Jan
4
2025

… But Lack of Correlation Implies Lack of Causation

Not to get all creepy on you, but I find Emma Camp's geek chic strangely appealing:

A critic in the comments section says (accurately) that "correlation is not causation". True enough! But I think that misunderstands the myth Emma is disconfirming; see my headline.

Also of note:

  • In our continuing "Good Ideas That Won't Happen" series… OK, maybe I'm way too cynical about this stuff, but that's my reaction to Veronique de Rugy's column: Thinking Big as Trump, Congress Tackle Taxes. Vero, what's the problem at the heart of our tax system?

    At the heart of the problem is the definition of income developed by Robert Haig and Henry Simons in the 1920s and '30s, which provided a theoretical foundation for modern taxation. It defines income as the sum of a person's consumption plus the change in his or her net worth over a given period. Put in practice, Haig-Simons creates a tax bias against saving and investment.

    Decades of trying to correct these flaws have set the tax code on a path to extreme complexity, thanks to a resulting maze of exceptions, special treatments and differential rates — all while lots of double taxation, which undermines both efficiency and fairness, stayed in place.

    How? Imagine someone who earns $100 and saves it. This person first pays tax on the earnings. If the savings generate enough interest, dividends or capital gains, the saver pays again, though at a reduced rate. If the asset is left to heirs, the same income might be taxed a third time through estate taxes. In contrast, someone who earns the same $100 and consumes it immediately only pays the first tax.

    She goes on to advocate a flat 19% rate on wages above a generous deduction for individual taxpayers; something equally simple for businesses.

    But I think it's that classic public choice problem: too many people with political clout benefit from the nooks and crannies of the tax code. (Since I task Fidelity Investments to make my portfolio "tax efficient", I'm probably one of them. Except for the "clout" part.)

  • Hegseth, not Buttigieg. Kevin D. WIlliamson takes on Hollywood Pete. And explains for you and me:

    Being secretary of defense is not like being a television host or even a military-focused television pundit. It is, in terms of budget, responsibilities, and personnel, a lot more like being the chancellor of Germany. The DoD is the largest employer in the United States; it is one of the largest organizations of any kind in the world; its budget allocation, which runs the better part of a trillion dollars, actually understates the total financial resources committed to national defense, which is more like $2 trillion, roughly the size of the German, Japanese, or French national government budgets, with only the U.S. government itself and the Chinese government budget being much larger; in FY2023, DoD reported $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities; DoD has nearly 3 million employees, more than 2 million in uniform and nearly 1 million civilians; the Navy has more than 300 ships to keep up with and more than 4,000 aircraft; the Army has nearly 50,000 combat vehicles on its maintenance roster; the Air Force has more than 6,300 aircraft to keep up with and nearly 400 ICBMs. The managerial challenges of running that organization are immensely complex.

    If you read through the U.S. National Defense Strategy documents, you won’t see very much about infantry maneuvers, but you will see a good deal about different approaches to financial management. “Audit remediation is one of the major components of the National Defense Strategy’s line of effort focused on reforming our business processes,” reads one document. Now, go look at that video of Pete Hegseth riding around on the tricycle and tell me that—stone-cold sober or blackout drunk—he is the man to undertake that apparently critical audit-remediation work.

    He isn’t.

    But we'll probably get him anyway. As KDW bottom-lines: "One understands the appeal of a TV-host Cabinet for a game-show-host president."

  • Git along, little DOGE. George F. Will provides advice in a Memo to Musk: Overhauling government isn’t rocket science. It’s harder.

    Elon Musk, a Don Quixote with Vivek Ramaswamy tagging along as Sancho Panza, recently ascended Capitol Hill to warn the windmills of tiltings to come. They have vowed to cut government down to the size they prefer. But when they descended from the Hill, their most specific proposal remained what it was before they ascended: to eliminate … daylight saving time. How this would improve governmental “efficiency” is unclear.

    Musk’s instrument for Washington’s betterment is the new “Department of Government Efficiency,” which might be more plausible if it did not incorporate two fibs in four words. DOGE is not a department; departments are created by Congress, which created pretty much everything Musk’s advisory committee exists to frown about. And his announced, and arithmetically daunting, goal is to slice a third of the federal budget from the less than a third of the budget that does not include Social Security, Medicare, debt service or defense.

    Musk does not just want government to do what it does more efficiently; he wants it to stop doing much of what it does. Bet on the windmills.

    I appreciate the literary metaphor; could have been even better if GFW had somehow worked in the lovely Dulcinea, played by Donald Trump in a wig.

  • Is there anything cheaper than declaring yourself to be against hatred? Tim Cushing writes at TechDirt about the latest news: Federal Judge Strikes Down Unconstitutional Arkansas Book Ban Law.

    Like far too many legislators, Arkansas politicians have decided it’s time to codify irrational hatred. To do this, they pretended they had a sudden and urgent new obligation to protect “the children” harder than they’ve ever been protected before against the encroachment of alternative viewpoints.

    Like far too many other states, the Arkansas government piggy-backed on existing obscenity laws to declare content they personally didn’t like as “obscene.” Then they went further, saddling librarians at public libraries with civil and criminal penalties for not doing enough censorship.

    And, like many similar hateful efforts, this codification of hatred hit a dead end in a federal court. Public library plaintiffs managed to secure a temporary injunction blocking Arkansas’ book ban from being enforced last summer. The catch was this: the law would remain blocked only until the government presented its revised case for expanded censorship. If it could demonstrate it had a legitimate government interest in banning books these legislators felt were harmful to kids, the law could go back into force.

    Wow, that's a whole lotta hate goin' on in three short paragraphs. I suppose when you easily psychoanalyze your targets as haters, it relieves you of any duty to actually deal with the issues they're raising.

    To be clear, I'm a fan of people reading a wide range of books, whatever they like. On their own dime and time. Things get a lot murkier when you're talking about (1) taxpayer funding of state institutions, and (2) a profession that's been credibly accused of pushing an ideological narrative to the exclusion of others.

    One of my more radical libertarian leanings is "separation of school and state". I have pragmatic reasons for that. (See, for one example, that Emma Camp video above; it's not like the state is doing a good job of it.)

    But there are also principles at stake. See any argument for the "separation of church and state"; the same arguments apply when you substitute "school" for church.

    And also when you substitute "libraries". (Although I'd give my main library in Portsmouth NH a solid B- for their halfway decent, albeit only halfway, effort at ideological diversity.)

    [Amazon Link]
    (paid link)

    But since school and state ain't gonna separate soon, that leaves us with the thorny issue of who decides what books to shelve in school libraries, and who gets access to them.

    (For the record, Amazon lists In My Daddy's Belly age-appropriate for "4+". Link at your right.)

    Tim excerpts the recent judicial ruling:

    The vocation of a librarian requires a commitment to freedom of speech and the celebration of diverse viewpoints unlike that found in any other profession. The librarian curates the collection of reading materials for an entire community, and in doing so, he or she reinforces the bedrock principles on which this country was founded. According to the United States Supreme Court, “Public libraries pursue the worthy missions of facilitating learning and cultural enrichment.”

    […]

    The librarian’s only enemy is the censor who judges contrary opinions to be dangerous, immoral, or wrong.

    The public library of the 21st century is funded and overseen by state and local governments, with the assistance of taxpayer dollars. Nonetheless, the public library is not to be mistaken for simply an arm of the state. By virtue of its mission to provide the citizenry with access to a wide array of information, viewpoints, and content, the public library is decidedly not the state’s creature; it is the people’s.

    It gets pretty close to saying: "Shut up and trust the librarians"

    Fine, but that's not an unchecked power we extend to any other government employee, in Arkansas or (I presume) in any other state.

    It could be the Arkansas law went too far in its zeal. I dont' know, and I wouldn't trust Tim Cushing to be the judge of that.