Re: spamonomics
I would. It happens all the time. So what are the methodologies of the auto-erotic reporting studies and how are they flawed? __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the Signing Bonus Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
Re: increases money supply over time?
Fred Foldvary Wrote: The Fed buys bond and in effect pays with a check. Okay. To buy back bonds, it must have sold them at some time in the past. This process of selling then buying back bonds doesn't net to zero? Is the multiplier larger for buying bonds than selling? --- I don't know anything about blue lines, with the exception of Blue Lines, the brilliant album by trip-hop artists Massive Attack. Sorry. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the Signing Bonus Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
Re: How do I convince New Agers that not everybody should get the same wage?
Fred Foldarvy wrote: 'The sentiment seems to revolve around social justice: No person is worth any other, etc.' So long as this stays within the club, what is the harm? Well, they're doing this to try to make the world a better place. If they choose to design the currency project so that the equal wage philosophy creates a distortion, it seems reasonable that such a distortion will make the project less effective in making the world a better place. It's not that I want to rain on anybody's parade. Well, not in this particular instance, anyway. And I do like Blue Lines. Outstanding album. Anton Sherwood wrote: You've just expanded my knowledge of SbSp at least threefold. Proud? Heh, heh, heh. ---Evil Laugh - Thanks for the tips, everybody. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the Signing Bonus Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
How do I convince New Agers that not everybody should get the same wage?
Since beautiful women make me stupid, and since I am a bit curious, I have become involved in a local currency project. One reoccuring theme is that everybody should be paid the same wage for their labor. Doctor or bagboy, judge or record store clerk, the only fair way to do things is for everybody to get the same pay per hour. I fail to see the wisdom in this. The sentiment seems to revolve around social justice: No person is worth any other, etc. How would you suggest I argue otherwise. One option is to show that not everybody even values time equally, let alone an hour of effort. However, I'm not familiar with the research, if any, on that, and I get the impression that wages play a role in the estimation of time which would make my argument circular. Alternatively, I could just say, Do the math, and then say that people get paid what they bring in and try to impress them with a little calculus. I haven't really thought that one through too heavily. Another option I thought of is to compare Spongebob Squarepants with Squidward Tentacles--the uberfry-cook vs. the surly cashier--to show how Spongebob adds armloads of revenue, whereas Squidward produces only minimally. Then I'd try to explain why it is fair for Spongebob to be paid more. I'm sure this will backfire when someone points out some plot device from some episode that will derail the whole affair. What would you suggest? How can I demonstrate, in a relatively short period of time, that imposing equal wages isn't the best way to organize the world? __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the Signing Bonus Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
Three Fed tools, which increases money supply over time?
I have blanked and I cannot shake it. My apologies for what seems a bonehead question. (Certainly not my first.) Old textbooks aren't helping me, either. There are three money supply tools used by the Fed. It can buy sell bonds, it can change the reserve requirement, or it can change the interest rate it charges banks on overnight loans, right? If the money supply is increasing over time, then it can't be because of the second two, since they can only go so low. Is it the first that causes money supply to grow at x% per year? How does this happen? Losing my mind, jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the Signing Bonus Sweepstakes http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
Many choices
I don't think a point estimate is any way to gauge something like happiness with respect to time. As for surveys, from what I know of the experimental literature, economists seem to put very little credence in surveys aside from gathering rather concrete data (e.g. demographics, independently verifiable data). Aren't political surveys generally pretty close to the results? IIRC, market researchers have some fairly sophisticated techniques for eliciting truthful info from large groups. I don't know much other than an early example had to do w/ estimating drug use by soldiers in Vietnam during the U.S.-Vietnam war. Sorry. BTW, how do we reply to the list now? I keep making new messages--can I just reply? Thanks. __ Do you Yahoo!? Find out what made the Top Yahoo! Searches of 2003 http://search.yahoo.com/top2003
Real wages constant since 1964?!
I'm sorry to bother you with this. I just looked up the time series for total private average hourly earnings, seasonally adjusted, in 1982 dollars on the BLS web site. It comes back that they've been more-or-less constant since 1964. I'm floored. Is this right, or am I doing something wrong. I thought that real wages were generally higher today than in the past, ups downs notwithstanding. Why are we better off today? (Better products two wage households would be a start, I guess.) __ Do you Yahoo!? Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now http://companion.yahoo.com/
Inflation-Free Currency
You may recall my recent question regarding local currencies. Some sources of info claim that currencies can be made to be resistant/immune to inflation. I've been unable to locate any more-or-less rigorous arguments to this effect. Questions: Does this sound reasonable? Does it sound desirable? I don't see how it would be reasonable since the value of a commodity, even a numeraire commodity, is not established by fiat. Or is it? The issuer of a local currency may declare the value of the currency to be X in terms of dollars, but then to be inflation-resistant, that value would have to be constantly changed to represent a consistent level of purchasing power. Right? Last year it was worth $1, now it's worth $1.03, for example, in terms of nominal dollars. How else could it be done, if at all? If it weren't done, then the value of the local currency would erode over time, right? If we use an Hours model, then the currency is worth 1 hour of (anybody's) labor _or_ $10 in terms of real dollars. Next year, it is worth one hour or $9.70, let's say, in real dollars. So if the value in dollars is declared by fiat, then it needs to be changed periodically to maintain purchasing power. If the value is determined by fiat, to maintain that value in the market, we must depend on the goodwill and cooperation of the participants. Is this true? If our Hour is to be worth an hour of labor or $10 of goods, it depends on the participants to act according to this rule rather than on the results of the tatonnement of the economy. A Pound Sterling is worth so many dollars because there is an active market exchanging it, and it's price is based on the ebb and flow of goods and people using the two currencies. But there is no market for our Hours; since there is no demarcation dividing goods valued in dollars from goods demoninated in Hours--is that reasonable? You can see that I'm a little confused on this. A local currency issuer could set up a stock-market type auction to determine the price of the local currency in terms of dollars, correct? Any helpful thoughts or resources? __ Do you Yahoo!? Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now http://companion.yahoo.com/
Why is local currency good or bad or neither?
It seems that there are a number of schemes to create currencies, on top of extant national currencies, that will be accepted only locally. Under such a program, a unit of currency, let's call it a Local, will be created by a group in the community. The currency may have a more-or-less arbitrary value associated to it--one group I've read about sets their equal in value to ten dollars as well as one hour worth of effort. Presumably, then, if someone rakes your lawn for one hour, you pay that person one Local, and that person can exchange the Local for $10 worth of goods or services from participating merchants or individuals. I am not sure how universal the dollar-pegging aspect is. For all I know, some schemes may the dollar-Local exchange rate may be free to fluctuate. I am very uncomfortable with such programs, although I haven't been able to find any scholarly research on them. Apart from obvious complaints, such as arbitrarily setting the wage rate too high causes unemployment, or those who wish to keep their transactions local could just do so anyway without this extra layer of complication, why are such schemes a bad thing? Alternatively, why are they good? Or, why are they neither? __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: Is a non-optimizing organism evolutionarily viable?
Sure, they'd be a good example. :-) --- Fred Foldvary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- john hull [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is an organism that routinely fails to optimize evolutionarily viable? Human beings, for example? Fred Foldvary = [EMAIL PROTECTED] __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM). http://calendar.yahoo.com
Re: Speaking of Illegal Guns and Deterrence
--- Misha [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: They think that criminals like being killed Or perhaps it has to do with the nature of the threat. One would imagine that if murderers thought they had a high probability of being caught, they'd not do the crime. However, an armed victim is a different story, since the threat is so immediate--it's not that easy to kill a person and the victim will probably have a good chance to draw and fire a gun. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day http://shopping.yahoo.com
Re: income and substitution effect
I'm not disagreeing, but I am curious: what would you teach instead? __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Shopping - Send Flowers for Valentine's Day http://shopping.yahoo.com
RE: anecdotal concealed carry
--- Gil Guillory [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: One man I know was convicted of tax evasion, was on the lam for almost 2 years with his wife (part of the time in a cabin in the woods with his wife, reading Bohm-Bawerk and Mises by night and hunting by day) Hunting or poaching? __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Lott
--- William Dickens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm quite sure that if this happened with a Brookings scholar he would be fired. It will be interesting to see what AEI does. Hats off to Sanchez at Cato for discovering this. Writing under a pen name while creating no lies regarding the actual issues involved is a fireable offense?! -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Lott
--- William Dickens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: He represented himself as someone who had taken courses from himself and presented testimonials about his character from that persona. That isn't lying? Not about the issues involved. The debate is about violent crime, not Lott. Frankly, given that he was writing under a pen name, I think it is funny that he'd make up a goofy little story about himself. It did have him saying to take listen to other economists and get difference views after all. If under his nom de plume, or however it's spelled, he fairly represented the facts and arguments of the gun-control debate, then he's committed no transgression--other than having a little fun. Probably the only reason he shouldn't have done it is that the state of logical reasoning in our society is so poor that ad hominems have considerable weight with alot of people. He has probably given fodder to those whose rhetorical style is a little, for lack of a better phrase, ad captandum vulgus. More to the point. Allowing a family member to submit a review of a book under a false name is a pretty serious breach of academic integrity. To amazon.com? I don't know about that. The forum operates under effective anonymity, with no references, virtually no standards, and little (if any) editorial review. His kid writes a review and submits it to amazon.com under his pen name? I don't see the harm. I respect your view on this, but I strongly disagree with it. I see no reason to judge Lott poorly as a result of this. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Economic anamolies and Kuhn
Assymetric information? Lemon car markets whatnot? (Signalling models?) How fundamental is fundamental? There is a game theory text that assumes a certain amount of irrational behavior to obtain its results. I can search the closet if you want. Sorry I'm not more helpful, jsh --- fabio guillermo rojas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm teaching a course on the sociology of science and we read Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions. FYI, Kuhn says that science is characterized by paradigms - most science works from basic assumptions justified by model achievements. Scientific change occurs when anamolies - observations contradicting theory - undermine the paradigm and new ideas are adopted. Can someone provide me an example of an anamoly from the recent history of economics that led to a fundamental change in economic theory? Fabio __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: are real estate markets competitive?
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm also reminded that, like one friend of mine, people who work in small towns often buy an old farm house and live in it, while contracting out to some neighbor or farming friend to do a little bit of farming on the land the buyer doesn't use for residential purposes. Is that what they call gentleman farming? __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Gametheory.net
I bumped into this site which some may find interesting: www.gametheory.net It includes: Lecture Notes--Online notes for teaching game theory. Pop Culture--Game Theory in books and movies. News--Game theory in the news. Games--Fun activities related to game theory. Interactive Materials--Java applets and online games. Quizzes Tests--Evaluation materials, print and online. Books--Reviews of textbooks. Links--Other resources on the web. Enjoy! __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
study on whether phony degree helps??
Howdy, A few years ago I read in the Christian Science Monitor about a study that went approximately like this: The researchers compared income of those who had college degrees and evidence of having actually with those who claimed to have degrees but for whom the college had no records of attendance, i.e. phony degrees. They also looked at income of of students who went to college and earned no degree. What they found was that the degree itself had no significant impact, but instead a strong correlation existed between income earned and years attended. In other words, someone who attended for four years and didn't get a degree could expect to make as much as someone who went four years and got the degree as well. Does anybody have any idea who did this study or where I might find it? I've searched CSM with no luck, ditto for google. I don't have access to any academic resources like JSTOR (at least not locally, I have to drive about an hour to the nearest community college). Any help would be greatly appreciated. Best regards, jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
questions about dividend tax cut
Howdy,
I have some questions about the dividend tax cut
(elimination). Let's suppose that the elimination of
taxes on dividend income to stock holders is
instituded and it is a complete suprise to the public,
so that no adjustment can take place either in
expectation of it being passed, or after it is passed
but before it takes effect. Let's also assume that
growth opportunities are not an issue, so the price is
wholly dependent on dividends.
If the price of a stock is the PV of the dividend
stream into the future, then should there merely be a
one time jump in the value of a stock as a result?
More concretely, if the tax rate was T, then a
dividend was worth (1-T)D, where D is the amount of
the dividend. And the present value of the
perpetuity, i.e. the dividend stream, would be
(1-T)D/r, where r is the interest rate (right?). So
the price of the of the stock would be P=(1-T)D/r.
Now the suprise tax cut comes into effect. The price
of the stock should jump to P'=(1-0)D/r=D/r. Thus,
there should be merely a one off jump in the share
price by the amount P'-P=[D/r]-[(1-T)D/r]=(D+T)/r.
Is this correct? Should the tax rate on dividend
income be included in the pricing of the shares, and
should we see a jump in prices? I suppose that
intstead of T:=tax rate on dividends, I could have
used T:=Td-To, where Td is the tax rate on dividends
and To is the tax rate on some other investment.
Would that be correct?
Okay. Assuming the above is correct, then the rate of
return on a stock should increase from (1-T)D/P to
D/P'. The increase in the rate of return then is
=[(1-T)D/P]-[D/P']
=[D/(D/r)]-[(1-T)D/{(1-T)D/r}]
=r-r
=0.
So the increase in the rate of return on stocks should
be equal to zero. Stocks are no more profitable after
the tax cut than before--it shouldn't help the market
at all.
If dividend income tax is not priced into the stock,
then again, there should be no change in the
profitability of stocks, because P=P' and 1-0=1.
The same should be true if T:=Td-To, correct?
Is my conclusion that the dividend tax cut should have
no impact on the rate of return of stocks correct? Is
the only effect of such a tax cut to provide a once
off permanent increase in the wealth of stock holders
as the price jumps from P to P', thus stimulating the
economy solely through the wealth effect of that
change?
If this conclusion is correct, how will loosening the
two assumptions, first that the cut is publicly known
before it takes effect and second that the present
value of growth opportunities are taken into account
in share pricing, affect the conclusion? Will
loosening the second assumption change corporate
behavior viz. investing in growth vs. paying
dividends? What should we expect that change to be?
Has this question already been asked on this list and
I missed it?
Curiously yours,
jsh
__
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Re: questions about dividend tax cut
--- john hull [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now the suprise tax cut comes into effect. The price of the stock should jump to P'=(1-0)D/r=D/r. Thus, there should be merely a one off jump in the share price by the amount P'-P=[D/r]-[(1-T)D/r]=(D+T)/r. Mistake #1, (D+T)/r is greater than the price itself. I don't think the rest depends on that. Back to the drawing board for that part. Sorry about that. -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Babynomics
Fabio- You may profit from visiting the page of an old prof. of mine at Oregon, http://harbaugh.uoregon.edu/index.htm , specifically, his Nanoeconomics? Pedianomics? The Economic Behavior of Children Homepage, http://nanoeconomics.org/ . I'm not sure what help it will be, but it's the best I can do. Best regards, jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: News Coverage and bad economics
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...shall I just unsubscribe then? No. Although when you go on about statists you do sound a little like Marxists when they go on about captialists. :) -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Lester's extreme compatibility thesis
What prevents a particular private law enforcement agency from engaging in mob-style protection? For example, in Friedman's Anarchy and Efficient Law, he states that, The most obvious and least likely is direct violence-a mini-war between my agency, attempting to arrest the burglar, and his agency attempting to defend him from arrest. A somewhat more plausible scenario is negotiation. Since warfare is expensive, agencies might include in the contracts they offer their customers a provision under which they are not obliged to defend customers against legitimate punishment for their actual crimes. (http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Anarchy_and_Eff_Law/Anarchy_and_Eff_Law.html) First, if war were so expensive relative to peace why does it exist? Maybe peace is more expensive, in terms of risk for example, than open warfare. Second, I might say that going to war isn't expensive, going to war against ME is expensive, because I'm going to recruit the demons who walk the earth. I won't put Charles Manson in jail, I'll put him on the payroll. This is an honest question, one that has been vexing me. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Politics and Game Theory
I don't know the answer to the problem as you stated it. I did, however, recently work for a state Senate campaign and asked alot of questions. One thing they told me was that negative advertising only puts doubt in the mind of the unaligned voters regarding the opponent rather than winning any voter's support. As an example, here in Michigan, Dick Posthumus was trailing Jennifer Granholm in the polls by quite a bit. The Posthumus campaign ran no positive Posthumus ads for quite some time, instead running negative ads about Granholm in the hopes of getting unaligned voters to abandon her. Once the polls showed that alot of unaligned voters had become undecided again, the Posthumus campaign started in on the positive Posthumus ads to win those undecided voters over. In the end the results were close. I know that doesn't help solve the problem as you worded it, but perhaps the payoffs are different from what your example assumed. So any candidate trailing in the polls will run negative ads to make the unaligned voters become undecided again. Once that is accomplished, all candidates must begin competition all over again for those votes. With three viable candidates, I suppose the two trailing ones must play a game of brinkmanship, waiting for the other to go negative, and cash in on the newly dislodged voters. -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
behaviorism economics
I've been wondering how something from the world of behavioral psychology would fit the world of economics. The spanking article brought it to the surface. Positive reinforcement means that you give something good after a behavior that you wish to occur with greater frequency. Hence positive, you apply something, and reinforcement, you reinforce the behavior. If I get an animal, let's say a rat, to do something for reinforcement, e.g. food, I can start to increase the number of times the behavior needs to be performed before giving the food. So if my rat presses a lever once and I give it food, I can wait until it presses twice before giving it food once the reinforcement for pressing once is well established. Once press twice=food is established, I can increase it to thrice, and so on. So for a set quantity of food, I can get increasing amounts of lever presses from my rat! This is not unique. Suppose a kid screams once and the parents gives it candy. Then the parent decides not to cave so the kid screams a couple of times and the parent gives in and gives it candy. Now the screaming behavior is stronger. Next time the parent decides to not cave in, the kid will scream even longer. If the parent caves in after an even longer time, the screaming will be even more strongly reinforced, and so on. What I'm wondering is, does this seem interesting from an economic point of view? Is this something worth modeling, and how would it be modeled? Best regards, jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
anyone speak Swedish?--not econ
Hi, Sorry about the intrusion. I keep getting email from Target in Swedish, at least I think it is since the return address ends in a .se. Anyway, I can't read it to figure out how to unsubscribe. Can anyone help me? Best wishes, -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Mach. quote--off topic??
Hey, Since Brian isn't here to keep us in line, I decided to change the subject heading to make it easy to identify and delete if one so chooses. --- Akilesh Ayyar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi there. I'm not sure where the Machiavelli quote comes from, but are you sure he wasn't arguing, by a kind of appeal to majority opinion, that there is no debt to people who have done no wrong? Good question. I almost panicked when I read it. I'm reading it from Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses translated by Leslie J. Walker, Penguin Classics 1983. Page 154. Let me reproduce the paragraph: In addition to the difficulty already mentioned [in a state going from servitude to freedom] there is yet another. It is that the government of a state which has become free evokes factions which are hostile, not factions which are friendly. To such hostile factions will belong all those who held preferment under the tyrannical government and grew fat on the riches of its prince, since, now that they are deprived of these emoluments, they cannot live contented, but are compelled, each of them, to try to restore the tyranny in order to regain their authority. Nor, as I have said, will such a government acquire supporters who are friendly, because a self-governing state assigns honours and reward only for honest and determinate reasons, and, apart from this, rewards and honours no one; and when one acquires honours or advantages which appear to have been deserved, one does not acknowledge any obligation towards those responsible for the remuneration. Furthermore, that common advantage which results from a self-governing state is not recognized by anybody so long as it is possessed - the possibility of enjoying what one has, freely and without incurring suspicion for instance, the assurance that one's wife and children will be respected, the absence of fear for oneself - for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong.(Any typos are my own.) Since he asserts the existence of a common advantage and that no one recognizes it, I think I did the passage justice. Would you agree? I certainly don't want to do violence to an author's work. I've heard that Walker's translation isn't the best, but I've not encountered any others. Best regards, jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: A Short Review of *Hard Heads, Soft Hearts*
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 'Actually it would be interesting to hear someone delinate a clear distinction between taxation on money and taxation in kind.'...I'm inclined to think there is no clear distinction,which is why I asked the original author of the comment (js I believe) to provide one. I don't think it was me, I think it was in response to something I wrote. Aren't payments in kind worth less than payments in cash, when the value is a significant portion of one's income, because they impose the consumption decision (for lack of a better term) on the individual? I thought I remember learning how that was modeled, but it was a while ago. If that is true, then maybe taxes in kind may be analogous? Just a guess. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Median voter thm. Elementary question
Howdy, I've never really studied the Median Voter Theorem. Recently I read where someone claimed that the U.S. political system was designed to keep the two parties nearly identical by keeping other parties out. I assumed that the reason they Dems Reps seem so close may be because of the MVT--they want the middle guy's vote. So then I thought, suppose a third party were let into the race, does the MVT still hold w/ for 3 or more candidates? Does it weaken as more candidates are added, or do they all bunch toward the center for for any n2, where n is the number of candidates? Does anybody know of a good discussion of it online? -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Bottle Deposits
I'm in Michigan. I could have sworn that there was a one cent deposit in California. Maybe I'm mistaken. -jsh --- Anton Sherwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: john hull wrote: I have nothing economic to offer, but only the observation that the effects of having bottle deposits have been striking. I recall as a kid that litter in the form of bottles and cans was ubiquitous, now returnable are rarely seen as litter. Bottles that don't have deposits associated with them, such as bottled water, I see not infrequently on the ground. In California, I have no idea where to turn my bottles in. (Haven't noticed whether the distribution of litter has changed; the deposit law came in two or three years after I moved here.) Where are you? -- Anton Sherwood, http://www.ogre.nu/ __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: A Short Review of *Hard Heads, Soft Hearts*
I apologize for being flip. I hope I did at least get a smile. Seriously, I think that I tend to believe, and I think what Machiavelli was driving at, is that in a free society we all agree to participate peacefully and not try to usurp power and authority. The 2000 election was a good example, in my limited judgement, because it seems that in many places (and eras) an event like that could have easily occasioned serious violence. The logical leap to the case of the bum I assume is my own. I cannot ask Machiavelli how he feels about it. When I see a bum begging, it seems to me that he could just as easily prey on innocent people as pray for their goodwill. Of course, one could argue that the penalty for crime is severe and it is better to be an honest beggar than an inmate. I question the weight of this argument since crime (for lack of a better term) seems to be endemic to the human condition. The peaceful beggar doesn't seem to benefit too greatly from society's largesse. Through a series of bad decisions, a few strokes of bad luck, or an inability to obtain adequate mental health care, inter alia, he has become homeless and remedy has not been obtained--since he remains homeless. Yet he still participates in civic society. Were I in his place, I'm not so sure I'd be so civil. This does not make the bum superior to me. I could easily view him as a non-productive blight offensive to the eye and (yuck!) nose, and seek to have him banished through my influence with the polity or by threats and harassment. But I don't. Hence, I consider the debt to be reciprocal. Does that make sense? It's one of those things that is difficult for me to put into words. To put another way, every civil member of a free and civic society owes a debt to every other civil member seems to me to be a guideline far superior to the Golden Rule. -jsh --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In a message dated 12/3/02 2:51:56 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 'As Machiavelli pointed out, no one is willing to admit the debt that they incure to those who choose option #1. -jsh' What debt is that? Exactly. No, seriously, how do I benefit others by begging? Do I give them a needed sense of superiority? Or do I serve as an excuse for government to steal your money and give it to bureaucrats in the name of helping me? __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: A Short Review of *Hard Heads, Soft Hearts*
--- Jacob W Braestrup [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My point with the example is this: when there are so many things in life that are blatantly unfairly (if you believe in equality) distributed among us, [1]why this preoccupation with wealth / income - [2]especially when it is conceeded that effeorts to redistribute existing income / wealth will inevitably reduce future income / wealth. 1: My guess: Because wealth income are relatively easy to measure objectively, as opposed to mate satisfaction. So it is an easy proxy. It seems to be a fairly good one, too, since money is a numeraire good. 2: Does the logic/math of the 2nd Fund. Welfare Thm. imply that lump-sum redistribution, so that a more favorable market outcome obtains, necessarily lowers output? Optimization is still a calculus problem after all. -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
RE: A Short Review of *Hard Heads, Soft Hearts*
--- Grey Thomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (1)you can choose to be homeless, take no jobs nor responsibility, and peacefully beg from others who, if it's voluntary, can give to you (or not) with no moral problems. (This includes living with parents or other loved ones, from whom receipt of resources isn't quite begging from strangers.) (2) You can become a thief, and take other's property by force/ fraud/ in secret -- illegally, until you get caught punished. As Machiavelli pointed out, no one is willing to admit the debt that they incure to those who choose option #1. -jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: A Short Review of *Hard Heads, Soft Hearts*
--- Alypius Skinner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But what if this ugly guy isn't rich--oh! You mean pecuniary benefits taken from *other* people--purely through voluntary donations of course. After all, you consider force to be (morally?) bad. I'm just looking for some consistency here. That's funny. I'm assuming that I don't really need to justify why I feel there is a difference between taxation sexual slavery. -jsh John Hull wrote: --- Jacob W Braestrup [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Would we ever say: Uhhh, this guy is ugly and no good, bad mannered and ill tempered - but, it's no fault of his own, and he REALLY doesn't enjoy the competition for sexual partner forced upon him by society, so why don't we just force this beautiful girl to have sex with him Um, no. Force would be bad. You could sweeten the deal for her, however, using perhaps pecuinary benefits to level the field. But what if this ugly guy isn't rich--oh! You mean pecuniary benefits taken from *other* people--purely through voluntary donations of course. After all, you consider force to be (morally?) bad. I'm just looking for some consistency here. But what happens if there aren't enough people who are willing to donate? ~Alypius Skinner __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: A Short Review of *Hard Heads, Soft Hearts*
--- david friedman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Suppose we instead assume that everyone has the same ability to convert leisure into income I'm not disputing the logic. The assumption does seem awfully unrealistic. All zygotes are created equal, except the ones with the wrong number of chromosones (oh, and maybe not some with nasty genetic predispositions), but the family one comes into along with a host of factors beyond one's control do play a role in affecting who one becomes, including the ability to convert leisure into income. -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: A Short Review of *Hard Heads, Soft Hearts*
--- Jacob W Braestrup [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 'John Hull wrote:...' Assuming you are not just joking, this implies that things such as ability to atract mates should be taken into account when redistributing income today. Mostly joking. I was more concerned with the idea that forcing marriage on people was the only way to level the playing field for mates. It does seem that fincanial security luxury goods really can sweeten the deal, at least for some people. That's not to say that such a program would be practical. However, ugly people do get shafted in life. If that could be reasonably accounted for as a component in a redistribution scheme that met the approval of the polity, then I probably wouldn't oppose it. ...it would be unfair to take money from a rich, ugly man (or woman)... They'd just pay less in taxes than a rich, beautiful person. -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: A Short Review of *Hard Heads, Soft Hearts*
--- david friedman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My point is that moral worthiness isn't being predicated of the newborn infant or fertilized ovum but of the adult that it turned into. Whatever the reasons are that I am cruel and dishonest, cruel and dishonest people deserve to have bad things happen to them. That, at least, is a moral intuition that many people find convincing. Well put. I'm not an existentialist, but I do agree to at least some extent that we make our own moral choices. My point is merely that, since some of who we become is the product of things outside of our control, even hard-hearted* policies should have a soft edge. -jsh *I don't like the term hard-hearted. It reminds me of PETA: c'mon! Is anybody really for the UNethical treatment of animals? Or do we just have different standards of ethical? __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: A Short Review of *Hard Heads, Soft Hearts*
--- david friedman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My point was that, while the first cause, considered alone, leads to the conventional conclusion that we can increase utility by transferring from rich to poor, the second leads to the opposite conclusion. Oh, okay. My bad. Sorry about that. -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: A Short Review of *Hard Heads, Soft Hearts*
--- Jacob W Braestrup [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Would we ever say: Uhhh, this guy is ugly and no good, bad mannered and ill tempered - but, it's no fault of his own, and he REALLY doesn't enjoy the competition for sexual partner forced upon him by society, so why don't we just force this beautiful girl to have sex with him Um, no. Force would be bad. You could sweeten the deal for her, however, using perhaps pecuinary benefits to level the field. That's one possibility. Whichever you choose, hurry up! I need the help. -jsh Wei Dai wrote: People don't mind competition if it's voluntary, but you can't opt out of economic competition. I think it's a necessary evil, not something to be desired for its own sake. Clearly some people do enjoy competition, and they should certainly be able to participate, but what's the point of forcing competition on people who hate it, besides efficiency? While it is may be true that many people do not enjoy the economic competition forced upon them by society (but they surely benefit from the positive externalities of this competition), is this any ground for political action?? There are many other forced kind of competition, that we (thankfully) do not consider grounds for redistribution - like the competition for mates. (I think I have stolen this point blatantly from Nozik, sorry). Would we ever say: Uhhh, this guy is ugly and no good, bad mannered and ill tempered - but, it's no fault of his own, and he REALLY doesn't enjoy the competition for sexual partner forced upon him by society, so why don't we just force this beautiful girl to have sex with him I DON'T THINK SO! And if you look at it, the case for redistribution is in fact stronger in the case of sexual partners than in the case of economic competition, since the loosers in the latter game, will at least benefit from the positive externalities of economic competition, while the loosers of the sex-game will get NOTHING! - jacob braestrup = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: A Short Review of *Hard Heads, Soft Hearts*
--- david friedman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To put it differently, once you take the determinist position And if we take the free will position, can't we just as easily come to the defense of Aristotlean (sp?) physics where a thrown rock moves of its own impetus until it 'decides' that it no longer has impetus and falls straight to the ground? Acknowledging that humans are the products of their environments, and allowing for that, does not imply that a radical determinist approach to life is necessary. At least, it isn't obvious to me. -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
John Rawls died
www.iht.com/articles/78308.html NEW YORK John Rawls, 82, the American political theorist whose work gave new meaning and resonance to the concepts of justice and liberalism, died Sunday at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts. . His wife, Margaret, said he had been incapacitated since suffering a stroke in 1995. . The publication of Rawls's book A Theory of Justice in 1971 was perceived as a watershed moment in modern philosophy and came at a time of furious national debate over the Vietnam War and the fight for racial equality. Not only did it veer from the main current of philosophical thought, which was logic and linguistic analysis, it also stimulated a revival of attention to moral philosophy. Rawls made a sophisticated argument for a new concept of justice, based on simple fairness. . Before Rawls, the concept of utilitarianism, meaning that a society ought to work for the greatest good of the greatest number of people, held sway as the standard for social justice. He wrote that this approach could ride roughshod over the rights of minorities and meant that the liberty of an individual was of only secondary importance compared with the majority's interests. . His new theory began with two principles. The first was that each individual has a right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with the same liberty for others. The second was that social and economic inequalities are just only to the extent that they serve to promote the well-being of the least advantaged. . But how could people agree to structure a society in accordance with these two principles? Rawls's response was to revive the concept of the social contract developed earlier by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau. . For people to make the necessary decisions to arrive at the social contract, Rawls introduced the concept of a veil of ignorance. This meant that each person must select rules to live by without knowing whether he would be prosperous or destitute in the society governed by the rules he chose. He called this the original position. . An individual in the original position would choose the society in which the worst possible position - which, for all he knows, would be his - was better than the worst possible position in any other system. The result, Rawls argued, was that the least fortunate would be best protected. The lowest rung of society would be higher. Though inequalities would not be abolished by favoring the neediest, they would be minimized, he argued. In later works, Rawls expanded his arguments to suggest how a pluralistic society could be just to all its members. His idea was that the public could reason things out, provided that comprehensive religious or philosophical doctrines are avoided. Like Kant, whom he revered, Rawls believed that as liberal democracies capable of such reasonableness spread, wars would be avoided. . Eugene Rostow, 89, led agency on arms control in Reagan era . WASHINGTON:Eugene Rostow, 89, a legal scholar who helped create Yale Law School's current eminence and became a vigorous defender of the Vietnam War as a senior State Department official, died Monday at an assisted-living residence in Alexandria, Virginia. . Like his more famous younger brother, Walt, who was President Lyndon Johnson's national security adviser and an architect of the administration's Vietnam strategy, Rostow, who served as undersecretary of state for political affairs, was part of a generation of hawkish Democrats. Deeply influenced by World War II, they saw fighting communism in Southeast Asia as central to a policy of global containment. . The Brooklyn-born son of a Socialist, who named him for the party's presidential candidate, Eugene Victor Debs, Rostow exemplified the strain of hard-headed Democratic thinking on foreign policy and defense that flowered in the 1960s. He ended his public career as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Reagan administration. He was also an affable and erudite scholar, with a taste for bow ties and vests, fine food and wine, who as dean of Yale Law School from 1955 to 1965 built up its endowment. He was renowned for recruiting more than a dozen top legal scholars in 1956, during a period of turmoil at the school over the lack of promotions for faculty members who had clerked for liberal justices.(NYT) __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Limited Liability for Vaccine Makers
William Dickens [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Can your friend explain why vaccines are different from other drugs? While I'm certainly not qualified to negotiate that legal minefield, may I guess? I'd say that a drug is intended to fix an existing problem, whereas a vaccine applies a dangerous element to prevent possible future risk. Thus one who gets sick from a vaccine* can claim that absent the vaccine, the illness would not have occured; however, with other drugs the person was already sick and something had to be done. It sounds like a stretch, to be sure, but then the claim that putting a car in drive and pushing the accelerator literally through the floor board is consistent with an automatically accelerating car is a bit of a stretch as well. Yet Audi lost to such a claim. -jsh *Here's an unsettling tidbit: But there would be panic [from smallpox terror scares]. Mass vaccination would be demanded, and politicians would find such calls very difficult to resist. They should remember, however, that when millions of people were vaccinated in response to the outbreak in Britain in 1962, nearly as many died from its complications as from smallpox itself. www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n17/penn01_.html __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
Re: Cost vs. Price or Flatland
Suppose I can spend $10 on a widget that I want or
invest the $10 at the best possible rate. The
invested money will grow to, let's say, $100 in some
period of time. But that $10 isn't worth $100 today,
it's only worth $10 today. The widget and the
investment have the same** value today, right? Even
though I won't be able to resell the widget for $100
in the future, I do get the use of the widget, as
opposed to my invested $10 which doesn't do anything
for me until I cash it in. So the $225,000 you could
obtain on your death-bed is only worth $250 today, the
same as the plane ticket. And if you buy the ticket,
you get to go to Hawaii, to boot. That's not to say
that one shouldn't plan for the future, but one
shouldn't sell out the present for the benefit of the
future, either.
If someone is willing to make a bet with you, you
should wonder if maybe she knows something you don't.
I don't think the same is true with sales bargains.
Hal Varian briefly mentions his theory of sales in
this paper: www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/how.pdf
. I don't have the resources to locate the Theory of
Sales paper itself.
--jsh
**Okay, okay. They won't have the same value if I'm
not the marginal purchaser, or whatever.
--- Jonathan Kalbfeld [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
I recently obtained my series 7 license, but during
the six weeks of
studying, a great deal of my material involved
economic impact of various
fiscal and monetary policy, and also of course the
laws of compounding
interest.
I think I figured out the problem with society
today. Business prays on
countless individuals who can not distinguish the
difference between cost
and price. Of course there's no need to define
those terms on here, but
it occurred to me that while I can spend $250 on a
plane ticket now, I
will have paid $225,000 for that plane ticket by the
time I am dead.
This has become a very big problem for me, because I
don't want to spend
any money. Not one red cent. I don't enjoy
anything because all I can
see any more is opportunity cost. I have gotten to
the point in my life
where I can't enjoy anything--probably not even a
weekend in Hawaii
because I see it as a missed investment opportunity.
I look at every single bargain or sale with the
eyes of a skeptic,
knowing that the counter-party in the transaction
must have a reason for
what they are doing. They must see this item as
worth less than what they
are selling it for so why should I buy it for the
sale price?
I feel much like the main character of Flatland who
is suddenly bumped
into the third dimension by a strange object, gets
catapulted above the
normal 2-dimensional plane, and can never look at
his world the same way.
Does anyone else feel like this?
jonathan
--
Jonathan KalbfeldM268@6]U('!L87D@=AIR!M
ThoughtWave Technologies LLC
(v) +1 415 386 UNIX 97-S86=E()A8VMW87)DRP@:
UNIX, Networking, Programming
__
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Re: Incentives
Psychologists have conducted experiments where the subjects are (randomly) split into two categories. They both perform the same task, perhaps a memory drill, and then one group gets paid money for participating and the other doesn't. After the experiment, i.e. the task that the subjects were told was the experiment, the subjects are interviewed. One of the questions asks how much they enjoyed the experiment. Subjects who were paid money enjoy the task significantly less than those who aren't. The theory behind this is that when a person does the task, their mind needs a reason to avoid cognitive dissonance. When they are paid, the money acts as the reason; when they aren't paid, enjoying the task acts as the reason. To put another way, one's mind imposes enjoyment ex post, so that it doesn't have to cope with the disconnect of doing something for no good reason and disliking doing it. Hazing rituals are supposed to perform a similar function. If one puts up with the hazing, it must be for a good reason. Therefore, the group that does the hazing, the frat, military academy, or whatever, is seen in a better light to avoid the cognitive dissonance. Don't judge this theory based on my explanation of it. As I've noted before, I'm a clumsy writer at best. But that is the theory as I recall it. Whether grades fit the theory, I haven't a clue. Hope that helps, -jsh --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The following appeared in an article on grade inflation in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Grades motivate (a fallacy according to the article). With the exception of orthodox behaviorists, psychologists have come to realize that people can exhibit qualitatively different kinds of motivation: intrinsic, in which the task itself is seen as valuable, and extrinsic, in which the task is just a means to the end of gaining a reward or escaping a punishment. The two are not only distinct but often inversely related. Scores of studies have demonstrated, for example, that the more people are rewarded, the more they come to lose interest in whatever had to be done in order to get the reward. (That conclusion is essentially reaffirmed by the latest major meta-analysis on the topic: a review of 128 studies, published in 1999 by Edward L. Deci, Richard Koestner, and Richard Ryan.) Is anyone on the list familiar with this literature? It sounds like they are saying that incentives don't matter. Cyril Morong __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site http://webhosting.yahoo.com
RE: Increase in the flow of communication since 1970
--- Grey Thomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm sorry that I didn't immediately find the internet map showing the transfer of giga- and tera- bytes of data. I've seen such before, such info maps certainly exist. I've found a story I heard about, though it may be talking about stock rather than flow. Here are two web sites with news stories: www.emc.com/news/in_depth_archive/10192000_berkeley.jsp www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=398206 But what I find particularly noteworty is this fantastic map of internet relationships: http://www.orgnet.com/netindustry.html discussed elsewhere as: A jiggly power chart shows who really rules your world I saw this on Techtv's The Screen Savers: www.touchgraph.com -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive greatest hits videos http://launch.yahoo.com/u2
Re: Self-assesment vs. Rationality
--- fabio guillermo rojas wrote: how much of investing behavior is based on self-assesment vs. rational expectations? It seems like the difference between the return on self-managed investments vs. the market, let's say, should measure something meaningful like the value of being an executive monkey vs. being a yoked monkey (salmon.psy.plym.ac.uk/year1/stresbeh.htm and www.betteryou.com/feature.htm, for example). -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive greatest hits videos http://launch.yahoo.com/u2
Re: Fw: The Economics of Suicide Bombing
Interesting article, thanks! A couple of months ago I watched a documentary that was on either Frontline--World or the National Geographic Channel, I can't recall which (sorry) about the suicide bombings of the Tamil Tigers. The Tigers aren't Muslim, they're primarily Hindu with a Christian minority, and nothing was mentioned about their families getting paid. Yet the Tigers have commited over 200 suicide bombings as compared to the 50-55 for Hamas and The Islamic Jihad combined (www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=373). Interestingly, the same article notes that the terrorist suicide attack is quite old: The phenomenon appeared among the Jewish Sicaris in the 1st century According to O.N. Mehrotra at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi, the violence seems to be the result of the minority Tamils not being able to get their language accepted as an official language through non-violent means when the Sinhalese majority adopted Sinhala only as an official national language in place of English. As the situation became more grim, the frustrated youth came to believe that they could not achieve any tangible solution to the problem without adopting violent means to achieve their cherished goal of independence (www.idsa-india.org/an-jan-9.html). Frustration seems to be a powerful motivator. Sometimes it's justified, more often it's not, but that's not the point. Nor is the point that terrorism cannot be fruitfully viewed from an economic vantage point (the first article I referenced also notes that in the 1990s, the Hizballah drastically reduced the number of suicide attacks due to rational cost-benefit considerations). Rather I just want to undermine, to some small extent, the idea that suicide bombers can be understood in terms of religion or monetary payoffs. I suspect that in the case of the article Mr. Skinner (Crazy Al?) sent along, frustration at political intransigence (www.gush-shalom.org/archives/oslo.html, for example) is a more powerful economic variable than 72 dark-eyed virgins or mom's new apartment. Thanks for the soapbox, -jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do you Yahoo!? U2 on LAUNCH - Exclusive greatest hits videos http://launch.yahoo.com/u2
Re: (book review)The Case against Government Science
--- Francois-Rene Rideau [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Obviously, the government didn't forecast the unpredictable path of discovery any more than the private sector. Non sequitur. No. I was using the story as neither a premise nor a conclusion to an argument about funding sources. It seemed as though the discussion was starting to be framed in terms of useful vs. useless science, and I wanted to nip it in the bud with an interesting example. --- Gil Guillory [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sorry so long. I enjoy reading all the posts, even the long ones. I would also like to raise an objection to the supposed distinction between basic and applied research. This is, at best, a...continuum with a fuziness akin to the economic distinction between goods of the first order and goods of higher orders. I feel like I'm in a Monty Python sketch. Since I'm a clumsy writer at best, I will accept defeat. The argument is much better presented in a chapter from this list's namesake. That's not an argument from authority! I'm just pointing to an interesting idea to which I cannot do justice. Best regards, jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do you Yahoo!? Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos More http://faith.yahoo.com
Re: (book review)The Case against Government Science
From: Warnick, Walt [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the natural sciences, basic research at universities tends to be funded by the Federal government... Basic research funded by corporations is very small. Which hits on my original remark: if we have two types of scientists, Basic Applied, and if business is the only funder of research, then the firms will be hiring both types since the Basics will portray themselves as Applieds to get jobs. With gov't. funding basic research, then the Basics get to do basic research at taxpayer expense, but the firms can apply the Applieds to applied research at greater efficiency because there are no Basics getting in the way. The economic benefits of this separation outweighs the cost of paying for basic research. The world is better off. That's not to say that basic research is not valuable, but it evidently follows strange and unpredictable paths. The Nobel winning chemist Dudly Herschback traced the path of work starting with Otto Stern 75 years ago on molecular rays (or beams) to test a prediction of quantum physics. It lead to the discovery of the laser, radio-astronomy, and nuclear magnetic resonance which lead to the MRI. Chemists who wanted to study crossed beams layed the groundwork for the discovery of the Buckyball, with the study that discovered it being motivated by studying interstellar spectra. And the Buckyball, in turn, may prove a key to shutting down an enzyme that governs the HIV virus' replication, not to mention the value it has as a strong and lightweight material. He ends the story by noting that, No funding agency would find plausable a research proposal requesting support on supersonic beams or interstellar spectra as an approach to AIDS. But many such historical paths can be traced that celebrate hybridizing discoveries from seemingly unrelated patches of scientific gardens. -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos More http://faith.yahoo.com
Re: (book review)The Case against Government Science
I was given to the impression that one of the benefits of gov't funded science was that it creates separating equilibria such that the okay, but not ground breaking, scientists don't muck-up the works at ground breaking institutions by misrepresenting themselves and getting hired. That the expense of cushy jobs for okay scientists was more than offset by the gains from getting only the best scientists to go to Bell Labs, or MIT, or wherever. The review didn't seem to indicate that that was addressed. -jsh --- Alypius Skinner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.cycad.com/cgi-bin/pinc/apr2000/books/ff_govscience.html The Case against Government Science The Economic Laws of Scientific Research Terence Kealey St. Martin's, New York, 1997 382 pp, paper ISBN 0-312-17306-7 Reviewed by Frank Forman Ayn Rand dramatized the case against government funding of science in Atlas Shrugged, but a dramatization is not evidence. The problem is that, according to standard economic theory, research is almost a perfect example of a pure public good, a good that once produced can be consumed by all without any possibility of exclusion by way of property-rights delimitation. Such goods will be underproduced in the market, since the producers can capture only the benefits of the research that they themselves use. Rational citizens, all of them, might very well empower the state to provide for the provision of research and other public goods. Not every citizen would actually benefit from each good so provided, but under a well-designed constitution, each citizen would presumably be better off as a result of constitutionally limited state provision of public goods than without it. This would mean unanimity of agreement-a social contract-and hence no initiation of force. But what about government funding of science? Nearly every scientific paper, it is true, seems to conclude with an appeal for funds for further research, but even so the case for public funding is accepted by nearly everyone except a few ideological extremists. Along comes a bombshell of a book by Terence Kealey, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, that argues that government funding of science at best displaces private funding and in fact diverts research into less productive channels. I am surprised that this book has not gotten much more attention from the free-market community. The book is essentially a history of science and its funding, with the number of pages per century increasing up to the present. The author argues that technology drives science, even basic science, just as much as the reverse, which is awfully reminiscent of John Galt and his motor. Kealey describes the work of several engineers and other practical men turned scientists, such as Carnot, Torricelli, Joule, Pasteur, and Mendel. He argues that most new technology comes from old technology. The book is highly instructive on matters of history and greatly entertaining to read. To wit: Laissez-faire works. The historical (and contemporary) evidence is compelling: the freer the markets and the lower the taxes, the richer the country grows. But laissez-faire fails to satisfy certain human needs. It fails the politician, who craves for power; it fails the socialist, who craves to impose equality on others; it fails the businessman, who craves for security; and it fails the anally fixated, who craves for order. It also fails the idle, the greedy, and the sluttish, who crave for a political system that allows them to acquire others' wealth under the due process of law. This dreadful collection of inadequates, therefore, will coalesce on dirigisme, high taxes and a strong state (p. 260). Here are the three Laws of Funding for Civil RD, based upon comparing different countries and across time: 1.. The percentage of national GDP spent increases with national GDP per capita. 2.. Public and private funding displace each other. 3.. Public and private displacements are not equal: public funds displace more than they do themselves provide (p. 245). But it is not just the funds that are displaced; so is their effectiveness, as a rule, from projects that have a promise to become useful to those that only keep scientists busy. Furthermore, many wealthy men generously fund science and are free to choose genuine innovators and not those merely expert in filling out grant applications. Kealey describes many gentleman amateurs, the greatest being Darwin. And he compares the quality of private and public medical research in England during this century in detail, with the advantage going to the former. Kealey also notes that businesses have to fund their own science departments even if they would rather let other businesses perform the research and free-ride off it: it takes pretty good scientists to be able to understand what the really good ones are up to. And
Re: Ig Nobels
This year's Ig Nobel prizes have been announced as well, www.improb.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2002: The 2002 Ig Nobel Prize Winners BIOLOGY Norma E. Bubier, Charles G.M. Paxton, Phil Bowers, and D. Charles Deeming of the United Kingdom, for their report Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain. [REFERENCE: Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches (Struthio camelus) Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain, Norma E. Bubier, Charles G.M. Paxton, P. Bowers, D.C. Deeming, British Poultry Science, vol. 39, no. 4, September 1998, pp. 477-481.] PHYSICS Arnd Leike of the University of Munich, for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the mathematical Law of Exponential Decay. [REFERENCE: Demonstration of the Exponential Decay Law Using Beer Froth, Arnd Leike, European Journal of Physics, vol. 23, January 2002, pp. 21-26.] INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH Karl Kruszelnicki of The University of Sydney, for performing a comprehensive survey of human belly button lint -- who gets it, when, what color, and how much. CHEMISTRY Theo Gray of Wolfram Research, in Champaign, Illinois, for gathering many elements of the periodic table, and assembling them into the form of a four-legged periodic table table. MATHEMATICS K.P. Sreekumar and the late G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University, India, for their analytical report Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants. [REFERENCE: Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants (Elephas maximus indicus), K.P. Sreekumar and G. Nirmalan, Veterinary Research Communications, vol. 14, no. 1, 1990, pp. 5-17.] LITERATURE Vicki L. Silvers of the University of Nevada-Reno and David S. Kreiner of Central Missouri State University, for their colorful report The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension. [ PUBLISHED IN: Reading Research and Instruction, vol. 36, no. 3, 1997, pp. 217-23.] PEACE Keita Sato, President of Takara Co., Dr. Matsumi Suzuki, President of Japan Acoustic Lab, and Dr. Norio Kogure, Executive Director, Kogure Veterinary Hospital, for promoting peace and harmony between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual, a computer-based automatic dog-to-human language translation device. HYGEINE Eduardo Segura, of Lavakan de Aste, in Tarragona, Spain, for inventing a washing machine for cats and dogs. ECONOMICS The executives, corporate directors, and auditors of Enron, Lernaut Hauspie [Belgium], Adelphia, Bank of Commerce and Credit International [Pakistan], Cendant, CMS Energy, Duke Energy, Dynegy, Gazprom [Russia], Global Crossing, HIH Insurance [Australia], Informix, Kmart, Maxwell Communications [UK], McKessonHBOC, Merrill Lynch, Merck, Peregrine Systems, Qwest Communications, Reliant Resources, Rent-Way, Rite Aid, Sunbeam, Tyco, Waste Management, WorldCom, Xerox, and Arthur Andersen, for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world. [NOTE: all companies are US-based unless otherwise noted.] MEDICINE Chris McManus of University College London, for his excruciatingly balanced report, Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture. [PUBLISHED IN: Nature, vol. 259, February 5, 1976, p. 426.] I didn't predict any of these, especially the one in mathematics. -jsh p.s. Here's the one for econ. in 2001: ECONOMICS Joel Slemrod, of the University of Michigan Business School, and Wojciech Kopczuk, of University of British Columbia, for their conclusion that people find a way to postpone their deaths if that that would qualify them for a lower rate on the inheritance tax. [REFERENCE:Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. W8158, March 2001.] Cool. __ Do you Yahoo!? Faith Hill - Exclusive Performances, Videos More http://faith.yahoo.com
soviet economists
Howdy, Here's an interesting quote on one of the diffuculties of a planned economy, from Robert Conquest's Reflections on a Ravaged Century, W.W. Norton, 2000, pg 102-103: Soviet economists, as soon as they got the chance, pointed out that the problem of setting prices was insoluble. Twenty-four to twenty-five million industrial prices alone per annum, each backed by thousands of pages of documentation, had to be handled by the State Commission on Prices. What a pickle! -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? New DSL Internet Access from SBC Yahoo! http://sbc.yahoo.com
Re: Charity and Races as Complements
--- Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is a confused about economics explanation They could spend the same effort they spent training for the race and running it doing their usual kind of job That's a good point. Of course, people who are salaried can't get a few extra bucks by staying late at the office since they're salaried. Wage earners really don't have that option, if every job I've ever had is any indication, since taking overtime is generally regarded as a cardinal sin except when specifically mandated by the company. They could get part-time jobs during their normal jogging time, but I don't see many help wanted ads asking for someone to work for seven hours a week. You'll have to convince me that the extra-work option is viable. They could sell Amway or Mary Kay for seven hours a week, but then they'd give up that good healthy exercise. If they're going to exercise anyway, then running isn't much sacrifice, as I suggested. Best regards, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com
Re: Feral Children
Good point, Anton. Thanks! -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com
Re: Feral Children
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is there a critical period for language acquisition? Yup. Very early on all infants make all the sounds of all human languages (I think they might be called phonemes). Anyway, they get culled by imitating the parents. Hence, it's so difficult for Japanese to say L, for example. Also, language acquisition is hardwired, sort of like the way chicks imprint their mothers. If you miss that window then you're going to have real trouble. That's why kids learn new languages so easily. This window closes around puberty, if I recall correctly. What are the consequences of extreme social isolation in children regarding their abilities to develope complex forms of reasoning and abstract thinking? They've imposed extreme social isolation on apes and is devastating for the ape. But here's another study that shows the importance of stimulation. I can't recall the cite, but here goes: in a mental hospital a group of retarded infants was randomly split into two groups. One was treated as usual, whereas the experimental group played one-on-one with retarded teenage girls from the same hospital for a few hours a day. After two years, the difference in IQs were something like 30 points higher for the experimental group. In adulthood the difference was just as pronounced. The control group was pretty much all institutionalized, while a few lived on their own, etc. The experimental group pretty much all lived on their own, most had at least some college (I think) and one or two even had some graaduate school. So play with your kid is a big moral there I suppose. Best regards, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com
The Other Lane
Howdy, Why does it seem like the other lane in heavy traffic is always going faster? Depends on who you ask. Here's two contradictory answers with explanations. www.stat.duke.edu/chance/133.redelmeier.pdf plus.maths.org/issue17/features/traffic/index.html The first, by Redelmeier and Tibshirani, says it's an illusion. Put simplistically, one perceives the other lane as moving faster, even when it is in fact going slower, because during the times when it makes gains one spends more time being overtaken than when passing since passing cars are more spread out. They conducted experiments to back this up. On the other hand, Nick Bostrom says it really is going faster. He asserts that Redelmeier and Tibshirani are falling prey to the observation selection effect. Put simlistically, since passing cars are less densly packed than those being passed, any randomly chosen vehicle is most likley a vehicle being passed. Therefore, the other lane is moving faster. I hope you find these articles interesting, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com
Re: Median Voter and Sampling
--- fabio guillermo rojas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 4. Cognitive limitations: I'm no expert, but my hunch is that many people are only willing to get worked up over a small # of issues - taxes, abortion, immigration, defense... and the dedicated might add their favorites like gun control or affirmative action. Therefore, it's no risk to screw the voter on an issue as long as you don't do it on certain big issues. Therefore it's easy to get a list of dozens of issues and find a descrepancy - what's so puzzling about that? You mean litmus-test issues that people value above all else? Abortion is a good example. There seems to be alot of people who will choose to not vote for a candidate because of her stance on abortion, regardless of her stance on all other issues. So litmus-test issues could throw off the MVT because that issue decides who one will vote for before any other issue will be considered. I think this criticism fails because the winning candidate would be the candidate who chooses the median vector. That is, she chooses the median for the biggest litmus test issue, then the second biggest, and on down the line. Of course my criticism of your criticism would fail for issues that are under the radar of most people. At which point I would just be wasting bandwidth. But I do have a naive question: Is there a median voter for each issue, so that if there n issues, there can be up to n median voters? Or, is there only one median voter who satisfies the vector median as I described above? Can such a person be proven to exist, sort of like a voter version of the Ham Sandwich Theorem? Humbly yours, jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com
Re: Europe's worst ever floods linked to poor land management
Good points. Thanks. -jsh --- Fred Foldvary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- john hull [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... you seem to be suggesting that policy makers are benefiting the present at the expense of the future, yet couldn't one could accuse you of wanting to benefit the future at the expense of the present? One could accuse me thusly, but the accusation would not be warranted. My belief is that a pure free market would bias neither the present nor the future. It seems like the balanced position would be to accept the consequences of the 100 year flood for the benefit of 99 years of prosperity and growth. There can be too much investment in disaster prevention, but I have not seen any cost/benefit analysis indicating that the governmental river policies in Europe have been optimal. The same applies to US and Chinese policy. At any rate, if prosperity and growth are the goals, none of the European countries have tax and regulatory policies that maximize it, so the evidence is that there are other goals and preferences that have higher priority for the policy makers. Fred Foldvary = [EMAIL PROTECTED] __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com
Re: Celeb Pay-or-Homer's Insight
--- Dan Lewis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At dinner last night [T]hey get contracts commensurate to this level. I agree with you almost entirely. While a guaranteed record contract for the winning 'Idol' surely has some value, for example, it's probably not as much of a boost as getting to the finals, like you wrote. But for music stars record companies can create their own hype. Suppose I own the Scipio Recording Concern, marketing to lovers of pop music and military history, I could have had a casting call and found some marketable people who I could have then injected into the market with the appropriate media blitz. In baseball there are only so many available short-stop positions, but for music the field is very wide**. Now consider Vanilla Ice. This guy had only one hit, yet a VH-1 documentary revealed that he has a small fleet of expensive sports cars and an impressive mansion to boot. That's alot of bread. As owner of SRC I would say, Hey, let's get more people into the pop-rap market, and flood the market until SRC's profits from pop-rap artists are just equal to the cost of my media blitz to enter a new artist into the market. It seems to me that that optimum point should be well in excess of what is currently on the market. Hence Normandie Shields exclusion from the market. It seems like I, as head of SRC, should be flooding the market until there are so many artists that each doesn't make a king's ransom. Real record companies don't do that. Why not? I think I've assumed an answer to my initial question by asking why record companies don't put more singers/musicians on the market. Maybe it's not up to them. **It could be constrained, for example by the amount of available air time on radio stations--thus limiting the market size. I feel like I'm being stubborn by refusing to accept possible answers. That's not my intent. Best regards, jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com
Re: The phenomenon of the line getting longer
--- Jonathan Kalbfeld [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So we've noticed that wherever we go it seems as if the lines seem to grow exponentially: book store, post office, bank. Is there some economic precept to describe this growth? There may well be; however, the problem has also been addressed from the perspective of the traffic engineer. You may benefit by searching the internet. The traffic forum, www.trafficforum.de, may be a start. It can tend to be highly technical, e.g. physics papers on granular flows and stuff like that, but it may point the way to better lay explanations. I note this because I'll probably botch the explanation as I understand it. I think it stems from the facts that arrivals are not evenly distributed and that people can be serviced only so quickly. Traffic engineers estimate the service time of a stop sign to be about five seconds per car. Therefore a stop sign can service about 60*60/5 = 720 cars per hour, or 12 cars per minute. If cars arrived in 5 second intervals there would always be a car at the sign, but no line waiting to offically stop. But cars don't arrive evenly spaced. (Arrival rates are described by a Poisson distribution, if I recall correctly.) If there are a couple minutes in a row where more than 12 cars show up, let's say 16 20, then at the end of the second minute there are 12 cars left waiting to be serviced. That's a full minute to clear the waiting cars. Now the cars could pile even faster if you have a couple of greater-than-twelve minutes, or it could clear (slowly) with a some of less-than-twelve minutes. I think it's clear that this can quickly get out of hand with a little bad luck (from the perspective of the poor slob at the end of the line...). Of course, you can say that my explanation doesn't account for the frequency with which things get out of hand. That's fair. I would respond by suggesting that you keep track for a while. This is a memorable experience and humans commit the availability hueristic, that is we estimate probabilities based on how memorable an event is. Just for kicks I went to a shark-fishing java applet here: http://www.math.csusb.edu/faculty/stanton/m262/poisson_distribution/Poisson.html and ran the experiment for three sets of five trials each. The results were: 1: 14 13 15 16 10 2: 10 16 17 21 14 3: 10 6 11 10 11 Trial 1 gives a line of 8 cars after 5 minutes; trial 2 gives 18; trial 3 gives zero cars in line. So maybe my explanation is plausable. Also interesting is that your perspective is from one who's *not* in line! By definition your odds of being in a line are greater since there's more people in lines--otherwise there'd be no line. We should go drinking together...I hate waiting in line for a beer at the bar. I hope that made sense, was accurate, and not too confused, -jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com
Re: Europe's worst ever floods linked to poor land management
--- Fred Foldvary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It takes a government to ruin a river. ...As for the future, they have not learned the right lesson, as huge dams and other current works will continue to alter the natural flow of Europe's rivers. With all due respect, you seem to be suggesting that policy makers are benefiting the present at the expense of the future, yet couldn't one could accuse you of wanting to benefit the future at the expense of the present? It seems like the balanced position would be to accept the consequences of the 100 year flood for the benefit of 99 years of prosperity and growth. Or to put it more generally, accept the consequences of the X year flood for the benefits of the X-1 years of growth and prosperity. I infer that you are putting X as near zero as possible, why do you view that as the optimal solution? Respectfully yours, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com
Re: Celeb Pay-or-Homer's Insight
Howdy, A big thanks for those who replied. --- Christopher Auld [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Classic winner-take-all markets, no? Um, I don't know. I live in a village of 1,500 people with a library to match, and I couldn't find much on the internet. There were references to Beta v. VHS, from which I'll make the ex pede Herculem leap and ask, what market is Britney Spears taking that she can keep out Normandie Shields (thanks, Anton)? Is she dominating the shockingly callipygian, good dancing but with a questionable voice and a face-to-neck proportion that gives a creepy E.T.-in-a-wig vibe, blonde market? My intent there was not to be rude to you, Chris, but to illustrate the specificness of the market she would fill. In the cute blonde teen singer market we have Christina Aguilera at one end (voice oriented, incidently sexy) through Mandy Moore and Jessica Simpson to Britney Spears (bad voice, aggressively sexy). I think there's even a few more out there (I haven't been watching MTV lately). To put it more plainly, no single artist is dominating the cute-blonde market and I don't know what market Britney actually owns. I would like to read more on how Britney is the victor of a winner take all market. I'm not saying she ain't, but my guess says otherwise. But that's just a guess. Dan Lewis profitably compared Britney Normandie's positions with a baseball metaphore. (He also reminded me of the pleasure of language and the beauty of a good throw-away line.) Unfortunately I don't know baseball and the AAA AA references are greek to me. However, I think it is telling that the baseball metaphore was used, since baseball is notable for being a decidedly noncompetitive industry. (Off the field.) Surely it's true that a Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Ingemar Stenmark, or Pele would be a relative superstar regardless of the nature of the market. That's why I chose Britney and not The Beatles or Dave Brubeck or Bob Marley or Elvis or The Beastie Boys. Britney is no Michael Jordan; regardless of what her sympathetic bio may assert, she amounts to a pre-fab entertainment act. Yet she is hugely successful, while Normandie Shields is left out in the cold. It could be marketing. But why not add a Normandie Shields and make a little more money? The market for baseball players if fixed by the number of teams, right? But that's not the case for the cute-blonde singer. Consider another metaphore: American Idol. The final ten, if not the final fifty, were virtually indistinguishable. Yeah, individual differences existed, but they were just variations on a theme. One wins, but that's the contest rules. What rules make Britney such a big winner? Why not squeeze Normandie into the cute-blonde market with Christina, Jessica, Mandy, and Britney? It makes me question the baseball metaphore, but only slightly. My meditation leads me to think that maybe the cute-blonde market is a Cournot game. There's an optimal number of cute-blondes on the market and the record industry has found the equilibrium. Huh. Could we take the number of cute-blondes number of recording firms and work backwards to the rest of the parameters of the game? Would that tell us anything worthwhile? Curiously your, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com
Re: proximo articulo
Howdy, I got this email. I can't read it. It wasn't from the Armchair list, but it replies to the list. Here it is in case anybody speaks Spanish. -jsh --- Alexander Guerrero [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ECONOMÍA Y REVOLUCIÓN: GERENCIANDO EN CRISIS Alexander Guerrero E Muchos expresan que el proyecto del Presidente por su estilo y hechuras no es ninguna revolución; se usan muchos adjetivos para graficarla; sin embargo lo más curioso es que detrás de esa expresión coexiste un criterio y hasta una añoranza utópica o cierta nostalgia que las revoluciones son realmente distintas, y hasta buenas. Esta apreciación es tan falaz como el propio proceso revolucionario que vivimos. Las revoluciones son movimientos telúricos que derrumban instituciones, cambian radicalmente reglas de juego, reemplazan instituciones con otras, creando un amplio espectro de incertidumbre institucional, y muchas llegan hasta la violencia política, la cual se convierte en mecanismo para el control del poder de quienes en nombre del pueblo toman el mandato para arreglarle la vida a los ciudadanos. Sin embargo, la mayoría de las revoluciones terminan haciendo lo contrario, envilecen el contrato social entre la gente y sus instituciones, llegándose inclusive a extremos que restringen la libertad, el mercado, el orden y la paz ciudadana. En general una revolución destruye la curva de aprendizaje que evolutivamente un país va dibujando dinámicamente con el curso de la historia. En el caso venezolano, el proceso revolucionario dirigido por el Presidente trastoco las reglas de juego de una economía de mercado, en los hechos y en el derecho, la nueva constitución ha reforzado al estado como eje solidario económico y social, debilitando en consecuencia el ejercicio de los derechos de propiedad; estos, en vastos sectores de la economía han visto perder el valor de sus garantías y se han debilitado intensamente, el estado ha renunciado a la protección de esos derechos y en muchos casos los derechos aparecen con severas restricciones institucionales como la propiedad de la tierra en la nueva Ley de Tierras. El incremento de los impuestos como consecuencia de indisciplina fiscal y desorden político en la gerencia del presupuesto y las finanzas públicas, la devaluación con sentido fiscalista, las leyes que restringen los mercados, la permisología para la inversión, la sobreregulación de los mercados, restricciones comerciales, limitaciones al intercambio, la negativa del estado en privatizar bienes que no son públicos, la corrupción, la debilidad del poder judicial y la opacidad en la aplicación y arbitraje de esta respecto de los contratos entre el sector privado y el publico y entre terceros, el auge de la delincuencia, y hasta la promoción de la lucha de clases; la reproducción de esos fenómenos ablandan y debilitan los derechos de propiedad, incrementando costos de transacción y encareciendo por lo tanto el proceso de producción de bienes y servicios de la gente. Los derechos de propiedad constituyen el motor de la historia para la creación de riqueza, ellos marcan el horizonte de ingresos de los propietarios, y conocemos que una sociedad capitalista es una sociedad de propietarios, la nuestra no escapa de esa realidad institucional aunque el proceso revolucionario, socialista en su esencia, ha hecho lo imposible por limitar su desarrollo, escondido en su lucha imaginaria contra el neoliberalismo salvaje. Este proceso de debilitamiento de los derechos de propiedad ha incrementado los costos de transacción para ejercer los derechos frente al estado o terceros, inclusive, en el discurso político y en el engranaje informal que emanan de la gestión publica la propiedad privada ha aparecido anatematizada, esa ha sido la razón de fondo de la perdida de confianza en las instituciones y el estado que ha sostenido el proceso de descapitalización de estos anos y que ahora conduce hacia una contracción angustiosa de la economía nacional. En conjunto esos fenómenos económicos y jurídicos configuran perdida de gobernabilidad que ahora tiende a transformarse en crisis política en la medida que se ha venido deteriorando rápidamente el balance que debe existir entre los diversos poderes públicos. En el ámbito económico, estos fenómenos se expresan como debilidad del marco jurídico - y de los contratos- que justifica las transacciones y el intercambio de bienes y servicios, los cuales se conocen son extensiones naturales del ejercicio de los derechos de propiedad. El impacto que todo ello ha tenido en la economía puede leerse claramente en los resultados económicos de estos anos, y particularmente en este ultimo semestre donde el proceso de descapitalización que observamos lleva a la economía a contraerse profundamente. Ahora, no solo en la macroeconómico, sino en lo microeconómico, en la capacidad de hacer negocios, de
Re: Median Voter and Sampling
--- fabio guillermo rojas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There are other sources of non-median-voterness in policy Like the Supreme Court? Brown v. Board of Education might be a good example. Of course it's not a legislative body, so I'm out on a limb here. Maybe there's also a cultural bias that values leadership even if it doesn't start out as being popular. Did the median voter want a man on the moon when Kennedy laid out his vision? Humbly yours, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com
Re: Environmental and economic effects of Speed Limits
Hey, I know this may be a little late, but you might try the traffic forum: www.trafficforum.de . I can't make any promises, but it might be useful. At least the java applets on the links page are fun to play with Best regards, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs http://www.hotjobs.com
Re: Nations as Corporations
--- Alypius Skinner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 'John Hull wrote: 1. The program will prevent poor from coming to the States. I think that's wrong' So you think its wrong to demand that poor people respect private property rights That's a bit of a non sequitur. :) Nope. All I was saying is that poor shouldn't be prevented from immigrating simply for being poor (and that the proposed citizenship structure would do that, a view that has been well challenged). Furthermore, that people should be allowed to move from country to country fairly unhindered--taking the fleas with the dog. No insightful economic arguments here, it's just a value that I have (and interjected). Alypius Skinner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ken Lay, Bill Clinton (Hillary in 2008), what's the difference? Lay might even be an improvement. Hillary in 2008? Ooof. Humor aside, I'm not sure I agree that Lay-esque leadership would be an improvement. You remark how stupid and apathetic voters are, it seems to me that in that environment someone more clever than I could come up with a scheme to build stock prices in the short-run, get paid, and bail out of office. The world has certainly seen its share of bad leaders, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be worse. I think that the proposed scheme would shorten political time horizons by linking reward to a very short-term phenomenon, and thereby produce even greater incentives for bone-head moves. I feel that if leaders' primary compensation comes in the form of going down in the history books in a good light, then they'll be more inclined to think in the longer term. Obviously, I don't have a general argument to back this up. It is also obvious that one could easily pick out plenty of counter examples, which I could not counter with counter examples because we're dealing with a hypothetical. I would like to hear an argument as to why linking reward to an extremely short-term phenomenon would produce better leaders on average. I'm not throwing down the gauntlet...it's just something I'd like to hear. --- Alypius Skinner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But all the incentives for that scenario (embracing mercantile excesses) already exist. That must be true to some degree since people keep putting Pat Buchanan on TV. But I submit that those incentives arise from your aforementioned voter ignorance stupidity: some people support schemes that are ultimately harmful for the nation the world and will vote for the slobs who enact such policies. The proposed scheme, IMO, creates an *institutional* incentive for such mercantilist policies because they can, at least in the short-run, hurt the rest of the world alot more than they will hurt us. Thanks for reading my stuff, jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs http://www.hotjobs.com
Re: North on ideology
--- Kevin Carson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: One neocon recently argued that anyone who does not support Isreael is, by definition, an antisemite, because Israel is the Jewish national homeland. Which is ironic in that Arabs are Semitic as well. Picking sides in the conflict is not anti- or pro-Semitic, any more than hating the Scots and loving the Welsh is anti-British. Go figure. -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs http://www.hotjobs.com
Re: Nations as Corporations--how to price?
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you wish to speculate in U.S. Citizenship Stocks, UCS for short--pronounced yuks. By low sell high, and all that sort of thing. Assume that: 1. An individual is free to own many UCS 2. Non-human legal entities may own UCS 3. There is no legally recognized disenfranchised class, in line w/ Mr. Hanson's affirmation that one may be stopped and asked for proof of citizenship. Anyone without at least one UCS who cannot be deported is shot on sight. Fatally. As a speculator in UCS, how would you go about estimating a fair price? Do you think taking the break-up value of the States gives the fair price? Recall that one must be able to go somewhere after selling; no foreign visa, no sale. Terminally curious, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs http://www.hotjobs.com
Re: falling murder rates attributable to better trauma care?
A while back I heard an ex-military man and author claim that first-person video games do lead to gun violence. He made the claim that better medical care has has hidden the rise in gun violence by reducing the mortality rate. It does make intuitive sense, if one looks at murder per se. While I don't think I've really answered your question, I just wanted to say that it may be an 'old' idea in some fields. Perhaps economists could profit from it. -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs http://www.hotjobs.com
Re: charlatanism
--- Fred Foldvary [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think it is better to use other symbols, such as *caps*, since when they get copied, one may want to revert to u/l. Sorry. Yahoo email doesn't give me many options. I was hesitant about yelling, which I guess is what all caps is. I'll try something else in the future. Thanks. Most of textbook microeconomics is a priori. For example, when deriving the law of demand, do they justify this with data? By that reasoning, aren't all the results obtained in Euclid's Elements assumed a priori? I took the law of demand, along with most textbook economics, to be derived axiomatically rather than assumed. Or is that what a priori means? Given reasonable assumptions (axioms), does that mean that economic findings are valid without being 'scientific,' i.e. rigoriously tested? It seems to me yes, but when data doesn't match theory, one must search for new or modified axioms. Thoughts on that? By the way, I was particularly interested in Bunge's assertions that a scientific research program is to find the functional forms between variables. Should economists spend more time on that program? It seems like it would be unnecessary in many contexts, e.g. the Tragedy of the Commons where a result can obtain by merely knowing that the production function is concave, inter alia. But then again, maybe not. It seems that alot of people critique econ. without learning it, and Bunge seems to be in that school of thought. But it is good to take critiques seriously. I bet there are a lot of psychic mediums and polygraph artists who actually believe what they're doing it valid and real. It's probably best to double check once in a while and make sure we're not headed down that road. I still maintain that Bunge's ridiculous assertion that economics assumes greed/money as the only human motivator is held by most people. I think it could be addressed by including the definition of rationality as the structure of preferences rather than the content of preferences in basic economics education. I think educators are doing a great disservice by not making this clear early on. -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs http://www.hotjobs.com
Re: Why Compact Cars Identical?
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My own guess is that the economy cars look alike because of technology. I asked a former GM engineer with 40 years at the company if there was any engineering reason why all compact cars look the same, even between manufacturers. He couldn't think of any. Granted he built cars rather than designed them, but that is some evidence to suspect non-technology reasons. Maybe they look the same because we don't pay much attention to them. Kind of like if you grew up in Northern Michigan you'll probably have trouble telling a person of Chinese vs. Thaiwanese vs. Japanese descent, while you can separate English from French from Italian, let's say. It's not that some people all look the same, rather it's one's lack of exposure to that group. (Almost) similarly, we don't pay much attention to compact cars--on the road all we really look at are brake lights and blinkers; however, 'nicer' cars do get our attention and so we are more attuned to thier differnces. Evidence for this might be the gentleman who posted that he does see very distinct differences between compact cars. Perhaps he just pays closer attention to them. Hopefully helpful, jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs http://www.hotjobs.com
charlatanism
Holy entropy! It's boiling! --G. Gamow Here's a couple interesting passages from Mario Bunge's Chalratanism in Academia. I am hoping to generate interesting replies--any will be welcome. The ALL CAPS lines are my emphasis. To paraphrase Groucho Marx: the trademark of modern culture is science; if you can fake this, you've got it made. Hence the drive to clothe groundless speculations...with the gown of science. ...[T]he academic pseudosciences abide by reason, or at least seem at first sight to do so. Their main flaws are that their constructions are fuzzy and do not match reality. (Some of them, SUCH AS NEO-AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS, EVEN CLAIM THAT THEIR THEORIES ARE TRUE A PRIORI.) Let us take a small sample Example 1: Pseudomathematical Symbolism Vilfredo Pareto, an original, insightful, and erudite student of society...listed a number of 'residues' or 'forces,' among them sentiments, abilities, dispositions, and myths. He assumed tacitly that 'residues' are numerical variables. But, since he failed to define them, the symbols he used are mere abbreviations for intuitive notions. ...Professor Gary Becker, a Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago, is famous for his economic approach to the study of human behavior. Unfortunatley he leans heavily on undefined utility functions and tends to pepper his writings with symbols that do not always represent concepts. For example, a key formula of his theory of social interactions reads thus: 'R = Di + h.' Here i labels an arbitrary individual, and R is supposed to stand for 'the opinion of i held by other persons in the same occupation'; and 'h measures the effect of i's efforts, and Di the level of R when i makes no effort; that is, Di measures i's social environment.' BECKER CHRISTENS THESE 'FUNCTIONS' BUT DOES NOT SPECIFY THEM. CONSEQUENTLY HE ADDS WORDS, NOT FUNCTIONS. WE ARE NOT EVEN TOLD WHAT THE DIMENSIONS AND UNITS OF THESE PSEUDOMAGNITUDES ARE. Therefore, we would not know how to measure the corresponding properties and so to test for the adequacy of the formula. Of course, PSEUDOQUANTITATION IS SUFFICIENT BUT NOT NECESSARY TO ENGAGE IN PSEUDOSCIENCE. An alternative is to relate precise magnitudes in imprecise ways, such as 'Y is some function of X,' where X and Y are well defined but the function is left unspecified. Milton Friedman's 'theoretical framework for monetary analysis' is a case in point. Indeed, it revolves around three undefined function symbols (f, g, and l). HENCE IT MAY AT MOST PASS FOR A RESEARCH PROPOSAL, AN AIM OF WHICH WOULD BE TO FIND THE PRECISE FORM OF THE HOPEFUL FUNCTIONS IN QUESTION. But the project does not seem to have been carried out. And in any case, given the bankruptcy of monetarism, the project does not seem worthy of being carried out. Example 3: Subjective Utility Most of the utility 'functions' occurring in neoclassical microeconomics...are not well defined--as Henri Poincare pointed out to Leon Walras. In fact, the only conditions required of them is that they be twice differentiable, the first derivative being positive and the second negative. Obviously, infinitely many functions satisfy these mild requirements. THIS OFTEN SUFFICES IN SOME BRANCHES OF PURE MATHEMATICS BUT THE FACTUAL (OR EMPIRICAL) SCIENCES ARE MORE DEMANDING: HERE ONE USES ONLY FUNCTIONS THAT ARE DEFINED EXPLICITLY...OR IMPLICITLY. Finally, experimental studies have shown that preferences and subjective estimates of utility and risk do not satisfy the assumptions of expected utility theory. In short, THE USE OF UTILITY FUNCTIONS IS OFTEN MATHEMATICALLY SLOPPY AND EMPIRICALLY UNWARRANTED. Now, rational choice models make heavy use of both subjective utilities and subjective probabilities, as well as of the simplistic hypothesis that selfishness is the only motivation of human behavior. Not suprisingly, NONE OF THESE MODELS FITS THE FACT. Hence, although at first sight they look scientific, as a matter of fact they are pseudoscientific. Thoughts? -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs http://www.hotjobs.com
Re: farm subsidies/amtrak
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've noticed in contest after contest media polls fairly consistently overstate support for the candidate percieved to be more liberal by 5-15% That's interesting. Two serious questions. First, do I recall correctly that the last presidential polls were predicting something pretty close to a dead heat? (I wonder if there is a past poll database out there somewhere) That's not to contradict your observations, I really don't follow polls much so it's a vague memory. Second, do you think political pollsters are more accurate than media pollsters since their reputations (and paychecks?) hinge on closely tracking actual results? (Or are they more accurate at all?) Curiously yours, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs http://www.hotjobs.com
Re: Public support for farm subsidies
Howdy, Does anybody think that the amount or pattern of support for farm subsidies would change if the average American were better informed? (I know, I know, better informed is awfully value laden and implies a Philistine-ish public, I'm just not sure how to phrase it.) By better info I mean deeper understanding of int'l trade economics along with more complete knowledge of amounts spent and the patterns of spending and per capita costs, etc. (And anything else you feel is important.) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Even many self-proclaimed conservatives supported ag subsidies during the Iowa Caucus seasons... Michael Moore, in an episode of his show TV Nation went to Newt Gingrich's home district during a 4th of July parade. He first joined the parade carrying a sign denouncing big government and got cheers. He changed his sign so that it denounced federally funded local projects and was kicked out of the parade. While I'm not a big M. Moore fan, that stunt was a bit revealing Best regards, jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - Feel better, live better http://health.yahoo.com
Re: free-vs-competitive please reply!!
--- Bryan D Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What exactly is 'rectifying a conception'? It sounds like the punchline to a very, very bad joke. Begging your forgiveness, what I am trying to ask, poorly, is what is the free market, how does it differ from the competitive market as defined in economic parlance, why do economists and economically educated people speak of the free market rather than the competitive market, and how is the free market superior to the competitive market? My inelegant phrase was intended to ask that one put right the apparent discrepency between two concepts: free vs. competitive markets. It seems that the spirit of the free market requires us to cheer, Bully for Enron! Too bad it didn't work out! Whereas, the spirit of the competitive market would counsel us to enforce more rigorous accounting and disclosure standards. I suggest that we do a disservice when in public we praise the former and ignore the latter. With that mess hopefully cleared up, I respectfully re-submit my question. Best to you and yours, -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - Feel better, live better http://health.yahoo.com
free-vs-competitive please reply!!
Howdy: Here's my justification for this question: Milton Friedman declared on C-span that The Road to Serfdom was the book that inspired him to become a libertarian. So please consider the following: In the Road to Serfdom, Hayek takes great pains to distinguish between free vs. competitive markets. The first are considered to be very contrary to, let's say, American values, while the latter are considered to be in line with said values. Free markets are bad, according to Hayek, e.g. the monopolist should be the economic whipping boy to such an extent that any monopolist will welcome competition rather than continue to be a monopolist and suffer the regulation/abuse of government. Additionally, Hayek makes clear extensive oppornuties for government intervention to ensure a competitive market rather than a free market. Please, please, please!!! Will the advocates of the free market, and those uninterested who have an opinion, please rectify their conception of the free market with the competitive market so that it doesn't offend The Road To Serfdom. Begging enlightment, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - Feel better, live better http://health.yahoo.com
Q for environmental economists
Howdy, As ad hominem arguments fly around the internet, I seem unable to get an impartial opinion. Would those who study the envirnment give me the straight dope on The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg? His economic arguments seem pretty sound, and this statistical methods, from what I can tell (not much?) seem good. However, I would really enjoy an unbiased review (however brief it may be) from someone more knowledgeable than me. Sincerely from a barefooted, gap-toothed mouthbreather, -jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes http://autos.yahoo.com
RE: Republican Reversal -- from whence, belief?
This seems awfully off topic, but the notion that atheism implies an immoral society is not true. For a primer, visit: www.infidels.org/library/modern/nontheism/atheism/morality-and-atheism.html Regarding believing biblical creation, every person should know that the Bible contradicts itself on creation. One example: GE 1:11-12, 26-27 Trees were created before man was created. GE 2:4-9 Man was created before trees were created. Insisting on the LITERAL truth a story that is internally inconsistent does not put one on the logical or factual high ground. That said, courtesy demands that I welcome rebuttals, but I'll not continue on this tangent myself. Thanks, -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes http://autos.yahoo.com
Re: New article on cooperation the brain
--- Cyril Morong [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Maybe I am running the game wrong somehow and that is why I get little cooperation. Are you teaching on the West Coast?! Just kidding. (Maybe not entirely*) I recall from my psych days that a notable thing about the prisoner's dilemma is that cooperation obtains. I got the impression that the result was robust. Perhaps a perusal of psych literature may shed some light on the subject--they have a long history in dealing with human subjects, so there might be something to learn. I'm stuck in a backwater (pop. 1,500) with a one-room library, so I can't help look. Sorry I can't be more helpful. jsh *I went to the Univ. of Oregon and found attitudes regarding considerate-ness significantly different from my native Michigan. That's where I really learned to appreciate the significance of the following quote: = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes http://autos.yahoo.com
Re: New article on cooperation the brain PD??
--- fabio guillermo rojas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I wouldn't be surprised if there were a similar difference when you P.D. Can anybody confirm or reject this claim about students? I'm awfully sorry, what does P.D. mean? Thanks, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes http://autos.yahoo.com
RE: Republican Reversal
--- Michael Etchison [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: CongressCritter does is to decide what to do not about, say, farm subsidies generally, but about SB1234, sponsored by Sen. This and Sen. That, which goes through specific committees with specific members... So the farm bill never went to the floor for a vote? While it is possible that the general public would approve of a bill that would cost the average family $4,377 over the next decade in order to give increased subsidies to a population whose average net worth is $546,000 and who's net income was ALREADY 21% gov't handouts--handouts which are causing massive problems for some of the world's truly poor--it seems hard to believe. Certainly believeable, but hard to believe. This bill certainly must have went to the floor of both houses, where it must have passed by a majority of votes. This seems a pretty good example of a real world event. Yes, it is certain that Senator Somesuch gets bogged down in the specifics, and it is certainly true that the act of governing is ALOT more complicated than outsiders would like to believe, but none of that changes the fact that an outrageous bill was passed. While I certainly do not wish to minimize the truth of your remarks--they seem quite insightful to me--I am nevertheless skeptical that an American public that is less [insert your perjorative here] would be more resistant to such legislation. Best wishes, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes http://autos.yahoo.com
RE: Silent Takeover--IMO??
--- Kevin Carson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The chief failing of the mainstream antiglobalization movement is, IMO, they fail to recognize the extent that the global corporate economy rests on state intervention. What does IMO mean? -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes http://autos.yahoo.com
Re: Autism, brain damage and cooperation
--- Bryan D Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Actually, I was thinking about kids' amazing ability to learn languages, which involves massive memorization. Language learning is a hard-wired trait--another well established fact. Kids pick up language automatically from their environment. Some neuroscientists consider it to be analogous to imprinting, the space for language is already there waiting to be filled. This imprinting faculty dries up around puberty. That's why it is so much easier for kids to learn new languages, and to learn them as native speakers, i.e. to become true polyglots. It is also why most adults are never really able to get rid of their accents when after learning a new language. ...IQ is this all powerful explanatory device, or that it is meaningless when it's neither Not all powerful, just one of the best available. The purpose of the IQ test, and its main use, is to predict school success; it is used to identify children who need extra help in school before it's too late. How this relates to cooperative problems is another issue. -jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes http://autos.yahoo.com
lumpy decimals
Howdy, Now that the NYSE has gone to trading in decimals, does anybody actually negotiate to the penny? While I'm afraid that my reasoning is obvious, here's why I ask anyway: Negotiating to the penny is expensive, and it may be worth a few cents to get the trade over with and move on. Once particular multi-penny spreads become popular, they should solidify into standards similar to how lawyer percentages on money awards and manager percentages become standardized. So it seems like rather than negotiating to the penny, the market should eventually gravitate to generally accepted multi-penny spreads--perhaps similar to the system that decimal trading sought to replace. Does any one know if that is happening in the market? Does any one expect it to happen in the market? If not why? -jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes http://autos.yahoo.com
Re: children and cooperation
--- Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Let me propose a signaling story Perhaps it is an evolutionary artifact: dominance hierarchies are established when young, and children are just doing what evolution has hard wired in their brains. So rather than asking why children don't cooperate as well as adults, we should be asking why do adults cooperate as well as they do? Possible answers: It takes that long to overcome evolutionary hard wiring (consider how violently adults of other species compete), or any of the economic models for cooperation that one favors, or something else clever that I can't think of. Considering that if you look a dominant macaque in the eyes he'll jump on your head and rip your face off, perhaps child social behavior better represents the null hypothesis (so to speak) and adult cooperation represents the break from nature that needs to be explained. Best regards, jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com
Re: Autism, brain damage and cooperation
fabio guillermo rojas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ...a well adjusted rail road worker in the 19th century is injured on the job. It was Phineas Gage, he had a tamping iron blown throught his head. The Malcolm Macmillan School of Psychology has a homepage dedicated to him at www.deakin.edu.au/hbs/GAGEPAGE . It is fairly thorough. -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com
Re: Autism, brain damage and cooperation
--- fabio guillermo rojas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's well documented that long term memory is nil for children less than five years of age (doctors call it pediatric amnesia) The Hippacampus isn't fully developed, and it's the organ of the brain responsible for transferring short term memories into long term memories. It is well documented that adults with hippacampal lesions cannot put memories into long term storage. The brain goes through alot of development and fine tuning up through adolescense, and the formative years are when all the major pathways are solidified. Additionally, it's also the time when all the unused neurons die; the only time more neurons die than in early childhood is at death. Still, it nevertheless seems odd to address the question to children's non-cooperation--Mr. Hanson's post notwithstanding. Cooperation as we think of it here in the west is not really a species wide phenomenon; i.e. it's probably not instictive. As I understand it, about 40% of adult male Yanomami have killed another person and about 25% of adult males will die from some form of violence. That's hardly the sort of peacful social cooperation that this string seems to assume. In some cultures it is considered kosher to hide in wait and actually hunt people. While I WOULD be interested to see how child cooperative behavior compares between modern societies and hunter-gatherer societies, as Mr. Hanson suggested, it still seems a bit unreasonable to suggest that adult cooperative behavior as we understand it is the standard against which the strangeness of child behavior should be guaged. Rather one should ask: 1. Is child social behavior more stereotyped across the species? And if so 2. Why does adult behavior develop the way it does in so many different forms? Or possibly 3. If child social behavior not stereotyped across the species, what accounts for the differences. Thanks for your time, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com
Silent Takeover
Howdy, Has anybody read The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy by Noreena Hertz? If so, is it any good? Curiously yours, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com
Re: Fwd: Cheap parking spaces drive up fuel prices
The paper Mr. Tabarrok offered was very interesting and of considerably different charactor than the piece that drew my initial protest. Particularly interesting was the conclusion that the value of all the parking spaces in the U.S. exceeds--by far!--the value of all the cars in the U.S. Holy cats! Predictably, I was put off by the frightened natives remark. Perhaps a more culturally sensitive alternative to planners...behave like frightened natives before a powerful totem could be planners...behave like frightened Senators before an 'under god' clause. -jsh --- Alex Tabarrok [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.vtpi.org/shoup.pdf __ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com
Re: Amusement Park Lines and Concert Tickets
sometimes the best explanation for why something isn't done when economics suggests that it should be done is simply that people don't understand economics. I've often wondered if a previously untapped (and possibly lucrative) avenue in counciling/therapy isn't 'personal optimization.' Economics essentially assumes that economic man can make all sorts of wildly difficult calculations in his head. Yet experimental psychology has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that humans are simply unequipped for even relatively simple calculations, and instead resort to hueristic calculations. For example, consider the number of people who die unnecessarily because they fall prey to the availability hueristic and crash on the road instead of flying. Indeed, if calculating probablities were so intuitively easy, we wouldn't need probability theory--yet understanding probabilities are essential to understanding risk, which is essential to optimizing. Isn't it? It seems like I've seen several methods for calculating the value of people's time, their tastes for risk, their utility from income, inter alia. Wouldn't it be possible to apply those methods to individuals, do the calculations, and then offer a menu of options (how many hours to work, how much insurace to purchase, how many hours of TV, etc.) that should help maximize their welfare given the constraints they face in life? Seriously. Am I completely nuts? Or does this seem possible? -jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com
Re: Fwd: Cheap parking spaces drive up fuel prices
Where communities are still being laid out, streets can be narrow, eliminating on-street parking. Olympia plans to build residential streets as skinny as 13 feet in one fast-growing neighborhood - one-third the conventional width and a national record - while Missoula, Eugene and Kirkland have pinched some streets down to 20 or 24 feet. I'd like to see a fire truck get down a 13 foot wide street--especially when somebody's life or home is at stake. Not to mention that many people LIKE on street parking. This piece seems more interested in eliminating parking for a political agenda than increasing economic efficiency by more properly pricing parking spaces: it completely neglects calculate how much space that the author intends to go to plazas and parks will actually go to creating more parking garages. Not that I'm opposed to efficient pricing of parking spaces; however, this author seems more interested in a political agenda than efficiency. It seems like more of an anti-car apology than an argument for a better world. Yours truly, jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com
Re: double vs. single entry-Benford
...imaginary numbers...ARE the work of the devil. Whoah! - Speaking of accounting, here's a site with an online lecture for accountants about using Benford's law for identifying fraud: www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/ChanceLecture/AudioVideo.html While not really related to this thread, it IS pretty interesting. -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com
Re: high school economics
Howdy, Let me apologize in advance for this letter being too long. With all due respect, I think I may be disagreeing with Mr. Foldarvy. First, I think his list may be too ambitious for a high school class. Second, I really think that your efforts should be toward making economics interesting for those few who will be excited enough to pursue it in college. In that regard, I'd almost recommend following the book for which this list is named: The Armchair Economist. Also, Landsburg's book Fair Play may be good as well, I have only read his online chapter on int'l trade and I think it is very important. It is here: www.netacc.net/~fairplay/chapter.htm I think that The Armchair Economist gives such a good overview of what economics IS as opposed to what it is generally thought to be that it would make a fine intro designed to pique the interest of the curious. I lent my copy to my dad and he was AMAZED! at what economics is really about. That said, there are a few issues that I think should be covered--issues that I didn't see until I was in a Ph.D. program, and I think that it is a crime that these issues aren't addressed earlier. First, I'd really define what it is to be economically rational. Do it intuitively: there are relationships between things, let's say taller than. Explain that. Then transitivity (if that tree is taller than my house, and my house is taller than that shrub, then that tree is taller than that shrub), and completeness (every thing is taller than, not as tall as, or as tall as everything else). Myriad examples fit that scheme, I'd spend a week covering examples, so that when you inject (as good as) preferences, transitivity and completeness are already well grounded. Second, I'd be sure to cover the first AND second fundamental theorems of welfare economics--at least intuitively. For example, the competitive market will distribute, say medical care, (Pareto) efficiently, but is it reasonable that a well-educated, affluent person who knew better gets great AIDS treatments while the working poor get very little medical care at all? Surely that could generate some discussion. Third, I'd make it clear that people choose. People face the world and they choose. This concept, while seemingly simple, is very subtle and significant in regards to public policy. Suppose, using an example inappropriate for H.S. students, that I want to outlaw adult pornography, because I feel that it exploits the actors. Fair enough--except that they chose that career becaues it was their best option available! If acting in adult film is a crappy option, that implies that what they turned down to be porn stars is even crappier--and if we outlaw porn, those peope will be forced to abandon a crappy option and into a crappier one! I think the idea that restricting people's available options is inherently detrimental to their well being not really appreciated by society at large, especially as the U.S. becomes more and more of a nanny state. (Oops! I think I've just inject some politics--sorry about that.) Two final thing of utmost importance. Explain that (and why) capitalism is not the root of all evil. Also, explain why free trade is good for everybody; furthermore, drive home the fact that blocking free trade starves real people in poor nations. In the words of a Bangledeshi representative at the now-infamous Seattle WTO meeting, expressing his confusion regarding the protestor's motives (saving sea turtles), We love sea turtles, too. But we love our children more. In today's society, these last two are vital. Sorry about going on so long, -jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com
Re: In Praise of Pay Toilets
John Perich wrote: Well, I made the comment originally because, in the neoclassical framework, would one have any reason to assume that any given cost WASN'T included in the final price? Your question seems straight forward, yet I'm not sure I understand. Assuming the problem is at my end, let me try again and you can tell me where I'm going wrong. That I may poorly articulate what I'm thinking is a given, so please bear with me. I face a certain state of the world and I optimize. Suppose that the government then levies a lump-sum tax. Since it doesn't affect any marginal values, it is non-distortionary, so I don't change my opitimizing behavior--I just suffer a loss of utility from the taxation (I have to enjoy less across the board). Analogously, the firm with the free bathroom experiences the cost of maintenance as just a lump-sum expense. It may be spread out, but it affects no marginal values. Since it affects no marginal values, it doesn't affect the firm's optimizing behavior--the firm just suffers lower profits as a result. The prices the firm charges for goods are the same with and without the free bathroom. Hence toilet maintenance is not a part of the prices. That's what I was thinking originally. As I mentioned before my assumptions may be wrong. I'm also neglecting secondary effects, e.g. pee for free = repeat business, etc. Anyway, let me know if I make no sense or if my reasoning is totally out of whack. I don't want to go through life with a head full of bad economics! Best to you, jsh --- John Perich [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well, I made the comment originally because, in the neoclassical framework, would one have any reason to assume that any given cost WASN'T included in the final price? -JP From: john hull [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: In Praise of Pay Toilets Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 17:20:34 -0700 (PDT) John Perich wrote: Why do you assume the cost of bathroom maintenance isn't already included in the price charged? I hadn't thought about it. I guess I had assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that bathroom maintenance costs would be idependent of the prices charged for goods at the establishment. Thus bathroom maintenance costs would not bear on optimizing decisions, in much the same way that lump-sum taxes are non-disortionary. On reflection it has occured to me that prices may affect bathroom maintenance costs: if Mc.D's charges less for burgers and obtains more customers, then they may have more bathroom use which may require more bathroom cleaning, i.e. an increase in bathroom maintenance costs. If such were the case (it seems reasonable), then maintenance costs would enter into the profit max. problem and would therefore affect the price, right? That's not a rhetorical question; if I'm wrong please tell me. Well--I think that was what I was thinking anyway: that bathroom use would be independent of the price. Of course Michael Etchison may be right as well (if I read him correctly), in that firms engage in hueristic pricing and just toss bathroom maintenance into the mix. (If I read you wrong, Mr. Etchison, I apologize for that.) That possibility just never crossed my mind. -jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com _ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com
Re: In Praise of Pay Toilets
John Perich wrote: Why do you assume the cost of bathroom maintenance isn't already included in the price charged? I hadn't thought about it. I guess I had assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that bathroom maintenance costs would be idependent of the prices charged for goods at the establishment. Thus bathroom maintenance costs would not bear on optimizing decisions, in much the same way that lump-sum taxes are non-disortionary. On reflection it has occured to me that prices may affect bathroom maintenance costs: if Mc.D's charges less for burgers and obtains more customers, then they may have more bathroom use which may require more bathroom cleaning, i.e. an increase in bathroom maintenance costs. If such were the case (it seems reasonable), then maintenance costs would enter into the profit max. problem and would therefore affect the price, right? That's not a rhetorical question; if I'm wrong please tell me. Well--I think that was what I was thinking anyway: that bathroom use would be independent of the price. Of course Michael Etchison may be right as well (if I read him correctly), in that firms engage in hueristic pricing and just toss bathroom maintenance into the mix. (If I read you wrong, Mr. Etchison, I apologize for that.) That possibility just never crossed my mind. -jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com
Re: Tax Leisure via Time Audits?
Howdy, Instead of surveillance schemes that sound a bit Big-Brotheresque, no offense, why not just take the forms already extant and merely switch hours worked for income earned? Question: Would such a program necessarily imply flat taxation, instead of progressive, since income will not be reported but hours will? -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Games - play chess, backgammon, pool and more http://games.yahoo.com/
nafta
Howdy, I recently visited a web page by a political scientist that seemed to suggest that NAFTA was a failure. I'd enjoy reading your opinions on the question of whether NAFTA made the world a better place or a worse place, or if it really had no impact. Also, if you could also say why you feel this way or that would be interesting as well. You're the best! -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Games - play chess, backgammon, pool and more http://games.yahoo.com/
Re: entropy and sustainabilityt
Robert wrote: 'meaning a pristine environment 6 billion years from now might be worth more to them than one now. After all, by then the human race, the cancer on the planet might be gone and the environment will be truly natural according to some points of view.' For those who haven't heard of it, check out VHEMT (pronounced vehement). It's the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, you can learn all about it at www.vhemt.org. It's an eye opener. -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax http://taxes.yahoo.com/
RE: entropy and sustainability
Because I don't agree with that, I'm looking for profound arguments against that costly influence. From Jean Bricmont's essay Science of Chaos or Chaos in Science in _The Flight From Science and Reason_, ed. Paul Gross, et al: As discussed in Penrose [R. Penrose, 'The Emperor's New Mind' and 'On the Second Law of Thermodynamics'], the earth does not gain energy from the sun (that energy is reradiated by the earth), but low entropy; the sun sends (relatively) few high-energy photons, and the earth reradiates more low-energy photons (in such a way that the total energy is concerved). Expressed in terms of 'phase space,' the numerous low-energy photons occupy a much bigger volume than the incoming high-energy ones. So the solar system, as a whole, moves towards a larger part of its phase space while the sun burns its fuel. Nice, but is there a meaningful amount to cover all human uses? I turn to The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg (though, since environmentalists have equated him with holocoust sympathizers, you will want to go to his source material and avoid using his name), and look at figure 73 on page 133 (in the chapter on energy). It shows, inter alia, total annual [human] energy consumption (400EJ), total plant photosynthesis (1,260EJ), and ANNUAL solar radiation (2,895,000EJ). Taking that surplus of solar energy (2,895,000 - 1,260) and asking a physcist or chemist to interpret that surplus in terms of entropy (if that's possible or even meaningful), I think you will be able to show that there is plenty of low entropy out there for human consumption for a long time to come. Also, though not directly related, if you seek discussions of entropy in lay-man's terms, you might try turning to the creationist/evolution debate in the States. Creationists love to claim that evolution violates entropy, so scientists have spent alot of time explaining entropy in simple terms. You could try www.infidels.org and go to their library section, also www.talkorigins.org has pages somewhere in their site that discuss entropy. Good luck! jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax http://taxes.yahoo.com/
