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Economics and Common Sense Reviewed by Gil Kalai Book Review Economics and Common Sense Reviewed by Gil Kalai More Sex is Safer Sex: to draw surprising The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics conclusions that Steven E. Landsburg run against com- Free Press, 2007 mon sense. “If your US$26.00, 288 pages common sense tells ISBN-13:978-1-4165-3222-4 you otherwise,” says Landsburg, “remem- The surprise 2005 bestseller Freakonomics by ber that common Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner launched a small sense also tells you genre of books by economists applying economic the Earth is flat.” reasoning to everyday life and finding counter- Drawing on this intuitive results. Mathematician and economist bold statement, here Steven Landsburg, whose online Slate column “Ev- is a small riddle (I eryday Economics” predates the Levitt and Dubner shall come back to volume, has now collected and expanded some of its relevance at the those columns to form the basis of his new book. end): You sail 300 ki- The Logic of Economics lometers from point A to B and then in a perpen- An old Jewish joke [1] goes as follows: “Why is it dicular direction 400 kilometers from point B to C. What is the sailing distance from A to C? Choose that rich people have open credit lines and poor the best answer. people need to pay cash? The world would have a) 500 kilometers been a much better place if the opposite was true.” b) 499.99 kilometers “You can argue,” the joke continues, “that giving c) 490 kilometers credit to poor people runs the risk of making the d) 450 kilometers creditor himself poor. But this is all for the better, once the creditor is poor he will also have an open Is More Sex Safer? credit line!” Let us start with the first example that gives the Common Sense, the Flat Earth, and a Little book its name. Common sense tells us that promis- Riddle cuity spreads AIDS. Landsburg, relying on a paper by Harvard economist Michael Kremer, argues oth- In his book, Landsburg uses the “weapons of evi- erwise. Before presenting Landsburg’s claim, let’s dence and logic, especially the logic of economics” clarify what he does not claim. Landsburg agrees that for every individual in the society, having Gil Kalai is professor of mathematics and member of the more sex is less safe. (Landsburg also agrees that Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew Univer- practicing safe sex is safer than not taking safety sity of Jerusalem. He is also professor of computer science and mathematics at Yale University. His email address is measures.) Yet he argues that if sexual conserva- [email protected]. tives relax their standards, sex will be overall safer. “Michael Kremer estimates that the spread of AIDS The author would like to thank Robert J. Aumann, Allyn Jackson, Anat Lotan, Andy Magid, Ariel Rubenstein, and in England could plausibly be retarded if everyone Edna Ullmann-Margalit for helpful comments and sug- with fewer than about 2.25 partners per year were gestions. to take additional partners more frequently.” We JUNE/JULY 2008 NOTICES OF THE AMS 687 charity organizations will have stronger incentives to invest more in public relations and salesman- Landsburg says ship. This may increase the overhead and reduce the amount of money available to support actual that “Resistance charitable works. to logic frequently It also stands to reason that on average, people who follow the single charity recommendation will reveals itself as eventually give less to charity. animosity towards The Separation of Business from Charity and Moses Maimonides mathematics” Landsburg starts this interesting chapter 12 by dismissing as “stupid” the view he attributes to the famous Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, can imagine a mathematical stochastic model be- Moses Maimonides, that a high form of charity is hind this claim: men and women are represented where the person who gives charity and the person by vertices in a bipartite graph, which is used to de- who receives it do not know about each other. As a scribe the spread of the epidemic. A sexual relation matter of fact, while this form of charity is indeed is described by an edge, and the main conclusion high on the list of Maimonides (who followed ear- will roughly be based on the following observation. lier teachings from the Talmud), it is only second If we fix the number of edges (sexual encounters), to the highest form of charity, which has a strong then the epidemic will spread more rapidly when ingredient of “mixing charity with business”. “Give the variance in the degrees of the vertices is larger. him a gift or a loan, make him a partner, arrange (There is not much more about sex, neither in this for him a job, hold and strengthen him so he will model nor in Landsburg’s book as a whole.) not need more charity” wrote Moses Maimonides Is this argument convincing? Does it represent about charity [3]. Landsburg and other economists a solid contribution of economic theory (and even give a clear teaching to the contrary: “Do not mix of mathematics) to the area of medicine? Should business with charity.” To quote Landsburg, “you it be translated into practical social recommenda- hire a tailor to make your clothes, you hire a tions? I was not convinced. But I will let you read carpenter to fix your roof, and, if you are a stock- the book, or better yet, Kremer’s original paper [2], holder, you hire executives to run your company. and make your own judgment. To be sure, this is Your tailor, your carpenter, and your executives provocative and quite interesting. might be very good at what they do, but it does not follow that they’d also be good at figuring out The Unique Charity Recommendation how to give away your money.” A common eco- People tend to diversify their charity contributions, nomic teaching is: run your business strictly for but unless you are very rich and make significant the purpose of maximizing revenues for yourself contributions, this runs against Landsburg’s logic (or for the stockholders), and if you want to give of economics. charity do it separately; such a separation is more “Economists,” writes Landsburg in chapter 12 “efficient”, some economists tell you, while others “are traditionally humble enough to restrict them- strongly disagree. selves to pure description.” But Landsburg sticks Where do I stand in this debate? I think that his neck out to make a definite recommendation: a strict separation between charity (and other “If you are trying to be charitable, then you ought moral values) and business has a cost. Trying to target a single charity instead of diversifying to understand this cost and putting it back to your contributions” [italics in original]. the economic equations may demonstrate that The rationale in this case is very simple. You Maimonides’ teaching on this matter had some should give all your charity dollars to the charity wisdom after all. organization for which your first charity dollar gives the most mileage. This is a rare case in which The Role of Reason and Mathematics Landsburg actually describes the mathematics. The same chapter 12 ends with a lovely defense of He also explains why issues regarding risk, which the application of pure reason and mathematical are relevant to diversifying your investments, modeling to social issues. I heartily recommend are irrelevant in this case of charity. To make it reading it. clear: Landsburg does not just advocate giving Landsburg says that “Resistance to logic fre- your charity donations to a few organizations. He quently reveals itself as animosity toward math- advocates giving all donations to a single charity ematics” and mentions readers who claim that organization. “no mathematically expressible argument can A serious difficulty I see with Landsburg’s ad- ever be relevant to a moral dilemma.” Landsburg vice is that if people adopt his recommendation, disagrees, and I agree with him. The major role 688 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 55, NUMBER 6 of mathematics and statistics in economics and other social sciences is a twentieth century devel- opment. Economist Herbert Scarf described to me We should take the unique role of the Cowles Foundation at Yale University in bringing about the dominance of economists’ mathematical and statistical methods in econom- advice seriously ics. (He “complained”, though, that the success of this revolution has made Cowles a less unique but be aware of place than it used to be.) But mathematicians can be just as skeptical errors and even about applications of mathematics to social sci- ences as those with animosity towards math- certain systematic ematics. One difficulty in the interpretation of mathematical modeling and results is that often biases. they run much beyond the scope of the original mathematical setting. As mathematician Wolfgang Dahmen often argues, the most important thing to and weigh all information, including prior criminal remember regarding the application of mathemat- records of the defendant, the track records of the ics is the sentence: “If if then then.” The conclu- lawyers, the opinion of the press, etc. He argues sions of a mathematical theorem go only as far that a Bayesian process based on all available as its conditions allow. Right? Well, in most areas information will yield optimal results. One can where mathematics is applied the interpretations be skeptical about this advice and argue that the go well beyond what mathematics allows. This ac- “noise sensitivity” of a complicated Bayesian pro- counts for the many successes in applications of cess will make the outcomes meaningless. mathematics and mathematical formalism, and for Landsburg gives a quotation by Abraham Lincoln quite a few failures, as well.
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