Markets and communities: the social cost of the meritocracy

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jean-Paul Carvalho
Keyword(s):  
Social Cost ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Mobility ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Excessive Competition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Narrow Definition ◽  
Productive Traits ◽  
Deaths Of Despair

Abstract Critiques of the meritocracy have centered on its narrow definition and biased assessment of merit, its stigmatization of the unsuccessful, and excessive competition. This paper identifies a different mechanism that could have pernicious social and political consequences. Economic mobility sorts people based on certain ‘productive’ traits, separating them into classes, and thus alters social externalities. This sorting–separation–externalities mechanism can produce between-class polarization in social outcomes (e.g. alcoholism and drug abuse) and worsen aggregate outcomes over all classes, consistent with rising ‘deaths of despair’ in the United States (Case and Deaton, 2020, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton University Press). When traits are endogenous, transition out of a caste-based society produces an initial burst of economic mobility which dissipates over time. Thus, a dynamic meritocratic society devolves into a static class-based society. I set out an alternative model called the ‘experimental society’, which is less susceptible to these problems.

scholarly journals The Interaction of Wildfire Risk Mitigation Policies in the Presence of Spatial Externalities and Heterogeneous Landowners

Forests ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibtisam Al Abri ◽  
Kelly Grogan
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Model ◽  
Social Cost ◽  
Risk Mitigation ◽  
Policy Issue ◽  
Spillover Effects ◽  
The United States ◽  
Free Riding ◽  
Stochastic Dynamic ◽  
Fuel Treatment ◽  
The Social

The dramatic increase in the number of uncontrollable wildfires in the United States has become an important policy issue as they threaten valuable forests and human property. The derived stochastic dynamic model of this study is capable of determining optimal fuel treatment timing and level simultaneously and as a function of fire risk and fuel biomass dynamics. This study develops a stochastic dynamic model to evaluate the interaction of fuel treatment decisions for two adjacent landowners under various scenarios of misinformation about fire occurrence and spread. Findings indicate that a landowner tends to free ride on fuel treatment undertaken by his adjacent landowner. However, the study finds that the free riding potential of a landowner could be alleviated to some extent by having a neighboring landowner who is aware of fire spillover effects. In addition, the study reveals that the social cost resultant from free riding behavior is lower that the social cost associated with complete absence of fire externality awareness for both landowners. These findings imply that governments could introduce more effective educational programs to ensure that all landowners are fully aware of cross-parcel benefits of fuel treatment in order to align socially and privately optimal decisions, thus minimizing externality costs.

“It’s not something I’ve really thought about ‘til now’”: The social aspects of U.S. emerging adults’ comics reading histories

2021 ◽  
pp. 096100062110542
Author(s):  
Robin A. Moeller
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Emerging Adults ◽  
Social Cost ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
The Common

The common image of a reader is that of a person alone with a book, but reading is actually a social activity. The purpose of this study was to examine the ways in which social aspects influenced a group of emerging adults’ comics reading when they were children and/or teens. Data was collected by surveying and conducting semi-structured interviews with 34 emerging adults in the Southeast region of the United States about their comics reading histories. The research findings describe who the participants felt had the most impact on their comics reading, as well as the extent to which the participants felt that they belonged to a community of comics readers. Significantly, the participants’ notion of comics readers as “nerds” emerged from the data, which the participants largely connected to gender, and which participant Lauren noted, “It’s not something I’ve really thought about ‘til now.’” The implications of these findings suggest that some of these participants felt that there was a social cost to comics reading. Suggestions for making comics reading more accessible for more readers are discussed.

scholarly journals A Conversation with Angus Deaton

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Angus Deaton ◽  
Gordon Rausser ◽  
David Zilberman
Keyword(s):  
Commodity Prices ◽  
The United States ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Behavior Understanding ◽  
International Agencies ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Senior Scholar ◽  
Economics Of Health ◽  
Deaths Of Despair

The Annual Review of Resource Economics presents Professor Sir Angus Deaton in conversation with economist Dr. Gordon Rausser. Dr. Deaton is Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Department of Economics at Princeton University and Presidential Professor of Economics at University of Southern California. An applied economist, Deaton has made seminal contributions to the econometrics and estimation of demand systems, analysis of consumer behavior, understanding of commodity prices, the economics of health, nutrition and poverty, and most recently, deaths of despair and the future of capitalism, focusing on the United States. His work to improve welfare estimation in developing countries contributed to upgrading data collection efforts at the World Bank and other international agencies.

scholarly journals Productivity and Misallocation in General Equilibrium*

2019 ◽  
Vol 135 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rezza Baqaee ◽  
Emmanuel Farhi
Keyword(s):  
Social Cost ◽  
Returns To Scale ◽  
Allocative Efficiency ◽  
The United States ◽  
Resource Reallocation ◽  
Firm Level ◽  
Tfp Growth ◽  
The Social ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Technical And Allocative Efficiency

Abstract This paper develops a general theory of aggregation in inefficient economies. We provide nonparametric formulas for aggregating microeconomic shocks in economies with distortions such as taxes, markups, frictions to resource reallocation, financial frictions, and nominal rigidities. We allow for arbitrary elasticities of substitution, returns to scale, factor mobility, and input-output network linkages. We show how to separately measure changes in technical and allocative efficiency. We also show how to compute the social cost of distortions. We pursue applications focusing on firm-level markups in the United States. We find that improvement in allocative efficiency, due to the reallocation over time of market share to high-markup firms, accounts for about half of aggregate TFP growth over the period 1997–2015. We also find that eliminating the misallocation resulting from the large and dispersed markups estimated in the data would raise aggregate TFP by about 15%, increasing the economy-wide cost of monopoly distortions by two orders of magnitude compared with the famous 0.1% estimate by Harberger (1954). These exact numbers should be interpreted with care because the data are imperfect and require substantial imputation.

scholarly journals The Social Cost of Carbon from Theory to Trump

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Paul Kelleher
Keyword(s):  
Value Function ◽  
Social Cost ◽  
The United States ◽  
Discount Rates ◽  
Social Cost Of Carbon ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
A Value ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Value Function

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a central concept in climate change economics. This chapter explains the SCC and investigates it philosophically. As is widely acknowledged, any SCC calculation requires the analyst to make choices about the infamous topic of discount rates. But to understand the nature and role of discount rates, one must understand how each of these economic concepts—and indeed the SCC concept itself—is yoked to the concept of a value function, whose job is to take ways the world could be across indefinite timespans and to rank them from better to worse. A great deal, therefore, turns on the details of the value function and on just what is meant by “better” and “worse.” This chapter seeks to explicate these and related issues, and then to situate them within the evolving landscape of federal climate policy in the United States.

The Complexity of Health Disparities: More Than Just Black–White Differences

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Charles Ellis ◽  
Molly Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Health Disparities ◽  
Clinical Outcomes ◽  
The United States ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Speech Language Pathology ◽  
Death Rates ◽  
The Social ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Language Pathology

Health disparities have once again moved to the forefront of America's consciousness with the recent significant observation of dramatically higher death rates among African Americans with COVID-19 when compared to White Americans. Health disparities have a long history in the United States, yet little consideration has been given to their impact on the clinical outcomes in the rehabilitative health professions such as speech-language pathology/audiology (SLP/A). Consequently, it is unclear how the absence of a careful examination of health disparities in fields like SLP/A impacts the clinical outcomes desired or achieved. The purpose of this tutorial is to examine the issue of health disparities in relationship to SLP/A. This tutorial includes operational definitions related to health disparities and a review of the social determinants of health that are the underlying cause of such disparities. The tutorial concludes with a discussion of potential directions for the study of health disparities in SLP/A to identify strategies to close the disparity gap in health-related outcomes that currently exists.

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