RE: Pareto laws and expected income

From: Jonathan Colvin <jcolvin.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 21:42:49 -0700

Russell Standish wrote:
>>
>> (JC) My consciousness (or degree of such) is a complicated function of my

>> evolutionary history, but the problem is so multifactorial it is
>> inappropriate to use anthropic reasoning.
>
>Nonsense. You are either conscious, in which case you will
>observe something, or you are not, which case you don't. This
>is a simple two state logic.

That seems a remarkable assertion. As I grow from a fetus to an adult, is
there one particular interval of planck time where I go from being an
unconscious object to a conscious observer?


>> > What it does show is what an ass the ASSA is. It is
>unreasonable to
>> > suppose that my current wealth is sampled randomly from the
>> > distribution of al wealths (a Pareto distribution like
>P(x)=x^a, for
>> > some a).
>>
>> Why is it any more unreasonable than supposing that your
>birth rank is
>> sampled randomly from the distribution of all birth ranks?
>
>Because current observer moments are dependent on previous
>observer moments. Births are not.

Ok, forget observer moments/ momentary income, and look at your total income
integrated over your entire life. Shouldn't you expect your lifetime net
worth to be sampled randomly from the distribution of all lifetime net
worths?

>
>For example, one's income tends to be positively correlated
>with age (until age of retirement, that is, when the trend reverses).

As above, look at sum lifetime income rather than momentary income. No more
age correlation.

Jonathan Colvin
Received on Wed Jun 22 2005 - 00:48:09 PDT