Perfect weather for today. I'll be the guy with a blue and white cooler
Warning: segment contains Colbert's version of the basilisk.
I have to agree with Sanderson's first law. One reason I liked HPMOR more than the original Harry Potter was the transition from soft magic to hard (rule-based, well-explained) magic.
"smart characters that win"
Miles Vorkosigan saga, Ender's Game, anything by Neal Stephenson.
Got my dissertation proposal approved.
First paragraph: This dissertation continues the tradition of identifying the unintended consequences of the US health insurance system. Its main contribution is to estimate the size of the distortions caused by the employer-based system and regulations intended to fix it, while using methods that are more novel and appropriate than those of previous work.
The most relevant field here is International Monetary Economics.
After TAing a class on the subject, I became convinced that most people (including economists) would be better off ignoring money most of the time, and just following where the goods went. So think of this as a transfer of $1000 worth of goods from the US to Kenya.
You could get the official answer with an IS-LM-BP model and some masochism.
More seriously, this does make me want to look into theoretical work on the macroeconomics of charity. On the empirical side, the best evidence is that even average (poorly targeted and managed) foreign aid has positive effects on country-level growth.
While I agree with almost all of the antifaq (the general point is apparently more plausible to economists than non-economists), this is pretty misleading:
"The future cannot be a cause of the past."
True, but human expectations about the future can be very important in the present. If you expect that 5 years from now FAI will take over, you won't bother to make many long-term investments like building factories and training new workers.
"Shorter work weeks didn't just happen. It took a huge amount of effort from unions, which were a lot more powerful then than they are now." I've never understood why people find this story compelling, precisely because of your final clause. If unions were the main force determining hours, why have hours continued to go down now that unions have been drastically weakened?
Its not showing on desktop now either