Friday, September 21, 2012

This was me a couple weeks ago

 
More or less out of the blue it occurred to me that the ability of a majoritarian government to supply goods that are positive externalities dependend critically and quite straightforwardly on the distribution of utility functions across the population.
 
I did a little googling and it turns out that back in the 70s someone had published almost exactly the same math I had jotted down.
 
 






 

3 comments:

  1. Ideas certainly aren't scarce. Only the ones that we attach ourselves to seem to share that characteristic.

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  2. Ah, yes. When I was nearly done with my thesis, I found a source that had covered exactly the same ground... in 1917. It was disspiriting.

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  3. I've written a blog post only to find a paper pretty convincingly refuting everything I said.

    Not quite the same, but still.

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