More Sex Is Safer Sex . . .
The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics by Steven E. Landsburg. http://www.amazon.com/More-Sex-Safer-Unc…I believe this issue was raised by Book Guy in an earlier thread, but don't get essorant or even hopeful; a little caveat actor is in order. The more sex is safer sex theory applies to society as a whole and only then under a set of crafted assumptions e.g. think perhaps canard.
I liked this book because it questions *common assumptions* perhaps not successfully, btw. I had kept confusing it with Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. ---- http://www.amazon.com/Freakonomics-Revis…
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Assessing Evidence:
You are given an HIV test despite the fact that 99% of the people in your demographic group are uninfected. You think the test is a waste of your hard earned $. You, do, get a hellacious shock when your test results come back: INFECTED!!! Time for self-defensetration? Perhaps. However, the HIV test is wrong 5% of the time and this means that there is roughly a 5% chance that you're okay? WRONG!!! More like an 84% chance you're okay.
"Why 84%? In a population of 100,000 people, we've assumed that just 1%----that is, 1,000----are infected. Of the the 1,000 who are infected, 95% [950 people] get accurate (and grim) test results. Of the 99,000 who are healthy, 5%, or 4,950 get inaccurate results that say they're infected. That makes 950 + 4,950 = 5,900 people who got bad [grim] news, and of 5,900, only 950, or 16%, are actually infected. The other 84% are just fine." Footnote on page 91, "More Sex is Safer Sex The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics," by Steven E. Landsburg.
"But if Oswald is right, then much or the world's unemployment is caused by home ownership-----which puts an interesting gloss on the fact that home ownership is subsidized by governments almost everywhere in the Western world." ID at 143.
"Over two centuries ago, a lawyer named William Blackstone declared that it's better for ten guilty persons to escape than for one innocent to suffer. Why ten, as opposed to, say twelve or eight? Because Blackstone said so, that's why. By pulling the number ten out of thin air, Blackstone defiantly refused to think about the trade-offs that go into designing a criminal justice system. But for two centuries, legal scholars have cited Blackstone's *refusal* to think and mistaken it for an example of a *thought*. Of *course* it's a bad thing to convict the innocent. We all know, that, just as we know it's a bad thing to acquit the quilty." ID at page 222.
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Unfortunately, imo, we all don't don't that it is bad to convict the innocent. More importantly "we know it's a bad thing to acquit the quilty"??? Shit, I don't belief for a second that even the author, Mr. Steven E. Landsburg, actually believes it's necessarily a bad thing to acquit the guilty. My guess is, and I could be very wrong, more often than not it is ***better for the guilty NOT to be convicted.***
Anyway, the reason I supplied the snippits, supra, is so that readers could get a little more of a glimpse of what his book is about. Also, I liked it much better than Freaknomics. :) The starter, imo, is "Free to Choose: A Personal Statement," by Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman. http://www.amazon.com/Free-Choose-Statem…
Correction: Unfortunately, imo, we all don't agree that it is bad to convict the innocent.