Sean Carroll

Author: Sean Carroll

  • Economists on immigration

    Immigration has been in the news quite a bit recently, as certain political factions (we are so fair and balanced that we won’t say which ones) are looking to score some cheap points at the expense of immigrants. They will even go so far as to deploy the National Guard at our border with Mexico, since those Guard folks have more or less been sitting around with nothing to do for the last three years.

    Alex Tabarrok, who blogs at Marginal Revolution, is attempting to inject some facts into the debate. He is basically libertarian/conservative himself, but there is consensus among economists from either side of the political spectrum on the basic realities of immigration, and he has written an open letter to the President and Congress urging them to take these realties into account. It’s been signed by professional social scientists of all political persuasions (including Brad DeLong on the left); if there are any experts reading, they are welcome to sign it themselves.

    Dear President George W. Bush and All Members of Congress:

    People from around the world are drawn to America for its promise of freedom and opportunity. That promise has been fulfilled for the tens of millions of immigrants who came here in the twentieth century.

    Throughout our history as an immigrant nation, those who are already here worry about the impact of newcomers. Yet, over time, immigrants have become part of a richer America, richer both economically and culturally. The current debate over immigration is a healthy part of a democratic society, but as economists and other social scientists we are concerned that some of the fundamental economics of immigration are too often obscured by misguided commentary.

    Overall, immigration has been a net gain for existing American citizens, though a modest one in proportion to the size of our 13 trillion-dollar economy.

    Immigrants do not take American jobs. The American economy can create as many jobs as there are workers willing to work so long as labor markets remain free, flexible and open to all workers on an equal basis.

    Immigration in recent decades of low-skilled workers may have lowered the wages of domestic low-skilled workers, but the effect is likely to be small, with estimates of wage reductions for high-school dropouts ranging from eight percent to as little as zero percent.

    While a small percentage of native-born Americans may be harmed by immigration, vastly more Americans benefit from the contributions that immigrants make to our economy, including lower consumer prices. As with trade in goods and services, the gains from immigration outweigh the losses. The effect of all immigration on low-skilled workers is very likely positive as many immigrants bring skills, capital and entrepreneurship to the American economy.

    Legitimate concerns about the impact of immigration on the poorest Americans should not be addressed by penalizing even poorer immigrants. Instead, we should promote policies, such as improving our education system that enables Americans to be more productive with high-wage skills.

    We must not forget that the gains to immigrants from coming to the United States are immense. Immigration is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised. The American dream is a reality for many immigrants who not only increase their own living standards but who also send billions of dollars of their money back to their families in their home countries—a form of truly effective foreign aid..

    America is a generous and open country and these qualities make America a beacon to the world. We should not let exaggerated fears dim that beacon.

  • Holy Bibble

    The Bible, whatever it’s other flaws or virtues, is undeniably an impressive compendium of entertaining stories. Of course, it can be tough slogging to read the whole thing from start to finish, suffused as it is with miscellaneous begats and exhortations against the eating of shellfish.

    Fortunately, you can now get your Bible stories in easily-digestible comic form, from Holy Bibble. Cannan and Lucas have set themselves the task of rewriting the entire bible as humorous sequential art. Admittedly, some poetic license is occasionally taken with the material — I’m pretty sure there was no trip to Japan in the original Scriptures. But all of the stories are based on real Bible narratives, and you do learn a lot by reading them.

    Holy Bibble

    For example, we’ve all heard the story of Lot and his wife. Yahweh had decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for their various sinful activities. Lot, being virtuous, was given advance warning, and fled with his wife and two daughters. But his wife couldn’t resist looking back one last time, and was turned into a pillar of salt. God works in mysterious ways.

    But the afterstory is so much more interesting. Lot and his daughters apparently thought they were completely alone, and there was some question as to how the family line would be able to continue. The women decided to take matters into their own hands — they got their father drunk and raped him in order to get themselves pregnant. The scheme worked, and they eventually gave birth to sons who fathered the Moabites and the Ammonites, two rival tribes to Israel.

    The unwitting seductions actually happened on two successive nights, so one may question whether Lot shouldn’t have figured out what was going on. On the other hand, his daughters may have had some issues, as Lot had previously offered them up to a rampaging mob of Sodomites. At least, that’s what I gather from the comics; but apparently it’s all in the book.

    Cain’s trip to Japan, though — pretty sure they made that up.

    Update: David Plotz at Slate blogs the Bible!

  • People fusion

    “Fusion” is an important concept in nearly all artistic fields — music, cooking, painting, what have you. Each endeavor tends to feature multiple strongly-identified styles — Mexican food, Japanese food, Ethiopian food…; Jazz, Classical, Rock…; Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop… — and it is fun to mix and match to obtain exciting new combinations. Here in Chicago, you can visit SushiSamba for Latin/Japanese cuisine, then head over to the Empty Bottle to listen to some jazz/rock hybrid.

    Despite the excitement, however, genres do not just blend together to form one homogeneous goop. While styles evolve, they are typically held together by distinct aspects setting them apart from other approaches. (Latin/Japanese fusion will never grow in popularity to displace the authentic cuisines of either region.) This can be informally understood through the concept of a fitness landscape, a function of the underlying variables that describes how successful a certain approach ultimately is. A typical fitness landscape has peaks and valleys, indicating that particular combinations work well together, much better than a random mish-mash. Imagine setting aside our delicate sensibilities for a moment to contemplate a giant “food machine” (or “music machine” or whatever) that can create any dish we want, simply by adjusting the position of a large set of dials. (A thought experiment, okay?) There’s a dial for the amount of jalapeno peppers, another dial for how long the food should be cooked, and so forth. There is a region of dial settings that corresponds roughly to “Japanese food” and another that corresponds to “Latin food.” If we simply adjust the dial setting to be a linear combination of the Japanese and Latin settings, the likely outcome is — some sort of horrifying mush. We would find ourselves in a valley of the fitness landscape where nobody would want to live. In other words, different approaches to cuisine (or other artistic endeavors) tend to cohere into sensible and distinct groupings, and random mixtures between them are unlikely to be an improvement; successful fusion is a delicate art.

    Interestingly, however, there is a well-known counterexample to the peaks-and-valleys structure of aesthetic fitness landscapes: human faces. It’s been known for a while now that if you take a selection of randomly-chosen people, and construct a picture by averaging their features together, the result is typically a more attractive person. The phenomenon is extremely easy to notice in examples. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution writes about an experiment that tested this conclusion. He extracted this figure from Judith Rich Harris’s book No Two Alike. From top to bottom, it shows some actual faces, then the average of two faces, four faces, and so on up to 32 faces.

    Averaging People

    For an even more striking demonstration, see The Face of Tomorrow, a photography project that takes portraits of random people in certain cities around the world and blends them together (city by city), with the idea that these composite portraits will resemble future citizens in an increasingly interconnected world. (Alas, real heredity doesn’t work that way — stupid discretized genetic code.) Go to The Faces and click on a city to see the composites decomposed into the individual people. The future, I have to say, looks pretty hot.

  • Suppressing The Da Vinci Code

    Cardinal Francis Arinze is suggesting that good Catholics should take legal action against The Da Vinci Code (via Volokh).

    In the latest Vatican broadside against “The Da Vinci Code”, a leading cardinal says Christians should respond to the book and film with legal action because both offend Christ and the Church he founded. Cardinal Francis Arinze, a Nigerian who was considered a candidate for pope last year, made his strong comments in a documentary called “The Da Vinci Code — A Masterful Deception.” …

    “Christians must not just sit back and say it is enough for us to forgive and to forget,” Arinze said in the documentary made by Rome film maker Mario Biasetti for Rome Reports, a Catholic film agency specializing in religious affairs.

    “Sometimes it is our duty to do something practical. So it is not I who will tell all Christians what to do but some know legal means which can be taken in order to get the other person to respect the rights of others,” Arinze said.

    I like the bit about how Christians shouldn’t just forgive and forget. I’m no expert, but aren’t there some religions that preach otherwise?

    No word as to whether Pope Benedict is considering issuing a fatwa against Dan Brown.

  • The wrongness singularity

    The blogosphere has been having its fun with this little bit of instant punditry from Glenn Reynolds:

    Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy. But we’d be called imperialist oppressors, then.

    Far be it from me to add anything to the trenchant political analysis already available. But as a Physics Blog, we feel it’s our duty here to point out the exciting scientific consequences that our more humanistical friends have thus far missed: the possibility that Prof. Reynolds has discovered a new state of wrongness.

    You see, wrongness is a fermionic property. That is to say, a statement is either wrong or it is not wrong; you can’t pile on the wrongness to make a condensate of wrong. By the conventional rules, n declarative statements can be wrong at most n times. By the Pauli exclusion principle, you just can’t be more wrong than that!

    I count four declarative statements in Instapundit’s two sentences. (“… prices would plummet,” “dictators would be broke,” “poor nations would benefit,” “we’d be called imperialist oppressors.”) Now let’s count how many time he is wrong.

    • prices would plummet — No, they wouldn’t. As it turns out, the Saudi and Iranian oil fields are running at very close to full capacity; any increase would be at most a perturbation.
    • dictators would be broke — Not sure which dictators we’re talking about here — the ones we just deposed? In fact, dictators have shown a remarkable ability to not be broke even in countries without vast stores of oil wealth.
    • poor nations would benefit — Because it’s really the poor countries that guzzle oil? This one baffles me.
    • we’d be called imperialist oppressors — Now, in a strict sense this is not wrong. We would be called that. Because invading sovereign countries in order to take over their natural resources is more or less the definition of imperialist oppression. However, Reynolds’ implication is clearly that we should not be called imperialist oppressors, that it would somehow be unfair. Which is crazy. So can we count that as wrong? Yes!

    So indeed we count four instances of wrongness in only four declarative statements — Fermi degeneracy! No more wrongness should be possible.

    But as Tim Lambert points out, Instapundit managed to be wrong yet another time, by begging a question and then getting the wrong answer!

    • The subjunctive clause opening the first sentence cleverly slides from invading Saudi Arabia and Iran to running pumps at full speed. Actually not something that would happen in the reality-based world! As Tim says, “Yeah, because that’s pretty much the way it worked out in Iraq.”

    So in fact, Reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! This is the hackular equivalent of crossing the Chandrasekhar Limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself. It is unknown at this point whether the resulting end state will be an intermediate neutron-blog phase, or whether the collapse will proceed all the way to a singularity surrounded by a black hole event horizon. We may have to wait for the neutrino signal to be sure.

  • Blogs!

    Some new-ish physics-y blogs that you might not know about, but are worth checking out. (How do I know about them? Probably because at some point they linked to CV. Not that I ever check.)

    • Backreaction is a group blog, I think by some physics grad students mostly postdocs. Sabine Hossenfelder seems to be the lead conspirator. Great fun posts, full of interesting physics.
    • physics musings, subtitled “the tale of a physicist’s comeback.” Jao (Jose Antonio Ortega Ruiz) got a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave detectors, left the field, and has now been inspired to get back in.
    • Charm &c. is by an experimentalist at Cornell, apparently working at Fermilab. Otherwise mysterious.
    • Sexy Science is like Us magazine, for science. No physicists yet! Outrageous.
    • Galactic Interactions is by occasional CV commenter Rob Knop. Articles about tenure and funding are must-reading.
    • Brad Hoc is not entirely serious, but still he should post more. He’s single ladies!

    Just a small sample of relatively new blogs that I happened to have noticed. As of this moment, Cosmic Variance is arguably the largest physics-oriented blog on the web. But the idea is just catching on, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we were overtaken at some point sooner rather than later. Which is great — let everyone do their thing, and the quality stuff will bubble to the top.

    If you have your own science-type blog that you’d like to plug, or know of some good ones that deserve wider recognition, consider this thread the place to be shameless.

  • Argument from banana

    Kevin Schnitzius pointed me to this video, which has been around for a while but was recently mentioned by the Disgruntled Chemist. Skip to about the two-minute mark to get some deep insight into the creationist mindset, which Tara from Aetiology (which has since moved) accurately dubbed the “argument from banana.”

    Argument from banana
    You really do need to see the video, but I’ll spill the beans for the impatient: bananas are the quintessentially designed object. Not only do they fit snugly into a human hand, they even have ridges to allow for a tighter grip, a built-in color-coding that lets us know when they’re ripe, and — my favorite — a convenient pull-tab at the top for easy peeling! What better proof for the existence of God could one need?

    I do wonder what they make of the Durian. Perhaps the Designer has a sense of humor?

    Update: If you want to know more (perhaps your faith in naturalism has been shaken?), the video comes from a series called The Way of the Master, featuring Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort. It purportedly shows in 70 countries, and has been awarded honors by the National Religious Broadcasters association.

  • Kosmos

    Kosmos Before there were blogs, there were things called “books” that people would carry around with them in order to occasionally read the words printed inside. In a clever bit of cross-platform fertilization, DarkSyde and DevilsTower (Mark Sumner) from Daily Kos have put together a collection of science posts into a new book, Kosmos: You Are Here. They’ve included original illustrations by artists Carl Buell and others, as well as interesting exerpts from the comment threads of the original posts. DarkSyde is a great science writer, so I imagine the book is worth reading for the actual content as well as representing an exciting new-media experiment.

    And before there were comment threads, there were events called “conferences” where actual human beings would gather in a common location to exchange ideas and patronize the local drinking establishments. This summer will witness the first ever YearlyKos, a gathering of bloggers at a small Nevada resort town on June 8-11. (Don’t ask me why “Daily Kos” is two separate words while “YearlyKos” has no spaces. For some reason, people type in a few URL’s and suddenly they think that spaces are an antiquated typographical anachronism.) Should be a fun event; celebrities to attend include Harry Reid, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, PZ Myers, and Chris Mooney. Hopefully there will be something to do to fill the downtime between the interesting talks.

  • Pandora’s box

    The Wikipedia article on countries with nuclear weapons is sobering reading. This map is from the article, although the color-coding is a bit misleading. (3quarksdaily points to more maps.)
    Nuclear powers

    • The United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France and the People’s Republic of China are the five nuclear powers recognized by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Not coincidentally, they are also the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The US and Russia have about 6,000 active warheads each, while the others have a few hundred each. According to the NPT, only these countries are permitted to have nuclear weapons, and they are prohibited from sharing weapons technology with other countries.
    • India did not sign the NPT, and exploded its first nuclear weapon in 1974 (in a test perversely named “Smiling Buddha“). In 1998 they tested “weaponized” nuclear warheads (I don’t know what that means) in Pokhran-II. Numerous complaints and sanctions followed, none of which had any appreciable effect, and the controversy eventually died down. Possession of nuclear weaponry is considered to be a crucial part of India’s self-image as a world power. They are now recognized by the US as a “responsible nuclear state.”
    • Pakistan is also not an NPT signatory. They performed their first nuclear test in 1998, in response to India’s test. In 1999 they signed accords with India, agreeing to a bilateral moratorium on nuclear testing. A.Q. Kahn, leader of the Pakistani program, confessed to being involved in a clandestine network to share nuclear weapons technology with Libya, Iran, and North Korea; he was pardoned by President Perez Musharraf in 2004. There is some evidence that his network was also collaborating with the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
    • Israel has not acknowledged possessing a nuclear arsenal, but it is an open secret; Israel is not an NPT signatory. (In fact, India, Pakistan, and Israel are the only sovereign states not to ratify the NPT — although see below.) They probably have several hundred warheads, comparable to the stockpiles of China, France, and the UK.
    • North Korea, in contrast to Israel, has publicly claimed to have nuclear weapons, although some analysts remain skeptical. After ratifying the NPT in 1985, they withdrew in 2003; no other countries have ever withdrawn from the treaty. In September 2005 they agreed to scrap their existing nuclear weapons and rejoin the NPT, but later stated that no such steps would be taken unless they were supplied with a light water reactor.
    • Iran is of course an interesting question.
    • South Africa produced a few nuclear weapons in the 1980’s, but later dismantled them. They are the only nation to build nuclear weapons themselves and later give up the capability.
    • Saudi Arabia has stated that they might need to develop nuclear weapons, although they deny actually having done so. Some recent reports claim that the Saudis have embarked on a weapons-development program, with aid from the Pakistani nuclear program.
    • Several republics of the former Soviet Union found themselves in possession of nuclear missiles upon the collapse of the USSR in 1991: Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. All have subsequently transferred the weapons to Russia and signed the NPT, and are currently nuclear-free. Concerns persist over the possibility that weapons technology was sold through the black market; Ukraine, in particular, was known to be active in selling at least conventional technology.
    • Several industrialized nations are thought to be capable of putting together nuclear weapons with very little effort, including Canada, Italy, Germany, Lithuania, and Japan. For the most part there is no evidence that these countries have any desire to pursue such a course. However, former German defense minister Rupert Scholz has argued that Germany should consider nuclear weapons as a way to respond to terrorist attacks.
    • Iraq, of course, had a program to develop nuclear weapons that suffered a number of setbacks, notably the Israeli air strike on the Osirak nuclear facility in 1981. After the 2003 invasion, the Iraq Survey Group concluded that the nuclear program had been abandoned in 1991, along with most other WMD programs, but that Saddam Hussein had plans to re-start the program once multilateral sanctions were lifted.
    • As part of NATO agreements, the US provides tactical nuclear weapons for use by Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey.
    • A number of countries are known to have begun programs to develop nuclear weapons, only to abandon them and eventually sign the NPT; these include Sweden, Switzerland, Egypt, Philippines, Libya, Australia, Poland, Romania, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan, and Yugoslavia.

    What are the chances, with all those weapons out there, that someone will use one, say in the next fifty years? Extremely high, I would guess. None has been used in the last fifty years, it’s true, but for most of that time we lived in a bipolar world with clearly defined lines of engagement and relatively symmetrical capabilities and liabilities. (The above list doesn’t even mention non-state groups, of course.) A more fragmented situation exponentially increases the number of events that could lead to a nuclear strike, including the possibility of accidents. And the number of nuclear-capable states shows little signs of decreasing in the near future.

    For what it’s worth, Russia, India and China have officially adopted a No-First-Use policy regarding nuclear weapons; the United States, United Kingdom, France, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea have declined to do so. In the 2005 revised Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations, the Pentagon listed the conditions under which a nuclear first strike could be requested, which includes basically any situation in which someone might want to use them. The Doctrine itself was originally published freely on the Pentagon web site, before being cancelled — that is, removed from the site, but not necessarily revised as doctrine. The original document can be read here. Britain and France have similarly asserted the right to nuclear first-use. It is hard to imagine that countries generally thought of as less responsible than the US, UK and France would feel much compulsion against using nuclear weapons if they felt threatened.

    Once any country strikes another using nuclear weapons, the presumption against further use will be considerably lowered. The consequences are hard to imagine, simply for being so terrifying.

  • “You’re saying he’s actually Bi?”

    Ali G and Noam ChomskyAli G interviews Noam Chomsky. I’m not really sure what there is to add to that, except my admiration that they pulled it off. Check Wikipedia if you’ve never heard of Ali G, or of Noam Chomsky. Via Omni Brain, by way of Mixing Memory.