In other words, increasing weekly shopping saves a penny per dollar.

The main difference between partial and general equilibrium models is, that partial equilibrium models assume that what happens on the market one wants to analyze has no effect on other markets.

https://archive.is/lomWE
https://archive.is/AimaI
https://archive.is/SkkqR

- Joshiah Ober, Barry Weingast

In the modern world, access-limiting fortification walls are not typically regarded as promoting democracy. But in Greek antiquity, increased investment in fortifications was correlated with the prevalence and stability of democracy. This paper sketches the background conditions of the Greek city-state ecology, analyzes a passage in Aristotle’s Politics, and assesses the choices of Hellenistic kings, Greek citizens, and urban elites, as modeled in a simple game. The paper explains how city walls promoted democracy and helps to explain several other puzzles: why Hellenistic kings taxed Greek cities at lower than expected rates; why elites in Greek cities supported democracy; and why elites were not more heavily taxed by democratic majorities. The relationship between walls, democracy, and taxes promoted continued economic growth into the late classical and Hellenistic period (4th-2nd centuries BCE), and ultimately contributed to the survival of Greek culture into the Roman era, and thus modernity. We conclude with a consideration of whether the walls-democracy relationship holds in modernity.

'Rulers Ruled by Women': An Economic Analysis of the Rise and Fall of Women's Rights in Ancient Sparta by Robert K. Fleck, F. Andrew Hanssen: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=788106
Throughout most of history, women as a class have possessed relatively few formal rights. The women of ancient Sparta were a striking exception. Although they could not vote, Spartan women reportedly owned 40 percent of Sparta's agricultural land and enjoyed other rights that were equally extraordinary. We offer a simple economic explanation for the Spartan anomaly. The defining moment for Sparta was its conquest of a neighboring land and people, which fundamentally changed the marginal products of Spartan men's and Spartan women's labor. To exploit the potential gains from a reallocation of labor - specifically, to provide the appropriate incentives and the proper human capital formation - men granted women property (and other) rights. Consistent with our explanation for the rise of women's rights, when Sparta lost the conquered land several centuries later, the rights for women disappeared. Two conclusions emerge that may help explain why women's rights have been so rare for most of history. First, in contrast to the rest of the world, the optimal (from the men's perspective) division of labor among Spartans involved women in work that was not easily monitored by men. Second, the rights held by Spartan women may have been part of an unstable equilibrium, which contained the seeds of its own destruction.

Abstract. The paper extends and empirically tests Gordon Tullock’s public choice theory of the nature of autocracy. A simple model of the relationship between constitutional rules governing succession in autocratic regimes and the occurrence of coups against autocrats is sketched. The model is applied to a case study of coups against monarchs in Denmark in the period ca. 935–1849. A clear connection is found between the specific constitutional rules governing succession and the frequency of coups. Specifically, the introduction of automatic hereditary succession in an autocracy provides stability and limits the number of coups conducted by contenders.

Table 2. General constitutional rules of succession, Denmark ca. 935–1849

To see this the data may be divided into three categories of constitutional rules of succession: One of open succession (for the periods 935–1165 and 1326–40), one of appointed succession combined with election (for the periods 1165–1326 and 1340–1536), and one of more or less formalized hereditary succession (1536–1849). On the basis of this categorization the data have been summarized in Table 3.

validity of empirics is a little sketchy

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/922103073257824257
https://archive.is/NXbdQ
The graphic novel it is based on is insightful, illustrates Tullock's game-theoretic, asymmetric information views on autocracy.

Conclusions from Gorton Tullock's book Autocracy, p. 211-215.: https://astro.temple.edu/~bstavis/courses/tulluck.htm

https://twitter.com/bswud/status/916323881652293634
Migration to Spain 2001-12 drove up rents & house prices, with native flight in response a substantial cause

A test patient who does not need treatment is sent to 180 dentists to receive treatment recommendations. In the experiment, we vary two factors: First, the information that the patient signals to the dentist. Second, we vary the perceived socioeconomic status (SES) of the test patient. Furthermore, we collected data to construct several measures of short- and long-term demand and competition as well as dentist and practice characteristics. We find that the patient receives an overtreatment recommendation in _more than every fourth visit_. A low short-term demand, indicating excess capacities, leads to significantly more overtreatment recommendations. Physician density and their price level, however, do not have a significant effect on overtreatment. Furthermore, we observe significantly less overtreatment recommendations for the patient with higher SES compared to lower SES under standard information. More signalled information however does not significantly reduce overtreatment.

How much dentists are ethically concerned about overtreatment; a vignette-based survey in Switzerland: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4474445/
Are Dentists Overtreating Your Teeth?: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/are-dentists-overtreating-your-teeth/
Have you had a rash of fillings after years of healthy teeth? The culprit may be “microcavities,” and not every dentist thinks they need to be treated, reports today’s Science Times.
How Dentists Rip Us Off: https://www.dentistat.com/ReaderDigestArticle.pdf

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130356647

A key contribution of our paper is to estimate the returns to an additional year of schooling while holding highest credential constant. We find the year generates a two percent gain in monthly income, with somewhat higher returns for China’s disadvantaged. This is much smaller than most estimates which do not separate the returns to additional schooling from those to earning a credential. We show that the policy, while redistributive, has generated a likely net loss of tens of billions of dollars. We interpret these results through a model of signaling and human capital accumulation and conclude that a high signaling value of earning a credential, also known as “credentialism,” plays a crucial role in household schooling decisions and in the returns to schooling in modern China.

Access to Elite Education, Wage Premium, and Social Mobility: Evidence from China’s College Entrance Exam: http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/ecs/events/seminar/seminar-papers/17-08-31.pdf
woah:
Exploiting a discontinuity in elite university eligibility around the cut off scores, we find elite education increases the monthly wage by around 40%. While elite education eligibility does significantly affect mobility, it does not alter the influence of parental background. We also provide suggestive evidence that the wage premium is more likely to be explained by university-related networks and signaling than that of human capital.

This paper attempts to estimate the size and distribution of tax evasion in rich countries. We combine stratified random audits—the key source used to study tax evasion so far—with new micro-data leaked from two large offshore financial institutions, HSBC Switzerland (“Swiss leaks”) and Mossack Fonseca (“Panama Papers”). We match these data to population-wide wealth records in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. We find that tax evasion rises sharply with wealth, a phenomenon that random audits fail to capture. On average about 3% of personal taxes are evaded in Scandinavia, but this figure rises to about 30% in the top 0.01% of the wealth distribution, a group that includes households with more than $40 million in net wealth. A simple model of the supply of tax evasion services can explain why evasion rises steeply with wealth. Taking tax evasion into account increases the rise in inequality seen in tax data since the 1970s markedly, highlighting the need to move beyond tax data to capture income and wealth at the top, even in countries where tax compliance is generally high. We also find that after reducing tax evasion—by using tax amnesties—tax evaders do not legally avoid taxes more. This result suggests that fighting tax evasion can be an effective way to collect more tax revenue from the ultra-wealthy.

Figure 1

America’s unreported economy: measuring the size, growth and determinants of income tax evasion in the U.S.: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10611-011-9346-x
This study empirically investigates the extent of noncompliance with the tax code and examines the determinants of federal income tax evasion in the U.S. Employing a refined version of Feige’s (Staff Papers, International Monetary Fund 33(4):768–881, 1986, 1989) General Currency Ratio (GCR) model to estimate a time series of unreported income as our measure of tax evasion, we find that 18–23% of total reportable income may not properly be reported to the IRS. This gives rise to a 2009 “tax gap” in the range of $390–$540 billion. As regards the determinants of tax noncompliance, we find that federal income tax evasion is an increasing function of the average effective federal income tax rate, the unemployment rate, the nominal interest rate, and per capita real GDP, and a decreasing function of the IRS audit rate. Despite important refinements of the traditional currency ratio approach for estimating the aggregate size and growth of unreported economies, we conclude that the sensitivity of the results to different benchmarks, imperfect data sources and alternative specifying assumptions precludes obtaining results of sufficient accuracy and reliability to serve as effective policy guides.

In 2012 and again in 2015, the German government proposed sending German administrators to manage Greece’s tax and privatization authorities. The idea was that shared governance would reduce corruption and root out inefficient practices. (In 2017 the Boston Globe proposed a similar arrangement for Haiti.) We test a version of shared governance using eight U.S. interventions between 1904 and 1931, under which American officials took over management of Latin American fiscal institutions. We develop a stylized model in which better monitoring by incorruptible managers does not lead to higher government revenues. Using a new panel of data on fiscal revenues and the volume and terms of trade, we find that revenue fell under receiverships. Our results hold under instrumental variables estimation and with counterfactual specifications using synthetic controls.

This study estimates the economic returns to Chinese Communist Party membership using complementary approaches to address the endogeneity of party membership status: propensity score matching and instrumental variable. Although the magnitudes of these estimates vary across estimators, all the estimates show positive economic returns to party membership.

An Exact Consumption-Loan Model of Interest with or without the Social Contrivance of Money: http://public.econ.duke.edu/~hf14/teaching/socialinsurance/readings/Samuelson58(6.3).pdf

Economists who have ventured into the alleged real world often quote Princeton's Alan Blinder, who has formulated what he calls ''Murphy's Law of economic policy'': ''Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.'' It's flip and cynical, but it's true.

A population considering a revolt must participate in sufficient numbers to succeed. We study how their ability to coordinate is affected by their information. The effects of information are non-monotone: the population may coordinate on a revolt if there is very little information or if they know a lot about each other’s preferences for change, but having each agent know about the the willingness of a few others to revolt can actually make non-participation by all the unique equilibrium. We also show that holding mass protests before a revolution can be an essential step in mobilizing a population. Protests provide costly signals of how many agents are willing to participate, while easier forms of communication (e.g., via social media) may fail to signal willingness to actively participate. Thus, although social media can enhance coordination, it may still be necessary to hold a protest before a revolution in order to measure the size of the population willing to revolt. We also examine how having competing groups involved in a revolution can change its feasibility, as well as other extensions, such as what the minimal redistribution on the part of the government is in order to avoid a revolution, and the role of propaganda.

Cultural economics is the branch of economics that studies the relation of culture to economic outcomes. Here, 'culture' is defined by shared beliefs and preferences of respective groups. Programmatic issues include whether and how much culture matters as to economic outcomes and what its relation is to institutions.[1]

Applications include the study of religion,[2] social norms.[3] social identity,[4] fertility,[5] beliefs in redistributive justice,[6] ideology,[7] hatred,[8] terrorism,[9] trust,[10] and the culture of economics.[11][12] A general analytical theme is how ideas and behaviors are spread among individuals through the formation of social capital,[13] social networks[14] and processes such as social learning, as in the theory of social evolution[15] and information cascades.[16] Methods include case studies and theoretical and empirical modeling of cultural transmission within and across social groups.[17] In 2013 Said E. Dawlabani added the value systems approach to the cultural emergence aspect of macroeconomics.[18]

interesting references

In 1968, Nobel laureate economist Gunnar Myrdal found corruption 'almost a taboo (among economists) as research topic'. Indeed, it has mostly been a matter of political science and sociology. However, the scenario changed since the 1970s. Since Rose-Ackerman's article "The Economics of Corruption", published in the Journal of Public Economics in 1975,[1] more than 3,000 articles have been written with 'corruption' in the title, at least 500 of which directly focus on different aspects relating to corruption using an economic framework.[2] Some books have also been published on the subject.[3]

Organizations have emerged to deal with the economics of corruption.[4] Some universities offer courses under the title Economics of Corruption.[5] Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker and an American Judge Richard Posner have opened a blog for open public discussion discussing economics of corruption [6]

The intensive margin regards the level of effort etet (think intensity), and the extensive margin the quantity of labor supplied LtLt.

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2017/06/is-economics-science.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-14/so-many-critics-of-economics-miss-what-it-gets-right

https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama/the-poverty-of-the-peasant-mode-of-production-121b90c933b4
historians: low taxes not priming the pump
everyone else: barbarians
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/04/mark-koyama-review-roman-economy.html
https://twitter.com/markkoyama/status/765881117266370560
https://soundcloud.com/macro-musings/markkoyama
https://medium.com/@MarkKoyama/peter-temin-and-the-malthusian-hypothesis-for-the-limits-of-roman-growth-12489edce93a

Many people believe that politics is difficult because of incentives: voters vote for their self interest; bureaucrats deliberately don’t solve problems to enlarge their departments; and elected officials maximize votes for power and sell out to lobbyists. But this cynical view is mostly wrong—politics, insofar as it has problems, has problems not because people are selfish—it has problems because people have wrong ideas. In fact, people mostly act surprisingly altruistically, motivated by trying to do good for their country.

...

I got into politics and ideas as a libertarian. I was attracted by the idea of public choice as a universal theory of politics. It’s intuitively appealing, methodologically individualist, and it supported all of the things I already believed. And it’s definitely true to some extent—there is a huge amount of evidence that it affects things somewhat. But it’s terrible as a general theory of politics in the developed world. Our policies are bad because voters are ignorant and politicians believe in things too much, not because everyone is irredeemably cynical and atavistic.

interesting take, HBD?: https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/869882831572434946

recommended by Garett Jones:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110517015819/http://reviewsindepth.com/2010/03/yes-prime-minister-the-most-cunning-political-propaganda-ever-conceived/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thick_of_It

Besides pedagogical inertia—enforced to some extent by textbook publishers—I am not quite sure what motivates the devotion in so many economics curricula to U-shaped average cost curves. Let me make one guess: there is a desire to explain why firms are the size they are rather than larger or smaller. To my mind, such an explanation should proceed in one of three ways, appropriate to three different situations.

A normal good is a good for which demand increases with income.

Thinking the unthinkable: sacred
values and taboo cognitions: http://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00135-9

Taboos and Identity: Considering the Unthinkable: http://sci-hub.tw/10.1257/mic.3.2.139
IDENTITY, MORALS, AND TABOOS: BELIEFS AS ASSETS∗: https://www.princeton.edu/~rbenabou/QJE%202011.pdf

*The Great Convergence*: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/11/the-great-convergence.html

Richard Baldwin on the New Globalization: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/04/the-new-globalization.html
To really understand how this changed the nature of globalization, consider a sports analogy. Suppose we have two football teams, one that needs a quarterback but has too many linebackers, and one that needs a linebacker but has too many quarterbacks. If they sit down and trade players, both teams win. It’s arbitrage in players. Each team gets rid of players they need less of and gets players they need more of. That’s the old globalization: exchange of goods.

Now let’s take a different kind of exchange, where the coach of the better team goes to the field of the worse team and starts training those players in the off-season. This is very good for the coach because he gets to sell his knowledge in two places. You can be sure that the quality of the league will rise, all the games will get more competitive, and the team that’s being trained up will enjoy the whole thing. But it’s not at all certain that the players of the better team will benefit from this exchange because the source of their advantage is now being traded.

In this analogy, the better team is, of course, the G7, and not surprisingly this has led to some resentment of globalization in those countries. The new globalization breaks the monopoly that G7 labor had on G7 know-how…

good reviews here:
The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Convergence-Information-Technology-Globalization/dp/067466048X

A Kaldor–Hicks improvement, named for Nicholas Kaldor and John Hicks, also known as the Kaldor–Hicks criterion, is a way of judging economic re-allocations of resources among people that captures some of the intuitive appeal of Pareto efficiencies, but has less stringent criteria and is hence applicable to more circumstances. A re-allocation is a Kaldor–Hicks improvement if those that are made better off could hypothetically compensate those that are made worse off and lead to a Pareto-improving outcome. The compensation does not actually have to occur (there is no presumption in favor of status-quo) and thus, a Kaldor–Hicks improvement can in fact leave some people worse off.

A situation is said to be Kaldor–Hicks efficient if no potential Kaldor–Hicks improvement from that situation exists.

We investigate the potential of transparency to influence committee decision-making. We present a model in which career concerned committee members receive private information of different type-dependent accuracy, deliberate and vote. We study three levels of transparency under which career concerns are predicted to affect behavior differently, and test the model’s key predictions in a laboratory experiment. The model’s predictions are largely borne out – transparency negatively affects information aggregation at the deliberation and voting stages, leading to sharply different committee error rates than under secrecy. This occurs despite subjects revealing more information under transparency than theory predicts.

https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6hp7yi/counter_r1_automation_can_actually_hurt_workers/
simple Cobb-Douglas analysis
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-26/in-a-robot-economy-all-humans-will-be-marketers

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/877351055276687362
Why Is There So Little Money in U.S. Politics?: http://cori.missouri.edu/pages/seminars/AES_JEP_2003.pdf
Does Money Buy Votes? The Case of Self-Financed
Gubernatorial Candidates, 1998–2008: https://sci-hub.tw/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-012-9193-1
Quid Pro Quo? Corporate Returns to Campaign Contributions*: http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/spenkuch/research/qpq.pdf

example:
Deadweight loss created by a binding price ceiling. Producer surplus is necessarily decreased, while consumer surplus may or may not increase; however the decrease in producer surplus must be greater than the increase (if any) in consumer surplus.

https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/961503023854833665
https://archive.is/qLsD4
The most important patterns:

1. Prisoner's Dilemma
2. Race to the Bottom
3. Free Rider Problem / Tragedy of the Commons / Collective Action
4. Zero Sum vs. Non-Zero Sum
5. Externalities / Principal Agent
6. Diminishing Returns
7. Evolutionarily Stable Strategy / Nash Equilibrium

apparently written to mock some proposed redistribution schemes

Next on the chart are the various epistocratic scenarios. What if we give especially low-knowledge voters only half a vote, or only a third, or bar them completely? What if we use a graduated more-votes-for-more-knowledge system? What if we give especially high-knowledge voters an extra vote, or two, or take epistocracy literally and allow only these high-knowledge folks to vote?

Do any of these proposals improve Clinton’s popular vote margin over Trump? No. In fact, each one would have given Trump a popular vote lead, anywhere from 0.5 points (giving high-knowledge folks a single extra vote) to 4.3 points (letting only high-knowledge folks vote). In an epistocracy of the sort Brennan and others imagine, Trump’s victory over Clinton would have been even more securely won.

contrary update:
ACTUALLY, EPISTOCRACY MIGHT HAVE HELPED CLINTON DEFEAT TRUMP: http://www.pleeps.org/2017/04/11/actually-epistocracy-might-have-helped-clinton-defeat-trump/
But she probably would have been running against President Romney, and might have still lost.

Were Trump Voters Irrational?: http://quillette.com/2017/09/28/trump-voters-irrational/
In addition to being misplaced, leftists never seem to see how insulting this critique of Republican voters is. Their failure to see the insult illustrates precisely what they get wrong in evaluating the rationality of the Trump voters. Consider that these What’s the Matter with Kansas? critiques are written by highly educated left-wing pundits, professors, and advocates. Perhaps we should ask one of them whether their own vote is purely self-interested and for their own monetary benefit. They will say no, of course. And they will deny as well that their vote is irrational. Progressives will say that they often vote against their own monetary interests in order to do good for other people. Or they will say that their vote reflects their values and worldview—that they are concerned about the larger issues that are encompassed by that worldview (abortion legislation or climate change or gun restriction). Leftists seem unable to see that Republican voters—even lower income ones—may be just as attached to their own values and worldviews. The stance of the educated progressive making the What’s the Matter with Kansas? argument seems to be that: “no one else should vote against their monetary interests, but it’s not irrational for me to do so, because I am enlightened.”

...

Progressives tend to deny or obfuscate (just as conservatives obfuscate the research on global warming) the data indicating that single-parent households lead to more behavioral problems among children. Overwhelmingly progressive university schools of education deny the strong scientific consensus that phonics-based reading instruction facilitates most readers, especially those struggling the most. Many progressives find it hard to believe that there is no bias at all in the initial hiring of women for tenure-track university positions in STEM disciplines. Progressives tend to deny the consensus view that genetically modified organisms are safe to consume. Gender feminists routinely deny biological facts about sex differences. Largely Democratic cities and university towns are at the forefront of the anti-vaccine movement which denies a scientific consensus. In the same cities and towns, people find it hard to believe that there is a strong consensus among economists that rent control causes housing shortages and a diminution in the quality of housing. [Research citations for all the above are available from the author here.]

...

More formal studies have indicated that there are few differences in factual knowledge of the world between Republicans and Democrats. The Pew Research Center reported one of its News IQ surveys in 2015 (What the Public Knows, April 28, 2015) and found very few partisan differences. People in the sample answered 12 questions about current events (identifying the route of the Keystone XL pipeline; knowledge of how many Supreme Court justices are women; etc.) and the Republicans outperformed the Democrats on 7 of the 12 items. Democrats outperformed the Republicans on 5 of the items. On average, the Republicans in the sample answered 8.3 items correctly, the Democrats answered 7.9 items correctly, and the independents answered 8.0 items correctly.

...

Measures of so-called “knowledge” in such a domain are easily skewed in a partisan manner by selection effects. This is a version of the “party of science” problem discussed previously. Whether the Democrats or the Republicans are the “party of science” depends entirely on how the issue in question is selected. The 17-item measure used by Klein was relatively balanced (8 items biased against leftists and 9 items biased against conservatives). With all the caveats in place about the difficulty of item matching, the weak conclusion that can be drawn is that existing research provides no evidence for the view that conservatives are deficient in the domain of economic knowledge—a domain critical for rational voting behavior.

pseudoerasmus commentary:
https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/812119586573316096
https://pseudoerasmus.com/2016/12/26/napoleon/
mentioned studies:
China and US today: http://www.ddorn.net/papers/Autor-Dorn-Hanson-ChinaShock.pdf
Turkey: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/econ/Krueger,%2520An%2520Empirical%2520Test%2520of%2520the%2520Infant.pdf
Napoleonic France: http://www.rjuhasz.com/research/jm_blockade_juhasz.pdf

This dismissal was premature. Arguments from theory can break down in any number of ways. And examples like Turkey’s aren’t true random experiments -- for example, countries might try to use protectionism to shore up industries that were uncompetitive to begin with, and which had little hope of ever flourishing. Policy decisions don’t just drive economic conditions, they’re also driven by them. To really know whether infant-industry protection is effective, we’d need some kind of random event that affected the competitive environment.

Economist Reka Juhasz, of Princeton and Columbia, combed through the historical record to find such a random event. And she found one: the Napoleonic Wars. It seems doubtful that Napoleon’s conquest of Europe was an elaborate scheme to protect failing French manufacturing industries, so it’s probably safe to consider its effects as akin to an act of God.

During his wars with Britain, Napoleon tried (unsuccessfully) to bring his island nemesis to its knees by cutting it off from European markets. The move protected industries within the sprawling Napoleonic domains that competed heavily with Britain. The prime example was mechanized cotton spinning, a very high-tech industry for its time, and a locus of intense competition between early industrial nations like Britain and France. With detailed historical records, Juhasz was able to identify how much different regions saw their trade costs with Britain go up as the result of Napoleon’s embargo, and to see whether cotton spinners in those areas flourished.

They did. Juhasz found that in the short term, profits of protected cotton spinners rose, and their size and productivity increased more in the long run. Decades later, these regions were exporting more, relative to less-protected regions, showing that companies in the shielded areas were eventually able to compete in global markets -- just as the infant-industry argument would predict.

I use a vector autoregressive model (VAR) to decompose an individual firm's stock return into two components: changes in cash-flow expectations (i.e., cash-flow news) and changes in discount rates (i.e., expected-return news). The VAR yields three main results. First, firm-level stock returns are mainly driven by cash-flow news. For a typical stock, the variance of cash-flow news is more than twice that of expected-return news. Second, shocks to expected returns and cash flows are positively correlated for a typical small stock. Third, expected-return-news series are highly correlated across firms, while cash-flow news can largely be diversified away in aggregate portfolios.

keep in mind rationalists have no taste
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/p9u/book_review_mathematics_for_computer_science/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/paying-professors-inside-googles-academic-influence-campaign-1499785286
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/07/12/tech-companies-arent-different/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-google-new-america.html
WASHINGTON — In the hours after European antitrust regulators levied a record $2.7 billion fine against Google in late June, an influential Washington think tank learned what can happen when a tech giant that shapes public policy debates with its enormous wealth is criticized.

The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left.

But not long after one of New America’s scholars posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had chaired New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/30/zephyr-teachout-google-is-coming-after-critics-in-academia-and-journalism-its-time-to-stop-them/
http://nypost.com/2017/08/30/being-evil-the-firing-of-a-google-critic/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/anne-marie-slaughter-new-america-google.html
https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/9/8/16266496/silicon-valley-google-apple-facebook-amazon-monopolies

mergers -> higher productivity but also higher prices

I think it would be nice if the world had more price discrimination; we would produce more goods, and those goods would be available to more people. As a society we could enable price discrimination by providing more high-quality signals to be used by price discriminators. The IRS is in a particularly attractive position to offer such signals since income is a particularly useful signal. But realistically I think that such a proposal would require coordination in order to get consumers’ consent to make the data available (and to ensure that only upper bounds were available); the total gains are probably not large enough to justify the amount of coordination and complexity that is required.

apparently about 1/3 of income goes to capital-holders, and 2/3 to workers (wonder what the source for that is, and how consistent it is across industries)

The Ancient Roman Market: https://medium.com/@BenitoArrunada/the-ancient-roman-market-f21cde3adf2