They all think it. Thinking it isn't the issue. The issue is whether it's a useful model to try and replicate in software. I think it is, but I didn't see much of anything like that in the AI/NLP classes I took.

I suspect part of the problem is, it's hard to come up with a test question that involves a neural net with more than three perceptrons.

You and the GP seem to have very different definitions of "phone".

More theoretically tractable, if nothing else.

Take hope. After the fifth or sixth time, you get to move on to 3 + 3.

Thank you for an outstanding and interesting response. I apologize, as I was mostly focusing on differences within the set of industrialized countries, a la The Spirit Level. I should have made that clear.

Now, the Great and Powerful Wikipedia is telling me that the PPP GDP/capita is $48K for the US and $35K for France. (PPP vs. Nominal is an important distinction, one I wasn't really thinking about, so good catch there). If correct, that's 37%, not 10%. The difference seems fairly stark, though it's not clear to me what that extra 37% purchasing power is buying us, since both countries are plenty wealthy enough to provide for their people, and France seems like a much nicer place to live.

I don't have any data to back up my statement that France could close the GDP gap by working longer hours. It makes intuitive sense to me, though my model is probably overly simplistic. The argument here reminds me of the (problematic) Laffer Curve. There has to be some point where working an additional hour actually diminishes the quality of work to the point where you're actually less productive over the entire labor period.

Extreme example: Say I'm working 154 hours a week and getting two hours of sleep each night (the minimum amount of sleep Navy SEAL trainers are required to give trainees, IIRC). Now move one of those hours a night from the "sleep" column to the "work" column. At that point, it doesn't matter what the nature of the work is, you're going to be way less productive at it.

Like the Laffer Curve, the actual shape of the Work/Life curve varies tremendously from person to person, by working conditions (if your work is inherently rewarding, or extremely hard on the body), by life conditions (if you're in a bad marriage, work might be where you go to unwind, to feel useful), whether a change in hours comes from vacation time or a longer work day, and probably by a dozen other factors that aren't coming to mind. So it's impossible to say which side of the "traditional" 40 hour work week the ideal falls on, even as a society-wide average. Maybe I'm too hung up on 40 hours a week as "the norm," but I suspect that adding a few hours to France's work week would result in increased GDP. If my math's right, and you assume the additional hours were as productive as the original hours (probably not the case), it would lead to a 25% increase in GDP, significantly closing the gap.

Which is kind of suggestive to me. Perhaps at this point in the evolution of the economy, we should be trying to maximize GDP per hour of labor, instead of GDP(PPP) per se, with some mechanism to keep Gini from straying too far from the ideal.

Quality of life metrics are indeed somewhat subjective, but I think a rough consensus can be obtained. For example, self-reported happiness is certainly a better measure of quality of life than, say, average educational attainment or per-capita hours spent playing video games. The Spirit Level makes the attempt by taking the unweighted average of several different indicators, which seems like a good start. It seems incomplete, because they only included those indicators that they found had a statistically significant relationship to inequality (educational attainment, drug abuse, obesity, life expectancy, levels of trust, etc.), and while they avoided weighting in order to avoid making value judgments, I think you could dig in and select some weights that make more sense than the unweighted version.

Your dad makes an interesting point. What do people do when money is no longer a big factor in their decisions. I assume people are generally more productive when they're doing what they're passionate about. Say you could become a doctor, which inspires you, or a job on Wall Street, which sounds like a boring job that would add nothing to the world. If you can make $80K/year as a doctor, and $110K/year on Wall Street, it seems like a pretty obvious decision. But if instead you could make $1.1M/year on Wall Street, suddenly "following your passion" makes you look like a chump. It's a good argument for a strongly progressive income tax; if the government is going to take 75% of your Wall Street dollars back, there's little incentive for Wall Street to offer those economy-distorting salaries, and less incentive for workers to take them, freeing the best and brightest to do what they love, and freeing up seats on Wall Street for the gambling addicts who would actually enjoy the work.

In a similar vein, I'd offer a guaranteed minimum income. It wouldn't be enough to live on, unless you're happy sharing a cramped apartment with three other adults and eating a lot of potatoes. But it would be enough to force employers to offer more than just a subsistence paycheck. Just being able to say, "I need this job, but I don't NEED need it" would be enough to give laborers more leverage against poor working conditions, and more freedom to find jobs that they actually found fulfilling. Plus it would be a humane incentive to automate away the boring, unrewarding tasks. Side note: I think that if the US existed in a vacuum, and we couldn't outsource our labor needs to the developing world, we'd be much further along the path to a mostly automated economy.

My thoughts. Take 'em or leave 'em.

Well said. I voted (past tense, cuzza vote by mail) third party because I live in Utah. As Romney leads +42 here, my vote has absolutely no chance of keeping Utah's five electoral votes out of his hands. Last time around, I voted for Gloria LaRiva (the real Socialist candidate), and this time I voted for former SLC mayor Rocky Anderson.

I'd say that if you don't live in one of the ten or fifteen states that Obama and Romney are actively campaigning in, you should feel safe about voting your conscience. Which is a powerful condemnation of the electoral college system we're saddled with.

"many many many?" My understanding is that perhaps three out of the thirty or forty clean energy companies that the government made loans to have failed. Can I get a citation?

I think you're talking about different things. Stripping a business for short-term profit happens frequently under cutthroat capitalism, but it's not what the GP is talking about when he says "a well-run business."

Businesses by nature try to maximize profits. It can do this by reducing "expenses," one of which is labor costs. To delve a bit further, you can reduce those costs by getting the same work done with fewer people (automation, making processes more efficient, etc.), or by hiring the same (or more) workers at a lower cost (offshoring, cutting salaries).

But there's unresolved tension here. Corporations benefit society when they provide wages to workers. They benefit themselves when they reduce the need to pay wages. The solution is simple: transfer ownership of the company to the people doing the work. Once wages are moved from the "expenses" column to the "profits" column, much of the tension disappears.

Would that I had mod points, good sir.

GDP per capita is a pretty terrible metric for gauging the success of a country. In fact, I'd say it's only slightly less awful than the idiots in climate change discussions who run around saying that the more energy a country uses, the more successful it is.

Certainly, there's a minimum GDP beneath which you can't provide a decent quality of life for your citizens. But every industrialized country is well above that threshold already. Beyond that minimum, distribution of the GDP among the various capitas seems to make a lot more difference to the overall quality of life. By most any metric, European nations have much lower income inequality, and they also score better on many quality of life metrics.

For example, France has a much lower GDP per capita than we do. Is it because their economy is less efficient? Partly. But a good chunk of the difference was a conscious policy decision. French citizens generally only work 35 hours a week, and get five weeks mandatory vacation. If they started working themselves to exhaustion the way we Americans do, it would close the GDP per capita gap significantly. But would France's quality of life go up? Doubtful.

Of course, why am I even arguing with someone with a sig that conveniently brands him as "too stupid to live?" Total wasteof my time.

Despite what FoxNews has been telling you, that form of socialism is pretty much irrelevant to the question of whether we should elect Obama or Romney.

Heck, Nixon was further left than Obama. I think we're safe from a Marxist takeover.

Fossil fuels should be more expensive. If you forced fossil fuels to internalize all the external costs (climate change, asthma, mercury poisoning, acid deposition, runoff, miner deaths, environmental degradation, etc.), alternative energy would be very competitive, and there wouldn't be a coal plant on Earth that didn't scrub its emissions until they smelled of pine and lavender.

Nope. That card can be used an infinite number of times. It's like an ace of spades with a tiny flamethrower that can set fire to other cards on the table.

The point of the whole "Obama had a filibuster-proof majority" line is to imply that the President had a free hand to institute whatever policies he wanted. Therefore, the thinking goes, the state of the economy can be blamed entirely on Obama's bad policies, not at all on Republicans stopping him from instituting his policies. Which is a load of crap. There are a lot of things Obama could have done had he actually had the Rasputin-like mind control powers over his congresscritters that Republicans seem to be blaming him for not having.

What is well-documented is this: Obama did not control Congress. Health care reform could have taken a couple of months, if only three or four Republican senators had been willing to take Romneycare national. It was originally the Heritage Foundation's idea, and something very similar was proposed by Republicans twenty years ago when Clinton was trying to pass his own health care legislation. How did such a right-wing friendly plan go from The Official Position of the Republican Party to something the Republicans were able to unite 40-0 against? Simple: back in 1992, Republicans actually wanted to increase the number of people with health insurance. Today, their number one goal is to deny President Obama any legislative victories.

And no, the fact that a few minor, "uncontroversial" bills managed to pass during that period doesn't change anything.