I thought of one more positional-goods related policy: limiting the number
of hours in a work week. In other words, forced spending on leisure,
which as this survey indicates is non-positional:
Do You Enjoy Having More Than Others? Survey Evidence of Positional Goods
On Sun, Nov 21, 2004 at 07:27:32AM -0500, Robin Hanson wrote:
I was at a workshop this weekend where we discussed the possibility of
regulating human genetic enhancements, and it was suggested that positional
goods were a valid reason for regulation. It might make sense, for
example, to tax
According to page 18 of
http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/pdfiles/cfovhds/divid.pdf, for tax
reasons, the average price drop of a stock on the ex-dividend day is only
90% of the dividend.
Microsoft has declared a $3 per share special dividend, with the
ex-dividend day being November 15, 2004
On Wed, Oct 20, 2004 at 02:13:23AM -0400, Robert A. Book wrote:
I think what you want is the Banzhaf Power Index, developed by Banzhaf
(surprise!) in the 1960s. I forwarded your post to a friend of mine
who's done some work on this, and discovered he's giving a talk on
this very topic on
On Tue, Oct 19, 2004 at 11:32:16AM -0700, Peter C. McCluskey wrote:
I think it's harder than this to adequately model p(x), because it acts
differently in close races because the incentive for the losing side to
cheat is highest when it's most likely to change the result.
Yes, to be more
On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 08:25:16PM -0500, Jeffrey Rous wrote:
When people ask me why I vote, my standard answer is because I can. Voting simply
reminds me that we have something special going here in the free world. I do a
decent job of learning about the candidates and issues not because I
On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 07:50:08PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I've been discussing with my undergradute students the rationality of voting.
What about the possibility that many people do not deal well with with
small probabilities, and mistakenly think that their votes matter?
Why have
Does anyone know if there is a correlation between a person's
willingness to buy lottery tickets, and his willingness to vote in large
elections (where the chances of any vote being pivotal is tiny)?
A simple explanation for both of these phenomena, where people choose
to do things with
On Wed, Mar 24, 2004 at 10:54:25AM -0500, Stephen Miller wrote:
I'm confused. How does one decide whether the younger version's
preferences are more right than the elder's?
When considering whether or not to return stolen goods to its original
owner, how does one decide whether the original
On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 01:44:42PM -0500, Bryan Caplan wrote:
My new paper on the economics of mental illness, entitled The Economics
of Szasz can now be downloaded from my webpage at:
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/szaszjhe.doc
The paper makes the point that what psychology
Here's a funny comic strip about using game theory for dating:
http://www.otherpeoplesstories.com/061.html
You might also want to check out the blog it was based on:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/shiga/
On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 11:18:21AM -0500, Robin Hanson wrote:
That and the difficulty of creating intelligence.
It can't be the latter, because the intelligence that already exist was
not selected for. Consider again the fact that Jews have an average IQ
that is about one standard deviation
On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 04:47:17PM -0500, Robin Hanson wrote:
There certainly do seem to be some situations in which it can pay not be
seen as too clever by half. But of course there are many other situations
in which being clever pays well. So unless the first set of situations are
more
Given that there is significant existing variation in human intelligence,
it's curious that we are not all much smarter than we actually are.
Besides the well-known costs of higher intelligence (e.g., more energy
use, bigger heads causing more difficult births), it seems that being
smart can be a
On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 05:28:34PM -0400, Bryan Caplan wrote:
One idea he did not explore: Maybe there is no inter-stellar travel
because the benefits almost never exceed the costs. It takes years to
get anywhere, and at best you find some unused natural resources. If
Julian Simon's
James Surowiecki has an article in the New Yorker (available at
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030818ta_talk_surowiecki) arguing
in favor of child tax credits, on the grounds that raising children
produces positive externalities. My question is, has anyone done a study
that quantifies how
On Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 10:50:35AM -0700, Fred Foldvary wrote:
However, the earth is not a closed system, as we continually get energy
from the sun, so even if we use up some resources, solar radiation will
supply energy, and technologicalp progress will make ever more efficient
use of it.
On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 07:04:27PM -0400, Robert A. Book wrote:
[...] The point
I was tryign to make is that it's possible for a dictatorship to
depress child-rearing opportunities less than other opportunities,
thus making child-rearing relatively more attractive.
Why do you think
According to a recent article [1] in Harvard International Review, because
of differences in fertility, the population growth rate in dictatorships
is higher than that in democracies at every income level. It says an
average woman has one-half of a child more under dictatorship than under
A few people seem to have skipped over the first sentence of my post.
The article said that fertility rate is higher in dictatorships than in
democracies at *all income levels*. Meaning if you take any income level
and compare dictatorships and democracies in the same level, the
dictatorships
On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 12:26:41AM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
[...] could it be done more efficiently? Probably, but I can't think of
it.
I can... The Do Not Call form should take a bank account number and dollar
amount. Any advertiser who pre-pays the amount I specify would be
allowed
I'm surprised that everyone who has responded to my post has defended the
conventional wisdom on charity giving. But surely one should either borrow
money to do a life time worth of giving right away, or save and do all
charity in one's will, or otherwise concentrate all charity giving to a
single
On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 09:29:34AM -0400, Richard L. white wrote:
Ignoring the utility of the money to the target charity today, e.g.,
food or medicine to live,
But the money will have a greater utility tomorrow (since there will be
more of it). Unless you think there will be less needy
On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 12:25:11PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
Typical charity recipients also do not have access to borrowing
opportunities
that are as efficient as the ones available to you. So yes you could help
them by delaying charity to people who would like to save, and borrowing
On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 12:05:01PM -0400, Eric Crampton wrote:
Shouldn't we also worry about how poor people are now relative to how
they'll be in the future? Today's poor are much better off than the poor
from a century ago; presumably the poor a century from now will be less
deserving than
On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 11:49:15AM -0400, Susan Hogarth wrote:
Speaking as the director of a very small but very active charity, I can tell
you that we tend to have *quite high* time preferences. Possibly some of that
is bleedover from the personality of the founder (that would be
Why does TV have seasons? I know it's customary to propose possible
answers to questions posted here, but I'm really stumped. I can't think of
any reason why television networks all premier their new shows in the
fall and play re-runs in the summer, instead of spreading out the premiers
and
On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 10:34:40PM -0500, William Dickens wrote:
Should OPEC set oil prices in Euros and hold their cash reserves in
Euros what would be the real consequences for the US? 1. A tiny increase
in risk wrt oil prices (we know its tiny because the cost of currency
hedging is
On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 01:44:59PM -0800, Fred Foldvary wrote:
There is also a supply-side effect from cutting the marginal tax rate, from
less uncertainty about the company as it shifts to less debt and more
equity, as well as more investor confidence when the profits are sent to
the
On Wed, Dec 25, 2002 at 12:33:00AM -0500, Bryan D Caplan wrote:
A question inspired by working the Caplan twin night shift:
How come almost all of the paid programming is on late at night? Yes,
rates are lower, but viewership is lower too. Are late-night viewers
unusually impressionable,
Does anyone know of a model that explains any or all of the following
features of the new car market? Which ones would you have predicted based
on economic theory?
- MSRP (manufacturer suggested retail price, where does this number come
from and what's its purpose?)
- dealer holdbacks (a fixed
On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 10:57:53AM -0800, Anton Sherwood wrote:
Reminds me of a story in one of the sf magazines - an abnormally
cheerful man was found to have an abnormally high level of endorphins,
and was compelled to take treatment to compensate, because we can't have
people running loose
On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 08:38:26PM -0500, Bryan D Caplan wrote:
1. The less fundamental reason to be hard-hearted is that soft-
hearted people - even comparatively reasonable ones like Blinder - are
hypocrites. They fret and fret about poor Americans, but barely even
remember the existence
On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 02:51:38PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
This would seem to work badly for socially consumed information goods,
like movies or music. If a group of us decides to watch a movie
together, one of us tries to download the movie, at which point he may
be denied. Should this
On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 01:24:12PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
Imagine that a nation like the US were run like a corporation. To live
(and vote) here, you'd have to own a share. You could sell your share and
leave, and foreigners could come if they bought a share. The corporate
Why do some Internet merchants refuse to display prices on some items
until you put the affected items in your online shopping cart? I first
noticed this at BestBuy.com, but now Amazon.com and CircuitCity.com have
also picked up this practice.
Here's Amazon.com's explanation, which doesn't
On Tue, Jun 04, 2002 at 01:17:25PM +0200, Jacob W Braestrup wrote:
The big problem is that parents have no right over the future income
of their children. Hence they cannot make the contract. Neither can the
children themselves until they reach (legal) maturity.
I recently saw a proposal to
On Sat, Apr 27, 2002 at 09:45:12AM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
When I'm inferring what it is that people think they want, I don't have to
believe everything they say. I can also look at their actions. I can't
see how anyone has a quadrillion dollar willingness to pay, as no one can
afford to
On Fri, Apr 26, 2002 at 09:12:53AM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
If the reason that government gets bigger as taxes become more efficient
is that most people have a downward-sloping demand for government, and
so buy more of it as the price gets lower, then it seems paternalistic
of me to keep
On Thu, Apr 25, 2002 at 11:36:31AM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
Once upon a time income taxes were difficult to collect, because
income was hard to cheaply monitor. So governments used less
efficient taxes, and arguably this was a reason the size of
government was lower. Today it seems that
On Sun, Apr 21, 2002 at 03:40:39PM -0700, Scott Eric Merryman wrote:
Paul Krugman has an article on NAFTA you might find interesting.
snip
If job creation isn't the point of NAFTA, what is? Another possible
justification is the classic economic argument that free trade will raise
U.S.
On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 08:10:59AM -0700, Fred Foldvary wrote:
Entropy says a closed system will dissipate into unavailable energy.
Entropy applies to open systems too. The way it works is, a given energy
source (the sun) and heat sink (outer space) allows you to remove so many
bits of entropy
The original paper is available at
http://www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/Economics/oswald/FinalJuly13Paris.pdf.
I think there's a major flaw in the experiment. When a subject pays to
decrease the income of another subject, he's deciding to transfer some
resources from himself and the other subject to
On Fri, Nov 16, 2001 at 10:31:22AM +0100, Hentrich, Steffen wrote:
I think that this could only be if subsidies payed up to the exquilibrium
price of all exhaustable ressources. But this is not the case. Only a small
part of renewable energies gets subsidies and this not in all countries.
On Sun, Nov 11, 2001 at 09:28:15PM +0100, Hentrich, Steffen wrote:
Nearly all countries run support policies for renewable energies to reduce
worldwide carbon dioxid emissions. But from resource economics point of view
sellers of exhaustible ressources will change to a new, lower price path if
Reading Jonathan Rauch's _Government's End: Why Washington Stopped
Working_ (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1891620495) made me
wonder how special-interest lobbies solved the public goods problem. Why
does an individual contribute to a lobbying organization when he can let
someone else
I wonder if what appears to be small-stakes risk aversion can be explained
as avoidance of the cost of making budget ajustments. If you win a bet,
you have to decide what to do with the money, and if you lose you have to
figure out where the money is going to come from (i.e., what purchases to
There's a new article in the Washington Post about Amazon's dynamic
pricing, at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15159-2000Sep25.html.
Here is a quote:
Amazon swears it won't happen there again. "Dynamic pricing is stupid,
because people will find out," said spokesman Curry.
48 matches
Mail list logo
