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May 20 - June 14, 2020
Math is like an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength.
Mankiw also points out that the very richest people—the ones who’d been paying 70% on the top tranche of their income—did contribute more tax revenue after Reagan’s tax cuts.* That leads to the somewhat vexing possibility that the way to maximize government revenue is to jack up taxes on the middle class, who have no choice but to keep on working, while slashing rates on the rich; those guys have enough stockpiled wealth to make credible threats to withhold or offshore their economic activity, should their government charge them a rate they deem too high. If that story’s right, a lot of
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The replication process is supposed to be science’s immune system, swarming over newly introduced objects and killing the ones that don’t belong.
What can I say? Mathematics is a way not to be wrong, but it isn’t a way not to be wrong about everything.
There is real danger that, by strengthening our abilities to analyze some questions mathematically, we acquire a general confidence in our beliefs, which extends unjustifiably to those things we’re still wrong about. We become like those pious people who, over time, accumulate a sense of their own virtuousness so powerful as to make them believe the bad things they do are virtuous too.
