The first part of this series of posts showed how small differences in average pay increases over time can explain much, if not most, most of the wide spread of income growth cited as evidence of income inequality. The question addressed in this part is whether the historical record supports this assertion. Part Three, in the queue, will look at… Read more »
I’d like to move away from the topic of lotteries, but not yet, because this is the window through which most people normally experience a very counter-intuitive mathematical law concerning probability and randomness. Indeed, the worldwide lottery business is primarily based on the assumption that the operators know this law and you don’t. Setting up a truly-random and fair lottery… Read more »
We finally made the time to see the Meryl Streep/Tom Hanks film “The Post,” about the Washington Post’s coverage of the Pentagon Papers, exposing secrets regarding the conduct of the Vietnam War. The film is well worth seeing, and I followed it up with listening to an interview with the lead Pentagon author on the papers, Leslie Gelb, on the… Read more »
Income inequality is an issue fraught with political stake-in-the-ground positioning, but there is some very basic math that, if understood, deflates a lot of the political grandstanding from either side. If we get the math out of the way then perhaps the policy implications and choices become clearer. The first principle applied here is that nature itself does not usually… Read more »
I have been working on a three-part post about the math of “income inequality” which goes online tomorrow and over the next week. I think it takes an important and different tack from other viewpoints. Hint: the newest tax law will only make income inequality worse. I am still banging my head trying to pin the “Tax Cuts and Jobs… Read more »
The excellent 2016 film Hidden Figures starred Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer, and was based on the women “computers” (that is what they were called) who worked behind the scenes to calculate trajectories for the first U. S. manned rocket flights. What you were seeing written on the chalkboards in that film was mostly the mathematics of differential and… Read more »
Recent headlines highlight problems in delivering appropriate patient care in the United Kingdom as this flu season overwhelms the National Health Service. [1] While this certainly does put a lot of British citizens at risk, the usual trashing of the British health care system by elements of the American press is, as usual, grossly misplaced. I have lived under the… Read more »
I posted recently about how “chain migration,” currently under attack by our President, was the norm in how our immigrant forebears assimilated into the United States, even those from places other than the countries he described as “s***holes.” I also shared, in a recent book review, how my grandfather came from Sweden in 1901 at the age of 19, escaping… Read more »
In Part One of this post, I described how Albert Einstein clashed with the younger generation of physicists over the role of probability in the events shaping this universe daily. Over the years he more than once invoked the name of God to say that “He does not play dice with the world.” The curious thing here is that Einstein… Read more »
My father was born just one mile down Ripley Hill from the one of the last surviving copper mine headframes in the Copper Range of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, almost exactly two years after, and only fifteen miles away from, a tragic event called either the “Italian Hall disaster” or the “Calumet Massacre of 1913” depending on your union viewpoint at… Read more »