William M. Briggs, Statistician

It’s obvious that, as time has gone on, the Federal Government has spent more and more and more money. Since a reasonable proxy of government control over the lives of its citizens is the outlay of funds from its treasury, a sane observer might wonder about this increasing trend.

A raw plot of the Federal outlay by year will not do as a measure, however. At least two adjustments have to be made.

A government ruling over 1000 people will obviously have to spend more than one ruling over 10 people, so we have to adjust by population size, which has also been increasing. We can be reasonably sure we are measuring population to, say, the nearest million, which is close enough. The budget is also reasonably well measured.

Then there is inflation, the phenomenon whereby a loaf of bread costs $1.00 ten years ago becomes $1.89 this year. But inflation is difficult to measure because of many reasons. For one, that loaf of bread probably isn’t the same as the loaf now: it has different ingredients, uses changed baking technology, improved packaging—who knows what has changed in that ten years. The population, too, which has increased over this period also tends to drive prices higher because it makes certain commodities scarcer. Plus, nobody knows which are the ideal items to track to measure cost increase: bread? cars? Eliot Spitzer’s hobbies? We’ll use inflation adjusted dollars in some of the plots, but we have to remember that these pictures are a lot more uncertain.

The first picture is the Outlay per Capita: that is, the dollars spent per citizen since 1901 (data from the US Budget Office and the US Census).

I have also colored the years red for Republican presidents, and blue for Democrat presidents. The years from 2009-2012 are obviously projections, so should not be taken too seriously. Not too much can be noticed, except for the obvious exponential increase in government control, plus the two blips for World Wars I and II.

Since the rate of increase is exponential, we can see things clearer by showing the picture on a logarithmic scale:

The two war-time era increases now pop out, with WW I showing the biggest increase. The after-war decreases are also more obvious. And we can see the small blip for the Korean war and a smaller build-up for Vietnam (all these increases are in the blue areas). The steady increase after Vietnam is also clear: where you can see a higher rate of increase in George W. Bush’s years because of the Iraq/Afghan wars, but certainly not a giant surge. Of course, I do not parse how much of any spending is due to military and civilian funding.

The big, but maybe not so obvious. point is that 2008 spending is about $10,000 per person. That means the government is spending $10-grand per head. That also means, in some loose sense, that if you pay more than this in taxes—if your personal bill is more than $10k—then you are paying more than your equal share. This implies, then, that if you are paying less than $10k you are not paying your equal share. You are requiring those that are better off to support the bulk of the government.

Now, if you are a Lefty, then you probably like this idea. “Let the rich pay their ‘fair’ share!” But to say this ignores Briggs’s Doctrine of Unintended Consequences. To see what I mean, let’s look at the same picture adjusted for inflation. The inflation adjustment index is from Oregon State University.

This is adjusted to 2008 dollars. Suppose I were to declare that every citizen had to pay $10 to the treasury. If you, for example, were Dad and the only worker in a family of four, your bill would be $40. The last time this happened was in the 1940s (remember: this is 2008 dollars, not 1940 dollars, so $40 was affordable).

Everybody can afford this (with the trivial exception of a handful of people). Everybody would contribute an identical amount and would, morally at least, be entitled to an equal say in government. “But, wait! The rich will still have more money, and with money comes influence!” Yes, true. It is a tautology to say the rich will have more money, and it is obvious that with more money comes more influence. But this is not a good argument, my Lefty friend. Because look at 2008, where the bill is $10k per head. Only a small percentage of the population (about 5%) can afford this. Those 5% of course have more money. They further are aware of where that money is going. They will therefore have plenty of motivation to control the outflow, which means controlling the laws, rules, and regulations—controlling the government—which say where the money is to go. This small minority will use their money to align the government to their views.

Now, the rich certainly would have done this to some extent had everybody had to pay the same share, but they will have orders of magnitude more motivation to do it when they are paying nearly all the bill. And—here’s the kicker, so pay attention—they will still have plenty of money left over to have the same influence over other non-governmental matters, influence they already had before this tax structure started asking more of them.

About the only thing this confiscatory tax policy will do is to take enough money from the just-rich, to make them no longer rich. Thus, more control will flow into the hands of fewer and fewer people. This is inevitable. And it’s happening at an exponential pace. The noble idea of having those with more pay for those with less guarantees that those with more will have even more, and those with less will have even less, plus they will suffer a corresponding loss of influence and control over government.

Disproportionately taxing the rich to grow government, and doing so at an increasing, exponential pace, thus guarantees the creation of a oligarchic ruling class. Supporting these tax laws, then, will have the exact opposite effect of your intent.

I use the term “Lefty” not to indicate “Democrat”, as will be clear in the next two pictures:

These are the year-to-year change in outlay per captia. The first is unadjusted, the second is adjusted to inflation.

The unadjusted shows the blips due to the wars, plus the accompanying decreases in the budgets after the wars ended. Most of the wars, WW I, WW II, Korea, and Vietnam happened under Democrat administrations. But there was only moderate growth until Nixon was president in 1969, then the increases began with real vigor, and it has rarely abated since (only one year in Reagan’s presidency did the budget not increase significantly).

The scarier picture is this one, adjusted by inflation:

This shows the contest between R and D more clearly. Nixon (R) had a modest rate of increase, but Carter (D) really showed how it was done with a stellar increase. Reagan (R) did his best, but could never match Carter. Clinton (D) was also just an average player. Bush (R) beat them all. No taxpayer left behind. Again, Obama’s (D) tenure is just a wild guess by the budget office; however he has often boasted of increasing taxes on “the rich”, so we can guess that his rate will be Carter-like.

I am not historian or economist enough to say why the rapid increase in government control really got going with Nixon, but we have some hints in his social spending policies. The funny thing is the opposite of common wisdom appears to be true. Most, but not all, of the increases in spending for the military have come from Democrats (the wars just mentioned); and most, but not all, of the increase in spending on social causes have come from Republicans. Each side, as we all know, is continuously accusing the other of the opposite! It might be a case of projected guilt all politicians feel (at some level; I cannot really guess why this is so).

Even if you don’t agree with me on anything, it must be clear that this rate of increase cannot continue indefinitely. It cannot even continue for very much longer. Roughly, every 20 years brings an order of magnitude increase in government control. So in 40 years, in the trend continues, the bill will be about $1 million per head, an impossibly high number. Power would be coalesced into the hands of a very, very few.

I don’t know about you, but I plan a two-pronged strategy: (1) to never vote for anybody, D or R, who I think will raise taxes, and (2) to be one of those who can afford the tax, because I’d rather have the control than not.

Update: to get a signed copy you must email me at matt@wmbriggs.com with SIGNED COPY in the subject line. I’ll then contact you for payment details. Cost is $32.00. You can order the book below, but it won’t be signed. If you did buy from below thinking it would be signed, send me an email and I’ll let you know where to mail the book to get it signed. Sorry for any confusion. Thanks.

Got another batch of books in last night and I’ll mail them out this morning.

This takes care of all the orders I have received so far.

Perhaps one of the wisest men to ever live has said this about the book:

[T]he book is very good. I am enjoying it thoroughly.

Buy one now. Perfect Christmas gift for that brainiac you know. You won’t be disappointed, and neither will they.

Click here to order.

In today’s New York Post comes a startling new research finding, bulleted in this graphic:

In case you can not see the picture, it says that 29% of women “Care about partner’s appearance” and that 63% of men do.

Internationally renowned researcher Dr. H. Harrister was quoted as saying, “You know what that means, don’t you?”

“It means that 37% of men are lying.”

That’s the sort of headline you see from time to time in places like Arts & Letters Daily and the arts sections of major newspapers. Invariably, what follows a few weeks letter is the rebuttal which argues, “No, it isn’t.”

It’s obvious, the Dying side says, that appreciation for serious, adult music is at an all time low. Just turn on any radio, walk into almost any business, or attend nearly any function purportedly for adults and you will hear simple, pop music, or worse. Classical music has all but disappeared.

Not true, say the Optimists. Just look at our attendance figures for last season’s opera or for the yearly Jazz Festival. Sure, the numbers wax and they wane, but they have held steady since roughly 1950. Concert halls are just as filled as they ever were.

I’ll suppose that later claim is true, that attendance is holding roughly steady. I can’t find an exact figure, but let’s say that concert attendance is 100,000 seats per year in the United States. The precise number doesn’t really matter: pick any steady number you want and what I’m about to say is just as true.

Here’s the relevant picture:

The left-hand vertical axis depicts the U.S. population in millions since 1950; it shows a doubling over the past 50-60 years. The right-hand vertical axis depicts the percentage of residents who buy tickets to adult music concerts conditioned on the fact that each year about 100,000 tickets are sold. The numbers are in hundredths of a percent. If I’m wrong and the number of tickets sold is a million, then the figures are the same but are in tenths of a percent.

This figure, of course, doesn’t account for people who buy multiple tickets. If we assume that the percent of people who buy multiple tickets is roughly constant, then the shape of the red line is still the same, it’s just shifted up or down a slight bit. Even if this percent is not constant, there will only be a small correction.

So, while population has doubled, appreciation has fallen by roughly 50%. No trivial amount, that.

Of course, some people will not go to concerts and will buy music instead. But we already know that the sales of classical music have dropped off a cliff. The number of radio stations that host classical music has declined, too. Do you even have one where you live? (NYC is an oasis in this respect.)

How about listening online? For one example, it wasn’t until earlier this year that Pandora began carrying adult music. In fact, when I was listening the other day they had a tool pop up on the side of their player which would allow you to move three sliders and then click a button, after which a search engine would find music you like. The distressing first slider was BPM: Beats per Minute. The others were something inane like funkiness or quirkiness. I wish I had the opportunity for a screen capture to show you. Anyway, I am unable to discover statistics on on-line listenership beyond the anecdotal, but I don’t find anybody boasting. The opportunities are there, on line, they are just not being fully used.

I don’t think lack of education accounts for the demise of serious music. There’s more than enough of that panacea going around. I believe it has more to do with fears of being called an elitist or of being thought old, or at least no longer youthful. To say that what you are hearing when you go into a bar (restaurant, store, bookstore, etc., etc.) is juvenile, simplistic, or just plain awful makes you sound crusty and sour. If it wasn’t for the constant barrage of bad music everywhere you go, we elitists would keep quiet about all this. But silence in a public establishment is rarer than a sense of humor in an Upper-West-Side Obama supporter.

To some extent, it’s those who create music who are to blame. Some of the musicians who call themselves “serious” are anything but. I’m thinking of that fellow Glass (which rhymes with) and that guy who “wrote” the piece where those on stage sit still for 9 minutes so the audience can hear the sounds of people gasping for breath after discovering they paid good money for the privilege. That’s art. Jazz in the mainstream has mostly devolved into the pablum called “smooth”: all flutes, and what I suppose are synthesizers, all the time.

I’m with the crowd shouting “Dying!” Too bad the only response seems to be “Who cares!”

To get a head start on the criticisms: no, there is nothing wrong with listening to pop music, just as there isn’t anything wrong with drinking pop. An occasional glass can be just the thing. But if you drink nothing else, your teeth will rot out, your stomach will ulcer, and you’ll regress towards diabetes and imbecility. Listening to Andrea Bocelli is like switching to diet pop: you have the idea that you’re drinking real pop, you just can’t identify that strange aftertaste. You are what you listen to. The British Invasion was just that: we should have fought back. Imagine a world without the musics of John Lennon. It’s easy if you try. Heaven.

There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.

—Mark Twain

Twain was on my mind as Marty Wells and I were sitting in The Cigar Inn enjoying an Ashton Corona (if you click the link, I was on that leather couch).

Marty had just given a talk in the Public Health Department of the Cornell Medical school—which is only steps away from the Cigar Inn—on a method to analyze micro-array data, a hot area in statistics. It was a stunning success, as always. The most difficult aspect of the talk was to keep the fans from rushing the stage. Statistics can be a dangerous profession!

Anyway, I was wondering how far we could push Twain’s words after a regular sat down next to me and, as he always does, lit up an enormous Maduro-wrapped log. He sipped from that; but his main course was a steady chain of Native Spirit cigarettes, which he had between puffs of the cigar.

Another regular said, “I don’t know why you don’t have a pinch between your cheek and gum, too.” I suggested he could also add snuff and the patch to get “the whole experience.”

This is a man of few words, so he just gave us a grin.

He was—or still is—an itinerant electrician. I remember once when he asked me what I did. After I told him, he asked what kind of money you could make as a professor of statistics, and then he asked me what it took to become someone like me. I told him. He was contemplative and said he’d consider giving it a try. But he’d move to Florida and be a professor there.

If you weren’t worried before, then take a look at this shocking new climate forecast!

No, only kidding. This is the real forecast:

Sorry. Can’t help myself. Here are four more “forecasts”.

Each of the “forecasts” were generated by what is called a “random walk.” Here is what that is. Grab a coin and go out and stand on a corner of some sidewalk that stretches for a long way in both directions. Call one direction “positive” and the other “negative”. The corner you start at will be called “zero”. Flip your coin: If it is heads, then take one step forward toward positive; if tails, then take one backward toward negative. Keep doing this for a long time and soon you will find…that your neighbors think you are crazy.

But that’s a random walk. If you do the coin flips and steps for a long enough time, you’ll find that you spend a heck of lot more time than you might have guessed on either the positive or the negative side. You will probably find that, when you quit, you are way up along the positive side, or way down along the negative. This is true even though the average of those coin flips, the +1s and -1s that make up your steps, is pretty near 0; and even though the average goes to 0 the longer you flip the coin.

The “climate model forecasts” generated above were done so by reference to a paper by A.H. Gordon, available here, called “Global Warming as a Manifestation of a Random Walk”. It is a very readable paper that bears attention.

Gordon proposed that a climate could be made by generating random “shocks” to a climate system. What’s that? Well, imagine the climate is going along peacefully, maintaining its temperature and minding it’s own business, when suddenly—bame!—some external force causes it to change its temperature up or down. An external force might be a change in the Earth’s orbit, or a shifting in cloud cover, or a flock of birds flying this way or that, or anything. This shock persists in the system for some time; little shocks build up and over the course of a year the climate—the mean temperature—changes. It is just as likely for this random-walk climate’s temperature to go up as it is to go down,.

Random walks have some surprising properties which, by virtue of being surprising, are not intuitive. The first is that we’d expect adding random ups and downs (1s and -1s) together would get us a bunch of no changes (or 0s). We don’t get 0s, but numbers which travel far from 0 as time goes on. In fact, it can be shown—via something called the arcsine law—that it’s more probable that this climate will be at an extreme value whenever the series stops, and will not be near 0. The pictures show this.

What about the real climate, the one we actually live in? It’s certainly true that the real climate experiences external shocks of every kind. Gordon found (over the period he looked and with one particular, often used data set) that temperatures went up about just as many times as it went down, just like what would be expected in a random walk climate. He found that the value of the temperature at the end of the series he had was an extreme one, just like we would be expect in a random walk climate. He made a lot of pictures, like we have, and noticed that a lot of them look just like our real climate.

The pictures that make up our and Gordon’s “arcsine forecast”, for technical reasons, aren’t 1s and -1s, but numbers simulated from a normal distribution with a central parameter of 0, which means the numbers are equally likely to be above 0 as below 0 just like in the -1/+1 random walk, but here they can be any number greater or less than 0 (the standard deviation parameter, for those who know of such things, is set at 0.12, which is the same as the estimated standard deviation parameter for actual global mean temperature; see Gordon’s paper for a fuller description).

What does all this say about the real climate? That it happens to look just like a bunch of random numbers. Gordon cautions, “That is not to say that the temperature record is a random walk, but that it does possess similar features.” The surface temperature records “also exhibits properties of the arc-sine law. It is concluded that the global series could have arisen from random fluctuations and could therefore be analogous to arc-sine law governed by random walks.”

This means the climate we have might be less controllable than we thought it was (controllable negatively or positively through man’s activities).

He ends with some sage advice:

It is important to examine all ways and means by which the observed data series develop trends before facing hard and fast conclusions that any particular activity is the one and only responsible agent.

Below is the code where you can generate your own arcsine climate model forecast in R:
Continue Reading »

Just now got another batch of books in and I’ll mail them out tomorrow morning.

That should take care of all the orders I have received. So you better now! Supplies aren’t limited!

Click here to order.

My Grandpa—my mom’s dad—Owen Johnston, enlisted in the army during World War II. He already had kids at the time, but joined anyway.

He served in Patton’s Third Army and made it to France in December of 1944 where he was shot. When he would talk about it, which was almost never, he said he could see the tracer bullets coming at him and that they moved so slowly. He lay in a trench for a long time and lost a lot of blood.

Eventually, he was evacuated, but he was in pretty bad shape. Several slugs had passed through and one stayed in. The doctors never thought he would live. We know this because The Stars and Stripes, looking for happy news that Christmas, wrote a short piece about him as “The soldier the Germans couldn’t kill.”

Only once did he ever show me his scar, and that only through his shirt, which he never took off in view of anybody. I was pretty young, but I recall seeing the depression, a kind of hole in his gut, through his t-shirt. I saw his Purple Heart, and he let me hold it. The slug they took out of him was supposed to be in a box in a trunk, but I was never allowed to see it. He also had his rifle, which he smuggled back as a souvenir. I was only allowed to hold it when my mom and grandma weren’t around, and I was forsworn to keep my mouth shut about it.

Years later, in the early 1970s, he and grandma took a trip to France to see the battle site. But the closer he got to the town, the harder it was, and he never made it. He turned around and came home.

Grandpa worked and retired from Fords in Dearborn, a regular union guy. We had an enormous family—a ton of uncles and aunts—and everybody stuck together. I used to go to the Eagles or the VFW with the gang and I would fetch drinks from the bar or sit and talk with my Aunt Katherine. I don’t think that a kid can do that nowadays.

Everybody would talk and drink and smoke for hours. Then the next day it would be the same. In the mornings, grandpa would tend to his yard—which was immaculate, like a golf course green; nobody was allowed on it—or go fishing. But in the evenings, flexibly defined to start anytime after noon, it was back with the gang or in front of the TV with the game and a glass of Kesslers and water.

All this eventually caught up with him and by the time the ’90s started, he had a stroke. He never really came back from it. My uncle Don, his oldest boy, would still sneak grandpa cigarettes, which irritated the hell out of my mother and her sister.

He was far from being any kind of saint and didn’t always make the right choices, but I always figured he earned it, so what the hell. He eventually died peacefully in his sleep at home.

Just one story with thousands more like it.

It’s Veteran’s Day. Try to remember or thank somebody who served and who helped make this country such a great place.

That question popped into my mind as I watched this video, sent in by loyal reader Jade.

Or is there a third option?

Unbuntu? i’m going to learn, Unbuntu?

Addendum Just to show how fair & balanced I am: in this house I have one dedicated Linux box, one Linux laptop, one duel-boot Linux/Vista, one dedicated Vista box, two Mac book pros. No Obama buttons.

First listen to the appalling Chuck Schumer responding to a question about the proposed Fairness Doctrine (link from Unfair Doctrine):

Let’s summarize. He said:

• I think we should all try to be fair and balanced, don’t you?
• [Radio broadcasts]: It’s not like printing a broadside…Do you think we should allow people to put pornography on the air? Absolutely not.
• The very same people who don’t want the Fairness Doctrine, want the FCC to limit pornography on the air.
• But you can’t say “Government, Hands off” in one area to a commercial enterprise, “But you’re allowed to intervene in another.” That’s not consistent.

Schumer is treasure trove to people like me who are always on the lookout for examples of appallingly bad reasoning to use for teaching students logic. Almost any Schumer speech can be milked for at least one lesson—you could probably get half a semester from this bare minute.

Now, nobody knows what any new Fairness Doctrine might be since it is now in its “trial balloon” phase. But we can look to an earlier, abandoned incarnation of it for some clues. We can also glean hints from Schumer’s words.

Schumer thinks we should try to be “Fair & Balanced.” A fine thing, but not something that can be mandated. This is not a question of opinion or morality. For example, supposed on some matter the truth is A (where this is some argument or proposition about a decision we have to make). I set up a newspaper to tout A. Another group, unhappy with the reality of A, says “B is better because it shows we care.” But since A is true, it is absurd for me to publish anything else. It is even more absurd for the government to threaten me with criminal liability for my refusal to explain the merits of B.

Of course, we don’t often know the truth of some thing, but we can make a rational guess. It might be, conditional on some evidence, that A is nearly true, or more than likely true, and that every other alternative to A is less likely to be true. Again, it is absurd for me to publish anything else, and equally or more absurd for the government to intervene.

Can the government ban certain opinions from being published? The answer is yes. In certain circumstances, it is rational to proscribe behavior. Some examples: calls for armed insurrection, pleas for murder or other crimes, for sedition and so on. It is not only right the government should ban these, but it is its duty to do so. The exact limits of opinion that can and should be banned are, of course, unknown, and will be, in some cases, flexibly defined. But in no case does it make sense for the government to say, “Ok, make your plea for murdering the president, but you also have to allow Mr X 5 minutes to offer his counter opinion.” The ludicrousness of any such an argument is apparent. In short, either an idea is banned or it is allowable (a trivial tautology, but one that bears mentioning).

It does not follow that because the vast majority of Americans want to ban or limit pornography from being broadcast, that the government can ban, limit, or regulate any other opinion. Whether or not it is right to ban or limit certain opinions, or what constitutes the definition of those opinions, it does not follow—it is idiotic to propose—that the government should allow airing of the controversial opinion but then require the broadcaster provide time for counter opinions. If that were the case, then we could have a station air Deep Throat followed by a plea for proper dental hygiene.

Proper dental hygiene? Why not “The evils of pornography”? Why not, indeed. Now comes the easiest refutation of any implementation of a Fairness Doctrine. Suppose I say “A is true!” The government wants to say, “You may say A is true, but I mandate that you allow fair time for opponents of A. You shall also bear the expense of this.” Who are the legitimate opponents of A? Those that say B? C?, D, E, F…?

This is the meat of it, friends. Pay attention. In order to enforce any “Fairness” Doctrine, the government will be forced to define the opposite of A. Because, for any matter that is uncertain, there are an infinite or certainly an enormously huge number of alternatives to A. You cannot, in finite time, broadcast every alternative to A even if you wanted to. The only way to mandate broadcasting alternatives to A is by the government dictating—and dictating requires a dictator—what those alternatives are.

For example, in the earlier incarnation of this naked power grab, a prominent person who was “attacked” on the air was to be allowed time to offer his defense. What defines an “attack”? Does any negative opinion about the Great Leader in power constitute an “attack”? The Great Leader proposes a tax increase, and a broadcaster says, “This will negatively effect credit and so make it more difficult to get home loans.” Is this an “attack”? Who can say? The government wants to say. In fact, it must say.

There is no way around this fact: the government must get into the business of defining what an “attack” is, what are its limits, and so on. There is no alternative if you require a Fairness Doctrine. There must come into an existence an office to administer Fairness (I propose “Ministry of Truth”).

Of course, many, like Schumer, would like nothing better than to be in the business of defining what are the limits of opinion on political matters. The reason for this is obvious as it is odious.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It is impossible for any Fairness Doctrine to be consonant with those words. It is not a debatable point: it is logically impossible. Unless, as Schumer and other advocates of the “living constitution” want to do, you change the meaning of the plain-English words “Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of the press.” They must interpret this to mean “Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of the press unless that law allows us to respond to people who hurt our feelings or otherwise pick on us, or that the speech printed or broadcast is hateful.” This is so absurd that I am shocked that anybody but an academic could ever think it.

Well, that’s enough. I’m already sick of this. There are no subtleties involved in this argument, not anywhere. To see these power-hungry politicians licking their chops over the possibilities due to them because of their recent electoral victory is truly frightening.

Sigh. I didn’t even get to the obvious logical absurdity in Schumer’s phrase “But you can’t say…” I’ll leave that for homework.