What I'll Do Here

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Expect in this space:
  • Posts about books I'm reading as I (slowly) process them.
  • Reflections on topics I teach (Economics, Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, and US History).
  • Responses or summaries of other pieces that grab my attention.
  • Many sentences and paragraphs that would offend Messrs. Strunk &White.
  • Frequent sabbaticals.

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Review: Enduring Divine Absence

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L'Absinthe, Edgar Degas (1876) While reading Joseph Minich's recent  Enduring Divine Absence ,  I was reminded of C.S. Lewis' first Screwtape Letter. In it, the demon Screwtape recalls a mini-crisis when the atheist "patient" he tempts considers Christianity. The danger passes as soon as the atheist walks out his front door: Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true. He knew he’d had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere lo
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Are Economists Good People? Should You Marry One?

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There are good reasons to call economics the "dismal science." Economists, Steven Rhoads jokes, see a bittersweet quality in the groundbreaking of a new community center. They might brood: "By spending money here and not elsewhere, we give up the mobile heart units that would save four lives a year, a remedial reading program ... [etc., etc.]" (22). This may be technically true. But isn't this view of life a little ... inhuman? Rhoads approvingly quotes Kenneth Boulding: "No one would want his daughter to marry an economic man, one who counted every cost and asked for every reward, [and] was never afflicted with mad generosity or uncalculating love" (34). Czech philosopher Zdeněk Neubauer suggests something similar when he argues "price is unholy."¹  Economists are suspicious of single-minded devotion to single goals at the expense of others. Because opportunity costs are everywhere, they will usually emphasize marginal investments in p
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Rhoads on Opportunity Cost

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Good economists use simple principles to transform our decision making in profound ways. Chapter 2 of The Economist's View of the World  unpacks what is, perhaps, the key insight of economics:   "spending and regulatory decisions that use scarce resources or require their use incur costs in terms of forgone alternatives" (11).  This is the concept economists call "opportunity costs." Every time we allocate a scarce resource in one way, we lose the chance to allocate that resource in other ways. Is that really so insightful?  If you're about to stop reading because this seems blindingly obvious, Rhoads then shows that few politicians or experts in other fields have properly absorbed this lesson. Rhoads quotes a representative city administrator explaining how his town budgets: "We give primary considerations to the public welfare, but cost considerations are also important" (12). This may sound humane, but to an economist it is nonsense. Costs
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