Rachel: I'll have to write that into the new gospel.
E-Merl: New gospel?
Rachel: Gospels should be updated regularly.
Edit: mispelling of "write" corrected.
My bookmark is made of two prices of fridge-magnet material. It can be closed around a few pages and the magnetism holds it in place, preventing it from falling out.
Plus dollars in my country are exclusively coins, the smallest note is $5.
Nonetheless it is important to have a firm grasp on the progress we have already attained. It's easy to go from "we haven't made any real progress" to "real progress is impossible". And so we should acknowledge the achievements we have made to date, while always striving to build on them.
That second point is particularly important. Since present governments cannot reliably bind future governments, credibility is a big issue with any politically-sensitive project with a long time horizon.
Except that an individual vote have a negligible effect on who wins an election, so voters have no incentive to figure out which political party best represents their goals.
The normal margin of error on a political opinion poll would be 1.96 sigma - a 95% confidence interval (that's how you'd get a margin of error of just over 3 percentage points on a poll of 1000 people.
Yes, I don't think "couldn't afford paper" is a good explanation, books of this nature were for wealthy people anyway.
I think much of it is that brevity simply wasn't seen as a virtue back then. There were far fewer written works, so you had more time to go through each one.
The three you mention are all subtypes of the same efficiency - informational efficiency. Informational efficiency is used in finance and refers to how well a financial market incorporates information into prices. Basically a market is informationally efficient if you can't out-predict without using information it doesn't have. The weak / semi-strong / strong distinction merely indicates how much information it is incorporating into prices: weak means it's incorporating it's own past prices, semi-strong includes all public information, and strong includes all information held in private as well.
The other type of efficiency is allocative efficiency, a concept used in microeconomics. An allocatively efficient market is one that assigns goods to the people who place the highest value on them (subject to the constraints of each person's endowments). It is effectively a utility-maximising condition. The whole concept of market failure in economics is built around situations where markets are failing to be allocatively efficient.
Thanks, fixed.