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Ideas tagged with economics
Venture reproducibility
Venture capitalists work under the concept of investing small amounts in lots of startup companies, some of which will fail, some of which will make a little money, and a few of which will make a lot of money. This is similar to [the "Miracle Machine" argument Eric Lander makes for funding ba...
name preferences: general vs specific, causation vs correlation
I suspect that there is a correlation between areas of the US where carbonated beverages are called soda vs pop and areas where Coke is preferred over Pepsi. Is this correct? If so, what might cause it? Beverage companies using their preferred general term as they expand out from their HQ? ...
Equitable methods of abolishing PAYG personal income tax
It is argued that the replacement of pay-as-you-go personal income tax ("PAYG tax") by something more efficient (e.g. a land tax or consumption tax) would offend intergenerational equity because retirees no longer pay PAYG tax, and would offend vertical equity because higher-income earners would...
Terrorism as a Factor of Production in a Coup D'état
Terror campaigns are perceived as a “.. weapon of the weak..” (Leiden & Schmitt, 1968), a refuge for actors lacking the political capital for a full coup d’état. Concentrated acts of terror could provide subversive political factions with clout, consensus, and supporters for a government takeove...
By Peter Clark
Axiology: is a learning intervention worth the effort?
Many medical education studies pursue a measurement approach to demonstrate the efficacy of a learning intervention. Researchers, steeped in the belief system that positions randomized controlled trials as the ultimate form of inquiry, try to apply this methodology in the confounded world of edu...
By David Topps, Rachel Ellaway
Partial replacement of the FairTax prebate by a wage subsidy
The proposed FairTax Act (H.R.25/S.155) would replace most U.S. federal taxes, including payroll tax and all forms of income tax, with a retail sales tax. To compensate for the rise in prices of necessities, the legislation provides for an annual "prebate" of a fixed amount per legally resident ...
Why research reputation trumps teaching reputation in universities
In humans we see lekking behaviour in the general rule that people like being around successful people. This is why social A-lists exist. More generally as animal behaviour, a lek is a gathering of individuals for the purposes of competitive display - competitive signalling. For universities, ...
By Sean Leaver
Thiel's Trap
Few economic concepts demonstrate scarcity as clearly as the Malthusian Trap. An economic condition where population growth outpaces food production (Malthus,1798). The fight for subsistence is in the rearview mirror of the developed world, but Malthusian logic is now applied to environmentalism...
By Peter Clark
Capitalist capital allocation as meta-reward function for AI training model
Machine learning protocols utilize rewards function during training as a means of tuning parameters toward obtaining desirable outputs from a model. One challenge for the current AI industry is the difficulty of translating real-world utility into reward functions for individual models that are ...
Menu-Board Theory of Voting
The dictum of Public Choice Theory is that politics functions as a form of exchange. This assertion is very much true of the process of voting, where participants either select policies or representatives to make policy decisions. Public policy is nothing about purchasing decisions. Any commodit...
By Peter Clark
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