Lotteries are just another government revenue tool, and so they should be examined from a public policy perspective. I don’t think anyone would say it was a good idea if the government instituted a new tax that people had to pay at random and that predominantly targeted poorer and less educated people, but that would be an indistinguishable policy from holding a lottery. Gambling is fine (but foolish) for many people but extremely destructive for some, and government all over spend their time encouraging gambling because they make money out of it.
I was surprised when I moved to California and saw their California Dreamin’, etc commercials where they are selling the idea of winning. I came from Wisconsin where WI and MN have laws that the commercials cannot sell the idea of winning – just mention the game and the odds of winning. (I haven’t seen one in well over a decade, so that might have changed)
Well, I’m not sure what “smartest people around” means. I mean, built very complex models and got everything wrong… sure, that happens to smart people, but what is the evidence that they are smart?
PHDs up the wazoo? Lots of physics and maths geniuses go into finance for the money (I know one who went to school with me, ended up at Oxford and was a millionare in his early 20s). Executives made the decisions that lead to the subprime collapse largely off their risk models. This is a potentially intractable problem as well, being smarter than those that came before is no guarantee of fixing anything. The most we can learn from it for the moment is to factor our ignorance into the models a bit better, assume they’ll fail even when the maths say they won’t, that would lead to less profits when they don’t fail though, so good luck implementing that idea.
I think the problem is more in the executive decisions than in the models, but that doesn’t mean that the models were well done at all. Those models were, if you believe the reports, basically based on the idea that housing prices would never go down. Like I said, built complex models and got everything wrong. If you go all in on a pair of aces and lose to three twos then you made the right play and lost. If you didn’t even know there were twos in the deck then you should have known your model had problems to begin with.
People knew the collapse was coming and explained pretty much exactly how it was going to happen (I recall an economics teacher I know recommending not to buy property in 2005 - that it was better to rent for the time being). If you build a model of the real world and you don’t even do research to find out what could go wrong, that’s a pretty foundationally dumb mistake.
Anyway, it’s more the executives I think are the idiots. But at the same time I have a very hard time forgiving smart people who don’t realize that as smart people they can make dumb mistakes. That, to me, pretty much overrides whatever smarts you have and makes you a first class idiot.
Those models were, if you believe the reports, basically based on the idea that housing prices would never go down.
That’s not quite right, the models try and predict whether the prices would go down or not based on the available data, they would have allowed for various factors causing them to do so, just not the ones that actually did. They were not making the assumption that they would never go down, the model was simply erroneously telling them that it wasn’t about to go down right now.
Anyway, it’s more the executives I think are the idiots. But at the same time I have a very hard time forgiving smart people who don’t realize that as smart people they can make dumb mistakes. That, to me, pretty much overrides whatever smarts you have and makes you a first class idiot.
This applies to pretty much everyone ever, even the smart people who know they’re not as smart as they think they are, and that they are going to make mistakes, end up making mistakes they couldn’t predict. So I’m not sure it’s particularly helpful classifying everyone in the world as a first class idiot.
