On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 07:04:27PM -0400, Robert A. Book wrote:
> [...] The point
> I was tryign to make is that it's possible for a dictatorship to
> depress child-rearing opportunities less than other opportunities,
> thus making child-rearing relatively more attractive.
Why do you think dictat
A few people seem to have skipped over the first sentence of my post.
The article said that fertility rate is higher in dictatorships than in
democracies at *all income levels*. Meaning if you take any income level
and compare dictatorships and democracies in the same level, the
dictatorships wil
According to a recent article [1] in Harvard International Review, because
of differences in fertility, the population growth rate in dictatorships
is higher than that in democracies at every income level. It says "an
average woman has one-half of a child more under dictatorship than under
democrac
On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 12:26:41AM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> [...] could it be done more efficiently? Probably, but I can't think of
> it.
I can... The Do Not Call form should take a bank account number and dollar
amount. Any advertiser who pre-pays the amount I specify would be
allowed
On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 08:32:55PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
> This seems to me to confuse the decision with how the decision is
> represented and implemented. There are presumably many ways to disperse
> a decision process and make it robust to random errors, and some of those
> ways may be comp
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/852lodkv.asp
This fascinating article shows pretty conclusively that at least some
people are optimizers, although maybe they're the exception. BTW, if you
ever need to have an A+ grade removed from your academic record, read the
ar
I'm surprised that everyone who has responded to my post has defended the
conventional wisdom on charity giving. But surely one should either borrow
money to do a life time worth of giving right away, or save and do all
charity in one's will, or otherwise concentrate all charity giving to a
single
On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 11:49:15AM -0400, Susan Hogarth wrote:
> Speaking as the director of a very small but very active charity, I can tell
> you that we tend to have *quite high* time preferences. Possibly some of that
> is bleedover from the personality of the founder (that would be gotta-hav
On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 12:05:01PM -0400, Eric Crampton wrote:
> Shouldn't we also worry about how poor people are now relative to how
> they'll be in the future? Today's poor are much better off than the poor
> from a century ago; presumably the poor a century from now will be less
> deserving th
On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 12:25:11PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
> Typical charity recipients also do not have access to borrowing
> opportunities
> that are as efficient as the ones available to you. So yes you could help
> them by delaying charity to people who would like to save, and borrowing
>
On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 09:29:34AM -0400, Richard L. white wrote:
> Ignoring the utility of the money to the target charity today, e.g.,
> food or medicine to live,
But the money will have a greater utility tomorrow (since there will be
more of it). Unless you think there will be less needy
Suppose I have some money that I don't want to spend, and I'm sure I'll
never want to spend it. Should I give it to charity now, or put it in an
index fund and bequeath it to charity in my will?
Here's my argument in favor of charitable procrastination. The typical
recipient of charity does not ha
Why does TV have seasons? I know it's customary to propose possible
answers to questions posted here, but I'm really stumped. I can't think of
any reason why television networks all premier their new shows in the
fall and play re-runs in the summer, instead of spreading out the premiers
and re-
On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 10:34:40PM -0500, William Dickens wrote:
> Should OPEC set oil prices in Euros and hold their cash reserves in
> Euros what would be the real consequences for the US? 1. A tiny increase
> in risk wrt oil prices (we know its tiny because the cost of currency
> hedging is mini
On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 01:44:59PM -0800, Fred Foldvary wrote:
> There is also a supply-side effect from cutting the marginal tax rate, from
> less uncertainty about the company as it shifts to less debt and more
> equity, as well as more investor confidence when the profits are sent to
> the share
On Wed, Dec 25, 2002 at 12:33:00AM -0500, Bryan D Caplan wrote:
> A question inspired by working the Caplan twin night shift:
>
> How come almost all of the paid programming is on late at night? Yes,
> rates are lower, but viewership is lower too. Are late-night viewers
> unusually impressionab
Does anyone know of a model that explains any or all of the following
features of the new car market? Which ones would you have predicted based
on economic theory?
- MSRP (manufacturer suggested retail price, where does this number come
from and what's its purpose?)
- dealer holdbacks (a fixed p
On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 10:57:53AM -0800, Anton Sherwood wrote:
> Reminds me of a story in one of the sf magazines - an abnormally
> cheerful man was found to have an abnormally high level of endorphins,
> and was compelled to take treatment to compensate, because we can't have
> people running loo
On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 11:04:53AM -0800, david friedman wrote:
> 1. The question isn't whether you deserve to be the sort of person
> you turned out to be. It is whether the person you turned out to be
> deserves certain outcomes.
What's the difference between these two questions? Why is the se
On Thu, Nov 28, 2002 at 09:53:17AM +0100, Jacob W Braestrup wrote:
> 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).
In fact, w
On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 08:38:26PM -0500, Bryan D Caplan wrote:
> 1. The less fundamental reason to be "hard-hearted" is that soft-
> hearted people - even comparatively reasonable ones like Blinder - are
> hypocrites. They fret and fret about "poor" Americans, but barely even
> remember the exis
On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 10:29:29PM -0800, Jonathan Kalbfeld wrote:
> 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
On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 02:51:38PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
> This would seem to work badly for socially consumed information goods,
> like movies or music. If a group of us decides to watch a movie
> together, one of us tries to download the movie, at which point he may
> be denied. Should th
On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 01:24:12PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
> Imagine that a nation like the US were run like a corporation. To live
> (and vote) here, you'd have to own a share. You could sell your share and
> leave, and foreigners could come if they bought a share. The corporate
> manage
Why do some Internet merchants refuse to display prices on some items
until you put the affected items in your online shopping cart? I first
noticed this at BestBuy.com, but now Amazon.com and CircuitCity.com have
also picked up this practice.
Here's Amazon.com's explanation, which doesn't explai
On Tue, Jun 04, 2002 at 01:17:25PM +0200, Jacob W Braestrup wrote:
> The big "problem" is that parents have no right over the future income
> of their children. Hence they cannot make the contract. Neither can the
> children themselves until they reach (legal) maturity.
I recently saw a proposa
On Sat, Apr 27, 2002 at 09:45:12AM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
> When I'm inferring what it is that people think they want, I don't have to
> believe everything they say. I can also look at their actions. I can't
> see how anyone has a quadrillion dollar willingness to pay, as no one can
> afford
On Fri, Apr 26, 2002 at 05:15:33PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
> I apply the same logic to government. If I believe, as I do, that people
> often overestimate the value they get from government, I should fix that if
> I can by persuasion.
What if you can't fix it by persuasion and everyone become
On Fri, Apr 26, 2002 at 09:12:53AM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
> If the reason that government gets bigger as taxes become more efficient
> is that most people have a downward-sloping demand for government, and
> so "buy" more of it as the price gets lower, then it seems paternalistic
> of me to ke
On Thu, Apr 25, 2002 at 11:36:31AM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
> Once upon a time income taxes were difficult to collect, because
> income was hard to cheaply monitor. So governments used less
> efficient taxes, and arguably this was a reason the size of
> government was lower. Today it seems tha
On Sun, Apr 21, 2002 at 03:40:39PM -0700, Scott Eric Merryman wrote:
> Paul Krugman has an article on NAFTA you might find interesting.
> If job creation isn't the point of NAFTA, what is? Another possible
> justification is the classic economic argument that free trade will raise
> U.S. produc
On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 08:10:59AM -0700, Fred Foldvary wrote:
> Entropy says a closed system will dissipate into unavailable energy.
Entropy applies to open systems too. The way it works is, a given energy
source (the sun) and heat sink (outer space) allows you to remove so many
bits of entropy
The original paper is available at
http://www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/Economics/oswald/FinalJuly13Paris.pdf.
I think there's a major flaw in the experiment. When a subject pays to
decrease the income of another subject, he's deciding to transfer some
resources from himself and the other subject to
On Fri, Nov 16, 2001 at 10:31:22AM +0100, Hentrich, Steffen wrote:
> I think that this could only be if subsidies payed up to the exquilibrium
> price of all exhaustable ressources. But this is not the case. Only a small
> part of renewable energies gets subsidies and this not in all countries.
>
On Sun, Nov 11, 2001 at 09:28:15PM +0100, Hentrich, Steffen wrote:
> Nearly all countries run support policies for renewable energies to reduce
> worldwide carbon dioxid emissions. But from resource economics point of view
> sellers of exhaustible ressources will change to a new, lower price path
Reading Jonathan Rauch's _Government's End: Why Washington Stopped
Working_ (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1891620495) made me
wonder how special-interest lobbies solved the public goods problem. Why
does an individual contribute to a lobbying organization when he can let
someone else con
I wonder if what appears to be small-stakes risk aversion can be explained
as avoidance of the cost of making budget ajustments. If you win a bet,
you have to decide what to do with the money, and if you lose you have to
figure out where the money is going to come from (i.e., what purchases to
for
On Mon, Oct 23, 2000 at 10:53:27AM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
> But how many customers would find out? And can companies really commit
> to not using such information in setting prices? And if the customer
> doesn't report the bug they are less likely to see it fixed.
If companies could not com
There's a new article in the Washington Post about Amazon's dynamic
pricing, at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15159-2000Sep25.html.
Here is a quote:
> Amazon swears it won't happen there again. "Dynamic pricing is stupid,
> because people will find out," said spokesman Curry. "Fo
On Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 02:18:59PM -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
> I can understand people disliking foreigners, even going so far as to hurt
> themselves to hurt foreigners more. I can also understand people feeling
> altruistic toward the poor of the world, and wanting to spend resources to
> help
On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 01:19:47PM +0100, Erik Burns wrote:
> something that has always intrigued me about Amazon (being a regular client)
> is how they offer almost nothing for loyalty or regular use. i guess i was
> expecting something in the way of discounting or gift certificates or
> somethin
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