MLB wild-card tiebreaker rules

It seems unlikely to happen this year given the current wild-card standings, but if multiple teams tie for a single wild-card spot in MLB this year, here's how the ties would be broken:​

If there are three or four teams tied for wild-card spots, the first step is to designate teams A, B, and C (three teams) or A, B, C, and D (four teams). This is done by a complicated system that first uses head-to-head records, then winning percentage in division or league games, then winning percentage in second half division/league games, and, finally, winning percentage in division/league games in the second half of the season, plus one game, then going back one game at a time until the ties have been broken.
Two Teams Tied for One Wild-Card Spot - The two teams would play one game to determine the wild card.
Three Teams Tied for One Wild-Card Spot - Team A hosts Team B for one game. The winner hosts Team C for one game, and the winner is the wild-card team.
Three Teams Tied for Two Wild-Card Spots - Team A hosts Team B for one game. The winner is declared a wild card. The loser of the game plays at Team C, and the winner is the second wild-card team.
Four Teams Tied for One Wild-Card Spot - Team A hosts Team B, and Team C hosts Team D. The two winners play the next day at the field of the winner between A and B. The winner is the wild card.
Four Teams Tied for Two Wild-Card Spots - Team A hosts Team B, and Team C hosts Team D. The two winners are the wild card teams.

​I can't wait until four teams tie for a single wild-card spot one year. That would be fantastic.

Market argument for immigration

Bryan Caplan lays out his most succinct defense of immigration yet.​

1. Open borders are an extremely important component of the free market and human liberty.  The labor market is roughly 70% of the economy.  Labor is the main product that most people around the world have to sell.  Immigration restrictions massively distort this market, and deprive literally billions of people of the freedom to sell their labor to willing employers.  So even if open borders made all other policies much less pro-market and pro-liberty, the (open borders + side effects thereof) package would almost certainly constitute a net gain for free markets and liberty.

Click through to read the rest of his argument, and the discussion thread. Economics blogs tend to have more sane, less belligerent commenters than most sites.

Pessimism on the economy

Eli Dourado is skeptical of the effect of monetary stimulus on the U.S. economy.​

My first bit of evidence is corporate profits. They are at an all time high, around two-and-a-half times higher in nominal terms than they were during the late 1990s, our last real boom.
If you think that unemployment is high because demand is low and therefore business isn’t profitable, you are empirically mistaken. Business is very profitable, but it has learned to get by without as much labor.
A second data point is the duration of unemployment. Around 40 percent of the unemployed have been unemployed for six months or longer. And the mean duration of unemployment is even longer, around 40 weeks, which means that the distribution has a high-duration tail.
Now, do you mean to tell me that four years into the recession, for people who have been unemployed for six months, a year, or even longer, that their wage demands are sticky? This seems implausible.

​Will unemployment rates in the U.S. ever return to rates previously considered to be normal? Or is this current unemployment rate the new normal for the U.S. economy? Macroeconomics is so complex that it's hard to wrap one's minds around the debate. If there's one minor blessing in this recession it's that some hypotheses (like Zero Marginal Product workers, or ZMP) are being put through an empirical stress test.

Our body clocks

Two interesting articles on sleep and body clocks. In the NYTimes, Daniel Randall cites research showing that the idea of getting a continuous eight hour block of sleep each night is a relatively modern invention and possibly suboptimal.

The idea that we should sleep in eight-hour chunks is relatively recent. The world’s population sleeps in various and surprising ways. Millions of Chinese workers continue to put their heads on their desks for a nap of an hour or so after lunch, for example, and daytime napping is common from India to Spain.
One of the first signs that the emphasis on a straight eight-hour sleep had outlived its usefulness arose in the early 1990s, thanks to a history professor at Virginia Tech named A. Roger Ekirch, who spent hours investigating the history of the night and began to notice strange references to sleep. A character in the “Canterbury Tales,” for instance, decides to go back to bed after her “firste sleep.” A doctor in England wrote that the time between the “first sleep” and the “second sleep” was the best time for study and reflection. And one 16th-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive more children because they waited until after their “first sleep” to make love. Professor Ekirch soon learned that he wasn’t the only one who was on to the historical existence of alternate sleep cycles. In a fluke of history, Thomas A. Wehr, a psychiatrist then working at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., was conducting an experiment in which subjects were deprived of artificial light. Without the illumination and distraction from light bulbs, televisions or computers, the subjects slept through the night, at least at first. But, after a while, Dr. Wehr noticed that subjects began to wake up a little after midnight, lie awake for a couple of hours, and then drift back to sleep again, in the same pattern of segmented sleep that Professor Ekirch saw referenced in historical records and early works of literature.

​The article caught my eye because I've been naturally waking up after about four hours of sleep each night, spending a bit of time reading, then dropping back to sleep for a few hours. Is this my body naturally seeking a split sleep schedule? I'd assumed it was the scourge of keeping my iPad and iPhone near my bed. As soon as any early traffic noise wakes me, my impulse is to grab one of those devices to check my email. But perhaps I'm just finally settling into a more natural sleep pattern?

The other article, in the WSJ, ​cites a wide swath of research on optimal times of day to tackle certain tasks, from working out to sending email to creative thinking. Much of this feels like it could be the subject of a Timothy Ferriss book.