BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-05-08 Mo
Self-locating uncertainty; Tories break the British economy; slow-moving banking crisis; Wiesenthal on how the economy is good, Hausmann on boosting exports step-by-step, Burke on the New York Time...
MUST-READ: Uncertainty About the Location of One’s Self:
I always thought that this problem had a straight forward resolution:
The probability that the coin landed heads is 1/2: It is a fair coin after all, and fair coins land heads with probability 1/2.
Sleeping Beauty should not accept a bet that it is heads at less than 2-1 odds. If she accepts a $1 bet that it is heads at 1-1 odds, then she will lose $1 in expectation every three bets, because when it is heads she bets that it is heads once, while when it is tails she (unknowingly) bets that it is heads twice. The likelihood when you make a bet that the coin is tails is twice the likelihood that it is heads.
Now you can collapse any difference between “probability” and “likelihood”, in which case you must wind up with (2). But providing you are willing to maintain a small distinction between “probability” as a feature of the universe outside oneself and subjective “likelihood”, you can say that the answer is both 1/2 and 1/3:
Manon Bischoff: Why the ‘Sleeping Beauty Problem’ Is Keeping Mathematicians Awake: ‘Sleeping Beauty…. On Sunday she is given a sleeping pill and falls asleep. One of the experimenters then tosses a coin. If “heads” comes up, the scientists awaken Sleeping Beauty on Monday…. If “tails” comes up, they wake Sleeping Beauty up on Monday, put her back to sleep and wake her up again on Tuesday…. Because of the sleeping drug, Sleeping Beauty has no memory of whether she was woken up before. So when she wakes up, she cannot distinguish whether it is Monday or Tuesday. The experimenters… ask her one question after each time she awakens, however: What is the probability that the coin shows heads?… My first intuition was that Sleeping Beauty should guess ½.The probability of the coin landing on heads or tails—regardless of the rest of the experiment—is always 50 percent…. By the experiment’s design, she does not have any extra clues to the situation, so logically she should state the probability as ½. But there are also conclusive arguments in favor of a probability of ⅓…
ONE IMAGE: Breaking Britain:
Cameron, Osborne, Hamond, Javid, May, Sunak, Johnson, Zahawi, Truss, Kwarteng, Hunt —and, of course, Nick Clegg—have managed to break Britain to an unbelievable extent in less than fifteen short years:
ONE VIDEO: Why First Republic Bank Is No More:
Ben Eisen: WSJ News Explainer:
Very Briefly Noted:
Brooke Sample: Bank Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves: ‘Bloomberg Opinion’s banking analysts are keeping a close eye on the crisis. Here’s what they had to say about the past week…
Brooke Masters & al.: JPMorgan: the bank that never lets a crisis go to waste: ‘The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, advised by… Jim Millstein… believed that the financial engineering [to preserve an independent First Republic] would have required government assistance… inconsistent with the spirit of the Dodd-Frank…. Under a 1992 law, the FDIC must choose the solution that imposes the “least cost” on the deposit insurance fund…
Skanda Amarnath: ‘Just a remarkable jobs report on virtually all the metrics that should matter, especially if you look through the details. Gonna try to thread all my thoughts in one place this time around. Absolutely no sign of Dems and GOP even agreeing a process for resolution. They've got about three weeks left. Global ramifications of a US economic crisis caused by the debt ceiling are v concerning… Jonathan Portes: “DeLong is right about this
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/print-the-perpetual-consol-bond>Réka Juhász & al.: The Who, What, When, and How of Industrial Policy: A Text-Based Approach: ‘Since the 18th century, policymakers have debated the merits of industrial policy (IP). Yet, economists lack measures and data on its use. We provide a new approach to measuring industrial policy from text and study its global patterns. We create an automated classification algorithm and categorize policies from a global database of commercial…
Angus Deaton: Striking a balance between economics and human well-being…
John Ganz: Midcentury Modern Thought: ‘It’s worthwhile thinking about [Stefan J. Link’s] Forging Global Fordism alongside Jeffrey Herf’s Reactionary Modernism,..
Greg Sargent: ‘Ron DeSantis' ongoing disaster with Disney is getting worse for him. It turns out his own memoir repeatedly admits that he weaponized the state against Disney for criticizing "don't say gay." Disney extensively cites his book in its lawsuit against him…
David Rennie & Alice Su: Why has a hundred-year-old short story gone viral among China’s graduates?: ‘Job prospects for young Chinese: The story of Kong Yiji… scholar-turned-beggar, written by Lu Xun in 1918 has gone viral…
Robert Reich: ‘Trump is running for reelection, despite the explicit language of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anyone who has held public office and who has engaged in insurrection against the United States from ever again serving in office. He should be disqualified. It’s that simple…
Wikipedia: Luna 15 was a robotic space mission of the Soviet Luna programme, that crashed into the Moon on 21 July 1969…
¶s:
Sofia Horta e Costa: Here’s What Joe’s Interested in This Morning: ‘The main thing people talk about with this economy is inflation…. But there's more going on…. Low unemployment is a good thing. And mostly people agree, but also mostly people talk about the labor market in the context of the Fed's efforts to get inflation down. The labor market is described in terms that are neutral at best. "Tight" is a common way to describe it, even though that's an inherently employer-side perspective to take. Labor might be tight or scarce, but the flipside is that jobs are abundant. But even beyond the framing, this labor market is more than just tight. It's good. It's high quality…
Ricardo Hausmann: ChatGPT’s Lessons for Economic Development: ‘Gaps between developing and developed countries in life expectancy, infant mortality, fertility, education, university enrollment, female labor-force participation, and urbanization have all narrowed sharply…. [But] the median country is no closer to US income levels than it was four decades ago. How is it possible[?]…. The few countries that did manage to catch up share two distinctive features: their exports grew much faster than their GDP, and they diversified their exports by shifting toward more complex goods…. Development strategy… a simple goal: to improve the competitiveness, diversity, and complexity of exports. Figuring out how to do this would force policymakers to learn how to do important things…. Just as the language model tries to predict only the next word, policymakers could try to focus on facilitating the next export, as successful countries seem to have done….
Timothy Burke: Jerusalem + Judgment + Judged: ‘All the facts are in… [on] Elizabeth Holmes…. That’s what made Amy Chozick’s NYT weekend profile of “Liz” Holmes so irritating…. Holmes… is desperately trying to do some crisis-communication management of her image… perhaps just to position herself for a post-prison comeback as a gentle, kindly purveyor of herbal remedies…. It’s just such a Times thing, to make its writers and column inches available to a very particular kind of white elite criminal when everybody else in the world would have to pay for all that media space…. Or just get stuck with the plain old stigma of a criminal record…. [Nobody] should have agreed at this date to do a lengthy Holmes profile…on terms… Holmes… control[led]…. No reputable journalist should be serving as an unpaid public relations representative for her.
ONE IMAGE: Breaking Britain: That is just tragic.
It's interesting to compare Deaton's An Economist's Apology and Hardy's Mathematician's Apology.