Considering a Consumption Tax

A combination of electronic commerce and the Flat Tax could eliminate the IRS as we know it

Universal Health Care, American Pragmatism, and the Ethics of Health Policy: Questioning Political Efficacy

[Excerpt] “This article will explore the conceptual implications of applying ethical critique and analysis to health policy. This is not to imply any reductionist conception of health policy in which ethics is absent. As Deborah Stone and John W. Kingdon both note, policy is fraught with ethical implications, and value prioritization is a sine qua non for health policy. Nevertheless, I wish to suggest that there are some conceptually significant distinctions in thinking of the ethics of health policy as opposed to thinking separately about ethics and about health policy. Moreover, these distinctions themselves are of value, both in thinking about some of the most intractable problems of health policy, and in generating health policy that expressly presents its ethical bases, as opposed to masking the value assumptions and beliefs that underpin such policy.

The complexity of approximating the matching polynomial in the complex plane

We study the problem of approximating the value of the matching polynomial on graphs with edge parameter $\gamma$, where $\gamma$ takes arbitrary values in the complex plane. When $\gamma$ is a positive real, Jerrum and Sinclair showed that the problem admits an FPRAS on general graphs. For general complex values of $\gamma$, Patel and Regts, building on methods developed by Barvinok, showed that the problem admits an FPTAS on graphs of maximum degree $\Delta$ as long as $\gamma$ is not a negative real number less than or equal to $-1/(4(\Delta-1))$. Our first main result completes the picture for the approximability of the matching polynomial on bounded degree graphs. We show that for all $\Delta\geq 3$ and all real $\gamma$ less than $-1/(4(\Delta-1))$, the problem of approximating the value of the matching polynomial on graphs of maximum degree $\Delta$ with edge parameter $\gamma$ is #P-hard. We then explore whether the maximum degree parameter can be replaced by the connective constant. Sinclair et al. showed that for positive real $\gamma$ it is possible to approximate the value of the matching polynomial using a correlation decay algorithm on graphs with bounded connective constant (and potentially unbounded maximum degree). We first show that this result does not extend in general in the complex plane; in particular, the problem is #P-hard on graphs with bounded connective constant for a dense set of $\gamma$ values on the negative real axis. Nevertheless, we show that the result does extend for any complex value $\gamma$ that does not lie on the negative real axis. Our analysis accounts for complex values of $\gamma$ using geodesic distances in the complex plane in the metric defined by an appropriate density function

“A flower which blossoms and fades”: Depictions of Tuberculosis in 19th-century Opera

The romantic period in art and music is a time that focused on the regular person and had a fascination with nature, emotion, and death. One of the most common themes used was disease. One of the more common diseases of the time in both opera and real life was tuberculosis. In opera tuberculosis is always brought upon the same type of person time and time again and is always shown both by the character, and also though a series of metaphors. This character is always a woman and these “tubercular heroines” always are young, beautiful, frail people who need to be protected. This is the case in La Bohème by Puccini. La Traviata by Verdi, and Les Contes D’Hoffmann by Offenbach. In this way tuberculosis is always seen in a sort of anti-feminist light. Why is this the case and what are some of the ways tuberculosis is shown to us in the text and in the music and what metaphors convey the romantic understanding of tuberculosis? In Verdi we see the common metaphors of flowers and farewells both because of her short life, similarly in Puccini the metaphor of flowers is used but there is also the metaphor of light, temperature, and color used to show the symptoms shown with tuberculosis. In Offenbach the use of flowers as a metaphor is still used but this show points in an even greater anti-feminist and anti-disabled way by always putting the woman under the control of a man and by constantly making fun of the disabled. In all of these stories the heroine is a young beautiful woman who falls in love but eventually faces their demise at the hands of their deadly disease

Foreign and domestic bank participation in emerging markets: lessons from Mexico and Argentina

It is generally agreed that strong domestic financial systems play an important role in attaining overall economic development and stabilization. The role played by foreign banks in achieving this goal, however, is still controversial. This article brings new evidence to the debate over foreign participation by examining the lending patterns of domestic and foreign banks in Argentina and Mexico during the 1990s. The authors conclude that foreign banks in both countries typically have stronger and less volatile loan growth than their domestic counterparts. The corollary to this finding, however, is that bank health—not ownership per se—is the critical element in the growth, volatility, and cyclicality of bank credit. Still, diversity of ownership is found to contribute to greater credit stability in times of financial system turmoil and weakness.Bank loans - Argentina ; Bank loans - Mexico ; Banks and banking, Foreign ; Argentina ; Mexico