A Real Life Catch-22

I recently received a phone call from Blue Cross for my son William. The call was fully automated—recordings and voice recognition. It asked if I was William. When I replied that I was not, it asked me to take a message for him. The message was that he was to call a specific phone number.

I passed the information on to William, who is a student at the University of Chicago. He called the number from his cell phone—and was informed, I assume again by a robot responder, that he had to respond from the phone number that the original call had gone to—my home number in San Jose.

He reported the result to me. I called the number. The robot asked me if I was William. I replied that I was not. It asked if I was representing him. I replied that I was. It told me to tell him to call the number and hung up on me.

I called the general Blue Cross number, eventually got through to a human being, and described the elegantly impossible situation that I had encountered. He put me on hold, checked the situation, then informed me that the call was for a survey and he could and would remove William from the list of people being surveyed. I pointed out that the same problem would occur for anyone else being surveyed who was not living at the location of his home phone number and suggested that Blue Cross might want to alter the way they did their survey. My guess, from his response, is that it won't happen.

Successful Dieting: Report from a Sample Size of One

I have been somewhat overweight for a long time. In recent months, for the first time I can remember, I have succeeded in losing quite a lot of weight—something over twenty pounds—by dieting. The methods that turned out to work for me may work for some other people, although surely not all, so I thought it was worth describing them.

The diet started when my wife was out of town for over a month taking care of her mother, who had broken her arm and needed assistance. The reason that made it easier was not the difference between her cooking and mine—I am an adequate cook. It was the fact that eating is in part a social activity. Her absence made it much easier for me to skip meals. 

I have the good fortune to possess a metabolism that is not bothered by skipping meals; I can fast until dinner time without serious discomfort or other negative consequences. So one part of my diet, then and thereafter, was to limit myself to one meal a day, with only a little nibbling at other times. Usually the meal was dinner. Occasionally there was a lunchtime talk on campus with lunch provided, in which case I would make that my one meal and only have a light snack in the evening.

Another part of the diet was finding low calorie food I liked. That largely consisted of fruit salads, using fat-free cottage cheese, yogurt, or mayonnaise, all three of which taste pretty good and are quite low in calories. For snacks, the best solution was kimchee, the highly spiced Korean pickled cabbage which, I concluded, has the highest ratio of taste to calories of any food known to man. I also indulged in an occasional pummelo, the ancestor of the grapefruit, a fruit I had recently discovered and found to be quite tasty.

The final factor was feedback. I got a digital scale, put it in the bathroom, and weighed myself several times a day. Partly that was curiosity, seeing how my weight varied over the course of a day. The range was surprisingly large, typically including a drop of three pounds or so between immediately after dinner and the next morning. But the continual feedback also encouraged me to push my weight lower and warned me when a temporary deviation was letting it come back up.

The most discouraging part of the process occurred after I had reached my initial target, tried to return to something closer to my usual eating pattern of a light lunch plus a substantial dinner, and found that my weight was going back up. So I went back on the diet. I have yet to determine what pattern I need to follow in order to maintain a roughly constant weight, or whether the answer will change once my body has adjusted to its new level.

Recently I was invited to a black tie event, the first such I can  remember attending. In my closet was a very good suit that my parents bought me decades ago for such purposes, and that I had not worn—could not wear—for a very long time. The pants still did not fit, but they were a lot closer to fitting than they had been a few months earlier; I wore a less fancy suit to the event instead. 

I figure that when I can get into those pants, my diet will be done.

More on Nordhaus and Global Warming

In a blog post a while back, I pointed out that William Nordhaus's work on the economics of global warming demonstrated a serious problem with policy arguments based on externalities—the risk, in dealing with something as uncertain as costs and benefits over the next century, that the calculation of externalities will be biased in the direction that produces the result the person doing the calculation wants. Nordhaus included, as an essential part of his argument, an estimate of the expected cost from low probability/high cost outcomes of permitting global warming but made no attempt to include the cost of equivalent outcomes from preventing it—although there is no strong reason to assume that the current global climate is optimal, and so that any change will produce costs but not benefits.

Robert Murphy has webbed a detailed response to a recent Op-Ed by  Nordhaus on global warming, dealing with a variety of other issues. Among his points:

1. Climate models have, on average, overpredicted warming, suggesting that a better estimate would be about 2/3 the current predictions of such models.

2. The paper which Nordhaus cites as supporting the claim that CO2 is a pollutant actually provides evidence that net externalities are positive over a temperature range representing about the next fifty or sixty years of predicted rise, and go negative only after that.

3. Nordhaus's own work finds that the optimal policy to reduce global warming, coordinated among all nations of the world, produces net benefits, but that some proposed policies, including one proposed by Gore, produce much larger net costs. 

One point Murphy did not make but that is worth noting is that the benefits of climate control, on Nordhaus's own figures, are not very large. The optimal policy—for obvious reasons not likely to occur—is calculated to produce a net benefit of about three trillion dollars. That sounds like a lot of money—until one recognizes that it is spread over the entire world and about ninety years. That makes the annual benefit of the ideal policy about 33 billion dollar a year—roughly one percent of the current U.S. federal budget or one tenth of a percent of current world income. 

Which suggests that, with a less ideal and more realistic policy, net costs are likely to be larger than net benefits.

A Mass-Market Electric Car?

I recently came across a news story on the Coda, a new electric car, and noticed that one of the few dealers was within a few miles of my house. Yesterday I stopped by, explained that I wasn't really in the market but was curious, and was given a chance to drive it.

The Coda claims to be a five passenger car, but looked a little cramped for four adults. Its general feel was respectable but not luxurious. What is interesting about it is the price—MSRP of $37,250. State and federal subsidies are supposed to total about ten thousand dollars, bringing the cost to the buyer down to not much more than a comparable conventional sedan.

Claimed range on a single charge is up to 125 miles, time to fully recharge on a 240 outlet about six hours. Allowing for a reasonable safety margin, that makes it good for a trip of forty to fifty miles each way or a commute of up to twice that distance with  a charging station at the other end. My guess is that that would make it an adequate replacement for something like half of U.S. autos—a car for someone who didn't take long trips, or the second car of a family that did.

If the figures I was given were correct, that 120 miles costs about four dollars worth of electricity, a third to a quarter the cost of gas for a similar car with a conventional engine. For a car driven ten thousand miles a year, that is a savings of about a thousand dollars a year, not enough to justify the list price of the car but sufficient to make it a reasonably attractive buy with current subsidies. 

The current subsidies may not—hopefully will not—continue indefinitely, especially if the number of cars being sold becomes large. But I was told that nearly half the cost is for the batteries, so if battery technology continues to improve the price without subsidy might fall to somewhere in the twenty to thirty thousand dollar range in a few years. And if improvements include an increase in energy density, the range could become adequate for all save long trips.

Which is interesting. The Tesla is a snazzy looking car, but definitely a luxury vehicle. The Coda, if it performs as advertised and no unexpected problems show up, could be a serious competitor in the mass market in not very long.

Confession Under Torture: The Visigothic Solution

Quite a lot of legal systems have used torture to try to force defendants and/or witnesses to tell the truth. Moral problems aside, the obvious problem is that an innocent defendant may confess, or a witness give the testimony he thinks the interrogator wants, to avoid the torture.

Obvious not only to us but to them. The legal literature of Imperial China, where torture of both witnesses and defendants was legal, contains accounts of cases where a clever official figured out that a confession under torture was bogus and successfully identified the real criminal.

Much of what we know about the Athenian legal system comes from orations written by professional orators to be spoken by plaintiffs or defendants. They include two orations, written by the same orator for different cases, one of which argues that testimony under torture (of slaves) is entirely reliable, one of which gives the obvious argument for why it is not—in each case, of course, supporting his client's position.

I recently came across an ingenious, if imperfect, solution to the problem in what is apparently the oldest surviving Germanic law code—the Visigothic Forum Judicum. Alaric accuses Beremud of murder. There is not enough evidence to convict Beremud, so he is tortured to make him confess. Under the code:

 “The judge shall take the precaution to compel the accuser to specifically describe the alleged offence, in writing; and after he has done so, and presented it privately to the judge, the torture shall proceed; and if the confession of him who is subjected to the torture should correspond with the terms of the accusation, his guilt shall be considered to be established. But if the accusation should allege one thing, and the confession of the person tortured the opposite, the accuser must undergo the penalty hereinbefore provided; because persons often accuse themselves of crime while being tortured.

If Beremud is innocent, he won't know the details of the offense—where and when the victim was killed, with what weapon, what wounds were inflicted. However much he wants to stop the pain, he can't confess what he does not know. This assumes, of course, that an innocent defendant will not know the details of the crime. The code dealt with that problem:

But if the accuser, before he has secretly given the written accusation to the judge as aforesaid, should, either in his own proper person, or by anyone else, inform the party of what he is accused, then it shall not be lawful for the judge to subject the latter to torture, because the alleged offence has become publicly known.”

There is at least one  problem with this solution to the problem of false confessions. A guilty defendant, knowing the law, may confess under torture and deliberately get the details wrong. My conjecture is that that problem was dealt with by having the interrogator  keep up the torture until either the defendant confessed with the right details or the interrogator was convinced that he could not. I suspect that most of us, having had the good fortune not to have been subjected to torture, overestimate how easy is to hold out when saying the right words will end the present pain.

It may occur to some readers that a variant of the Visigothic solution survives in modern practice. Police officers are not supposed to torture defendants, but they are allowed to interrogate them, and interrogation sometimes leads to confessions—which may make one suspect that it comes closer to torture than it is supposed to. One way of checking whether the confession is for real is to see whether it contains details that an innocent defendant would not know.

Of course, this depends on the honesty of the officers doing the interrogation—they can, and for all I know sometimes do, subvert the process by feeding the defendant information that they have and he, if innocent, does not.

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P.S. A talk I just heard on the problem of jailhouse snitches points out a different modern version of the problem—the "confession" by a defendant that may have been invented by the person it was supposedly confessed to, a fellow criminal eager to testify in exchange for lenient treatment in his own case. Here again, one test of truth is whether the confession contains details that the real criminal would know and an innocent defendant, or the fellow criminal who claims to have heard the confession, would not. Here again, the problem is that the snitch may have been fed that information by the police or prosecution, or obtained it himself in some other way.

One further problem, in that case, is that the snitch may be, in some cases turned out to have been, the real criminal, eager to convict someone else for his crime. And well informed about the details.

Wanted: A Better Search String

I routinely use Google to look for people talking about me, in part out of curiosity, in part because, like other people, I like to feel important, and in part because they may be saying things to which I want to reply. 

In the old days, it was pretty easy—most of the hits were people actually saying something about me. As the Internet has grown, the search has become more complicated, both because there are more other David Friedmans online—including another law professor who blogs and an economic journalist—and because a lot of the hits I get are simply web pages that have a link to this blog.

I expect some of my readers know more than I do about the construction of search strings. Ideally, I want one that will not produce a hit for a page whose only mention of my name is a link to this blog. I would also like one that will not return multiple hits for the same reference appearing in multiple places, something that also often happens. Is there a way of doing that? Alternatively, is there a better search engine for the purpose than Google?

Truth, Falsity, and Jobless Numbers

I recently came across a web page with the following claim:

Given the difficulty of estimating economic data it is common practice for government agencies to announce a preliminary number subject to later revision. Under the law of averages, estimates should balance out between being higher or lower than later revisions. Amazingly, though, the Obama Department of Labor’s preliminary estimates of new jobless claims have been lower than later revisions in 56 of the last 57 weeks.  

The claim was followed by what purported to be a quote from Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. 

"We feel it is better to err on the side of optimism,” she said. “The preliminary estimate is widely reported. The subsequent revisions are rarely noticed. By adding a bit of sheen to the preliminary estimate we feel we are helping to boost morale. We believe that good morale is an important building block for positive change.”“Making the economy look better will make people feel better,” Solis went on. “If people feel better they are more likely to support the policies of the Administration, which we feel is crucial if we are to be given the opportunity to continue on the path laid out by the President for another four years."

My immediate reaction was suspicion—the quote sounded too much like what a critic of the President would imagine his labor secretary saying and quite unlike what an administration official would actually say. I put a comment on the web page to that effect, adding that I didn't have an opinion on whether the initial fact was true.

Further investigation found the quote only on pages hostile to the administration, and no source other than another such page. On the other hand, the fact, initial underestimates for 56 of the past 57 weeks, is from the Wall Street Journal and so presumably true.

I conclude that the labor department has indeed been deliberately misrepresenting the evidence—erring in the same direction 56 times out of 57 is not something that has any significant probability of happening by chance. The obvious explanation is  the one given in the purported quote. But I am quite confident that the labor secretary didn't actually say what the quote asserts she said, at least not in public.

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P.S. A commenter points out that the "quote" from the labor secretary actually originated as part of a longer piece, obviously intended as satire.

Pretty good satire, too.