Discouraging Effort and Success

Why do we tax labor? We know that any tax on an activity discourages people from engaging in that activity by reducing the rewards for doing it. So why do we tax hard work, production, and wise investment? Do we really want less of those things?

We need to fund our government (some claim), so we need to tax something. Why not tax behaviors that we want less of? Wouldn't that be killing two birds with one stone?

What would happen if we ditched all income taxes (including capital gains, and corporate income taxes) in favor of taxation levied exclusively against consumption? How would our society change?

I imagine a system wherein my income is not monitored by the government, but the total amount of my consumptive spending is instead. It's easy enough to do - just give up cash and require banks to report the amount of spending. As long as my consumptive spending total for the tax period stays below a legally established minimum, I pay no tax. But when my total rises above that level, I begin to pay tax out of each additional dollar spent. So if I don't spend much beyond the limit, the taxation I experience will be very low.

There are many advantages to such a system. For one, we'd stop punishing smart and hardworking people for being so productive. Every dollar they earn would be theirs to keep. This would include dollars earned for good investments (capital gains). Similarly, we'd stop punishing businesses for competence in producing and selling products and services to people who need them. When a highly successful business has to pay a large amount of income tax while its less successful competitor pays no tax (due to writing off business losses) the playing field is being unfairly tipped to reward poor performance! Not only that, but why tax production at all when production is what gives us the things we need and desire?

Also very important is the fact that taxing consumption, instead of labor, production, and investment, allows individuals to adjust their tax liability to fit their circumstances and desires. If I don't want to pay so much in taxes this year, I can reduce my consumption and pay less. And, I bear no penalty for working extra hard to earn additional money to fund my future, or my children's future.

Under this kind of system saving would be strongly incentivized. For those who wished to avoid taxation, saving and wise investment would be the safest harbor for their money. Everyone would be faced with compelling reasons to defer spending to a later date. Government subsidized retirement could become unnecessary for average Americans.

It's possible to take this idea to a more extreme level and suggest that leisure (time spent not producing or learning) could be taxed when it exceeded a certain minimum amount. This could spur the indolent and chronically unemployed (whether poor or wealthy) to return to productivity, lending their efforts to the improvement of society.

Undoubtedly there are many weaknesses in such a plan, and opportunities for clever gaming of the system. But that is no different from our current system for taxation.

Are there structural problems with this proposition?

The Point Of This Blog

"Without new technologies, an economy might grow slowly. But without decent rules, an economy cannot even make use of the technologies that already exist."


-Sebastian Mallaby

Rational Emotion

This is my response to Jenn's post Dismissing Emotion.

There are two kinds of mental process, conscious and subconscious. We can report the logic of the conscious mind, but we can't observe or give an accounting of the logic of the subconscious. However, many people learn the skill of explaining their subconscious processing after the fact, "rationalizing" the conclusions they came to subconsciously. Doing this completes a feedback loop in which the rules the subconscious uses in its processing can be updated. Basically, the conscious mind can be used to discard the false premises the subconscious may have been relying on.The movie Memento illustrates the inverse of how this is supposed to work. Instead of reliably updating old information with new, our hero deliberately deceives himself.

What is emotion? It is the motive impulse, the thing that drives us to act. It is the expression of mental processing, the result of our thinking, where thinking includes conscious and subconscious mental processes.

The conventional wisdom is that it is a mistake to act on impulse/emotion. However, this is something of a misdiagnosis. It isn't that emotion is unreliable, it's that in new situations our thinking is not well-developed and can be mistaken in its conclusions. The conventional wisdom is correct that it's best to pause and take stock and to seek to understand the situation in new light so as to avoid mistakes. But emotion versus reason is a false dichotomy. Emotion flows from reason.

Social Welfare

I’m puzzled about something, maybe you can help me out.

Economists sometimes talk about a concept that I am going to refer to as the level of social welfare. Basically this is how much utility, or satisfaction, the society is enjoying as a whole. Here’s a simple example: imagine a society that consists of just two people, Bob and Frank. Bob has a banana that he would like to sell to Frank. Bob is willing to sell the banana for any amount greater than $1. Frank is willing to buy the banana for any amount less than $2. Bob is a good negotiator, so they eventually agree on a price of $1.75.

In this example, the sale of the banana increases the wealth of both parties. Bob traded something he valued at $1 for $1.75, so he gained $.75 worth of value.  Frank gave $1.75 for something that he valued at $2.00, so he gained $.25 worth of value. The level of social welfare in Frank and Bob’s society has increased by $1.00, because of the sale of the banana.

So the level of social welfare, as measured by economists, has to do with how much value people place on different items, and on how those items are distributed through the society. Moving goods and services from people who value them less to people who value them more will increase the total level of social welfare in the society. This is basic microeconomics.

The thing that bothers me is this: How much a person is said to value any particular good or service is measured in dollars. That is a relative measure, because it’s really comparing how much the person values the good or service against how much she values dollars.

And how much she values dollars depends on how many dollars she has.

Is this an objective way to measure the level of social welfare in a society? If I am very poor then this measure of social welfare under represents my preferences, needs, desires. Here’s a simple example: two starving men approach a baker who has one loaf of bread left to sell. The baker, having studied microeconomics, knows that the man who values the bread the most will be willing to pay the highest price. One of the starving men has $2 in his pocket, the other has $5. The baker sells the loaf for $5, confident that the man who offered only $2 wasn’t as hungry as the man who offered $5.

Obviously, the prices that the two men are willing to pay do not adequately reflect the value they would receive from the bread.  This is a serious problem. It undermines the legitimacy of calculations of social welfare. It also undermines the legitimacy of the price mechanism as a welfare maximizing means of distributing goods and services.

Is there a legitimate, objective way to separate preferences or utility from ability to pay? Is there some way to put the preferences of the poor on equal footing with the preferences of the wealthy, at least for academic purposes? 

Citizens of the World

This is something I've wanted to blog about for a long time but haven't been able to put my thoughts in order. I might still not be there, but I'm going to give it a shot.

I love America. I'm proud to be part of this nation of immigrants and freedom, innovation and individuality, community and law. I'm an American. But I'm a human first.

I'm not a constitutional scholar so I can't speak to the intentions of the framers, but it seems inconsistent with the ideals that they encoded into the first law of the nation that the Constitution should apply to American government only within the boundaries of the States. Whatever the precedents may be, I believe that serving representatives of our government should be bound by the law of this land, wherever they are.

Here on American soil we don't believe in diluted ideals. We believe in and practice the freedom of discourse in a way that is not replicated in other western nations. We do not proscribe the wearing of the burkha in public universities. We protect the right of the Klan and of neo-Nazis to argue their misguided and hateful views, because we believe that no ideas are so dangerous that they can't be talked about. We applaud criticisms of our government, of our bigotries, and even of our traditions and culture, when such criticisms are levied with honest intent. And even when they aren't, we protect them.

On American soil we defend the right of all people, even non-citizens who are here illegally, to due process and equal access to the rule of law. We welcome far more immigrants than any other nation. We believe that YOU should reap the rewards of your hard work, and your creative ideas. We believe that every person, and especially every child, should have access to the best health care, and to a high quality education.

On American soil we hold our representatives in Congress to these ideals stubbornly, fiercely, and even foolishly at times. We believe in these ideals.

But outside the borders of the States we tolerate evil and cruel acts against humans, committed by our agents. We permit an abridgment of the rule of law. We condone the use of propaganda and misinformation, and the suppression of free discourse. We allow our tax dollars to support corrupt regimes. We lend our support to barbarous tyrants.

We do these things in our strategic interest. And in so doing we reveal a shallowness in our ideals that permits us to refuse to admit the humanity of persons who live far from us, and who are strangers to us. Yet they are the same people we welcome into our neighborhoods and our workplaces, our churches and schools, when they apply for the right to immigrate to the United States.

I don't propose a radical change to the law. I only propose that we extend the rightness of our laws to all of our actions, and to the actions of our government, wherever it is operating. I am an American, but I am a human first. What is right for the best and worst Americans is surely right for the best and worst of our neighbors abroad.

This Blew My Mind

The following is an excerpt from a fascinating article in Wired.

Dunbar tells the story of two labs that both ran into the same experimental problem: The proteins they were trying to measure were sticking to a filter, making it impossible to analyze the data. “One of the labs was full of people from different backgrounds,” Dunbar says. “They had biochemists and molecular biologists and geneticists and students in medical school.” The other lab, in contrast, was made up of E. coli experts. “They knew more about E. coli than anyone else, but that was what they knew,” he says. Dunbar watched how each of these labs dealt with their protein problem. The E. coli group took a brute-force approach, spending several weeks methodically testing various fixes. “It was extremely inefficient,” Dunbar says. “They eventually solved it, but they wasted a lot of valuable time.”

The diverse lab, in contrast, mulled the problem at a group meeting. None of the scientists were protein experts, so they began a wide-ranging discussion of possible solutions. At first, the conversation seemed rather useless. But then, as the chemists traded ideas with the biologists and the biologists bounced ideas off the med students, potential answers began to emerge. “After another 10 minutes of talking, the protein problem was solved,” Dunbar says. “They made it look easy.”

When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.

I think there is really something in the idea that reasoning by analogy, though potentially a logical mistake, can spur creative and new understanding. And I definitely agree that being forced to explain without reference to standard models helps to advance one's thinking.

I'm Starting To Get It

After considerably more reading, this is the way I'm understanding it. Let me know what I'm missing or getting wrong.

The key to Bayes’ theorem is that it makes explicit the relationship between two events, and the probability of one event given that the other event has occurred.

Here’s a simple example: Say you want to know if it rained last night, so you go outside and touch the grass to see if it’s wet. Before you touch the grass there is some probability that it rained during the night, maybe based on a forecast of 40% chance of rain. But after you touch the grass and feel that it is wet, there is a new (higher) probability that it rained. Bayes’ theorem gives you a way to calculate the new probability that it rained last night, given the evidence of wet grass.

You can’t conclude that it rained last night based on the fact that the grass is wet, because the sprinklers may have come on or it may just be dew. But if you know something about the relationship between the event of the grass being wet and the event of it having rained, then you can calculate how likely it is that rain is the cause of the wet grass (CORRECTION - that reference to 'cause' is objectionable, we're only discussing correlation). The real insight of Bayes’ theorem is that the likelihood that rain is the cause of the wet grass is related to the probability of the grass being wet when it hasn’t rained.

If you happen to know that there is a very low probability of the grass being wet in the morning after a night with no rain (maybe you don’t have sprinklers, and you live in a dry climate with very little dew), then wet grass is a strong indicator of rain. But if there is a high probability of the grass being wet on a morning after no rain, then wet grass is a very weak indicator of rain.

This is fairly intuitive, and so maybe it doesn’t seem very revolutionary. However, what Bayes’ theorem does is it makes this kind of reasoning explicit and calculable. Bayes’ theorem justifies this kind of reasoning by formally spelling out how and why it works. An understanding of Bayes’ theorem also helps one avoid mistakes of probabilistic reasoning, e.g. thinking that wet grass is a stronger indicator of rain than it really is. 

A Call to (Bayesian) Missionaries

Math is Tough

I need someone to show me the light.

I've tried, but I just can't seem to understand the far-reaching implications of Bayes' theorem. The more people I ask for help, the more I become convinced that 'Bayesian' is a synonym for 'inarticulate math-head'.

See, I want to understand why it matters. Why it's supposedly transformational.

Here's the example I have heard most frequently used to explain Bayes' theroem: Imagine there is a test to screen for a particular kind of cancer. When the test is administered to people who don't have the cancer, 99.5% of those screened will be correctly flagged as cancer-free (low false positive rate). When the test is administered to people who DO have the cancer, 99.9% of those screened will be correctly flagged as having the cancer (low false negative rate). In the general population, .01% of people have this cancer, so that would be about 30,000 people in the US!

Two questions: 1) Assuming the test is fairly cheap to administer, should this screening be done routinely for all people? 2) If I am flagged positive for having the cancer, what is the probability that I actually have the cancer?

The answer to question 2 is surprising, and that's why this example is used to promote Bayes' theorem. Using Bayes' theorem (I'll spare you the math) you find that if you're flagged as having the cancer, there is only about a 2% CORRECTION 16.7% chance that you actually have it. So the answer to question 1 is probably no, because getting a positive result still means you have a very low chance of actually having the cancer (instead the screening should probably only be done for people at high risk).

That seems like a pretty good example because it's easy to relate to and has a non-intuitive outcome. However, I think it must actually be a very poor example of the power of Bayes' theorem, because I can very easily work that same problem out with just standard probabilistic reasoning and get the same answer! You just divide the number of genuine positives (people who have the cancer who test positive for the cancer) by the number of total positives (false positives plus genuine positives) to get the likelihood that any particular positive result is a genuine positive result (the 2% result comes from the fact that the false positive rate is high relative to how rare the cancer is). It's simple, easy, and doesn't require Bayes' theorem.

But there are a lot of people who are excited about Bayes and his famous theorem, so there must be more to it than this example. So can someone please help me to understand?

Occam's Razor

Does it make any sense to have a preference for simpler explanations over more complicated explanations? Is there anything to Occam's Razor?

Yes, a little. There's more that can go wrong with a complicated explanation, or one that makes more assumptions, than a simpler explanation. Simply, when there are more elements to an explanation there is a greater possibility that one of them is inaccurate.

Is it useful or practical to invoke Occam's Razor? It is very useful for making guesses about explanations when you aren't heavily invested in actually being correct, and don't want to invest time and effort in evaluating the content of an explanation that you've already decided you don't like. It's sort of useful for dismissing extreme-case explanations where the number of assumed unknowns is very large (alternatively, you could just point out that there is uncertainty about all those unknowns - this requires you to make some kind of evaluation about the magnitude of the uncertainty rather than just using Occam's Razor as a sort of appeal to authority).

My point is simply that the more complicated explanation could be the more accurate one. Correctly invoked, Occam's Razor is a specific criticism about the content of an explanation. Incorrectly invoked, Occam's Razor is an intellectually lazy dismissal of an idea without addressing the content.

Generally speaking, it is probably better not to directly invoke Occam's Razor, but instead to simply be specific in your criticisms.

Freedom

Scott Adams, in one of his weaker posts, claims that freedom is a zero sum game. OK, since it's Scott Adams, he might just be playing a joke on me (not me exactly, just incautious, literally-minded people). It's happened before.

In case he's serious though, I've prepared a short rebuttal: B.S.

In my opinion. the whole point of government, law, etc. is to EXPAND my usable freedom by limiting the freedoms to do things that have net deleterious effects on freedom.

Quick example: making murder illegal is a limit on freedom, but successfully preventing murder expands freedom far more than freedom has been limited by murder being illegal.

Appeal to Authority

I've heard it argued that appeals to authority are not necessarily fallacies. For example, Gene Callahan argues that, "...appeals to authority are perfectly valid when the authorities in question are, in fact, true authorities... ." I think this is confused, and in fact wrong.

Let me be clear, I'm NOT talking about relying on the opinion of an authority for advice. I'm also NOT talking about pointing to evidence that other people have collected. I'm talking about putting forth the opinion of an authority in place of reasoning and evidence, in the course of argument.

Commonly, appeals to authority are recognized, not by the mention of an authority, but by the absence of presentation of that authority's reasoning and evidence. Note that a statement of the kind, "Einstein claimed _____, therefore _____ is true" is a fallacy even if Einstein is an expert on the subject. If you are persuaded by an argument that has been presented by an authority and think others will be as well, simply present that argument (duly credited, of course).

There is another, much more insidious form of appeal to authority. It is the inappropriate appeal to one's own authority. In a previous post I criticized Richard Dawkins for his sponsorship of Militant Atheism. My criticism of Dawkins was, and remains, that he is leaning on his status as a highly regarded Biologist to support his unscientific opinions about whether there is a god. Not only is Dawkins not an expert on the question of whether there is a god, but the question itself cannot be framed in scientific terms! To wrap the unscientific proposition Atheism in the mantle of Science is to discredit one's own authority as a reliable practitioner of science.

Dawkins doesn't present an argument or evidence that proves there is no god. He can't, because the proposition that there IS a god is logically non-falsifiable. Instead, he expects his audience to rely on his authority, and accept a conclusion that he has reached intuitively.

Yale Lectures

Donald Kagan is an excellent lecturer. Though some might feel that he is not critical enough of western civilization, I think it's a bit ironic that a Yale professor of classical antiquities comes across as an outsider throwing stones at the academic establishment.

Children are People

This quote is from David Balan at Less Wrong:

" I've even heard parents go so far as to say things like: "it's not your room, it's the room inmy house that I allow you to live in." This attitude makes little sense on its own terms, as it suggests that parents would have no legitimate authority over, say, a famous child actor whose earnings paid for the house. Worse, it's a relatively minor manifestation of the broader notion that the child has a fundamentally lower status in the family just for being a child, that they deserve less weight in the family's utility function."


This really strikes a nerve in me. I remember as a teenager being told by my stepfather and mother that no one else (other adults with homes) would be willing to take me in and deal with me, so I should just be glad that they didn't throw me out. I knew that they couldn't legally turn me out on the street, but that fact wasn't much comfort. 


Growing up, I accepted that children counted less than adults - I heard it so often opined that I didn't think to question it. When I look at my two daughters now, I am outraged by the notion.

Organ Donor

xkcd hits it hard, again.

Awhile back I had a friendly online debate about the important parts of human experience that are difficult to rationalize. At one point I said:

"I guess what I really believe is that "shoulds" are real, and that internal experience (unreliable as it is) is all we have to work with if we want to get to the "shoulds". I realize that many people won't see it this way, and I realize how many pitfalls there are on the path I've chosen (there's a long history of murder and evil justified by "shoulds"), but it's the best I can do. I'm willing to hear arguments for another way, but it will be hard for me to accept anything as sterile as: Just do what's in your own best interest, everything else is nonesense."


To be perfectly honest, that discussion and some since then has eroded my faith in the 'shoulds', and even made me question the belief most central to my philosophy of life - that humans possess divine identity. (Please don't understand that too quickly. Just because I said 'divine', it doesn't necessarily follow that I'm talking about a relationship with God, Christian or otherwise.) This is demoralizing to me. I don't want it to be true that people disappear when they die.


The poet said, "We live as dream - alone."

Science Ruckus

Quick post: there's a commotion going on in the comments over at ThinkMarkets. Do you have an opinion about what counts as Science?

Scientific Claims and Falsifiability

In my previous post I argued against an economist's criticisms of scientist's claims on truth. Arnold Kling does a much better job of making a similar criticism stick.

Arnold's argument boils down to this: Scientists sometimes claim that they will soon make particular discoveries or uncover particular knowledge, when in fact there is great doubt about whether they will.

These claims of impending success are common, and commonly wrong. More to the point (as Arnold suggests) these claims are unscientific, and therefore unbecoming to professed scientists, precisely because they are non-falsifiable. There is no theoretically possible method to disprove these claims (at the time they are made).

Science deals exclusively with claims that are (in principle) falsifiable. This is an extremely important part of why science works at all. By limiting scientific inquiry to falsifiable claims science is made testable and, ultimately, meaningful. If I believe that a scientific claim is false, I need only devise an experiment that will demonstrate a conflict or contradiction in order to prove that it is false.

Imagine what would happen if non-falsifiable claims were included under the domain of science. Under such a system scientists would concern themselves with claims that are mutually exclusive, but with no ability to distinguish between the truth or falseness of either. The discovery of knowledge would slow as time and effort were consumed in pointless and unending argument...

This is a concept that I'm sure all scientists are taught at some point early in their education. However, as important and fundamental as falsifiability is, many scientists seem to forget about it, or even become confused about what it means. Take, for example, Richard Dawkins' invocation of Russell's Teapot in support of militant Atheism. The bizarre thing here is that Dawkins uses Russell's Teapot as an example of a non-falsifiable claim, and therefore outside of scientific notice, while he simultaneously argues in favor of militant Atheism - which is a non-falsifiable claim as well. How can a scientist of such standing be so confused about one of science's founding principles?

Note: It  is important to recognize that Russell's Teapot may actually be a falsifiable claim, and therefore within  the purview of science. If you claim that there is a teapot in orbit, AND describe the orbit and the teapot in sufficient detail, then the claim is clearly falsifiable because the absence of the teapot in the specified orbit could, in principle, be observed. Militant Atheism, however is not a falsifiable claim because it is not possible, even in principle, to observe the absence of a god who can tweak the universe and human observation to achieve whatever end he/she/it desires. Militant Atheism must perforce fall outside of the notice of science.

Soft vs Hard Science?

Eric Falkenstein has made some sweeping generalizations about scientists. It's always a bit of a puzzle to me when I hear these kinds of arguments. When I look at the world around me I see the application of science everywhere. If scientists don't have a special claim to truth, then either my DVD drive shouldn't work, or communism should.

OK, that needs some explanation. First, my DVD drive:

Einstein discovered the principle of Light Amplification by Simulated Emission of Radiation (LASER, of course) while working on another problem. A few decades later his work was demonstrated to be correct when the first functional laser was built. Einstein's claim to truth is irrefutable, as are the claims of subsequent scientists and engineers who gradually refined the understanding of the concept until my DVD drive could be mass produced and sold to me.

What about communism? Well, economics is something of a science, but it's not a terribly successful one. Communism is a failure precisely because economic principles are not well enough understood to construct powerful and useful technologies for planning and coordinating the efforts of millions of people. Economics doesn't have a LASER equivalent. But, even though economics has not produced a lot of useful or even agreed upon knowledge, there are still many economists who have a need to publish in order to move their careers along. I think this is at the heart of what Eric Falkenstein is criticizing.

But why attack scientists altogether? To my mind, there is a genuine distinction between the hard and soft sciences, and that distinction is most visible in the technologies that emerge, or fail to emerge, from the knowledge that various kinds of scientists produce. After all, the purpose behind science isn't only to gain understanding, but to gain useful understanding that can be applied to better our lot.There's no need to conflate physicists with economists when their relative accomplishments are so distinct.

Alas, Eric doesn't note the distinction, and instead slanders 'physical' scientists while levying accurate criticisms against economists and other 'social' scientists. Maybe he does this because he's not prepared to countenance the disparity.

Does Natural Selection Account for All Biophenomena?

No. But too many people who like to dabble in evolutionary explanations assume that it does.

The book, How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just So Stories is a good example of this. Many hypotheses are put forward for this or that characteristic or behavior, all explained in terms of selective pressure acting upon our forbears. We are as we are precisely because our clever genes have tried out various reproductive strategies, and the cleverest genes have won out.

What the authors fail to consider is the missing evidence.

Hair color can illustrate what I mean. Has hair color been strongly selected for? Are brunettes more common than redheads because brunettes possess an evolutionary advantage? Probably not. After all, there are many different common shades and hues, and no obvious advantage of one color over another presents itself. One might point out that light-colored hair is correlated with light-colored skin, which does possess an evolutionary advantage for people in northern lands. But one needs only to travel to the Caucasus to find that light-skinned people can have dark-colored hair.

So, maybe hair color has not been strongly selected for. Perhaps it is merely the result of chance, isolated populations, and group identity that Swedes tend to be blonde while Han Chinese are nearly uniformly dark-haired. Indeed, a fundamental mechanism at work within evolution is chance mutation. Only after a feature has appeared, as the result of a genetic accident, can the feature become the subject of selective pressure.

Imagine, for a moment, a world in which a Great Calamity early in human history has by chance killed off the ancestors of all modern humans except for a small group who were to become the forbears the Chinese. In such a world, nearly everyone would have dark hair since we all would have descended from the dark-haired survivors. Scientists studying evolution in that world would perhaps, upon considering themselves and their fellows, conclude that it must be the case that there had been some strong advantage to their ancestors in having dark hair, since human chemistry could permit other hair colors but no living humans were in fact so colored. The missing evidence that could have revealed the truth, died with the proto-Europeans in the Great Calamity.

Such scenarios have in fact happened repeatedly throughout the history of life. Why are the creatures that have built universities, governments, and shopping malls descended from the ancestors of marmots instead of from the ancestors of falcons? Because of a chance extinction and climate change that gave mammals an opening against dinosaurs.

Indeed, assuming that a trait has been selected for merely because it exists, or even because it is common or exclusive, is bad science. Science demands evidence to connect premises with conclusions (reasoning alone is not sufficient). Evolution is powerful science, and may be invoked in the work of others who are seeking to describe the world, but there is more to Evolution than selective pressure.

The Reason

I intend to use this blog to organize and direct my thinking. Publishing to a public forum helps me to see the weaknesses in my positions, and to verbalize the strengths that might otherwise be left unexpressed and unexplored.

I am a mechanical engineer by profession and training. I am not an academic, nor do I possess advanced degrees (I am pursuing a masters in engineering). However, I am interested in economics, history, science, policy, and philosophy, and will seek to discuss these and other things. I approach these subjects as an amature.

I don't write for an audience, but I encourage you to argue with me when you think I'm wrong. Just please do so courteously and thoughtfully. I promise to do likewise.

--Robert Johnson