e~2.718

DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com
Mon Oct 4 04:51:51 PDT 1999



>e is an irrational number or non-repeating decimal like pi. It is used
>as the base number in natural logarithms. Brad first suggested the use
>of a base-10 common logarithm. Dan Davies then suggested that Brad use
>a natural logarithm because logically the area under the slope of the
>curve would be getting smaller the farther you got from the xy axis
>point of origin. That's what I took out of this discussion.
>
>Not a phd,
>
>Tom Lehman

Sadly, I didn't mean anything so clever. Among finance/econ geeks, E is also the "expectation" operator. So E(0) in this context is "Expectation at time 0". Brad said that life expectancy at birth was the least worst measure. I objected that E(0) wasn't equal to E(0)(E(10)) "expectation at time 0 of expectation at time 10". Usually, this would be equal to E(0) - after all, there's something funny about expecting your expectation to change, which is where the reference to "law of iterated expectations" came in. But when you're talking about life expectancies, you can expect that if you survive until ten, then your expectation of your lifespan will change markedly. I suggested that you should be comparing expectancies on the basis of life expectancy at the most common age for people to die, which, frankly, sounds a lot less silly when you use five-shilling words like "modal"

"I hope that's a bit clearer"

As you can see, the reason why I resort to jargon is that I'm completely unable to express myself in normal English. Brad, who is a proper professor and writes books and everything, has no such excuse.

Sorry about that, but as my employer so kindly reminds the world, it is unwise to rely on information contained in emails from me.

dd

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