LONG-TERM IMPACTS OF THE FEDERAL DEFICIT

Public Economics,

THE U.S. ECONOMIC SYSTEM -- WHAT IS IT BECOMING?

Public Economics,

Education and Falling Wages

Start with a statistic that should be burned into the brain of every American. If one looks at young males eighteen to twenty-five years of age who work full-time for a full year — eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year — 18 percent of them could not earn a poverty-line income ($12,183 in 1990 dollars) in 1980. Ten years later, in 1990, that number had risen to 40 percent. Among young female workers eighteen to twenty-four years of age, the percentage unable to earn a poverty-line income despite full-time, full-year work rises from 29 to 48 percent over the decade. If the unemployed and part-time workers are added into the statistics, 73 percent of the young people who worked in America in 1990 could not earn a poverty-line income. Between 1988 and 1992, two-thirds of the American workforce has had to take a cut in their real, inflation-corrected wages. Unless something is done to reverse the current one percent per year decline in real wages, the numbers are going to be much worse a decade from now

1992--the end of the line for the current world economy

Series from publisher's information"Fall 1988.

Desmistificação e a crença plenamente apta

One of the contentious philosophical issues surrounding the cognitive science of religion (CSR) is whether well-confirmed CSR theories would debunk religious beliefs. These debates have been contentious in part because of criticisms of epistemic principles used in debunking arguments. In this paper I use Ernest Sosa’s respected theory of knowledge as fully apt belief—which avoids objections that have been leveled against sensitivity and safety principles often used in debunking arguments—to construct a plausible debunking argument for religious belief on the assumption that religious belief is formed simply through processes theorized by CSR. But, in fact, most believers also rely on arguments of various sorts, and their beliefs are not debunked.Keywords: debunking argument, cognitive science of religion, Ernest Sosa.Uma das questões filosóficas controversas que cercam a ciência cognitiva da religião (CCR) é se as teorias de CCR desmitificariam crenças religiosas. Esses debates têm sido controversos, em parte, por causa das críticas aos princípios epistêmicos usados para desmistificar argumentos. Neste artigo, uso a respeitada teoria do conhecimento de Ernest Sosa como crença plenamente apta – que evita objeções que foram levantadas contra princípios de sensibilidade e segurança frequentemente usados em desmistificar argumentos – para construir um argumento de desmistificação plausível para a crença religiosa na suposição de que crença religiosa é formada simplesmente por meio de processos teorizados pelo CCR. Mas, de fato, a maioria dos crentes também conta com argumentos de vários tipos, e suas crenças não são desmistificadas.Palavras-chave: argumento de desmistificação, ciência cognitiva da religião, Ernest Sosa

Functional Sequential Treatment Allocation

Consider a setting in which a policy maker assigns subjects to treatments, observing each outcome before the next subject arrives. Initially, it is unknown which treatment is best, but the sequential nature of the problem permits learning about the effectiveness of the treatments. While the multi-armed-bandit literature has shed much light on the situation when the policy maker compares the effectiveness of the treatments through their mean, much less is known about other targets. This is restrictive, because a cautious decision maker may prefer to target a robust location measure such as a quantile or a trimmed mean. Furthermore, socio-economic decision making often requires targeting purpose specific characteristics of the outcome distribution, such as its inherent degree of inequality, welfare or poverty. In the present paper we introduce and study sequential learning algorithms when the distributional characteristic of interest is a general functional of the outcome distribution. Minimax expected regret optimality results are obtained within the subclass of explore-then-commit policies, and for the unrestricted class of all policies