A man got to have a code. —Omar, The Wire.

One of the central tenets of the New Atheist program lately being peddled by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, et al., is that rational atheism does not entail moral nihilism. But what happens when scientists, working in the new field of moral psychology, find out that our moral thinking depends less on reason than it does on naturally-selected instinct?

Steven Pinker, in a long essay in this week’s New York Times Magazine, recognizes the threat:

“Morally corrosive” is exactly the term that some critics would apply to the new science of the moral sense. The attempt to dissect our moral intuitions can look like an attempt to debunk them…. The whole enterprise seems to be dragging us to an amoral nihilism, in which morality itself would be demoted from a transcendent principle to a figment of our neural circuitry.

Pinker thinks that he can save the appearances, but his solutions aren’t very convincing. (more…)

If taxes aren’t your thing, at least take a break from the elections with this, which might as well be one of David Simon’s rejected story ideas:

After Mr. Cintron recently died, Mr. O’Hare, 65, and another friend, David Daloia, also 65, whose last known address was in Queens, tried, without success, to cash a Social Security check of Mr. Cintron’s, the police say. They realized that they needed their dead buddy’s help.

So on Tuesday afternoon, the police say, they dressed Mr. Cintron’s corpse, carried him down a flight of stairs and heaved his body into a computer chair with wheels. Outside, they rolled him over the uneven sidewalk, pulling the chair toward Pay-O-Matic, a check-cashing shop on Ninth Avenue.

But as the men turned the corner, trying to steady the floppy corpse, they ran into the law. (more…)

Filed under Journalism + Movies/TV on January 10, 2008
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Anything David Cay Johnston writes for the New York Times is worth reading, and his article today on the Congressional testimony of Nina E. Olson, the national taxpayer advocate, is no exception. In the space of a single two-column article, he gives us more hard information than we can get in a week’s worth of primary-season punditry. In today’s article we learn that:

1/ Olson has proposed “apology payments” ranging from $100 to $1000 that would be used to compensate taxpayers who endure “excessive expense or undue burden” on their time as a result of I.R.S. mistakes.

2/ The government could collect $100 billion or more in taxes on the cash economy by tracking credit card payments, state sales tax reports, and other records.

3/ The use of private tax collectors may cost more money than it brings in: (more…)

Filed under Economics + Politics on January 10, 2008
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1/ Page 3 of this week’s NYT Week in Review (from “B%ME®$: Six Decades at the Center of Attention, and Counting,” by Charles Duhigg):

The elderly, by definition, are running out of opportunities for reinvention.

2/ Page 5 of this week’s NYT Week in Review (the full text of a full-page advertisement):

IMAGINE PEACE

love, yoko ono
www.IMAGINEPEACE.com

Today at Slate, Alex Halperin wonders why a Kenyan exit poll sponsored by the International Republican Institute hasn’t been released to the public:

The International Republican Institute, a democracy-fostering nonprofit funded by the U.S. government—and despite the name, officially nonpartisan*—commissioned an Election Day exit poll but has declined to release the results. Two people familiar with the results told me that they showed [Raila] Odinga with a substantial lead over President Kibaki—one reported eight points, the other nine points.

Why would the IRI withhold a poll that showed Odinga in the lead? I’d guess that it has something to do with Odinga’s political past: he trained as an engineer in East Germany and named his first child Fidel Castro, and his father was an open proponent of a socialist political program. From what I’ve heard from people in the country, Odinga’s (past/present/potential) socialist tendencies have been a quiet but recurring theme in pro-Kibaki political arguments. The answer to Halperin’s question might therefore be depressingly simple: the IRI won’t release their polling data because they don’t want the wrong guy to win.

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*Note: It may be true, as Halperin argues, that the IRI “missed an opportunity to advance its mission of promoting democracy and fair elections,” but if so, it wouldn’t be the first time. In fact, a person familiar with the organization’s activities in Haiti a decade ago might be excused for doubting the sincerity of that mission in the first place. Saying that the International Republican Institute is “officially nonpartisan” is a little like saying that Iran is “officially democratic”: it’s true but pointless.

Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber has a nice post today on arbitraging the Republican primary-election prediction markets. Weatherson’s main point is that arbitrage opportunities shouldn’t exist in a truly efficient market, and so the prediction markets might not be quite so effective as people think. But in the course of making this argument, he notes that the significant spreads among the different markets mean that there’s free money for the taking.

Here’s how to make an easy* $1000:

1/ First off, buy $500 worth of Giuliani contracts at the Iowa Electronic Markets. (Five hundred dollars is the maximum you can bet at IEM.) Giuliani was was trading at $0.233 this morning—the contracts pay $1.00 if he wins—which means you’d get 2145 shares for your $500.

2/ Next, short sell Giuliani contracts at Intrade to balance your long buy at IEM. Giuliani contracts that pay $100 for a win were on offer for $27.30 this morning, which means you’d need to short sell 21 Intrade contracts to offset your IEM bet. (Since Intrade doesn’t offer margins, you’ll have to fund your account there with enough money—$2100—to cover a loss.)

3/ Sit back and wait for September. If Giuliani wins the Republican nomination, you’ll bring home $2145 at IEM, which means you’ll make $1072 above and beyond the cost of your contracts. Counting the money you need to leave in your Intrade account to cover a loss, that’s a 41% profit. If Giuliani loses, you’ll collect $2100 at Intrade, which means a profit of $1027, or 39%.

(Optional step #4: Donate your ill-gotten gains to whatever Democrat makes it through the primary meat grinder.)

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*Okay, maybe not easy, especially if you’re American. Under federal law, the legality of betting in the election futures markets is questionable, and some states specifically ban betting on elections. Check out this guide at Slate before you do something you’ll regret. Also, the calculations above don’t take account of transaction costs.