The Arrogance of a Theist

I've always loved the video about factors of 10, where they show how you are simultaneously enormous at an atomic scale and minuscule at a galactic scale. When I think about how small I am relative to the Earth, and how small the Earth is relative to the Sun, and how the Sun isn't even a speck on the windshield of the galaxy, that is sort of how I have imagined humans must look at a godly scale. Humans knowledge would be insignificant next to godly knowledge. God would know every thought ever thunk by a human; humans cannot even figure out why the stock price of Accenture dropped to a penny on May 6.

It is in this context that I read a letter to Andrew Sullivan from one of his readers:

If Jesus was little more than a uniquely-adept Jewish mystic with a profound experience of the Divine (God-as-"Daddy," a pretty great idea), then while that is profound, it's no reason for me to follow him uniquely as opposed to the path of the Buddha, the Hindu mystics, or the Kabbalah.

So what is Christianity's trump card against these other faiths?

[The Resurrection] was the thing that separated Jesus from all the other miracle-working Torah commentators of his day (as stated previously, if one just takes Jesus at face value, he's pretty unremarkable). The Resurrection divinizes Jesus and humanizes God (the most amazing part, I think), and as such, makes Christianity unique.

Firstly, the "Resurrection humanizes God"? How? The Resurrection was when Jesus rose from the dead. This is not human. I have never heard of a human doing this. The Resurrection clearly establishes an enormous distance between humans and God. No human has ever risen from the dead; God has.

Secondly, it's interesting that the reader thinks that "if one just takes Jesus at face value, he's pretty unremarkable". Unremarkable? He walks on water! He turns water into wine! He feeds enormous crowds with paltry amounts of food! I have never seen anyone do any of those things. And yet, compared with "all the other miracle-working Torah commentators of his day", Jesus was "unremarkable". What sets Jesus apart is that he rises from the dead.

Therein lies Christianity's real trump card.

It's not that we have a unique experience of God, it's not that we have a monopoly on God, it's not that our ceremonies and rituals are better (they're pretty terrible sometimes). It's that God knows what it's like to be a human being. God eats, drinks, sleeps, cries, gets angry, bleeds, dies, and then shows us that death is not the end.

How desperate is this reader to be on par with God? An all-knowing god such as the Christian God does not need to be born as a human to know what it is to be human. An all-knowing god will already know what it is like to eat, drink, sleep, cry, get angry, bleed, and die. But an all-knowing knows so much more than any human ever will about any of those things. An all-knowing god knows how it feels for a woman with no teeth to eat. An all-knowing god knows how it feels for a man whose tongue has been cut out to eat. An all-knowing god knows how it feels for a master chef to eat. An all-knowing god knows how it feels for a smoker to eat. In short, an all-knowing god knows so much more than any human ever will about the human condition. And yet this reader believes that God needed to be born as a human, die, and rise from the dead, all that "He" may be humanized.

A Study That You Can Safely Ignore

Via Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy, it appears that "the further left you are, the less you know about economics". This is based on a paper in Econ Journal Watch by Zeljka Buturovic and Daniel B. Klein. In addition to the problems pointed out by Matthew Yglesias, the entire basis of the study is severely flawed. The study is based on a "survey" (for some reason, they do not call it a poll) by Zogby:

The survey was administered by Zogby International by usual procedure. It was a nationwide survey of American adults, randomly selected from the Zogby International online panel routinely used in political and commercial research. On December 5, 2008, Zogby sent by email 63,986 invitations to the members of the panel.

In conducting opinion polls, you must start with a random sample to prevent sampling error (the difference between the people you interview and the people in the overall population being studied). It is good that was Zogby randomly selecting adults from the Zogby International online panel. Unfortunately, the Zogby International online panel is not randomly chosen: you can sign up for it here. This is like having an online poll, receiving 10,000 unique votes, and then "randomly selecting" 1,000 of the votes. Even though you are randomly sampling, the pool from which you are sampling was not randomly chosen. Anything coming out of such a poll (or survey) is garbage. But you don't have to take my word for it. Listen to Nate Silver:

All told, between 48 contests that he's surveyed over the past two election cycles, Zogby's Internet polls have been off by an average of 7.6 points. This is an extreme outlier with respect to absolutely anyone else in the polling community.

These Internet polls, simply put, are not scientific and should not be published by any legitimate news organization, at least not without an asterisk the size of an Alex Rodriguez steroidal syringe.

Note: As to the actual content of the Econ Journal Watch paper, it would not surprise me at all if self-described conservatives have better economic knowledge than self-described liberals. This study, however, does not prove anything either way.

Can This Possibly Be True?

Via Matthew Yglesias, it seems that Casey Mulligan is not sure there was even a housing bubble. As part of her argument, however, she says something that sounds very wrong:

Now that the bubble is behind us, people today should be no more willing to pay to own a house than they were in the late 1990s. (It’s true that population has grown since the 1990s, but population growth is nothing new and should not by itself increase real housing prices. Don’t forget that greater population also means more people available to do construction work.)

The cost to build a house is essentially land, materials, and labour. Increasing population means less land per person, so (all else being equal) the price of land will increase. I imagine that over the last decade the price of raw materials has increased. Even if the labour costs are constant (and in Vancouver, at least, they have soared), the price of the house should still increase.

On this shaky foundation, Mulligan builds a very unconvincing argument. She shows the following inflation-adjusted housing price graph, normalized so that 1994-1997 is 100:

She argues that, according to bubble theorists, there was a 3-4% "over-build" of houses during the bubble, so there must be a 3-4% drop in prices from the pre-bubble level. This estimate is shown in the blue line. She concludes:

But another interpretation is that a large fraction of the housing price boom was justified by fundamentals (and next week I’ll consider some of the specific fundamentals that may have permanently increased housing demand in the 2000s). If so, we are probably asking too much of the Federal Reserve and other regulators to accurately disentangle bubbles from fundamentals the next time that asset prices rise.

So what sort of a "large fraction" are we talking about? In February, 2000, the index was around 105. Today, it's around 111. Assuming that Mulligan is right and that housing is now properly priced, this 6 points of growth can be attributed to fundamentals. However, at the peak in 2006-7, the index reached 130. Assuming 6 points of this was fundamentals, that still leaves 19 points of bubble. The "large fraction" is therefore 6/25, or 24%.

Please note that this is assuming everything that Mulligan says is true. I would argue that it is not. Mulligan does not even mention the role of the $8,000 home buying tax credit in boosting demand for housing. In the Northeast, the most expensive housing market in the US, the median selling price last month was $249,800. The home buying tax credit represents 3.2% of the cost of buying the house. Neglecting this from your analysis is negligent.