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