Complicated rules always advantage the rich over the poor and the big over the little. The modern era of increasing Gini and bigco dominance has such an obvious cause in increasing regulatory complexity, that to the econoliterate it seems pointless to discuss littler causes.
(Two exceptions that I've heard taken seriously by econoliterates are software-world good-duplication yielding winner-take-all, and "trade decreases global inequality but increases local inequality" though I don't see why latter is necessary true absent rules complexity.
That is, those two are taken seriously as plausibly having an effect large enough that it plays in the same park as the incredibly vast increase in richadvantagers, or "regulations" as the naive call them.
I myself can't see it, but it's the sort of idea that might be taken seriously by, I dunno, Alex Tabarrok and not just Tyler Cowen. Though I don't know if Tabarrok actually agrees in this particular case.
On reflection, I should just retract this. Econoliterate people debate this for real, and some propose stories that don't boil down to NIMBY + healthcare + "accredited college" credentialism + occupational licensing + bigco advantaging + licensed banks + student loans + &c.
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I am trying to wrap my head around "this small tax would generate at least $3 trillion". Like. If you generate $3 trillion then it's not a small tax. It's a $3 trillion tax. You can't. Just. Stick the word "small" next to "$3 trillion" to cancel it.
Cade Metz's byline is on the NYT hit piece to absorb blame, but the blameworthy one is more likely to be Metz's editor. The higher aristocrat is usually closer to being "the" source of the problem. Who was Metz's boss on this piece? Who'd they report to? Who ordered the hit?
Seeing a nice big name of an non-management employee, that was put out by the BigCo to take the blame, and then heaping blame on that first name you saw - trying to make *that* name infamous - seems like mental laxness to the point of being the NYTrash's willing tool, ya know?
You think Pui-Wing Tam (NYT tech editor) or Mark Thompson (CEO) give two shits if you ruin Metz's life? Tam and Thompson have a thousand eager guys with journalism degrees desperate to take Metz's place, per job opening. Metz is a very replaceable cog to them.
What on Earth is up with the "even after being vaccinated, you can't change your behavior" thing? Insane, yes, much of society is insane, but this insanity has some root that I don't understand. It's not the equilibrium of anything obvious-to-me.
So far, something like 1 rings truest to me, maybe with side doses of 2 & 3. People are performing virtuous compliance and there's no controlling legal authority, not even science or a vaccine, that can say it's okay to dial the performance down?
Requiring public mask-wearing for everyone, because you don't want to check vaccine certifications each time - that would make sense, sure. But in this case you would then add, "That said, go ahead and visit and hug your also-vaccinated friends in private."
Real journalism serves an important function in society. I've just subscribed to @TheEconomist to do my part and underscore this point: my call to bury the rotting corpse of the NYT is not meant as an attack on the very few real journalist institutions remaining. We need more.
Clarification: I think having Big Buildings Containing People With Press Passes, that do at least some real journalism, is still horrifyingly vital to modern society. If you just want one more honest blogger, sure, support them directly via Substack.
"Why?" you ask. (A): Because some investigations work better when you show up with an Official Press Pass that places you in the recognized social role of an Investigator to the bureaucrat, and announces you have a non-dismissable moderately powerful institution behind you...
It's honestly really really easy to filter out this entire class of mistakes if you're a "high-decoupler", as I expect most real scientists are, and know about the is-ought type distinction and the naturalistic fallacy. Low-decouplers are endlessly paranoid about such, mostly...
... realistically speaking because it's a political performance, for which you are not the intended audience. But also because they genuinely can't do an easy mental slice that distinguishes eg "how people evolved" and "what is good"...
...and they genuinely can't imagine what it's like for that mental motion to produce a clean slice that just works. Or so I suspect.
Does a known cryptographic system exist which:
- Enables proving who voted
- Enables proving the result of the vote
- Doesn't prove who voted for what
- Doesn't let anyone prove who they voted for, even voluntarily by revealing a key or a calculation
(I realize this sounds pretty impossible; but, to me, it sounds substantially *less* impossible than zk-SNARKs, so at my level it's a fair question.)
Clarification: By "proving who voted" I mean being able to verify a complete list of all the voters/keys who voted, and that no extra votes outside the list occurred. We'd like it to be publicly verifiable that there were no extra or illegal votes.