Beyond Rivalry - math_and_numbers

What's the U.S. Economic Bailout Costing?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 10:50:00 -0500

At the conservative estimate of $4.6165 trillion, so far (including the Citi bailout) (Bloomberg estimates the bailout even higher, at over $7 trillion already, which is $24,000 for every person in the country), the bailout would cost more in inflation-adjusted costs than:

the Marshall Plan,

the Louisiana Purchase,

the Race to the Moon,

the 1980s S&L Crisis,

the Korean War,

The New Deal,

the Invasion of Iraq,

the Vietnam War,

and NASA [hope that doesn't include The Race to the Moon ...],

which together total $3.92 trillion.

"The only single American event in history that even comes close to matching the cost of the credit crisis is World War II: Original Cost [to U.S.]: $288 billion, Inflation-Adjusted Cost: $3.6 trillion."

More scary details here, courtesy Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture

Yes, taxpayers could get some of the money back (the Chrysler 1.5 billion bailout loan in the early 1980s was repaid in full with interest) (maybe), but even if taxpayers are on the hook for only $1-2 trillion, that's still between $3,200 and $6,500 per every man, woman, and child in the country.

Others suggest we should look at the cost of the bailout in terms of GDP, or in…

Thoughts To Ponder

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:16:00 -0400

"You can't model human behavior with math."

-- Frank Partnoy, a former derivatives broker and corporate securities attorney, who now teaches law at the University of San Diego, explaining why investments made up of unreliable mortgage loans failed to eliminate the risk inherent in the loans.

A 12-minute clip on 60 Minutes explains the financial mess we're in.

Partnoy sums it up succinctly towards the end of the clip:

"As bad as the mortgage crisis has been, 94 percent of all Americans are still paying off their loans. The problem is Wall Street placed its huge bets and side bets with all of those fancy securities on the 6 percent who are not. 'We wouldn't be in any of this trouble right now if we had just had underlying investments in mortgages. We wouldn't be in any trouble right now,' says Partnoy." The problem he says, is the side bets on the mortgages, which were operating in an unregulated environment.

Waste

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 10:10:00 -0400

IRS Spends Millions to Tell You the Check is Almost in the Mail

Al Tompkins at Poynter Online reports on The Associated Press story:

"'At a cost of nearly $42 million, the IRS wants you to know: Your check is almost in the mail.

"'The Internal Revenue Service is spending the money on letters to alert taxpayers to expect rebate checks as part of the economic stimulus plan.

"'The notices are going out this month to an estimated 130 million households who filed returns for the 2006 tax year, at a cost of $41.8 million, IRS spokesman John Lipold confirmed.

"'That works out to about 32 cents to print, process and mail each letter. ...'"

"Why spend this money? The story quoted Keith Hennessey, director of the president's National Economic Council:

"'"Any time you do something as a government tens of millions of times, there is ample room for people to get confused. And so if you're going to have tens of millions of taxpayers getting checks, you want to get the information out so that you have as few people as possible confused about what's happening, they understand what's coming, and it reduces the number of incoming requests that IRS…

Mathematical Beauty and Trying to Make Meaning

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 07:20:00 -0500

At Overcoming Bias, Eliezer Yudkowsky offers a sequence of numbers (1, 8, 27, 64, 125, ...) and considers the order inherent in it. He considers that one might try to impose order on the sequence, insisting on "neatness and elegance when there isn't any there."

He goes on, speaking of the elegant, inherent order of math, in words that seem to me to apply to many aspects of life (or am I forcing the analogy?):

"Someone who grasped too quickly at order, who demanded closure right now, who forced the pattern, might never find the stable level. If you tweak the table of first differences to make them "more even", fit your own conception of aesthetics before you found the math's own rhythm, then the second differences and third differences will come out wrong. Maybe you won't even bother to take the second differences and third differences. Since, once you've forced the first differences to conform to your own sense of aesthetics, you'll be happy -- or you'll insist in a loud voice that you're happy.

"None of this says a word against - gasp! - reductionism. The order is there, it's just better-hidden. [T]he moral is to reduce at the…

So Many Dead and Dying

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 16:37:18 -0400

On Thursday, to my knowledge, a bird and a woman died. The bird, a pet parakeet belonging to a friend, died at 11:03 a.m., after a long life; the woman, a friend of a friend, and an acquaintance of mine, died at 8:04 p.m., after a relatively short life (48 years), one that seems cut terribly short. Both deaths were witnessed by people who love the dying creatures, who were sad they were leaving, who found it hard to watch them die, who cried, who mourn and grieve, who will remember. In the case of the woman's death, other lives will also change, and perhaps major decisions will be made because she is gone, because she was here.

On Thursday, if it was an 'average' day, about 155,000 people died around the world (and about 363,000 people are born). It's hard to comprehend that one or two people die every second. Since I started typing this 10 minutes ago, if this day is average, about 1,000 people who were alive when I started are now dead. Their lives and deaths change other lives.

I can't find any statistics online about global animals deaths per day, but it must be in the…

Recent Reading

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 14:25:00 -0400

Recent online reading of interest: of Girard, desire, imitation and fashion; musing on death and life; findings of sloppy science; essays on climate change and human responsibility; the anniversary of Sputnik; and how hypocrisy traps make some of us squirm.

>> Death and the garden, Shelley, not looking out the window, obituary motifs, and thoughts on decay in The glad reaper: Our obituaries editor finds solace in a garden, a correspondent's diary (by Ann Wroe) in The Economist:

"More than I used to, I note the premature browning of leaves and grass, the erosion of statues and stones, the rotting of things. The odd pangs and pains in my own body I now surmise to be Death knocking, or leaving a calling card, with a promise to come back later.

"Is this morbid? Some friends and colleagues think so, joking nervously about 'the Grim Reaper' and 'Grave-Watch', muttering of coffin counts. But to me it is simply part of a continuum: death in life, life in death. Everything in nature springs up, flourishes, dies, springs up again: we do the same. Bodies form and decay all the time. What the spirit does, being outside nature, has the potential to be much…

Risk Assessment, Scapegoating, Escaping Death

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 18 May 2007 12:35:00 -0400

Dave Pollard writes about a study that researches "the risks of various 'voluntary' activities: non-critical medical therapies, job and transportation choices, and hobbies" and figures the comparative risk of fatality for people engaging in these activities for a year.

His analysis is that the report is an "illustration of the degree to which we mentally miscalculate the risks we face in our everyday lives, seeing some things as much safer than they really are (e.g. firefighting) and other things as much more dangerous than they really are (e.g. drowsy driving)." He also cites the example of SUVs being slightly less safe to drive than convertibles.

What interests most is this comment:

"This delusion of danger, and the illusion that something can or has to be done, that someone -- British cows, Canadian farmers, Chinese cats, Firestone, Saddam Hussein -- must be brought to account in order to give us back control, is literally making us all crazy. It causes us to believe we cannot let children out of our sight even for a moment. It causes us to wildly change our diets, to avoid visiting whole countries, to fingerprint whole nations of visitors, to suspend civil liberties, to put barbed wire…

Fairness, Procreation and a Hummer

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 19:55:31 -0400

What's Fair?

We often think we know, but maybe we simplify the context to such a great extent that we're usually wrong.

Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) asks whether, because he hasn't procreated and is therefore saving a huge amount of energy in that realm, and because he routinely walks to work and therefore saves energy every day, it's fair for him to have a Hummer. Is it?

Manure

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:33:57 -0400

"Please remember that my web page is like a two-year-old manure pile in back of your barn: It is continually growing and the best stuff is often buried on the bottom." -- The Humble Farmer

J'agree, not just for myself but for lots of weblogs. Newest ≠ best.

How To Celebrate Pi Day

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:20:00 -0400

Celebrate Pi Day (3/14, specifically at 1:59) -- There's not a lot of time left! You could try the frozen hot dog throw. Or honour pi by memorising it. More ideas here.