I came across this neat concept today: the statistical person. Statistical people are like real people, but without the uncertainty; whereas a real person might, or might not, be killed by being run over by a bus, we say that several statistical people are killed by busses every year. Because they always get the average, statistical people are certain to be on the receiving end of everything that the rest of us only chance.

The poor statistical person is a second class citizen, however; unlike real people, who it is considered immoral to kill, with statistical people we are allowed to kill as many as we like, provided it can be justified by a cost-benefit analysis. The paper goes into some detail about the reasons why we real people don't care that much about statistical people (although "it won't happen to me" is probably 90% of the explanation).

It is an interesting way of looking at public policy problems. But I can't agree with the thrust of the paper, which seems to be aiming at statistical deaths ranking equally in a moral and criminal sense with real deaths. What's an appropriate punishment for causing 0.1 statistical deaths per year, I wonder?

Is CNN trying to put The Onion out of business?

It appears that Tony Blair does have something to show for all that sucking up to America. Much as I hate to post anything positive about Blair, it's good to see the other side to the story.

I came across this interesting one today: Jevons paradox. Briefly stated, it is that more efficient use of a resource will often cause its consumption to increase.

Clearly it is just a restatement of a simpler principle from economics — cheaper goods sell more — but stated in this way it is a little new and clever, and certainly gives an interesting rebuttal to the idea of energy efficiency as a way to solve the world's energy crisis. Just as government intervention in Britain to reform the car industry caused the price of cars to fall, and hence caused car use to rise, in direct opposition to their election promises to cut car use, the law of unintended consequences and Jevons paradox may be the death of energy efficiency as a silver bullet.