Lacking a source to support the claim but I am very confident in the statement here, that sound very similar to the critique James Buchanan (Public Choice economist) made of Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom. Basically the machine can work as long as everyone has the same understanding of property rights. Once that assumption is lost the machine is broke.
jmh
Karma: 722
I’m not sure that is as sound as suggested. Just when are we really in a one-shot PD setting? In the, I might argue, rare cases where we are, is it really morality or merely habit of thinking that set our behavior?
Perhaps going a level further down we can talk about the wonder of polymers. Plastics. Oils. DNA. WIthout polymers we have no life I suspect.
I think the answer is yes. I would say it is a very similar strategy to that of corporate financial management and using financial leverage to improve returns and earnings.
Should I ask what question you were asking when you decided on this position ;-)
I think you are creating an incorrect dichotomy. Neither schools, nor learning in general, are about either getting answers or posing questions. I think they are a bundle we take together.
To the extent you are arguing modern schooling approaches might tend to penalize a curious (and probably less focused) mind in the interest of conveying known facts and knowledge I would agree to some extent. At the same time, there are a lot of people that seem born with a lack of intellectual curiosity, or at least a lack of discipline and gumption to pursue that interest (a lot of us are lazy, though I suspect many like me just have to work a lot harder than others to get the the same place so lazy might just be another way of saying lack or energy to get there).
I think all these sort of fail on the basis of partial equilibrium rather then general equilibrium but here are a few thought that may or may not fit somewhere.
1. Is a bit of a Say’s Law take. One thing that might be considered is just how quickly the realized new demand from increased wages (and how quickly some might react in terms of quantity of labor employed is reduced) transmits thought the local economy. If demand propagates quickly, 1 might hold.
2. That’s an interesting approach. Could increased wages result in increased investment in human capital? Maybe, maybe not. An interesting historical debate might come back here. The old Cambridge Capital Controversy, as it was explained to be once, basically supports a multi equilibrium outcome. One is a high wage equilibrium with a low return to capital (the w and r in the model). While the debate was supposed to be been resolved and so the two outcomes not possible I never got the sense that all agreed so perhaps there might be something there.
3. Was a theory called Efficiency Wages.
All that said, I think the biggest problem with wage theory for economics is that “wages” are not really set as much in the market as in the corporate HR office. This is not to say that there is not linkage to external markets, but borrowing from old monetary policy terms, is only loosely linked. Within a medium to large (and probably even what would be called small these days) corporation the effort is very much a complex joint production activity and margins are poorly understood (and probably not even known in a lot of cases). The standard micro economic analysis only goes so far. The margin really should be some unit output from the corporate effort. Wages then become more a political economy setting where the issue is more distribution and less about allocation. (Include all the thinking about need for “slack” for productivity...)
[Question] What is the current process for increases testing?
No clue if they might fit well with your thinking or if it is even common, but where would you put the case where the person has a Ph.D. but in a different field from their main study?
Would that fit better with the non credentialed case? I would like to think so but perhaps just having the paper gets you into the club.
Not sure where of if this fits into your thought or not. In many was I see both the paradox and many of the attempts to explain it may well stem from incorrectly specifying the question. The argument is that the payoff from voting for any given person is lower than the costs incurred so why vote?
However, since people clearly do vote isn’t the better question to ask: what did we miss in specifying the equation that results in the implication all these people are irrational and imposing costs on themselves?
In other words, rather than accepting the claimed paradox why not just take the empirical observation and then look for the underlying explanation. Would a good scientist ever talk about the paradox of flight once observed?
I suspect a couple of things might be worth considering, but I’m not the expert here either so take everything with the view I am speculating/thinking aloud not stating any findings.
I don’t think testing will tend to lower the CFR as that testing will move things towards the real IFR rather than the CFR. This probably related to point 1 & 2 above.
I think the 10-12 days from the old data to say we see movement in the death data due to the new cases probably has some type of skew in it, the older the data the more likely it will be complete. That should be driven by the the death reporting distribution (and perhaps even corrections). The closer the old data gets to the new threshold of new deaths it should under report due to the lag. Perhaps we need to look at the distribution of reported deaths over that 8+ week period before trying to assess the results after the 10-12 days. I’m not sure if that is what you are saying in point 3.
Do you make any adjustment on the PE evaluation, particularly for the top 4, in light of all the ways reported earning can be manipulated. I have not looked but would you have the same list if looking at things from a revenue based valuation or a free cash flow valuation?
Small addition on:
If there was a 7 day lag, we’d expect to see a 20% increase in deaths by from May 31 to June 28. Eyeballing the google deaths data things look basically flat. So I guess that means a drop of ~20% in fatality rate over that month.
The CDC site says the lag on reporting deaths is between 2 and 8 weeks—and can be longer.
Might be that deaths are being classified a bit differently now too. Just looking at https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Weekly-Counts-of-Deaths-by-State-and-Select-Causes/muzy-jte6/data for the national level numbers/trend for “Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified (R00-R99)” look different from last year. I also heard someone claim that something of a spike in pneumonia deaths is happening but didn’t really see that in the data.
But I would also think some marginal improvement in treating patients and keeping them alive has occurred as well.
That was the experience I had in the last corp I worked for. They traditionally were waterfall and trying to move towards agile. As T3t notes below, it’s best not to think of things as either or (and I suspect you are not suggesting such).
A couple of related thought come to mind though. One clearly is the cost of the bug and effort to fix—I don’t think all environments support ease of update to code base or code modules. Additionally, in different settings having something go wrong for 30 minutes might be a minor inconvenience (I’ll do something else this morning and come back this afternoon) while in other cases you might be talking about billions in damage/loses or even lives lost.
There is also something of a culture aspect here. Organizations and the staff who lived and breathed waterfall have a lot of business processes & procedures and human thought process in place that don’t really support agile, and vise versa.
However, I think the approach in the OP is fully compatible with either waterfall or agile development. But it might actually be more valuable to the former. Might also generalize pretty well into things like, say, vacation planning????
What if we rephrased the question as “When is it okay to be bored?”
The way the post seems to frame the setting is that these three are doing things in a largely nonsocial setting. None are overtly engaging in some activities that imply some form of social interaction. As such, if we consider that aspect and then pose the alternative “go home and stare at the wall” does that suggest any additional takes on how to assess the situations?
But why doesn’t the all out attack work against status?
This model, when we’re only talking about status, seems like another reflection of the “I can’t” view so no commitment to make the effort is made.
I assume your “slap down” is not merely those with status ridiculing the idea attempting to point out flaws in the theory or design but rather that of applying both economic, political and perhaps even raw force to stop you. In that case the issue doesn’t seem to be status (though clearly that might indicate a level or location of risk). It issue is the ability of others with an interest in stopping you in achieving that goal. Seems to me that decision process there would be performing a calculation on a different set of inputs than status.
One additional point that should matter. The valuation is not merely Hertz as an enterprise but the value of Hertz’s assets to other market players. If Hertz is gone then the market equilibrium shifts for all the other rental companies. What is the value of merger (friendly or not)?
I also like the tool and expect to use it at times so thanks for building and sharing.
I have to also share the performance related experience—yesterday I had several attempts return the system overloaded response.
This morning my test looks to be progressing 45% after about 10 minutes. I suspect that your message there might be a bit optimistic. If generating the results is expected to take more than a few minutes allow some form of notification once the graph has been complete.
I lack a good answer for you. I find all the suggested sources okay and read them myself in most cases (FT and Economists no but used to long ago).
I also read South Morning China Post and Al Jazeera (and some Korean papers) for non western perspectives. I keep saying I should add some of the continental European papers.
Occasionally I will check out something from Russia and some of the party mainland China papers as well as Japanese.
I look at a couple of Philippine papers as well for personal reasons and sometimes get a new insight to a larger theme.
I don’t think any are unbiased and non really seem to try to be completely objective. That is why I would suggest reading several version of the same story. Basically, it’s the application of the old saying, your side, my side and somewhere in between is the truth.
Yes, but when is that really the case. Perhaps it’s a case of my just not seeing the setting as that of pure isolation. So while we might call it morality perhaps it is potential impact in other games we also play that are not one-shot.
For instance, I see someone drop $10,000 (or $100 if you want) and not notice they did. I let them walk out of site and notice no one else is around and quietly pick it up and put it in my pocket.
Later I’m out with friend having lunch or drinks and offer to pick up the tab. In generally we all tend to pay our own way as none generally had a lot of money to just throw around. They start asking why so how do I explain?
Or perhaps my child has been asking for a special toy that was not in the budget. Suddenly I can buy it. How do I explain that to my spouse and child?
The idea being the lives we live is not one with the degree of separability implied by the one-shot assumption, so the game setting is really a repeated game but not always with same players.
Perhaps that is just explaining why morality might emerge and so your point holds but I’m not sure.