John Graunt’s Natural and Political Observations on the Bills of Mortality (1662) is acknowledged as the inaugural text of “political arithmetick.” Graunt is ranked along with William Petty, Charles Davenant and Gregory King as a major pioneer of “the art of reasoning by figures, upon things relating to government.” In their Outline of the History […]

Yes, it’s okay to talk about climate change right now. The devastating natural disaster in Fort McMurray is “consistent” with climate change. The Fort McMurray wildfire is horrific. Miraculously, no people have been killed, so far. Saying that the unseasonably hot conditions in Alberta are “consistent with” climate change is not to say that they […]

In a large multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma, any change in any one individual’s strategy doesn’t affect anyone else, so a player can know that defection will be a Pareto improvement. We might say that the problem of social evil is that the road to hell is paved with Pareto improvements. — Ted Poston, “Social Evil,” Oxford […]

In an op-ed at the New York Times yesterday, Nick Hanauer and Robert Reich made the following observation: In a cruel twist, the longer and harder we work for the same wage, the fewer jobs there are for others, the higher unemployment goes and the more we weaken our own bargaining power. That helps explain why […]