Win of secular right in Israel

In Likud primaries current Israeli prime minister won by a huge margin:
"With 85 percent of votes counted, Netanyahu was leading with 75 percent of votes. Rival Moshe Feiglin took 24%."

1. This is a clear triumph for the secular Israeli right. Combined with the recent Labor primary and the Labor's  rise in popularity, we may expect a serious debate during the next election election, rather than a competition between the ideological left and the religious right.

2. Note that Netanyahu has clearly moved towards the center, which accords with the pattern demonstrated by the previous right-wing prime ministers (notably Begin and Sharon):
"A boycott of the vote called by Likud activists in Judea and Samaria to protest Netanyahu’s settlement policies appeared to have succeeded, as polling stations there had an exceptionally low turnout. The organizers of the boycott expressed outrage when people loyal to Feiglin sent text messages saying that the boycott had been canceled."

About liberalism: why I use quotation marks

Article on subjectm that I am not very interested in, comes up with the following remarkable statement:
"Classical liberalism was concerned with the freedom to hold and practice beliefs at odds with a public consensus. Modern liberalism uses the power of the state to impose liberal values on institutions it regards as backward. It is the difference between pluralism and anti-­clericalism." 

My comments:
1. The imposition of "liberal" values can be seen in the intolerant attitudes towards the evangelical Christians in the US. Another case is the attempts by "liberal" groups to impose economic and academic boycotts on Israel, whereas in Israel itself this takes a form of anti-settler sentiment. Ironically, if a liberally-minded person tries to defend the rights of evangelicals or settlers on their views (without actually agreeing with them), he/she is branded a right-winger.

2. You may have noticed that sometimes I use quotation marks to designate the terms whose linguistic usage does not agree with their literal meaning: "liberal", "progressive", "rich/poor" etc. So, for example, in the US "liberal" is used to designate Democrats, often extremely left-wing ones. Yet, for the reason outlined in the previous comment these people frequently are not liberal in the original sense of the word.

Another case when "liberals" are not really liberals is when one refers to their views on the economy. "Liberals" often advocate limiting the market freedom and discriminating against those who are more economically successful. In this contextm the people who do hold liberal economic views are referred to as "neo-liberals" (or, in an extreme case, "libertarians".) In fact, those who are called "liberals", should be really named "neo-communists" (no offence intended - simple statement of ideology.)

The subject, that goes beyond the theme of this post, is whether one can forgo the economic liberalism, but preserve the liberal freedoms in the other areas of life (freedom of speech, freedom of gatherings etc.) Marx and Lenin would certainly disagree.

Dating, War and Dr. Strangelove

I discussed recently dating from the point of view of market strategy, and also pointed out the link, where the game theory was applied to the same model. These things are more than  a joke: once upon a time the game theory was deciding the fate of the World: it was behind the American (and perhaps also Soviet) strategy during the Cold War era. 

This article discusses how game theory led to the Cold War episode, known as "Operation Gian Lance":
"Nixon's madman pose and Giant Lance were based on game theory, a branch of mathematics that uses simple calculations and rigorous logic to help understand how people make choices — like whether to surge ahead in traffic or whether to respond to a military provocation with a strike of one's own. The most famous example in the field is the Prisoner's Dilemma: If two criminal suspects are held in separate cells, should they keep mum or rat each other out? (Answer: They should keep quiet, but as self-interested actors, what they will do is betray each other and both go to jail.) In the Cold War, the "games" were much more complicated simulations of war and bargaining: Would the Soviets be more likely to attack Western Europe if we kept missiles there or if we didn't?

Kissinger had studied game theory as a young academic and strategic theorist at Harvard. In the early '60s, he was part of a group of World War II veterans who became the oracles or "whiz kids" of the nuclear age. Working at newly formed institutes and think tanks, like the RAND Corporation, they preached that the proper way to deal with the existence of nuclear weapons wasn't to act as if the situation was so grave that one couldn't even discuss using them; it was to figure out how to use them most effectively. This was the attitude mocked by Stanley Kubrik in Dr. Strangelove, in which RAND appears thinly disguised as the Bland Corporation."

Absurd face of political correctness

Loves of absurd will appreciate the opening sentence of this article:
"Richard Nixon was many things — crafty, criminal, self-pitying, vengeful, paranoid. But gay?"

Any pretense of political correctness is washed away by putting in the same row: "crafty, criminal, self-pitying, vengeful, paranoid, gay". The double irony is that Nixon, a Republican, is usually the target of the "progressive" left, which pretends to be the great supporter of sexual minorities.

Finally, the extra level of absurdity is provided by the uniform across the political spectrum vilification of Nixon by the Americans: Yes, he might have been a crook... yet, these very Americans twice elected him the president. He won 1972 election by a landslide, even though the public was already aware of the Watergate scandal. In addition, many of the Nixon's achievements as a US president are things, without which one cannot imagine modern America (for good or for bad):
- first nuclear disarmament negotiations with Soviet Union (one of the treaties concluded, Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, lasted till George W. Bush withdrew from it in 2002)
- the end of the Vietnam war,
- establishing relationship with China (imagine that once upon a time the goods "made in China" were not present in American stores)
- first true demonstration of the US commitment to Israel security during 1793 Yom Kippour war
- dealing with the economic crisis and high inflation of the early 70s and abolishing the gold standard (the former is a very contemporary topic, the latter is a favorite subject of the Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul)
- introducing first ever in the US environmental regulations
- promoting desegregation of schools and affirmative action

"How can one evaluate such an idiosyncratic president, so brilliant and so morally lacking?"

Were the billionaires born rich?

Most rich people became rich by being born rich. This wisdom seems so obvious that I have never questioned it. Thus, the original goal of the little research project that I describe below was to quantify how often “poor” people become rich and whether there are any trends in time, making it more difficult to become rich in the recent decades.

The basis of the study was the Forbes billionaires list for 2011. (Note that this list is already somewhat outdated – for example, it includes Steve Jobs.) The billionaires were looked up in Wikipedia and then classified into three groups, depending on how they became rich:

i)        People who inherited the wealth from their parents/spouses/other relatives. (designated as “rich family”)

ii)       Those who came from a “poor” background, ranging from really poor to university professors or owners of a small business, such as a grocery store (“poor family”)

iii)     Those who did not inherit the wealth, but were otherwise well positioned for starting a business due to the connections of their parent, i.e. children of politicians, CEOs of companies etc. (“promising family”; Bill Gates, for example, was assigned to this category)

There is also the fourth group – those, about whom the Wikipedia does not contain enough information to classify them into one of the three categories above.

The figure below shows how the number of people in each category increases with the number of the topmost billionaires taken. For example, among the top 100 billionaires, 33 were born “rich,” 35 grew all the way from the bottom, 20 had a connected family and 12 are of unknown background. The figure does not continue beyond 281st billionaire, since the number of those, whose background is undetermined, reaches almost 20 percent and grows even faster after that.

The next figure shows a similar study for the 412 US billionaires, for whom the Wikipedia information is more complete. Still, at the end the number of those with unknown background reaches 25%.

One observes that the fractions of those coming from the “poor” and from the “rich” backgrounds are approximately the same. Those coming from the “promising families” together with the “poor” form the total number of self-made billionaires. However, the high number of “unknowns” means that the claim that most rich people were born already rich may be technically true. Nevertheless, it is not as striking as one could have expected, and one might expect that the ration of self-made rich and born rich continues to lower incomes (below the billion.)

Let us look how the US millionaires are distributed depending on their age, see the next figure. In order to smooth the fluctuations, the age was changed in the steps of 5 years.

There are no substantial differences between different categories. Most billionaires are older than 40, which in the case of the “poor” is due to the time needed to earn such a big capital, whereas in the case of the “rich” is about the time when one’s parents pass away and leave the inheritance. The small number of the extremely young billionaires are mainly those, who made their money in high-tech or internet industry, such as, for example, Mark Zuckerberg who is now 27. However, this number is statistically too small to claim that becoming rich has become easier in the recent decades.

Similarly, the decrease of the number of billionaires beyond the retirement age probably has to do more with mortality than with lower social mobility during the years when these people were young (Great Depression and World War 2.)

Dating and the game theory

A game-theoretical approach to dating (with a bit of math). Note that the model is nearly identical to the one that I used in my recent post on dating, but the author develops the strategies to much greater extent:
"Here are some ground rules (basically the same rules as on MTV’s show Next):
1. You only date one person at a time.
2. A relationship either ends with you “rejecting” or “selecting” the other person.
3. If you “reject” someone, the person is gone forever. Sorry, old flames cannot be rekindled.
4. You plan on dating some fixed number of people (N) during your lifetime.
5. As you date people, you can only tell relative rank and not true rank. This means you can tell the second person was better than the first person, but you cannot judge whether the second person is your true love. After all, there are people you have not dated yet."

Added later:
All this is not as ridiculous, as it sounds - it is the algorithm that is used by most "single and looking" people that I know, particularly by those who use the internet dating. Even though most of them don't formulate it so clearly.

My article points out that this algorithm always fails, and that there is much truth to the statement that you meet your love when you are not really looking for it (i.e. when you don't bind yourself by silly rules.) - again, this is what many people who found a partner say.

The article, that I added today, has a definition of success in dating that is different from mine. It is certainly useless in terms of finding a soulmate. But if the goal is to get married  - it is a big improvement, compared to what most people normally do.

Mankiw on stimulus spending

Addition to my "stimulus vs. austerity" collection (here, here, here, here, here, and here) - old Gregory Mankiw's article on the disadvantages of stimulus spending.