Author Archives: Pablo Stafforini

Harold Hotelling

When in different parts of a book there are passages from which the casual reader may obtain two different ideas of what the book is proving, and when one version of the thesis is interesting but false and the other true but trivial, it becomes the duty of a reviewer to give warning at least against the false version. My review of The Triumph of Mediocrity in Business was chiefly devoted to warning readers not to conclude that business firms have a tendency to become mediocre, or that the mediocre type of business tends with the passage of time to become increasingly representative or triumphant. That such a warning was needed is suggested by the title of the book and by various passages in it, and confirmed by the opinions of several eminent economists and statisticians who have taken the trouble to write or speak about the matter.

It is now clear that a tendency to stability or mediocrity of the kind which I showed was unproven, was not what the author intended to prove, and that a sufficiently careful reader would not be misled. But the thesis of the book, when correctly interpreted, is essentially trivial.

Consider a statistical variate x whose variance does not change from year to year, but for which there is a correlation r between successive values for the same individual. Let the individuals be grouped so that in a certain year all those in a group have values of x within a narrow range. Then among the mean values in these groups, the variance (calculated with the group frequencies as weights) will in the next year be less than that in the first year, in a ratio of which the mean value for linear regression and fine grouping is r², but in any case is η², less than unity. This theorem is proved by simple mathematics. It is illustrated by genetic, astronomical, physical, sociological and other phenomena. To “prove” such a mathematical result by a costly and prolonged numerical study of many kinds of business profit and expense ratios is analogous to proving the multiplication table by arranging elephants in rows and columns, and then doing the same for numerous other kinds of animals. The performance, though perhaps entertaining, and having a certain pedagogical value, is not an important contribution either to zoology or to mathematics.

Harold Hotelling, letter to the editor, Journal of the American Statistical Association, vol. 29, no. 186 (June, 1934),  pp. 198-199

Matt Ridley

The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.

But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.

You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.

My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.

Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, New York, 2010,  pp. 36-37

Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Seagal & Jon Kabat-Zinn

When our minds are incessantly preoccupied with the rewards or dangers that may await us at the end of our journey, we are cutting ourselves off from the richness of life itself, and from our ability to recognize it in the texture of each moment along the way. In any one moment, this may seem no great loss–but a whole life of lost moments is a whole life lost.

Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Seagal & Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness, New York, 2007, p. 226

Glenn Geher & Scott Barry Kaufman

[W]e know what kinds of physical and psychological features make someone attractive to others. It’s often the case that someone is attracted to someone else because of some such specific feature (e.g., smooth skin) without realizing the cause of the attraction. Then you could see courtship, dating, and the development of a long-term relationship forming—all because one member of the couple had smooth skin when they first met and this feature was attractive enough to spark the courtship process. When asked years later about how the relationship began, the smooth skin when they first met may well be the kind of detail that gets lost in the retelling.

Glenn Geher & Scott Barry Kaufman, Mating Intelligence Unleashed: The Role of the Mind in Sex, Dating, and Love, Oxford, 2013, p. 125

Gregory Clark

[T]he case of Chile seems to underscore a theme of earlier chapters: social and political movements have a surprisingly modest effect on the rate of social mobility. Events that at the time seem crucial, powerful, and critical determinants of the fate of societies leave astonishingly little imprint in the objective records of social mobility rates. Allende tried to remake Chilean society and died bravely when the military intervened to destroy his dream. Thousands were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered under Pinochet’s brutal military regime. But if social mobility rates were the only record of the history of Chile in the past hundred years, we would detect no trace of these events. Despite the cries, the suffering, the outrage, and the struggle, social mobility continued its slow shuffle toward the mean, indifferent to the events that so profoundly affected the lives of individual Chileans.

Gregory Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility, Princeton, New Jersey, 2014, p. 211

G. A. Cohen

I said that believing that no inequality could truly reflect real freedom of choice would contradict your reactions to people in day-to-day life, and that I lack that belief. I lack that belief because I am not convinced that it is true both that all choices are causally determined and that causal determination obliterates responsibility. If you are indeed so convinced, then do not blame me for thinking otherwise, do not blame right-wing politicians for reducing welfare support (since, in your view, they can’t help doing so), do not, indeed, blame, or praise, anyone for choosing to do anything, and therefore live your life, henceforth, differently from the way that we both know that you have lived it up to now.

G. A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism?, Princeton, 2009, pp. 29-30

Steven Pinker

Cannibalism is so repugnant to us that for years even anthropologists failed to admit that it was common in prehistory. It is easy to think: could other human beings really be capable of such a depraved act? But of course animal rights activists have a similarly low opinion of meat eaters, who not only cause millions of preventable deaths but do so with utter callousness: castrating and branding cattle without an anesthetic, impaling fish by the mouth and letting them suffocate in the hold of a boat, boiling lobsters alive. My point is not to make a moral case for vegetarianism but to shed light on the mindset of human violence and cruelty. History and ethnography suggest that people can treat strangers the way we now treat lobsters, and our incomprehension of such deeds may be compared with animal rights activists’ incomprehension of ours. It is no coincidence that Peter Singer, the author of The Expanding Circle, is also the author of Animal Liberation.

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, New York, 2002, p. 320

Tim Harford

Keyhole surgery techniques allow surgeons to operate without making large incisions, minimizing the risk of complications and side effects. Economists often advocate a similar strategy when trying to fix a policy problem: target the problem as closely as possible rather than attempting something a little more drastic.

Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist, London, 2006, p. 138

Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares

Paradójicamente, los detractores más implacables de las novelas policiales, suelen ser aquellas personas que más se deleitan en su lectura. Ello se debe, quizá, a un inconfesado prejuicio puritano: considerar que un acto puramente agradable no puede ser meritorio.

Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares, ‘El séptimo círculo’, in Museo: textos inéditos, Buenos Aires, 2002, p. 112

Hunter Thompson

[A] man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

Hunter Thompson, Letter to Hume Logan, April 22, 1958, in Shaun Usher (ed.), Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, San Francisco, 2014, p. 67

William James

It takes […] what Berkeley calls a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of any instinctive human act. To the metaphysician alone can such questions occur as: Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down? The common man can only say, “Of course we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made from all eternity to be loved!”

William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, New York, 1890, pp. 386-387

Timothy Wilson, David Centerbar, Deborah Kermer & Daniel Gilbert

The benefit of knowledge is that it makes the world more predictable, but the cost is that a predictable world sometimes seems less delicious, less exciting, less poignant.

Timothy Wilson, David Centerbar, Deborah Kermer & Daniel Gilbert, ‘The Pleasures of Uncertainty: Prolonging Positive Moods in Ways People Do Not Anticipate’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 88, no. 1 (2005), p. 5

Paul Bloom

[O]ne of the strongest examples of essentialism concerns the difference between the sexes. Before ever learning about physiology, genetics, evolutionary theory, or any other science, children think that there is something internal and invisible that distinguishes boys from girls. This essentialism can be explicit, as when one girl explained why a boy will go fishing rather than put on makeup: “’Cause that’s they boy instinct.” And seven-year-olds tend to endorse statements such as “Boys have different things in their innards than girls” and “Because God made them that way” (a biological essence and a spiritual essence). Only later in development do children accept cultural explanations, such as “Because it is the way we have been brought up.” You need to be socialized to think about socialization.

Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like, New York, 2010, p. 17

Joshua Greene

[W]e can appeal to rights when moral matters have been settled. In other words, our appeals to rights may serve as shields, protecting our moral progress from the threats that remain. Likewise, there are times when it makes sense to use “rights” as weapons, as rhetorical tools for making moral progress when arguments have failed.

Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, New York, 2013, p. 308

Joshua Greene

Perhaps, as Kant thought, making transgressors suffer is a truly worthy goal, just for its own sake. But if that’s right, it’s a remarkable coincidence. How strange if the true principles of justice just happen to coincide with the feelings produced by our punishment gizmos, installed in our brains by natural selection to help us stabilize cooperation and thus make more copies of our genes. Knowing how our brains work and how they got here, it’s more reasonable to suppose that our taste for justice is a useful illusion.

Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, New York, 2013, p. 274

Joshua Greene

Another possibility is that our intuitive sense of justice is a set of heuristics: moral machinery that’s very useful but far from infallible. We have a taste for punishment. This taste, like all tastes, is subtle and complicated, shaped by a complex mix of genetic, cultural, and idiosyncratic factors. But our taste for punishment is still a taste, implemented by automatic settings and thus limited by its inflexibility. All tastes can be fooled. We fool our taste buds with artificial sweeteners. We fool our sexual appetites with birth control and pornography, both of which supply sexual gratification while doing nothing to spread our genes. Sometimes, however, our tastes make fools of us. Our tastes for fat and sugar make us obese in a world of abundance. Drugs of abuse hijack our reward circuits and destroy people’s lives. To know whether we’re fooling our tastes or whether our tastes are fooling us, we have to step outside the limited perspective of our tastes: To what extent is this thing—diet soda, porn, Nutella, heroin—really serving our bests interests? We should ask the same question about our taste for punishment.

Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, New York, 2013, p. 272

Roy Baumeister

During a conference debate the influential social psychologist Robert Zajonc once proposed that the image of the human mind as a small computer should be updated to assign more prominence to motivation and emotion, and he suggested the memorable image of a computer covered in barbecue sauce!

Roy Baumeister, ‘Background’, in Roy Baumeister & Eli Finkel (eds.), Advanced Social Psychology: The State of the Science, Oxford, 2010, p. 12

Lant Pricthett

The typical person in a rich industrial country lives better in material terms than any king or duke or the wealthiest financier in 1820 or even 1870. The suburban chariot—the ubiquitous minivan—provides safer, faster, and more comfortable travel than the grandest carriage ever built. Cellular telephone owners can pull from their pocket a device that can communicate more quickly and reliably with any corner of the globe than anything available to the most powerful world leader in 1900. Nearly every house in the developed world has flush toilets connected to an amazing system of waste treatment and disposal that eliminates the stench and disease that afflicted even the wealthiest in the nineteenth century. In the age of digital recordings, people have access to a wider variety of better-performed music anywhere they travel than the richest of courts could ever provide. Health conditions have improved enormously so that nearly every child in the industrial world is born with a better chance to reach adulthood than the richest could achieve.

Lant Pricthett, Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on International Labor Mobility, Washington, D. C., 2006, p. 15

Philip Oppenheim

Any intelligent person will ask themselves a simple question: should I pay up to 80p more for my bananas when only 5p will end up with the grower; or should I just buy the regular ones and give the difference to a decent development charity?

Philip Oppenheim, ‘Fairtrade Fat Cats’, The Spectator, November 5, 2005, pp. 17-18.

Augustus De Morgan

Among the worst of barbarisms is that of introducing symbols which are quite new in mathematical, but perfectly understood in common, language. Writers have borrowed from the Germans the abbreviation n! to signify 1.2.3…(n-1).n, which gives their pages the appearance of expressing surprise and admiration that 2, 3, 4 &c. should be found in mathematical results.

Augustus De Morgan, The Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Difusion of Useful Knowledge, London, 1842, vol. 23, p. 444

Darrell Huff

It is worth keeping in mind also that the dependability of a sample can be destroyed just as easily by invisible sources of bias as by these visible ones. That is, even if you can’t find a source of demonstrable bias, allow yourself some degree of skepticism about the results as long as there is a possibility of bias somewhere.

Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics, New York, 1954, p. 19

Ian Eslick

I used to live above a small pizzeria and I knew the guy who owned the place. He worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week. He was there all the time and worked so hard for his little restaurant. I realized one day that I have to work just as hard for a restaurant as I do it for a multi-billion dollar company. If I have the choice, why not go for the big idea.

Ian Eslick, in Max Finger & Oliver Samwer, America’s Most Successful Startups: Lessons for Entrepreneurs, Wiesbaden, 1998, pp. 9-10

Adolfo Bioy Casares

Cuando concluye el día hago el balance. Si escribí algo no demasiado estúpido, si leí, si fui al cine, si estuve en cama con una mujer, si jugué al tenis, si anduve recorriendo campo a caballo, si inventé una historia o parte de una historia, si reflexioné apropiadamente sobre hechos o dichos, aun si conseguí un dístico, probablemente sienta justificado el día. Cuando todo eso falta, me parece que el día no justifica mi permanencia en el mundo.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, Descanso de caminantes: diarios íntimos, Buenos Aires, 2001, p. 273

Tim Harford

[S]ome companies have scarcity power and can set prices that are far above their true cost, which is where they would be in a competitive market. This is why economists believe there’s an important difference between being in favour of markets and being in favour of business, especially particular businesses. A politician who is in favour of markets believes in the importance of competition and wants to prevent businesses from getting too much scarcity power. A politician who’s too influenced by corporate lobbyists will do exactly the opposite.

Tim Harford, The Undercover Economist, London, 2006, p. 78

William Lane Craig & James Sinclair

Although G. W. F. Leibniz’s question, Why is there (tenselessly) something rather than nothing, should still rightly be asked, there would be no reason to look for a cause of the universe’s beginning to exist, since on tenseless theories of time the universe did not begin to exist in virtue of its having a first event anymore than a meter stick begins to exist in virtue of having a first centimeter.

William Lane Craig & James Sinclair, ‘The kalam Cosmological Argument’, in William Lane Craig & J. P. Moreland (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Malden, Massachusetts, p. 184

Nick Cooney

For most people, the goal of any altruistic act is simply to do something helpful. Very few of us choose where to donate, where to volunteer, and how to live our lives based on the answer to the question, “How can I do the most possible good in the world?” And yet it is that calculating attitude that is crucial to helping as many animals (or people) as possible.

Nick Cooney, Veganomics: The Surprising Science on What Motivates Vegetarians, from the Breakfast Table to the Bedroom, Brooklyn, New York, 2014, chap. 1

John Maynard Keynes

The death at the age of 26 of Frank Ramsey, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, sometime scholar of Winchester and of Trinity, son of the President of Magdalene, is a heavy loss—though his primary interests were in Philosophy and Mathematical Logic—to the pure theory of Economics. From a very early age, about 16 I think, his precocious mind was intensely interested in economic problems. Economists living in Cambridge have been accustomed from his undergraduate days to try their theories on the keen edge of his critical and logical faculties. If he had followed the easier path of mere inclination, I am not sure that he would not have exchanged the tormenting exercises of the foundations of thought and of psychology, where the mind tries to catch its own tail, for the delightful paths of our own most agreeable branch of the moral sciences, in which theory and fact, intuitive imagination and practical judgment, are blended in a manner comfortable to the human intellect.

When he did descend from his accustomed stony heights, he still lived without effort in a rarer atmosphere than most economists care to breathe, and handled the technical apparatus of our science with the easy grace of one accustomed to something far more difficult.

John Maynard Keynes, ‘F. P. Ramsey’, The Economic Journal, vol. 40, no. 157, p. 153

Paul Graham

[U]nless you’re extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one’s spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there’s less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there’s more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what’s around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.

Paul Graham, ‘Stuff’, July 2007

Jonathan Baron & Ewa Szymanska

Altruistic behavior often leads to desirable social outcomes. We can thus assume that more altruism is better than less, other things being equal. But altruism tends to be already widely encouraged, so efforts to promote it even further may produce little noticeable change. Instead, it might be easier to do more good by improving efficiency of the altruistic behaviors already in place.

Jonathan Baron & Ewa Szymanska, Heuristics and Biases in Charity, in Daniel Oppenheimer & Christopher Olivola (eds.), The Science of Giving: Experimental Approaches to the Study of Charity, New York, 2011, p. 215

Robin Hanson

If you want outsiders to believe you, then you don’t get to choose their rationality standard. The question is what should rational outsiders believe, given the evidence available to them, and their limited attention. Ask yourself carefully: if most contrarians are wrong, why should they believe your cause is different?

Robin Hanson, ‘Contrarian Excuses’, Overcoming Bias, November 15, 2009

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth

[L]et there be granted to the science of pleasure what is granted to the science of energy ; to imagine an ideally perfect instrument, a psychophysical machine, continually registering the height of pleasure experienced by an individual, exactly according to the verdict of consciousness, or rather diverging therefrom according to a law of errors. From moment to moment the hedonimeter varies; the delicate index now flickering with the flutter of the passions, now steadied by intellectual activity, low sunk whole hours in the neighbourhood of zero, or momentarily springing up towards infinity. The continually indicated height is registered by photographic or other frictionless apparatus upon a uniformly moving vertical plane. Then the quantity of happiness between two epochs is represented by the area contained between the zero-line, perpendiculars thereto at the points corresponding to the epochs, and the curve traced by the index; or, if the correction suggested in the last paragraph be admitted, another dimension will be required for the representation.

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences, London, 1881, p. 101

Steven Zaillian

“I could’ve got more out… I could’ve got more… if I’d just… I don’t know, if I’d just… I could’ve got more… If I’d made more money… I threw away so much money, you have no idea. If I’d just… I didn’t do enough.

“This car. Goeth would’ve bought this car. Why did I keep the car? Ten people, right there, ten more I could’ve got.

“This pin –Two people. This is gold. Two more people. He would’ve given me two for it. At least one. He would’ve given me one. One more. One more person. A person, Stern. For this. One more. I could’ve gotten one more person I didn’t.”

Steven Zaillian, Schindler’s List

James Mill

All conduct which we class as wrong or criminal is, or we suppose it to be, an attack upon some vital interest of ourselves or of those we care for (a category which may include the public, or the whole of human race): conduct which, if allowed to be repeated, would destroy or impair the security and comfort of our lives. We are prompted to defend these paramount interests by repelling the attack, and guarding against its renewal; and our earliest experience gives us a feeling, which acts with the rapidity of an instinct, that the most direct and efficacious protection is retaliation. We are therefore prompted to retaliate by inflicting pain on the person who has inflicted or tried to inflict it upon ourselves. We endeavour, as far as possible, that our social institutions shall render us this service. We are gratified when, by that or other means, the pain is inflicted, and dissatisfied if from any cause it is not. This strong association of the idea of punishment, and the desire for its infliction, with the idea of the act which has hurt us, is not in itself a moral sentiment; but it appears to me to be the element which is present when we have the feelings of obligation and of injury, and which mainly distinguishes them from simple distaste or dislike for any thing in the conduct of another that is disagreeable to us; that distinguishes, for instance, our feelings towards the person who steals our goods, from our feeling towards him who offends our senses by smoking tobacco. This impulse to self-defence by the retaliatory infliction of pain, only becomes a moral sentiment, when it is united with a conviction that the infliction of punishment in such a case is conformable to the general good, and when the impulse is not allowed to carry us beyond the point at which that conviction ends.

James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, London, 1869, vol. 2, chap. 23