Data sources Total and rural population: The Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2008, Historical Statistics; Farm population: The Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1925, 1950, 1974 and 1985.
The IMS Bulletin is usually not a technical publication. It usually carries announcements about upcoming conferences, obituaries, stories about award winners, job ads and columns.
The latest issue of the IMS Bulletin, however, has an unusual item on page 4 in which Ning-Zhong Shi of the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Northeast Normal University, P.R. China lays out “A conjecture on Maximum Likelihood Estimation”. Shi conjectures that the MLE has the finite sample property of having expected squared-error monotonically decreasing in the number of samples n, i.e., MSE( θn+1 ) ≤ MSE( θn ), where θn is the MLE calculated with n i.i.d. samples, and MSE( θn ) = E [ (θn − θ)2 ].
This is a rather bold conjecture, since there is very little established regarding finite sample properties of MLEs. Shi notes that the conjecture is true in the special case in which the MLE is a mean of a sample of i.i.d. variables - such as when the variables are normal or Bernoulli variables parameterized by the unknown mean. It seems that despite applying the qualifier “under some regularity conditions”, Shi expects the result to hold on a much wider set of cases.
He is, of course, wrong.
Plutoctomy
May 9, 2008
Economic equality may not be a necessary condition for a well-functioning democracy. In an eklogecracy, however, an economic advantage translates to a political advantage. While there are other attributes that confer political advantages in an eklogecracy (this is probably true to some extent in any system of government), large economic advantages are among the most effective ways to gain political power in an elections driven system.
Various devices have been proposed and implemented in an attempt to reduce the ways in which economic advantages can be translated to political power. The most widely adopted device is probably anti-bribery laws. Other, less universally accepted devices are various campaign finance rules. Undoubtedly, those devices have some effect in the intended direction, although, clearly, these devices are far from eliminating the advantages of wealth. It is also clear that eliminating those advantages altogether, or even diminishing them significantly goes against the intrinsic characteristics of eklogecracy and is therefore an unlikely prospect.
Nevertheless, experimentation with additional devices for diminishing the political power of wealth seems desirable. One possible type of devices involves conditioning the assumption of powerful government positions on a renunciation of wealth - a concept which may be termed “plutoctomy”. Under this rule, people running for powerful positions in government, or accepting nominations to such positions, agree in advance that in case they do win the position they will, from that point on and for the rest of their lives, limit their standard of living (as measured by, say, total yearly expenses, including gifts) to a pre-set level (e.g., no more than twice the median level among the citizens).
Delegation and rewards
May 6, 2008
In a previous comment I discussed the possible types of rewards that may collected by a re-elected delegate. These are the possible rewards that, according to the rewards-based theory of electoral delegation, may be motivating a delegate to be responsive to the interests of the electorate, by having the prospect of re-election available to those delegates whom the public perceives as having acted according to its wishes.
The notion that rewards are an effective way to motivate delegate responsiveness (of which, the rewards-based theory of electoral delegation is a special case) rests on the assumption that citizens can make accurate assessments of the quality of service rendered by delegates. This assumption is unrealistic in many cases - in particular, relying solely on reports in mass media seems like a very shaky foundation for forming an informed opinion on the performance of delegates. Nevertheless, it is interesting to examine what rewards-based mechanisms would be effective motivating factors in those cases where adequate assessment of performance of delegates is achievable.
Syndicalism, localism, atomism
April 20, 2008
Daniel Owen, a syndicalist, responded to my comments on the lack of a convincing syndicalist blueprint for the coordination of a large scale society. We then proceeded to discuss the matter on his blog, starting with his post, and continuing in the comments to the post.
Owen granted the need for some society-wide decision making body made of delegates from the small scale bodies - the local assemblies. His view is that the current version of such a body, i.e., the national legislature and courts, have encroached on what should be the powers of local, or intermediate level, bodies. Owen believes that once most of the business of government is handled at the appropriate, lower, level of aggregation (the local assemblies or aggregations of few local assemblies), the society-wide decision making body would handle only “[b]road ‘constitutional’ policy and foreign relations.”
Transportation risk
March 27, 2008
Data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (1, 2, 3) show that while using cars and trucks for transportation is continuously becoming safer, transportation using motorcycles has become considerably more risky in the last decade. It now about 50 times more risky to travel using a motorcycle than it is to travel by car or truck.
IMS Bulletin on refereeing
March 24, 2008
The March 2008 IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics) Bulletin issue has a special section discussing refereeing. The bulletin editor, Xuming He, introduces the matter on the front page of the issue while four present and past editors of statistics journals - John Marden, Michael Stein, Xiao-Li Meng and Rick Durrett - present their ideas about refereeing on the inside pages.
The discussion takes a predictable path - the writers describe and beseech what they perceive as good behavior on the side of referees (mostly focusing on promptness). Indeed, the choice of writers - established figures in the field - made it unlikely a-priori that a radical examination of the matter would be undertaken. The role of refereeing as gate-keeping is never questioned and the question of what is the objective of refereeing is not even raised by most writers (Marden is the exception here, see below). In view of the absence of the question of the objective, it is impossible to address fundamental questions - does refereeing serve the public (the public of researchers and the public at large) and whether there could be publication selection systems that are superior to refereeing - and refereeing, essentially in its present form and function, is presented as an immutable natural phenomenon.
U.S. energy consumption per capita
March 19, 2008
Energy consumption per capita in the U.S. is about 10 Kilowatt. For illustration, the power consumption of the human body is about 100 Watt (2000 Kilocalories per day) . That is, each person in the U.S. consumes on average 100 times more energy than that which is required for sustaining his or her body. Another point of reference is that 10 Kilowatt per person is what a family of four would be using if it would be driving its car on the highway for 14 hours a day (every day - 365 days a year).
The per-capita power consumption level has not changed much since the early 1970s. While energy use for residential, commercial and transportation purposes have been rising (at the rates of about 0.2%, 1.2% and 0.5% per year, respectively, on average), these were offset by a reduction in the consumption in industry (by about 0.8% per year on average).
Free markets, ownership
March 2, 2008
The main attraction of the notion of a free market, from a theoretical point of view at least, is that it seems like a natural concept in the sense that it is amenable to a crisp, intuitive description. As Wikipedia puts it,
A free market is a market in which prices of goods and services are arranged completely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers. By definition, in a free market environment buyers and sellers do not coerce or mislead each other nor are they coerced by a third party,
market being defined as
In economics, a market is a social structure developed to facilitate the exchange of rights, services or product ownership.
Two non-trivial issues arise directly:
- How do the sellers in the market come to own what they own? That is, how is the initial condition, before trade, determined? Can a market be considered “free” under any initial condition? Would a market in which someone owns all there is to own, or at least owns a resource without which the other traders cannot survive, or cannot trade at all, still considered “a free market”?
- When can sellers and buyers be said to be “not coerced”? Presumably, extra-market forces might be considered coercive, but what about within-market threats? For example, if someone has to exchange something he has for water, or else he would die of thirst, is that a coerced trade?
In praise of idelness
February 25, 2008
For ages, the rich and their sycophants have written in praise of ‘honest toil’, have praised the simple life, have professed a religion which teaches that the poor are much more likely to go to heaven than the rich, and in general have tried to make manual workers believe that there is some special nobility about altering the position of matter in space[.]
Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, 1932
