Scott published my interview questions on his blog, Chronic Murmuring today, and if you follow the link, you'll find the questions and my responses. If you'd like for me to interview you, leave a comment on this post, and I'll publish five new questions for you to answer.
1. Imagine that you and a friend are climbing mountains in Alaska. Your friend's line breaks and he falls 30 feet. He survives, but breaks both legs, and receives a concussion. It's approaching evening, at which point the temperature will fall somewhere between 40 and 50 below 0. What do you do? (make realistic assumptions about the equipment you have with you)
Well, I'll discount the first realistic assumption, which is that I will never be climbing mountains in Alaska with just me and a friend, but if that were the case, it is unlikely that I would have direct contact with the outside world, unless it were a satelite phone, which is concievable in the not-too-distant future. But it's much more fun to think of the question as if I had not communication equipment save an avalanche transponder, which would be practically useless in the given situation.
Now given the impending temperatures, our primary concern would be to build a hasty snow shelter to provide insulation from the elements. Once my friend (we'll call him Scott), is safely inside, I would try to stabilize him (get him in a comfortable position, reset the bones in his legs, give any available medication for pain), make him some food and a hot drink if possible, and try to make sure he can stay warm. At this point there are only two conceivable options: wait with him until friends realize that we have not returned and send help, or try to decend alone and seek help. Option 2 seems to have the only reasonable hope of either of us surviving. So odds are I would leave Scott as comfortable as possible in the snow shelter and decend the mountain to seek help. Provided that I am able to make it down, I could send a rescue unit to Scott's aid and get him out alive as well.
Now, if I ever were to attempt such an expedition, I would certainly be more knowledgable and prepared for such an eventuality, and my actual reaponse to the situation would likely differ quite a bit from this hypothetical one.
2. If you could go back and tell yourself anything the night before your wedding, what would you and yourself talk about?
I would probably spend the time telling me whose advice I would hear over the next three years would be worth listening to. And even that might not be worth the time I would take away from my own enjoyment of my last night of bachelorhood.
I might warn myself not to drink that last Irish Car Bomb tonight and get plenty of water before bed. That hangover the next morning was most inconvienent.
Other than that, i haven't learned anything in my marriage that I think might have been a whole lot easier given a few minutes of good advice. Of course, now that I think about it, I might have told myself to go ahead and sign up for marriage counselling right away--that might have short-circuited some problems later on. It did take me three years to realize how fucked-up my life had been, and that some of the things that I had deep down blamed myself for just weren't right. I underestimated the relational consequences of my own childhood. Genna, of course, did much the same, and it took us years to figure out how do deal with those consequences. But I wouldn't trade anything for the value of having learned those things on our own.
Honestly, I can't think of any monumental piece of information that I would be dying to tell myself. if anything, i have learned over the past few years that personal growth is a finction of a lot of ordinary days, not a few extraordinary ones. I'm the man I am today not because of the exotic destinations I've traveled, but because of the many days on end of getting up and going to work and to school to provide the best life I can for my wife and my daughter. There are no good "get mature quick" schemes. Despite popular opinion, people don't usually have single experiences that turn them "from a boy into a man," including the Marine Corps--I speak from exoerience. I would not desire any conversation with myself that would try to make an end run around any of that ordinary experience. I could ony become the man I am today via the path I have taken to get here, even if it has been circumloqutious, to say the least. I cannot accept the ends that God has given me while at the same time rejecting the means that he used to get me here. Of course, a more interesting curiousity might be the conversation between me and myself if my 75 year-old self were to join us for a few beers. oh what I wouldn't give to hear what he had to say. If it's anything like what I just said, he may not show up to tell us.
3. Why should we care whether a utility function is quasi-concave or not? And furthermore, explain the differences - including the advantages and disadvantages - of using a translog production function versus a Cobb-Douglass.
I'm going to answer this one completely in layman's terms, for three reasons:
1) If I attempt to use graduate-level theory, I would almost certainly screw it up royally.
2) Since this is directed at an audience that is not necessarily well-versed in economic theory, I will spare them the tedium.
3) If I attempt to explain this in a way that might be clear to non-economists, I will undoubtedly grow to understand it better myself.
Ok, in economist's terms, a utility function is a mathematical function that we use in the field to try to map a consumer's preferences over a space of arbitrary goods in such a way that we can show what bundles of those goods will provide them the most utility, or more simply, satisfaction. Utility finctions are most commonly represented in two dimentional graphs, where the vertical axis represents the quantities of one good, and the horizontal axis represents the quantity of another. Running from the top left of the first quadrant to the bottom right (we restrice ourselves to the first quadrant because we assume that we cannot consume a negative amount of any good) is what economists call an indifference curve that reresents what might bring an equal amount of utility to the consumer, or amounts that are indifferent to him. Much like contour lines on a map, there are many of these corves that could be mapped on the graph (an infinite number, in fact) but we are more concerned with the function that will allow us to map the consumer's utility for any bundle of goods, and to maximize that utility given the constraints that the consumer faces, most comonly, the consumer's budget.
Quasiconcavity of the utility function refers to the fact that, for any value on the consumption set (say, x* pizzas and y* beers), there is a set of bundles that will bring a greater level of utility than is brought at the consumprion levels x*,y*. We call that the upper coutour set of x*,y* (much like if we had colored in all of the points on a map that are higher above sea level than the point x*, y*, so there is an implied third dimension coming out from the map represented by the coutrour lines). Mathematically, that's represented as u(x,y)>u(x*,y*). The upper contour set of x*,y* just touches the indifference curve going through x*,y*, and include all points above and to the right of it (assuming that x and y, in this case, pizza and beer, are both "goods" to the consumer. We would have a problem if we replaced pizza with, say, garbage). So our our equation that maximizes the consumer's utility subject to the budget constraint (we assume he'll run out of money before he's completely satisfied with his levels of pizza and beer) is the point on the graph where the indifference curve just touches the budget line, which goes from top left to bottom right, interesecting the vertical axis at the point where he spends all of his money on beer, and intersecting the horizontal axis where all he buys all pizza and no beer. Any mix of goods that exhausts his wealth will fall on the straight line that connects the two points.
Quasiconcavity occurs when any given upper contour set of the function is a convex set. Sounds complicated, yes, but it's actually realtively simple in a 2 dimensional space (if the space grows larger than 3 dimensions our definition has to get more rigorous because we can't draw it): If you can pick any two points in the upper coutour set and connect them with a line that does not go outside the bounds of the set, then you have a quasiconcave function. Here's why it's important: in economic theory we like to assume that people generally prefer a mix of two goods more than they prefer all of one good and none of another. In other words, 10 pizzas or 10 beers will not make you more happy than 5 of each. And if you're going to get all of one and none of the other, you are going to need a lot of the one thing to make up for the fact that you have none of the other (we call that diminishing marginal utility). This assumption is important, and when it is violated it makes for ugly solutions to our utility maximization problems, and economists hate ugly solutions. It cuts to the heart of our most important assumption in economics, that the actors in our models are rational. you might think someone a bit peculiar if they were perfectly happy if you were to give them 10 beers or 10 pizzas, but were dissappointed with 5 of each. In fact, it's difficult to imagine a situation where this assumption would be violated--our textbook for micro theory had to go out of its way to provide one. It says that a consumer might like milk and orange juice but may take less pleasure from a mixture of the two. What the authors fail to mention is that they are amking an implicit assumption that the consumer has only one glass to put them in--you wouldn't like your beer poured all over your pizza either, but this is hardly a violation of quasiconcave utility functions!
A Cobb-Douglas utility function, is a nice little functional form that allows us to fairly accurately model a consumer's preferences in such a was that the results are guaranteed to be quasiconcave and give us a nice result. The translog function, though, you've got me on that one. I'll update this post when I do some research to find out what that is. If it's jsut the log of Cobb-Douglass, then that's a way to transofm the original functional form by making it a function of the natural log function. Since the ln function is increasing, then we know that we preserve the most important properties of the original utility function (continuity, differentiability, homoetheticity, and the preference relations), while at the same time making the function a whole lot easier to manipulate to derrive some of its properties (most importantly, the Slutsky Matrix, which tells us all kinds of imformation about the goods and the consumer's preferences). Now folks, if that's not everything you ever wanted to know about economics, you might consider applying to graduate school.
The remaining questions I will have to leave unanswered for now, as I have exhausted all available brainpower on questions 1-3. Stay tuned for answers to the final 2 questions.
4. Some experiences in life are so powerful that we ache when they disappear. Describe one period in your life, or event, that was so meaninful to you that you wish you could occasionally go back and either relive it.
5. The early 21st century experience of Christianity in the United States is of a mass commercialized, multi-billion dollar industry. Some criticize this phenomenon on the grounds that the church has abandoned its fundamental identity as being distinct from the culture in which it lives. Yet, one might also argue that this is unavoidable given religious pluralism. What is your opinion of the alterna-culture of mass marketed Christianity, and what should our response to it be as Christians?
In regards to question 2,
You were a Marine?