the population changes and the old generation becomes large relative to the young generation. When that happens, deaths may exceed births even if the young people start having lots of babies. A change in fertility rates does not have its full effects on population growth or decline immediately, but only after a long lag. There are several countries that have had low fertility rates for so long that their populations are now declining. Japan, Germany, and Russia are examples. In the not too distant future much of Europe will join their ranks.

Third, some people who understand that population expansion is not inevitable and that many parts of the world will in coming years will face a population decline maintain that the decline will be a good thing because there are too many people today. This position focuses on the level of population and is concerned with what level of population is ideal. It ignores that the rate of change in population, regardless of what the level is, has effects that may be good or bad. Last is not concerned with the issues surrounding the level of population. He is concerned only with the issues surrounding the change. He notes that a declining population creates some serious problems for a society and that we have limited experience in anticipating or dealing with those problems.

Chief among those problems is providing support for the elderly. All societies must deal with this problem in some way. In traditional societies children take care of their parents, so in these societies to be childless is a curse. In industrial societies a combination of financial markets and government transfer programs have relieved children from the task of caring for their parents but do not relieve the young from the task of supporting the old. Resources must be transferred from the young to the old, either voluntarily via financial markets or by coercion through government transfers. What we do not know is how societies will cope as the ratio of young to old decreases to levels as low as two to one. The change will affect savings and investment, innovation, and the military power a nation can project.

Last is not an expert in demography. He is a writer who is summarizing the work of others and presenting it in an easy-to-digest form for a popular audience. Demography is a story of numbers, and to enliven the book Last mixes in observations of American culture and stories. For example, Margaret Sanger was an eugenist whose goal was to stop the poor from breeding. She teamed up with a woman who had control of the fortune made by the founder of International Harvester to fund research to develop the birth control pill. The research was successful but had consequences quite different from what Sanger envisioned. The pill seems to have depressed births among the prosperous and educated more than it has depressed births among the poor and uneducated. (The extent to which the pill contributed to other changes such as increased premarital sex and cohabitation, increased age at first marriage, and a higher divorce rate remains uncertain.)

Fertility rates have fallen to levels that no one expected back when Ehrlich was renewing Malthusian fears. In Singapore, for example, the average number of babies being born is only a little more than one per young woman. The government has tried a variety of policies to raise that level, but without success. Last points out throughout his book that in the contemporary world there are no economic benefits to having children but there are substantial costs. It is therefore not surprising that so many people opt for few or no children. Last sees no reason for low fertility rates to rise, though most estimates of what the population will be in 50 or 100 years from now assume that they bounce back to replacement levels. Eventually fertility rates will rise, but only time will reveal when and why.