Public Policy Toward Life Saving: Maximize Lives Saved vs. Consumer Sovereignty

This paper is a theoretical analysis of individual and societal demands for life saving. We begin by demonstrating that the allocation of health expenditures to maximize lives saved may be inconsistent with the willingness-to-pay criterion and consumer sovereignty. We further investigate the effects of information on aggregate willingness to pay. This discussion is related to the concepts of statistical and identified lives. Methods of financing health expenditures are considered. We show that risk averse individuals may reject actuarially fair insurance for treatments of fatal diseases even if they plan to pay for the treatment if they get sick. This result has implications regarding the choice of treatment or prevention. Finally, we examine the importance of the timing of life-saving decisions. A conflict arises between society's preferences before it is known who will be sick and after, even if it is known in advance how many people will be sick.

The saving grace

Many economists agree that a country's rate of saving can be a key factor in the growth rate and living standards the country achieves. Analysts are less certain about which factors have positive and negative influences on saving, what role government should have in creating a better environment for saving, and the extent to which a country can offset the effects of low domestic saving by tapping into other countries' savings. ; Economists, bankers, and officials discussed these and other aspects of saving earlier this year at a symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Richard Alm and David Gould recap much of that discussion in this article.Money ; Saving and investment

Flow of liquids in pipes of circular and annular cross-sections

Cover title.Prepared as part of an investigation conducted by the Engineering Experiment Station, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Sons of Martha: reshaping the electric industry

LectureIn summary, what had we actually done? Succinctly stated, we had made dramatic changes in the way the electric utility service was to be offered in the future. The changes had been to some degree institutional and political. But primarily they were technological. And all of this was done at lesser cost and with reduced impact on the environment that had been the situation with earlier procedures

Coherence for categorified operadic theories

Given an algebraic theory which can be described by a (possibly symmetric) operad P, we propose a definition of the weakening (or categorification) of the theory, in which equations that hold strictly for P -algebras hold only up to coherent isomorphism. This generalizes the theories of monoidal categories and symmetric monoidal categories, and several related notions defined in the literature. Using this definition, we generalize the result that every monoidal category is monoidally equivalent to a strict monoidal category, and show that the “strictification” functor has an interesting universal property, being left adjoint to the forgetful functor from the category of strict P -categories to the category of weak P -categories. We further show that the categorification obtained is independent of our choice of presentation for P , and extend some of our results to many-sorted theories, using multicategories

Studying Wrongful Convictions: Learning from Social Science

There has been an explosion of legal scholarship on wrongful convictions in the last decade, reflecting a growing concern about the problem of actual innocence in the criminal justice system. Yet criminal law and procedure scholars have engaged in relatively little dialogue or collaboration on this topic with criminologists. In this article, we use the empirical study of wrongful convictions to illustrate what criminological approaches—or, more broadly, social science methods—can teach legal scholars. After briefly examining the history of wrongful conviction scholarship, we discuss the limits of the (primarily) narrative methodology of legal scholarship on wrongful convictions. We argue that social scientific methods allow for more precise and accurate depictions of the multifactorial and complex nature of causation in wrongful conviction cases. In the main body of this article, we discuss and illustrate several social science approaches to the study of wrongful conviction: aggregated case studies, matched comparison samples, and path analysis. We argue these methods would help criminal law and procedure scholars to better understand the causes, characteristics, and consequences of wrongful convictions than a purely narrative approach. Finally, we offer concluding thoughts about improving the dialogue between criminal law and criminology on the subject of wrongful conviction