election by jury election by jury is a system of choosing political representatives by randomly selecting a group of citizens who act as jurors and vote for the best candidate from a pool of nominees. sortition is another system of random selection, but it directly appoints the chosen citizens to…

a new approach to economic equality — economic inequality is one of the most pressing challenges of our time. the gap between the rich and the poor has been widening in many countries, leading to social unrest, political polarization, and human suffering. how can we address this problem without sacrificing economic efficiency, innovation, and growth? one possible…

there’s a claim that lvt is beneficial because it causes land to be more productively allocated. but this is irrational, because the the measure of “productivity” is just “how much someone will pay for something”, and land is always owned by whoever pays the most for it, by definition. for…

introduction picture this: you get a 100$ gift card for a store you don't really like. you'd prefer the cash, so you could spend it however you want. this is a simple example of what economists call "deadweight loss." in this blog post, we'll use the "gift card fallacy" to help…

consider the following table of tax rates. ┌──────────────┬────────────┬────────────────┐ │ Gross Income │ Net Income │ Effective Rate │ ├──────────────┼────────────┼────────────────┤ │ 12,000$ │ 17,200$ │ -43.33% │ │ 20,000$ │ 22,000$ │…

first watch the video. to understand this, let’s use the simplest meaningful example, with three people. we’ll use an algebraic notation so that ag means “alice has green eyes”, and bg means “bob has green eyes”, and so on. and bk[] means “bob knows the facts within the array”…

St Louis Turnout

imagine you’re traveling in a vessel which holds three people. there are blue vessels and red vessels. upon every trip, two occupants will experience organ failure. in the blue vessels, they will simply die. in the red vessels, the third one will be sacrificed and their organs harvested to save the other two. obviously all travelers will want to take a red vessel, because it cuts their risk of death in half. this by definition means that the laws of the red vssels are more ethical. the more ethical system is by definition the one that a self-interested party would choose if they were unsure of their identity.

introduction — people often debate whether it's possible to sum individual utilities to create a social utility. there are many traditional arguments against this idea, usually materialist in nature, claiming that utility should ultimately be quantifiable, like the number of dopamine molecules in one's brain. however, for practical purposes, we can avoid…