Punintended Consequences

Last night I came across a peculiar type of word play called Tom Swifties. The pun takes its name from the abundantly adverbial series of Tom Swift books, which featured a child prodigy and his inventions (a legion of ghostwriters expanded the series to over 100 books since its inception in 1910, with the most recent being released in 2007). The multitude of authors often went to great lengths to avoid repeating the word ‘said’, embellishing stories with enough adverbs and synonyms to keep a nascent thesaurus industry afloat. Instead of being ‘said’, things were ‘explained’, ‘stammered’, ‘cried’, or ‘demanded'; said 'hotly', 'crossly', 'happily', or '<insert adverb here>-ly'. 

In the 1950-60’s a type of pun developed, where the adverb was linked to the dialogue. 

"I used to be a pilot," Tom explained. (ex-planed)

"Why is it so dark in here?" Tom said delightedly. (de-lighted) 

“It keeps my hair in place,” said Alice with abandon. (with a band on)

“I like a subtle play on words,” said Tom pungently. (pun-gently) 

The best tend to involve multiword puns and names.

“Who invented radium?” asked Marie curiously.

"The Red Sox didn't need the Babe", said Tom, ruthlessly.

“I’ll just have to kill the king,” Reggie sighed.

“I’m not going to drown in Egypt,” Tom said, deep in denial. 

“You should have brought a parachute,” Tom airily explained. 

"Ready or not, here I come!" Tom ejaculated prematurely. 

"I wish I had some flowers," said Tom lackadaisically. 

“Alright, I’ll give you back the pick-up I borrowed,” said Tom truculently.

Lists can be found on the Wall Street Journal and TV Tropes. 

Tom Swift is also the origin of the name ‘TASER’ (Tom A. Swift’s Electric Rifle), which was named for ‘Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle’ (1911). 

“Don’t tase me bro,” said Meyer, shocked. 

A Brand of Inequality

I don’t blog very often now (which is excellent news for anyone who reads my newsfeed - Facebook is classy enough without my thoughts making their way into the congealed soup of 9gag gifs and duckface drivel). However, occasionally something comes alone which I feel deserves a response. In this case, that response is to Daniel Katz’s take-down of the now famous Russell Brand interview by Jeremy Paxman. 

While Katz’s unsheathed barrage is entertaining and thought provoking, my eyebrows rivaled Paxman at his trivial treatment of inequality. 

Katz begins the argument by taking a case of trickle down economics and follows it up by arguing that poverty isn’t such an issue in advanced economies because even the poorest will earn well above the arbitrary international poverty line ($1.25 USD at purchasing power parity, the “condition so limited by malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, squalid surroundings, high infant mortality, and low life expectancy as to be beneath any reasonable definition of human decency.”) as if relative poverty didn’t exist.

While it would be worth two of Paxman’s eyebrows to discuss this issue here, I’ll instead be a good economics student and give a simple  model which illustrates intuitively why we should be concerned about inequality at the policy level. 

We’re going to assume a couple of simple things:

1. A person’s utility is determined by their income. 
2. Utility is a decreasing function of income. 
3. Each individual has an identical utility function.

Utility is an economic concept which can be understood in a couple of ways: as a person’s happiness, the ability to affect their desires, their welfare. 

The first assumption is simple enough: a person’s happiness depends on their income. 

The second assumption is again fairly simple: we are happier with more income, but our happiness increases at a slower rate as our income increases. Going from $0 to $10,000 makes us happier than going from $90,000 to $100,000, or $990,000 to $1,000,000. This is a fundamental result from the branch of economics happily called Happiness Economics. 

The third assumption: people react to income as a whole identically. This is not strictly true - a monk in Tibet probably has a different view of money than a French aristocrat - but it’s the best way to think about it. By treating everyone by a single representative individual, we can ignore the effects of age, gender, ‘whether they prefer a rainy day at the beach or a sunny day at the park’, favourite colour, and whatever other spurious factor you could think of. 

In this, I’m disagreeing with Nietzsche: 

“In a better social order the hard work and misery of life will be allotted to the man who suffers least from it, that is, to the dullest man, and so on step by step upwards to the man who is most sensitive to the highest, most sublimated kind of suffering, and therefore suffers even when life is most greatly eased.”

Whether an aristocrat or a penniless philosopher, there is no reason to suppose that you’ll like money any more or less than anyone else. 

These three assumptions lead to the social welfare function:

Welfare = U₁ + U₂ + ... + U_n 

Where U_k is each individual’s overall happiness or utility. 

What we find is income is optimally distributed when we have complete equality (when the marginal utility of each individual is equivalent).

Before we start a revolution

There’s a fourth assumption: that the total amount of income is fixed. Katz actually addresses this point arguing that wealth is not a zero-sum game. When income is completely equal (a doctor, and an economics student being paid the same regardless of their actions), economic incentive is removed. 

The incentive to become a civil engineer, or work as a labourer, is removed entirely when we have pure income equality, to the point where doing it would be out of pure altruism or interest. It might be cynical, but a society with pure equality would (almost certainly) lead of a collapse of income and overall welfare. Pure inequality (all income belonging to a single individual) would similarly lead to a collapse of incentive. Some inequality is required to act as incentive for individuals to increase welfare as a whole. 

That’s not even close to say that we should ignore the issue of inequality. Inequality is only beneficial to the point that it leads to an increase of overall social welfare. If we pretend that inequality is an issue that doesn’t require explicit intervention, then we implicitly imply that any action to reduce inequality will reduce social welfare overall. It’s an overly optimistic view of current inequality which itself deserves a pair of Paxman’s Eyebrows. 

I’ll finish this post with a thought experiment, which I hope shows the difference between economic efficiency and social welfare.

If society could choose between a billionaire receiving an million dollars, or five hundred individuals receiving a thousand dollars each, which would make society society better off?  

Election Game Theory, Or Why You Probably Voted for the Sex Party

By now most of you will have voted. 

Because I am one of those infuriating people who treat election day as if it was boring man's equivalent of Christmas, I thought I’d go through one of the examples that came up in Game Theory last year, dealing with voting preferences. 

Consider the situation where you have two parties (Douches and Assholes), and an odd-number N voters (we’re not going to allow ties). Voters 1 to k strictly prefer the D to A, and voters k+1 to N strictly prefer A to D. 

Each voter has two possible options - they can either vote for D or A. 

We will take every other voter’s action as given. 

Each voter feels happy if their preferred party wins the election, and sad otherwise. 

We will examine one voter’s decision. For argument, say he prefers D over A.

There are three possible scenarios:

1. More than half of the other voters vote for D. 
Voting for D or A does not affect the result. D wins regardless of his action.

2. Less than half of the other voters vote for D. 
Voting for D or A does not affect the result. D loses regardless of his action.

3. Exactly half of the other voters vote for D. 
Voting for D or A does affect the result. The voter’s decision wins the election.

What does this actually mean? It means that the voter’s decision only decides the election in the case that votes are split equally between the other voters. Even though he strictly prefers D to A it would make no difference to the election if he voted A instead. In Game Theory, we would call the decision to vote A over D a weakly dominated strategy (it is no worse than voting for D in the situation that a clear majority is found without the voter, and strictly worse than voting D when the votes are split).

How does this relate to the current election? In many seats a clear majority exists before the day of the election (call this a safe seat - one which always votes a particular way). In these seats, the individual’s vote doesn’t actually hold that much weight. You’re just as well off voting for a major party, or something like the Sex Party. It’s in marginal seats where a swing can be expected that the election is truly decided. This is reason why the Greens often described as holding the balance of power in the Senate, and why this balance is so important. It’s all about being that  voter.