[So I haven't been able to come up with anything new on the x^x = y^y problem. I'm still stuck at an infinite number of pairs--with an unknown number of rational pairs--made up of one number between 0 and 1/e and another between 1/e and 1. Haven't found any more other than my original 1/2 and 1/4.
My thoughts have been turning back to politics, lately, and I thought I'd answer a common question I've been getting.]
A lot of people have been asking me what I think of Obama's economic team. I'm going to give him pretty high marks. I already think Bernanke is a pretty good person to have as Fed Chair (which is good, because he'll be around for a while).
I think Geithner is EXACTLY what we need at Treasury Secretary, and he would have been one of my top choices (if not my top choice). I think Paulson has been limited in his abilities to help the country weather the crisis, because he's so much of a practitioner. He's a finance guy more than an economist, and he's essentially using a toolbag of applied economics based on assumptions that turned out not to be quite true. As a result he's been not-quite-right every step of the way. Geithner, if anything, has the opposite problem. The only thing he's lacking is high level experience with a financial services company. And I'm not sure that's a weakness right now.
Volcker is a strong choice, and Obama created a position for which he'll be especially well suited. He's too old to run a big department, and he's not a PhD economist (his doctorates are honorary). But he's an experienced former Fed Chairman with a lot of wisdom to provide to a relatively young team of geniuses, and his voice will be an important one. Furthermore, he has international street cred the likes of which no twenty people in the Bush adminsitration have put together. His actions under President Reagan (he essentially made "Reaganomics" work by keeping his word in the face of political and popular pressure to do otherwise) brought credibility both to himself and the U.S. Central Bank.
I'm also going to stick up for Larry Summers here. The former president of Harvard University got into trouble when he made some observations about the differences in men and women in the sciences. You know what? It doesn't matter. Also, he was grossly misrepresented. I'm going to stick up for him in two ways: as an economist, and in his argument about men and women. That's right, I'm throwing my hat in the ring on the side of Dr. Summers in the gender debate. And here's why: all he did was suggest that men might have a higher standard deviation of IQs than women. IQ measures a particular type of intelligence that makes one suited for math and science. I believe women, on average, are smarter than men, in almost every respect. Your average woman is smarter than your average men. But there's a lot more variation in the men. Meaning on the tails of the distribution, you see more men. Most of the dumbest people in the world are men, but at the same time, most of the people most capable of doing math and physics are also men. It's just the way the distributions break out. We're not talking about all men and all women here, Dr. Summers was talking about tenured Ivy League scientists and their peers, basically, some of the smartest people in the world. Women on average can be better at science, but at the very top you see more men, because there's a larger variation in their intelligence. OK? All the data actually suggest he UNDERSTATED the effect, so lay off him.
And finally, from what I gather he's a skilled evidence-based economist with a disposition many of the top theoretical economists in politics seem to be lacking. So he gets a spot on the team, and I'm happy about it. If you don't like what he had to say about women in the sciences, well, that's just hard cheese. Suck it up, because it doesn't affect his ability to make policy recommendations. Jefferson fathered illegitimate children with a woman he legally owned; Churchill was a raging alcoholic; Ty Cobb and Henry Ford were horrible human beings who hated Jews; and for all you know, Jesus was racist. It didn't affect any of their exemplary job performances, and I'm not condemning Dr. Summers for making an impolitic observation.
And the rest of Obama's economic team seems pretty good, though I don't have anything I need to get off my chest about anyone else. My only worry about the team comes in the form a book title about the collapse of Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund started by some of the smartest laureates ever to win a nobel prize in economics: "When Genius Failed." But if the economic team manages to conduct regular reality checks, as well as keep in mind fundmantals like supply and demand and basic incentive structures (the lack of attention paid to those two things probably did more than anything else to facilitate our current crisis), they should do just fine. It's certainly the best economic team any President has assembled in my lifetime. Maybe even since the days of Alexander Hamilton.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Though many may wish it so, I have yet to see a single source that indicates significantly different intelligence averages between men and women.
What I have seen is that there are more men at the extremes than women, which is more a matter of distribution than differences in average. For each level of intelligence within a certain range, there will be more women than men, but that doesn't mean that the average woman is more intelligent than the average man. It means that near the average and up to a certain point above the average, you will find more women than men. Beyond that point, on both ends it seems, it's a lot more men than women.
Per your request, I sent you an email and I hope you got it.
-A
I'd like to refer you to Malcolm Gladwell's new book, "Outliers." In it, he makes the point that in the nature v. nurture debate, it's all nurture, hands down. Sure, some people are smarter than others, more talented than others, but they are divided between success and failure. The difference is which of those exceptional people get the support and development needed to be successful. there's an interesting article and how it relates to sports on ESPN here, but the reason I bring it up is in reference to Dr. Summers. Might it be that with an educational system that excluded women outright for the first couple hundred years, and then favored men over them after women were allowed in, and so forth, men were getting better opportunities for success?
Post a Comment