My Sarah Palin Prediction

There is a fair amount of speculation as to what rationale Sarah Palin had for resigning her position as governor of Alaska 17 months before the end of her first term. After all, if she is trying to create a path to the White House, this does not seem to be the most reasonable way to do it. I certainly couldn't understand it, and I was perfectly happy to let her boneheaded decision destroy her political career. I would rather not have someone in the Oval Office who uses Revelation rather than the Constitution as her guiding document.

But then it occurred to me: She does have a plan. Or, more accurately, someone else has a plan for her, and she took the bait. So here it is, my prediction for Sarah Palin's intermediate professional future. I have to admit that it has me kind of worried.

I suspect that ever since her ill-fated run for the vice presidency, Mrs. Palin has been courted by Fox News, the only network she probably believes has given her a fair shake. I suspect that she has been offered her own show on that network, one with a much larger audience than she commands in Alaska, a much higher salary ... and a wardrobe allowance.

My guess is that she has decided to accept that offer. There may be a waiting period that will throw people off the scent, lest the good people of Alaska think that their governor bailed for a high-paying gig on television. But if Sarah Palin has a "higher calling," I believe that this is it. It is a great positioning plan.

With her small-town wisdom carefully scripted for her and an assortment of guests to make her points for her, Mrs. Palin will almost certainly have a massive hit on her hands. She'll be positioned as a champion of the common people, and she will have the opportunity to craft and hone a political philosophy that is focus-group tested to appeal to those people. It is the best plan possible for a 2012 run at the White House.

Guessing the Contents of the Economic Cauldron

One cannot escape mention of the economy in the news today, so I thought I would write a little bit about it. Let me begin, however, by saying that those looking for expert advice here are bound to be disappointed. After all, I don't really know anything about economics. Then again, neither do economists, so I'll go ahead and dig right in.

The first thing that needs to be recognized about the economy is that it is a fantastically complex system. It is so complex, in fact, that it is often difficult for everyone to agree about what state it is in. When looking at temperature data, for instance, one can gain a reasonable idea about how hot or cold it is without first needing to go outside. That is because temperature is a single scalar measure, even though the process it describes is complex beyond belief. There is no such single measure for the state of the economy.

What if there were such a measure? What might it look like? Well, we would likely have a formula of the form E(t) = E(x(t)), where x(t) is some n-dimensional vector that is allowed to vary with time, whose components are operated on to produce a scalar result. (This function, then, would be a mapping from n-dimensional space to one-dimensional space.) If we were lucky, the function would tell us unambiguously how healthy the economy was at any time.

What might our vector x(t) be made up of? Well, one might reasonably expect it to include information about unemployment, gross domestic product, inflation, national debt, total market value across the stock exchanges, etc. (These variables are known as economic indicators, and they are often considered separately, in one form or another, as indirect measurements of economic health.) At his first prime-time press conference since taking office, President Obama was asked what Americans should look for as an indicator that the economic stimulus was working. It was a good question, and although I think the president did quite well at this press conference, I do think that the answer he gave—namely, that one should look primarily at job creation—could have been improved. More on this in a moment.

Let us return to the economic equation that we have imagined. We have no idea what it would actually look like. In other words, we don't know what is being done to the components of x(t) to produce the output. We know the ingredients, but we don't know how to combine and cook them. But we can suspect that the function would be highly nonlinear with lots of interdependencies between components. (For this reason, we might suspect that no such single equation can exist.)

One thing we can do, however, is use our intuition to guess what might happen to the value of E(t) if we were to nudge one of the components of x(t). Considering one variable at a time, while holding all others constant, is a process known as partial differentiation in mathematics. It is an interesting and valuable procedure, but it gives us, at best, only partial information. (After all, what we have chosen to remain constant may be more important than the variable we are manipulating.)

Intuitively, if unemployment goes up, that is bad for the economy, so the value of E(t) should go down. (The partial derivative of E with respect to the variable we have chosen to represent unemployment would therefore be negative.) The same should be the case for inflation, national debt, and a number of other things you can probably easily identify. Things like GDP, on the other hand, should show the opposite behavior.

I once again have to stress that no such measure exists. If it did, we could easily (well, more easily, at least) identify periods of recession or growth (which would more accurately be represented by dE/dt, the derivative of our indicator with respect to time) and perhaps more easily come up with ways to fix a sagging economy by identifying the components that are dragging it down by the greatest degree. But even without such a measure, we intuitively know what factors should positively influence the state of the economy and what factors should negatively influence it; it is these things that will provide our indicators. President Obama correctly mentioned one of them to look for. Let these things be our guide, and let us learn to rely less on the so-called experts on the financial networks, none of whom seem to be able to predict anything at a rate better than chance.

Let me return to our economic formula and motivate it with an example from the NFL. Anyone who has watched a televised professional football game has, at one time or another, seen a statistic called a passer rating (or quarterback rating). It is the output of a formula that relates a quarterback's completion percentage, the yards gained after a completion (for whatever that has to do with the quarterback), percentage of touchdown passes per attempt, and the percentage of interceptions per attempt.

In the NFL, this rating has a minimum value of zero and a maximum value of 158.3, which is often referred to as a “perfect” rating. Mathematically, however, this function is unbounded, which means that there really is no maximum or minimum value if one is allowed to plug in any number for the variables. There are restrictions on what one can plug in for football-related variables, however. It is also the case that if each component goes over a certain amount, it is, for some reason, automatically set to 2.375. I actually think it would be interesting to reset the quarterback rating to the maximum value possible given the rules of the game (no one could gain more than 100 yards after a catch, for instance). By my calculation, the maximum possible quarterback rating would then be about 842.9.

What is the point? Well, the passer rating is one example of a function that maps many-dimensional (that is, represented by many variables) space to one-dimensional space. It is also an indicator, of sorts, and one can get a reasonable feel for how a quarterback's game went just from looking at the value of this one umbrella statistic. Although no such friendly scale exists for measuring the state of the economy, I believe it would be worthwhile for the government's economic experts to explain the state of the economy to the public with some awareness of how such a scale might behave.

It is also worthwhile—but perhaps not comforting—to consider whether any function that would describe our economy is bounded from above. (Personally, I believe that a function that describes any real economy accurately would map the economic domain to a bounded set in the range. It is therefore possible for an economy to peak and never return to the summit, just as it is possible for an economy to never reach its peak, despite its being finite and theoretically reachable.) Real economies rely on limited resources, and although the economy is not, strictly speaking, a zero-sum game, it is generally true that an increase in wealth at one point will correspond to a decrease in wealth somewhere else. With only so much potential for wealth in the world, any measure of economic health that takes inflation into account should have a ceiling.

The economy is a chaotic system that often reacts to human psychology more significantly than it does to any built-in dynamic component of an economic system. (Consider, for instance, that economic crises are often referred to as panics.) Among the participants in the economy, a better understanding of the nature of such a system, including an appreciation for how chaotic its behavior can be, can help tailor the effect of the one component we have a healthy measure of control over—the human component.

Sadly, the human component with the greatest effect on the economy is not the same component that is most affected by the economy. What we need, then, is a sense of calm among those whose previous successes were often built on frenzy. We endured years of trickle-down economics. Does our economic future depend on trickle-up equanimity?

Thank You, America

The long, twisted marathon that was the 2008 presidential campaign is now over, and Barack Obama has been elected our next president. I am writing this with a profound sense of relief at the outcome, and I am heartened by the reaction of people around the world.

In one day, the United States has earned a tremendous amount of worldwide goodwill ... and it didn't even take a tragedy for us to get it. I am confident that President Obama will be a better steward of that benevolence and that America will once again be seen as a beacon of hope around the world, not the font of disappointment it has recently been.

Mr. Obama's opponents frequently criticized the messiah-like treatment he was receiving, so one would be wise to use caution in lavishing praise on our new president before he has even taken office. Instead I will praise the tens of millions of Americans who used this election to vote their hopes instead of their fears. And for those whose votes went the other way, I urge you to stay tuned and give the new president a chance. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Colin Powell Endorses Barack Obama

In just over seven minutes, Gen. Colin Powell makes the best case I have heard for why Barack Obama should be the next president.

The Supernaturally Qualified Sarah Palin

You already know she is a young-Earth creationist. You already know that she is expecting the return of Jesus in her lifetime. But maybe you don't yet know why she is the best candidate to lead the country through the "end times." In the video below, you'll learn that Alaska will be a "refuge for the lower 48," and that Sarah's friends in Wasilla are prepared for the monumental task of ministering to those at risk of being on the wrong end of God's almighty smite stick.



There are several things worth noting in the video. First, a commercial for the religious group Palin is supporting (the video begins with her speaking at the group's "graduation" ceremony) is cut into the middle of the video to provide some context. This group, in Palin's hometown of Wasilla, is convinced that the end of the world is near. One of the crucial things to notice is the choice of graphics employed in the commercial. There is a very strong indication that this group believes nuclear war to be the thing to usher in the end of the world. Of course, a nuclear war would usher in the end of the world, at least as we know it. The difference is that this group believes that it will also herald the return of Jesus.

Under no circumstances should a person who considers such a calamity both positive and inevitable (in her lifetime) be allowed to have control over a nuclear arsenal. Sarah Palin stands an extraordinarily good chance of assuming the presidency if John McCain is elected. She has also casually indicated that it might be worthwhile to go to war with Russia for the sake of Georgia, a place she certainly knows next to nothing about.

Zealots have been forecasting the "imminent" end of the world for centuries, and they have always gotten it wrong. But fundamentalist Christians finally have a chance to make half of their dream come true. They now have a candidate in position who could soon have the power to end all of human civilization in the span of a single afternoon.

Were such a disaster to happen, only a suffering few among the credulous who actively sought to bring about man's last days would spend the agonizing wait for a savior who would never come, while the dead would never know how wrong they were.

Some Good News About Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin has been certified 100 percent witchcraft free!

Lies, Damned Lies, and Sexual Statistics

You may have seen one of several news reports in the past few years that reported on surveys of the sexual behavior of Americans. In particular, you may have seen lines such as this one: “Overall, women report an average of six sex partners in their lifetimes, men, 20.”¹ Now, if you’re a woman, maybe you read this and thought to yourself, “Boy, men sure are dogs. No wonder they can’t seem to commit to a relationship. They’re always off trying to find something to rub up against!” And if you’re a man, perhaps you thought that you have really underperformed relative to your fellow men.

But did you stop to question the validity of the numbers? Maybe you leafed through the full survey results. There are colorful graphs and some statistical terminology. The conclusions must be legitimate, right? Not even close.

Perhaps it did occur to you that it seems strange for the average number of sexual partners for men to be so much larger than that for women. Shouldn’t they be closer together? (Yes.) Should they be the same? (Not necessarily.)

Why are the statistics so different? Well, people lie, especially about sex. To motivate our discussion a bit, let’s have a look at the chart below (click on it to see a larger version).

This is a matrix, of sorts, representing a hypothetical population of 20 men and 21 women. The sexual relationships among those in the group are indicated by whether there is a numeral one in the cell that lies at the intersection of a row representing a male and a column representing a woman. For instance, we see that male number 11 and female number 12 have gotten it on with each other, whereas male 14 and female 14 have not known each other in the biblical sense. Notice also that male number 12 is a virgin.

Male number 10 is the stud in the group. We can see a lot of ones in his row, and we can see from the sum in the far-right column that male number 10 has slept with more than half of the women in the population (over 57 percent, in fact).

You probably know how to compute an arithmetic average, which is just the sum of all the numbers on a list divided by the total number of items on that list. To find the average number of partners for the men, we add the numbers in the right-most column, which gives us the total number of sexual relationships for all of the men.² The average number of partners among the men is 3.0. We use the same idea to compute the average for the women, this time adding up the numbers in the bottom row and dividing by the total number of women. The average number of partners among women is about 2.86.

Notice that the sum of the relationships for the men is the same as the sum of the relationships for the women, namely 60. This is necessarily so. After all, we can count up all of the ones on our table either row by row or column by column. Either way, we should get the same answer. It also makes intuitive sense, since for a man to have a sexual relationship with a woman, it is required that a woman have a sexual relationship with a man!

This is going to be the case in any complete population under consideration: The total number of relationships will be the same for both the men and the women. The average can be a little different, however, because it is not necessarily the case that there are exactly as many men as there are women. I haven’t looked it up, but for the purposes of the rest of this document, let us say that there are 51 percent women and 49 percent men in the American population. I think that is actually pretty close to being true.

We can represent the proportion of men in the population by the letter p (where p = 0.49). Necessarily, then, the proportion of women in the population is given by 1 - p. If the total population is the sum of the men and women, given by , then and .

As we showed earlier, the sum of sexual relationships is the same for both the men and the women. Let us represent this number by S. The average number of partners for men is therefore given by , and the average number of partners for women is given by .

We will assume that the average is higher for men (which it should be if there are fewer men in the population). We can represent the difference of the averages by

But recall from above that , so we can write

We see, then, that the difference between the averages is a function of the average for the men and the proportion of the population made up by men. If the 49 percent figure I mentioned above is correct, then it should be the case that . At any rate, the difference between the averages cannot be greater than four percent of the average for the men, a pretty trivial amount. The difference shrinks further the closer the men and women get to a 50-50 split in the population. In our model, if the men are telling the truth, the average number of sexual partners for women should be 19.2, not six.

But the men are probably lying. Many probably overstated their sexual histories, bumping the average up. The women are probably also lying by understating their sexual histories to avoid coming off as tramps.³

We are left feeling disappointed in this survey, which was apparently never vetted by a competent statistician. It appears that, for now, the truth about Americans’ sex lives will stay between the sheets.

1. From the ABC News Primetime Live Poll: The American Sex Survey, October 21, 2004.

2. Here I refer to “sexual relationships” rather than “partners” in order to avoid confusion, since some women will be counted more than once if they slept with different men.

3. The other possibility is that these numbers are correct but that participants were drawn from wildly different populations: relatively normal women and bar-hopping studs. This is a possibility, but it is remarkably improbable.

[Note: A PDF version of this article can be found here.]

It Was the Best of Times, It Was the End of Times

Below are excerpts from a September 3, 2008, entry on the blog Progressive Alaska. In it, blogger Philip Munger details the few informal meetings he had with the woman who would become the current Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin. The key issue raised in the piece—and the thing that frightens me most about her—is that she is apparently among those who regard the end of the world as a good thing. Considering how easily that can be helped along by Republican hawks with a nuclear (let the spelling guide your pronunciation, Sarah) arsenal, these beliefs are anything but innocuous, and they certainly do not suggest to me any firmer moral foundation than what is possessed by a rationalist nonbeliever who does not require the threat of damnation to motivate his good works. More after the excerpt.

I first met Alaska Governor and GOP Vice Presidential aspirant Sarah Palin when she was on the City of Wasilla Planning Commission. ... Of the encounters I've since had with Sarah Palin, two that brought up her faith, have become important, in light of the possibility that she might someday soon be in charge of thousands of thermonuclear weapons.

In June 1997, both Palin and I had responsibilities at the graduation ceremony of a small group of Wasilla area home schoolers. ... Palin had recently become Wasilla mayor, beating her earliest mentor, John Stein, the then-incumbent mayor. A large part of her campaign had been to enlist fundamentalist Christian groups, and invoke evangelical buzzwords into her talks and literature.

As the ceremony concluded, I bumped into her in a hall away from other people. I congratulated her on her victory, and took her aside to ask about her faith. Among other things, she declared that she was a young earth creationist, accepting both that the world was about 6,000-plus years old, and that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time.

I asked how she felt about the second coming and the end times. She responded that she fully believed that the signs of Jesus returning soon "during MY lifetime," were obvious. "I can see that, maybe you can't - but it guides me every day."

Our next discussion about religion was after she had switched to the less strict Wasilla Bible Church. ... Once again, we found ourselves being able to talk privately. I reminded her of the earlier conversation, asking her if her views had changed. She was no longer "necessarily" a young earth creationist, she told me. But she strongly reiterated her belief that "The Lord is coming soon." I was trying to get her to tell me what she felt the signs were, when she had to move on.

—Philip Munger, Progressive Alaska, September 3, 2008

Let me take a moment to say something about young-Earth creationism, just in case anyone believes it to be a defensible alternative to the scientific view. If it were true that Earth is on the order of 6,000 years old, it would mean that our basic understanding of fundamental physics is mistaken. The casual reader may not see a problem with that. But one of the ways that science shows that it is working is by having its facts confirmed over and over again, often by different methods being applied in different fields by researchers looking into very different things. When it comes to the age of Earth, there isn't just one way of getting the answer. Numerous, fundamentally different ways of estimating Earth's age are possible, and all of those methods agree on the answer. The take-home lesson is that they agree on the answer—that Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old—because the answer is probably pretty accurate.

These methods are based on a web of knowledge that forms our current scientific understanding. And, put simply, if we are wrong about the planet's age, then we are also wrong about most of physics. Your very ability to read this sentence on your computer depends on technology whose theoretical basis is the same system of physical principles responsible for the various methods of finding the age of Earth. The upshot is that our technology—and that includes your computer—would simply not work if our understanding of these fundamental ideas were so flawed. The ideas are so interwoven, in fact, that you cannot simply say that perhaps only our understanding of the physics behind the age of Earth is flawed. It doesn't work that way. The preponderance of the evidence, which includes your day-to-day experience with technology, shows that the young-Earth story is pure fiction.

Back on the topic of Sarah Palin, I could say more, but I think Matt Damon sums it up pretty well in this video clip: