I noticed your recent blog entry about Rejecta Mathematica. A couple of us on the editorial staff are semi-regular readers of your blog, so we were happy and excited to see your posting. I wanted to let you know that we are actually in the later stages of releasing our first issue – just finalizing a few things with the small crop of brave authors who have responded to our invitations. If you would like, I will let you know when our inaugural issue is available.
This passage reminded me of the Greg Mankiw student who wanted to boost spending through destruct-lotteries on dollar bills. But this is a way to encourage tax reporting:
It seems tax evasion was a problem for the government in a country
where credit cards are not widely accepted and small business transacts
most business. The government hit upon the idea of a sales lottery
rather than a sales tax. Every sales receipt has a lottery number
printed on its back. Once a month, the government publishes several
newspaper pages of winning numbers. You can win anywhere between $5
and about $200 if you have a lucky sales receipt.
The government’s theory was everybody would demand a sales receipt
if they had a chance of winning a lottery. You play anytime you make a
purchase; no matter how small a purchase. The result is, as the island
has become more prosperous, most people don’t want to bother with
combing through thousands of lucky numbers in a newspaper once a month
to maybe win $5. Charities stepped in. Along many streets you see
clear plastic canisters promoting various charitable causes soliciting
your sales receipts. Retired volunteers go over the numbers on
receipts collected. It gives non profits a source of funding and gives
old people a steady way to contribute without hard physical labor. The
Yngge Ceramics Museum I visited last Saturday collected sales receipts
instead of charging admission. If you were without a sales receipt
(unlikely in this country) you could run across the street to 7-11 and
buy a piece of candy for pennies and come back with a sales receipt.
Here is the full story and thanks to Joel Cretan for the pointer. Read the whole post, it makes many other interesting points about Taiwan.
Don't be surprised if you see Col. Sanders out filling potholes. In an
unusual cause-marketing push, KFC is tackling the pothole problem in
Louisville, Ky. in exchange for stamping the fresh pavement with
"Re-freshed by KFC," a chalky stencil likely to fade away in the next
downpour.
My answer is I would trust the person less in a business or corporate environment, but would still trust enough to maintain a relationship.
Here's a question for people like myself, people who do not strictly separate bedroom character from boardroom character:
Suppose that you were on an NBA team and you knew one of your
teammates was cheating on his wife. Would you trust him less on the
court? Trust is vitally important in basketball, just as it is
important in business.
My answer to this new scenario is no, I would not trust my point guard (who's cheating on his wife) any less on the court.
Why do I answer the questions differently?
Some of his readers think that trust in a point guard is automatic but I say ha.
When it comes to trust, I suggest that compartmentalization is the best default assumption. The cynical view, which you will never find on this blog, is that the NBA example starkly illustrates that an unfaithful man is driven by opportunity, not by a differing basic inclination. Putting that aside, Hitler was supposedly nice to his dog and Nixon never cheated on his wife. This is one reason why I don't wish to condemn people when I observe what is possibly their intellectual dishonesty. Even if the person has questionable morals in public discourse, he or she still might be more likely to give his life in a foxhole or perform other noble acts.
Removed from context, it's very difficult to judge people as a whole.
I do not read Italian, but Stefano offers me the following summary:
Gypsies exploit their bad reputation to make money. That's what happened in the provinces of Macerata, Ascoli Piceno and Ancona. A group of Gypsies coming from Veneto figured out an original way to swindle real estate agencies. Three of the Gypsies would show up at construction sites driving an expensive car and wearing nice clothes; they would get in touch with the sales office and and put down a down payment in cash for an apartment, sight unseen. After a couple of days they would then show up with their entire families, obstreperous and in tatters. This would trigger an immediate buy-back of the sale contract: the real estate agency would promptly pay back three times the amount of the down payment to get the apartment back (an apartment that the Gypsies did not in fact really want). Real estate agencies reporting this scheme to the police set in motion an investigation that resulted in three of the Gypsies being indicted for fraud. Their loot has been estimated around 300k Euros.
On debt salvation, Keynesian economics, the nature of government policy and more South Park has some of the wisest critiques of just about everyone and everything to do with the financial crisis. Of course, don't look to South Park for solutions! Sure to offend. Hat tip to Steve Horwtiz at The Austrian Economists.
Every day, usually promptly, he (it?) leaves comments on MR posts. His comments read like this:
Bayern LB Bank
Die krisengebeutelte BayernLB traut sich nach einem Verlust von rund
fünf Milliarden Euro im vergangenen Jahr auch für 2009 keine konkrete
Prognose zu. Die Unwägbarkeiten an den internationalen Finanzmärkten
seien zu groß, sagte BayernLB-Chef Michael Kemmer in München.
Die Bank sei aber zufriedenstellend ins neue Geschäftsjahr
gestartet. 2008 haben die Milliarden-Belastungen aus der Finanzkrise
tiefe Löcher in die Bilanz der BayernLB gerissen, sie musste alleine
vom Freistaat Bayern mit zehn Milliarden Euro gestützt werden. «Es ist
zu bedauern, dass vor allem die bayerischen Steuerzahler in Anspruch
genommen werden mussten, um die existenzbedrohende Lage bei der
BayernLB zu beseitigen», sagte Kemmer.
No link is offered (he's not trying to boost a Google ranking), but the posts do list an email. If you don't know German, I can assure you that is not an ad for Viagra. It is simply dull (or is it?) chat about German banks. He (it?) leaves these posts all over the internet, often on economics blogs. Each comment to MR comes from a new IP address, so reporting him (it?) as spam does not stop the flow.
What motivates Raivo Pommer? Do you have a theory of Raivo Pommer? Is this proof of a multiverse? (Apparently a world with Raivo Pommer is a possible world.) And will he offer a report about German banks on this post too?
Topic 357 – Tax Information for Parents of Kidnapped Children
You may claim a kidnapped child as your dependent if the following requirements
are met:
The child must be presumed by law enforcement to have been kidnapped by
someone who is not a member of your family or a member of the child's family,
and
The child had, for the taxable year in which the kidnapping occurred,
the same principal place of abode as the taxpayer for more than one-half of
the portion of such year before the date of kidnapping.
If both of these requirements are met, the child may meet the requirements
for purposes of determining:
The dependency exemption
The child tax credit, and
Head of household or qualifying widow(er) with dependent child filing
status.
This tax treatment will cease to apply as of your first tax year beginning
after the calendar year in which either there is a determination that the
child is dead or the child would have reached age 18, whichever occurs first.
For more information, refer to Publication 501, Exemptions, Standard
Deduction, and Filing Information.
The subtitle is Forty Tales From the Afterlives. This bestseller looks thin and unsubstantial but I would recommend it to some of you.
Take a Baylor neuroscientist, feed him a steady dose of Robin Hanson, and then let him write down forty short, conceptual scenarios for what life after death might be like. Not for everyone, but I found the "pleasure per minute" ratio to be worthwhile.
I enjoyed this article, which is interesting throughout. Excerpt:
English-speakers are keen to say please politely in other languages,
even if those languages do not express politeness by constantly saying
please. So English tourists say ‘por favor’ to waiters and barmen in a
way that sounds too insistent to a Spaniard. It is as if someone were
to say: ‘A glass of wine, if you please, my good man.’ If you want the
butter passed in Spanish, you say, ‘Pass the butter.’ To add por favor
can smack of impatience.
I've been following your Kindle posts for a while now and something that struck me is the signalling effects of reading a book versus a reading using a Kindle – yes I read Robin Hanson's blog too! Reading with a Kindle, the signal is relatively constant and, at the moment, is something like "I'm an early technology adopter and I like to read". As the Kindle gets more commonplace the efficacy of this signal will, I think, diminish. Compare this with the signalling effects of reading a traditional book, where you signal to people not only that you like to read, but crucially what you are reading.
I wonder if Kindle advocates are underestimating how important it is for people to show those around them not just that they like to read, but also what they like to read?
For all the talk about the Great Depression, we are missing one historical analogy for a program of large fiscal stimulus, namely Germany after the Berlin Wall came down. The two countries united, lots of money was spent and lots of money was borrowed. West Germany had a modern economy with both manufacturing and services. At the time Germany had unemployed resources, especially if you count the labor moving from East Germany to West Germany as grossly underemployed and available for higher-return projects.
The results were less than wonderful. The higher demand boosted measured gdp growth in the short run (bananas and porn, plus reconstruction) but Germany fell into economic stagnation. The new demands took the West German economy only so far. The higher taxes and debt then kept the German economy down for many years. Few Germans were happy with the economic fallout from this "stimulus." And that was with a relatively well-functioning financial system and a reasonable amount of initial optimism.
You can list many dissimilarities between German unification and the current U.S. situation (and in the comments I am sure you will). Still, as historical examples go, I believe this one has some relevance. When European leaders are skeptical about fiscal stimulus, they have some reasons, some of them quite recent.
If you'd like a lengthy account of the economics of that period, along with lots of numbers, try this study. Just read through the first few pages, you'll see statements like:
Economic theory suggests that a fiscal expansion financed by distortionary taxation could potentially generate substantial adverse growth effects after the initial positive demand stimulus dies down.
It is then estimated that the negative economic impact from the German stimulus may explain up to one third of the subsequent growth gap between Germany and comparable European nations.
Addendum: Don't be fooled by the topic-shifting comments on why East Germany didn't do better; this post is about how West Germany fared from so much stimulus. Not so great.
The rosy scenario is that in a highly connected, internet-intensive world, the bad news travels far more quickly and far more convincingly than before. The early stages of the downturn are like falling off a cliff. We bottomed out maybe two weeks ago. That said, the rebound also comes much more quickly. Wages are more flexible than before. Bad inventory policies are avoided through information technology. The Fed responds to changing conditions ever more quickly. Overall, economic time accelerates on both the downswing and the upswing.
I do not believe the rosy scenario, as I think there are still other "shoes to drop," most of all internationally. I also think we will see a double-dip or triple-dip recession, as the Fed must eventually withdraw some of new money from the system. Good news is then, in fact, simply a sign that some bad news is on the way, sooner or later.
Still, if you are looking for something to believe in, I offer you the rosy scenario.
