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Category Archive for 'incentives'

Today I reprint a slightly edited piece I put together several years ago. I’d change a lot of it, from the content to the tone, if I were to do it over – but one must live with one’s younger self. Happy Thanksgiving to all. Four centuries after the celebration of the first Thanksgiving, there […]

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Unquestionably it is the case that offering financial incentives can, and does, undermine motivation for certain behaviors. Not to be too crude, but if I offered my wife $100 in order to have her cook me dinner, she’d probably be less likely to do it than if we had planned something together. You can imagine […]

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Before I proceed with this post, let’s get this out of the way. Here is a really cute elephant picture: And let me get the following out of the way: even though I understand the economics and arguments about why we may want to allow and perhaps even encourage hunting, I don’t like it at […]

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Alex Tabarrok has a post today supporting the idea of term limits. He, like me, seems to support them on the grounds that if you know the opposite party may soon be in office, that may soften your governing stand while in office. I want to believe this is what happens. But in a world […]

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Don’t Masturbate in the Shower

I can never tell if I am having my leg pulled, but a student sincerely tells me that he wandered to the shower in his freshmen dorm this week to be greeted by this: Now, I have seen all kinds of stuff in my life on college campuses, but this has to be a  first. […]

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Taxing the “Rich”

Since 2006, as my real income has fallen by 25%: I have paid about $45,000 in property taxes to our local communities and school districts I have paid over $50,000 in state income taxes I have paid over $110,000 in federal income taxes I have paid over (via not just my share, but the real incidence) $200,000 […]

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Suppose you are worried that some particular activity threatens the water that you rely upon. In many cases, since there are so many possible polluters invading “our” water resources and since there are so many people who use a water source, the idea of arranging contracts between polluters and pollutees to get an optimum amount […]

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In the news earlier this week was the release of the IPCC Synthesis Report. The newsworthiness of the release is rather hilarious given that it is simply a synthesis of reports that the IPCC has been releasing over the past year. This is a great boon to the news industry – since they get to […]

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That would be people like my wife who continue to work. Here is how her income is taxed: Federal tax rate of 28% (her wage puts us in this bracket) State tax rate of 6.5% Social security – her “share is 7.65%, her employer pays 7.65%, but since we know that the incidence of this […]

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