Category Archives: Politics vs. math

Politics informed by math #4 – Grand conspiracies

The political fringes are dominated by conspiracy theories that far too often encroach on the usually more reasonable political middle. In this post I want to look at some math behind grand conspiracies, which involve many people keeping a secret, as contrasted with small conspiracies, which only require a small, tight group to maintain. One classic example of an alleged grand… Read more »

Politics informed by math #3 – “Money is speech”

Supreme Court Justices may know the law, but I am not convinced that they know math. This post is a little exercise in the math behind the conservative dictum that “money is speech.” To cut to the chase, and if indeed, “money is speech,” then a family whose net wealth in 1963 was in the 99th percentile of U.S. families… Read more »

Politics informed by math #2 – Medicare-for-all

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“Medicare-for-all” has become a common campaign promise on the political left but it suffers in the details, first from any widely-accepted definition, which can range from a (not-so-simple) “public option” to a complete nationalization of the healthcare insurance payments system. Second, all of its configurations that I have investigated suffer from an apparent naivete or lack of understanding of some… Read more »

Politics informed by math #1 – Voter fraud

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This is a first in a series of posts looking at issues in the current political landscape where a better understanding of some basic math principles would likely change the direction of the discussion. We are an innumerate nation (the mathematical equivalent of illiterate). When we make political decisions based on bad math we are harming our fellow citizens, and… Read more »

Why “pension plan socialism” never happened

In 1976, management guru Peter Drucker (1909 – 2005) published a thought-provoking “vision for the future” entitled The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America. [1] In that book he looked at the implications of the then-growing trend for “defined benefit” pension plans owning a greater and greater share of corporate capital, and the social implications for that shift…. Read more »

Money is choice

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Several recent posts in this blog have been focused on the idea of human volition (or “choice,” or “free will”). [1] While there is more ground to cover on the biological foundations of this perception, we can say at this point that we all (including the most strict of “determinists” who philosophically deny that free will exists) live our lives… Read more »

Update: The gun violence lottery

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The most-viewed post in the short history of this blog was a February post entitled “The gun violence lottery”. In the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting, I posited a rather cold math question: What if there is no single “cause” of mass shootings in the U.S. beyond “an unsecured gun was available, and we have millions of unsecured guns… Read more »

Income inequality and the Rule of 72 – part 2

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 »