My Erdős Number

Thanks to my thesis advisor and co-author, I have a finite Erdős number: 6.  Not so small, but something.  

According to MathSciNet's calculator, here's the path:

Craig J. Hogan	coauthored with	Mark G. Jackson	MR2550649
Mark G. Jackson	coauthored with	Brian R. Greene	MR1935717
Brian R. Greene	coauthored with	Shing-Tung Yau	MR1059826
Shing-Tung Yau	coauthored with	Fan Chung	MR1779780
Fan Chung	coauthored with	Paul1 Erdős	MR0889356

MathSciNet doesn't have all the papers; in particular, it doesn't have the two that I wrote with Craig Hogan, so there's a chance my Erdős number is smaller

Notes on "Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society"

 I just read and enjoyed "Blueprint", by Nicholas A. Christakis.  I learned a great deal of details of social science, esp. from an evolutionary standpoint, and am convinced of his hypotheses.  This post is mostly notes for myself to help me remember some of what I learned.

The basic point is that we are individually evolved with the following "social suite" of proclivities:

1. Feeling and recognizing individual identity
2. Love for partners and offspring
3. Forming friendship bonds
4. Forming social networks
5. Cooperation (with allies and strangers)
6. In-group bias
7. Supporting mild hierarchy (recognizing some authority, but generally egalitarian)
8. Social learning and teaching.

He supports all of those being innate and universal with various clever direct and natural experiments, and goes on to show how they interact with forming larger societies, and how evolutionary pressure at the individual level can lead to them. 

He doesn't talk about social evolution, whereby groups with varying cultures compete, with stronger groups surviving; that can also lead to pro-social genetics.  For example, a gene for selfishness might spread through one band and totally dominate it, but then that band would be out-competed by other bands.

Some of the factlets that struck me:  

1. Love for mates seems to have evolved from love for offspring
2. Cooperativeness in games becomes far more adaptive when players can choose whom they participate with.  The friendlies pair with the friendlies, and then do much better than the cheaters.
3. Female choice probably added to evolutionary pressure towards male pro-social traits.
4. Friendships and social networks are a sort of social "banking"; in the long run, I can be supported in time of need because I've got friends.  It goes beyond tit-for-tat because over the short run, friends don't worry about all good deeds being reciprocated.  There's some signs that social networks decline as governments provide the safety net.

Winifred Ruth Smith Bradford information

Here is the central place for info on Winifred Ruth Smith Bradford, wife of Lester Ezra Bradford.

Please add your remembrances of Winnie to this shared document.

Here's a short biography, which has a bit more information than her obituary.  In 2011, Winnie wrote a somewhat longer memoir "A Life Remembered" (that link's a 60 Meg PDF of images)!

There's a collection of photos of Winnie and family and friends.  Click on the photo, click the "i" in a circle to get info on the right to see who's in it and when it was taken (if I knew it).  Please tell me (in comments below or email) what I got wrong or am missing!

There was an on-line meeting with friends and family sharing memories on Sunday, Aug. 2, 2020.  We had an interment ceremony, that also included shared memories, on Jule 21, 2021.

Donations in her honor can be made to the Sherbro Foundation.

Lester Ezra Bradford information

This a collection of links to information on my father, Lester Ezra Bradford.  I'll update it as I get more info.  Please comment with your stories about Lester or other useful links.

We're extending his obituary into a biography.  See pages linked at the top of the biography for childhood memories of some of his siblings.  Lester also wrote a short biography titled A Life in Tropical Agroforestry.

There's a collection of photos of Lester with his family and friends, and a slightly smaller curated selection from a slide show at his memorial.

We made two videos of his memorial service. The first starts with introduction of the family and continues through the start of the service and a delightful memorial by Lester's dear friend Tyler Clark.  There's a gap due to the videographer (me) failing to watch his battery.  The second video continues with several other testimonials and a couple of interviews at the reception after.  We have audio of the service proper. The audio of the service is in four parts, missing the very start: 1, 2, 3, 4.  The third part covers the gap in the videos.

Progressive taxes with a flat marginal rate

Some of my proposals on this blog are completely serious (like Replace bad taxes with useful taxes); some are purely silly (like Covering the alphabet with states).  This is half way in between.  It would probably be a good idea, but there are lots of complications, and it will probably not be worth the disruption of the transition.  Still, it appeals to me.

Intro

William F. Buckley argued for a flat marginal income tax rate from a fairness position: we get benefits from society proportional to our income, so we should contribute to the maintenance of society proportional to our income.  Besides that, a flat rate is simpler, and supports other tax simplification.

That said, a flat marginal rate doesn't require everybody pays the same net rate, but the only way to get progressive taxes with a constant marginal rate is to have the government giving individuals money at the bottom rung.  I had this idea long ago, but thought the payments at the bottom would be too radical.  Apparently the "Basic Income" idea is catching on, so it's time to publish!

Example

This is more clear with an example.  I'll chose a marginal rate of 39.6% (the current US top marginal rate), a payment of $11,490 (the US individual poverty line), and no individual exemption (vs the current US $6100).  Somebody earning nothing gets $11,490, clearly.  Individuals earning up to $29,015 get more back than they pay in because 39.5% of $29,015 is $11,490.  Somebody earning $50,000 would pay $19,800 in taxes and get $11,490 back, for a net payment of $7,310, a bit more than the current $6,986.  Somebody earning $100,000 pays a net $28,110, somewhat more than the current $19,760.

The specific value for the basic subsidy can be set lower or higher depending on how progressive we want the taxes to be; the tax rate should be adjusted to be revenue neutral.  My example (starting with the poverty line) allows us to replace basic welfare entirely, but the opposite extreme of no basic income is obviously less progressive than our current system.

Advantage of a fixed rate to tax collecting

Here's another radical idea that's enabled by a flat tax rate: put banks (instead of employers) in charge of collecting income taxes.  We'd have two kinds of accounts: pre-tax and post-tax.  Paychecks go into pre-tax accounts; taxes are withdrawn when the money is transferred to a post-tax account.  Checks (or other debits) drawn against a pre-tax account can be deposited in other pre-tax accounts, e.g. long-term investments; this allows all savings to enjoy tax-free growth, like IRAs and 401Ks do today. Checks from a pre-tax account can be cashed by registered charities and anybody else we want to designate as able to receive tax-free payments.

We could require checks for services to be marked as such, and thus only legally depositable in a pre-tax account.  That doesn't eliminate the underground, untaxed economy, but it requires both parties to participate in the cheating.

The net effect of this, besides further simplification, is to switch taxes from earning to spending, which is also a good thing.

Arguments for Basic Income

Since Basic Income is already a thing, there are already plenty of arguments out there for it.  See for instance the current campaign to pass it in Switzerland.  For me, it comes down to each of us deserving basics of life such has food, shelter, and clothing.  We can give those out directly, e.g. with food stamps and subsidized housing, but it's much more respectful and efficient to give people the resources to get those things themselves.

So, why do we give any money to those who already earn enough for the basics?  From an economic standpoint, it's to give people "on support" incentive to go out and earn whatever they're capable of.  From a moral standpoint, it's because the poor deserve the extra luxuries that their extra income buys them as much as the rich do!

Replace bad taxes with useful taxes

Most taxes are a regrettable (but often necessary) drain on the economy; some (e.g. cigarette taxes) have a good side in that they discourage activities we don't like.  Here are three that we should add at a national level:

1. A financial transaction tax (aka Robin Hood tax).  This will discourage computer-controlled arbitrage, making things more fair for the small investor and avoiding runaways and it may just save us from take-over by an evil AI.  Please join the Facebook support group.
2. A carbon tax.  Since energy is at the base of most economic activity, this will dampen the economy, but not more so than an income tax, and it's by far the most efficient way to deal with global warming (by making energy efficiency and non-carbon-emitting energy alternatives more viable).
3. Tax income from hedge funds and private equity firms at the normal rate, instead of the (much lower) capital gains rate.

Combining Cribbage with Sorry or Chutes and Ladders

[This post won't mean much if you don't know the rules of Cribbage and Sorry.]

We enjoy Cribbage in my family, but a while back, Lola and I were without a cribbage board.  We did have her multi-game travel set which included a version of  "Chutes and Ladders", so we just combined the games, using the Cribbage scores to move our pawns along the "Chutes and Ladders" field.  Of course, it's much more fun than the pure-luck Chutes and Ladders, but it also added richness to Cribbage because you weren't always playing for the highest score.

Inspired by that, we tried combining Cribbage with Sorry to even better effect.  We kept the special meaning of numbers, so you need to score 1 or 2 to get out of Start, 7 can be split between pawns, 11 can be used to exchange pawns, 4 always goes back four spaces, and 10 can be used to go back one space.  Since there is no 6 in regular Sorry, we decided that 6 would correspond to a Sorry.

This is much more fun, especially for two people, than plain Sorry, but also more rich than Cribbage, again because you have to think about more than just getting the highest score.  Do you want to keep a hand scoring 4 with good potential for more points on the cut, or leave yourself with 2 in the hand, risking cutting 2 more?  When only small counts will help you (at the end, to get your pawns to Home), it's sometimes a challenge to cut down a good starting hand.

For complete rules, it's important to decide what constitutes a discrete scoring event.  Obviously, counting a hand is one event.  We play that counting the crib and the dealer's hand are separate events.  In pegging, you get all the points scored for playing one card in one event (e.g. if you play a card that makes a run of 3 and 15, then that's 5, not 2 and 3).  What's less clear is what happens when one player plays several cards in a row (at the end, or after a "go").  We've been playing that multiple cards played without any opponent's card being played count as the same event, e.g. if I play an ace on my opponent's ace to make 30 (and a pair), and I get a "go" and play another ace, that's one event for a total of 2 + 6 + 2 = 10 points.  It's also reasonable to make each card played be a separate event, or even to separate out the points for "go" or "31" from the points for combinations.