Cf. http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/econcs/pubs/ec270-chen.pdf

http://www.constrainedblisspoint.com/tag/fermats-last-theorem/

http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2011/08/if_computer_scientists_are_right_you_can_make_money_on_the_market_if_economists_are_right_you_can_compute_fast.html

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/deolalikars-claim-one-year-later/#comment-12862

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2895474

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144548

http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/b1w3n/markets_are_efficient_if_and_only_if_p_np_and_he/

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Why We Are In Political Gridlock: The Private Sector Is Dying http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/21/why-we-are-in-political-gridlock-the-private-sector-is-dying/

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Revealed: the capitalist network that runs the world http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed–the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html & http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf

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The Destruction of Economic Facts – Financial crisis wasn’t just about finance, but about the lack of knowledge http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/11_19/b4227060634112.htm
Cf. Reader comments http://app.businessweek.com/UserComments/combo_review;jsessionid=FA242695A0DC6ACABD095E9280C13911.ny04tls?action=all&style=wide&productId=127293&productCode=spec

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Monitoring the OECD’s Campaign Against Tax Competition, Fiscal Sovereignty, and Financial Privacy: Strategies for Low-Tax Jurisdictions “The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has an ongoing anti-tax competition project. This effort is designed to prop up inefficient welfare states in the industrialized world, thus enabling those governments to impose heavier tax burdens without having to fear that labor and capital will migrate to jurisdictions with better tax law. This project received a boost a few years ago when the Obama Administration joined forces with countries such as France and Germany, which resulted in all low-tax jurisdictions agreeing to erode their human rights policies regarding financial privacy. The tide is now turning against high-tax nations – particularly as more people understand that ever-increasing fiscal burdens inevitably lead to Greek-style fiscal collapse. Political changes in the United States further complicate the OECD’s ability to impose bad policy. Because of these developments, lowtax jurisdictions should be especially resistant to new anti-tax competition initiatives at the Bermuda Global Forum.” http://freedomandprosperity.org/files/OECD-Bermuda.pdf

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Download a free version of Policy and Choice – on the impact of behavioral economics on government tax and spending policies. The authors take a stream of research which had highlighted particular ‘nudges’ and turn it into a comprehensive framework for thinking about policy in a more realistic world where psychology is incorporated into economic decisionmaking. http://www.brookings.edu/press/Books/2011/policyandchoice.aspx

Cf. http://www.amazon.com/Policy-Choice-Finance-Behavioral-Economics/dp/0815704984/

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Feds seek $7M in privately made ‘Liberty Dollars’ that were invented by man to compete with US dollar

“Attempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism,” U.S. Attorney Anne Tompkins said in a statement after von NotHaus was convicted.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Feds-seek-7M-in-privately-apf-641808269.html

A ‘Unique’ Form of ‘Terrorism’ http://www.nysun.com/editorials/a-unique-form-of-terrorism/87269/

When Private Money Becomes a Felony Offense http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704425804576220383673608952.html

The conviction and likely asset forfeiture of Bernard von NotHaus shows that our fiat monetary system is not in any way voluntary. People who deride the gold standard as an obsolete relic that “we” abandoned should heed the words of Ludwig von Mises:

The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation. The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard. (The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 461).

http://mises.org/daily/5184/The-Crime-of-Private-Money

Update: Hard Money, Hard Time http://c4ss.org/content/6719

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The Purple Healthcare Plan

We, the undersigned economists, support the following principles governing fundamental healthcare reform and endorse immediate implementation of the Purple Healthcare Plan.

Principles of Healthcare Reform

1. All Americans need a basic health plan and should be free to purchase supplemental health insurance coverage.
2. Healthcare should be privately provided with people free to choose their doctors and hospitals.
3. All who can pay for their health plans should do so through a combination of existing tax payments and health plan co-payments.
4. The government’s projected healthcare costs must be strictly capped and affordable on a long-term basis.
5. Health plans should be affordable regardless of one’s pre-existing health conditions or risk.
6. The system must provide strong incentives to prevent overuse of healthcare services and discourage bad healthcare behavior.
7. Medical malpractice reform is needed to keep providers from engaging in unaffordable defensive medicine.

The Standard Plan

1. All Americans receive a voucher each year to purchase a standard plan from the private-plan provider of their choice.
2. Vouchers are individually risk-adjusted; those with higher expected healthcare costs, based on documented medical conditions, receive larger vouchers.
3. Participating insurance companies providing standard plans cannot deny coverage.
4. Each year a panel of doctors sets the coverages of the standard plan subject to a strict budget, namely that the total cost to the government of the vouchers cannot exceed 10 percent of GDP.
5. Insurance companies providing standard plans contract with private providers to cover their plan participants.
6. Americans choose doctors and hospitals included in the standard plan they choose.
7. Plan providers compete and provide incentives to improve participants’ health and limit bad health practices.
8. Plan providers offer supplemental plans to their participants and cannot deny supplemental insurance coverage to their participants.
9. The government (federal and state) ends the tax exclusion of employer-provided health insurance premiums.
10. Like all other Americans, Medicare, Medicaid, and health exchange participants are covered by the Purple Health Plan subject to appropriate transition provisions.
11. The roughly 10 percent of GDP now spent or allocated by federal and state government on these and related programs, as well as on the tax exclusion of employer-provided health insurance premiums, is reallocated to help finance the vouchers.

http://thepurplehealthplan.org/node/2

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Fear of China is exaggerated: its growth slows down by or soon after 2015: “Using international data starting in 1957, we construct a sample of cases where fast-growing economies slow down. The evidence suggests that rapidly growing economies slow down significantly, in the sense that the growth rate downshifts by at least 2 percentage points, when their per capita incomes reach around $17,000 US in year-2005 constant international prices, a level that China should achieve by or soon after 2015. Among our more provocative findings is that growth slowdowns are more likely in countries that maintain undervalued real exchange rates.” https://papers.nber.org/papers/w16919

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“As former chairmen and chairwomen of the Council of Economic Advisers, who have served in Republican and Democratic administrations, we [...] find ourselves in remarkable unanimity about the long-run federal budget deficit: It is a severe threat that calls for serious and prompt attention. [...]”

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/51864.html

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“[...]what looks like a Great Stagnation in the traditional market economy is to a significant extent a product of a vast growth in economic value that has occurred on the Internet and largely outside of the traditional market economy, and a corresponding cannibalization of and brain drain from traditional market businesses.

Most of the economic growth during the Internet era has been largely unmonetized, i.e. external to the measurable market. This is most obvious for completely free services like Craig’s List, Wikipedia, many blogs, open source software, and many other services based on content input by users. But ad-funded Internet services also usually create a much greater value than is captured by the advertising revenues. These include search, social networking, many online games, broadcast messaging, and many other services. Only a small fraction of the Internet’s overall value has been monetized. In other words, the vast majority of the Internet’s value is what economists call an externality: it is external to the measurable prices of the market. Of course, since this value is unmeasured, this thesis is extremely hard to prove or disprove, and can hardly be called scientific; mainly it just strikes me as subjectively obvious. [...]

What’s worse for the traditional market (as opposed to this recent tsunami of unmonetized voluntary information exchange), this tidal wave of value has greatly reduced the revenues of certain industries. The direct connection the Internet provides between authors and the readers put out of business many bookstores. Online classifieds and free news sources have cannibalized newspapers and magazines. Wikipedia is destroying demand for the traditional encyclopedia. Free and cut-price music has caused a substantial decline in music industry revenues. So the overall effect is a great increase in value combined with a perhaps small, but I’d guess significant reduction in what GDP growth would have been without the Internet. [...]

Cowen suggests that external gains of similar magnitude occurred in prior productivity revolutions, but I’m skeptical of this claim. A physical widget can be far more completely monetized than a piece of information, because it is excludable: if you don’t pay, you don’t get the widget. As opposed to information that computers readily copy. (The most underappreciated function of computers is that they are far better copy machines than the paper copiers). [...]” http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/02/great-stagnation-or-external-growth.html

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Are they angry that these firms are legally trying to minimize tax? If so, they must not understand that management has a fiduciary obligation to maximize after-tax returns for shareholders.

Are they implying that these businesses are cheating on their tax returns? If so, they clearly do not understand the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion.

Are they agitating for governments to impose worldwide taxation so that companies are double-taxed on any income earned (and already subject to tax) in other jurisdictions? If so, they should forthrightly admit this is their goal, notwithstanding the destructive, anti-competitive impact of such a policy.

Or, perhaps, could it be the case that leftists on both sides of the Atlantic don’t like tax competition? But rather than openly argue for tax harmonization and other policies that would lead to higher taxes and a loss of fiscal sovereignty, they think they will have more luck expanding the power of government by employing demagoguery against the big, bad, multinational companies and small, low-tax jurisdictions.

To give these statists credit, they are being smart. Tax competition almost certainly is the biggest impediment that now exists to restrain big government. Greedy politicians understand that high taxes may simply lead the geese with the golden eggs to fly across the border. Indeed, competition between governments is surely the main reason that tax rates have dropped so dramatically in the past 30 years. This video explains”

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Microfinance? [...] Deworming? [...] Conditional cash transfers? [CCT] [...]

I bet that facilitating international migration is not very high up the list of interventions people think of. But it should be. In a new working paper, John Gibson and I evaluate the development impacts of New Zealand’s new seasonal worker program, the RSE. The figure below compares the per-capita income gain we estimate to those from microfinance, CCTs, and from my previous research giving grants of $100-200 to microenterprises. It is simply no contest!” http://blogs.worldbank.org/allaboutfinance/the-most-effective-development-intervention-we-have-evidence-for

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