Abstract This paper tries to answer the question: in what ways does the logic of capital accumulation shape the organization of hospital care in the US – a sector characterized by a preponderance of both public and private ‘not-for-profit’ institutions? Rather than taking different hospital ownership types as our analytical starting point, to answer this […] The post Mouré, Gorsky, ‘No Place to Be Sick: Cooptation and Convergence in the US Hospital Care Sector’ appeared first on ...| Capital As Power
Sommaire Introduction I – La concurrence ferroviaire poursuivit son trajet en Europe : l’environnement est un argument de marché A – L’offre multimodale, nouvelle frontière de la mobilité B – Le rail renforcé par la concurrence, malgré la concentration II – Des défis à relever pour une concurrence durable : une nécessité de transition juste A – La quête d’une stratégie de marché pour le transport …| blogdroiteuropéen
Many fear that future artificial agents will resist shutdown. I present an idea – the POST-Agents Proposal – for ensuring that doesn’t happen. I propose that we train agents to satisfy Preferences Only Between Same-Length Trajectories(POST). I then prove that POST – together with other conditions – implies Neutrality+: the agent maximizes expected utility, ignoring the probability distribution over trajectorylengths. I argue that Neutrality+ keeps agents shutdownable and allows them...| Global Priorities Institute
When communicating numeric estimates with policymakers, journalists, or the general public, experts must choose between using numbers or natural language. We run two experiments to study whether experts strategically use language to communicate numeric estimates in order to persuade receivers. In Study 1, senders communicate probabilities of abstract events to receivers on Prolific, and in Study 2 academic researchers communicate the effect sizes in research papers to government policymakers....| Global Priorities Institute
The purpose of this paper is to address some ambiguities and misunderstandings that appear in previous studies of population ethics. In particular, we examine the structure of intervals that are employed in assessing the value of adding people to an existing population. Our focus is on critical-band utilitarianism and critical-range utilitarianism, which are commonly-used population theories that employ intervals, and we show that some previously assumed equivalences are not true in general. ...| Global Priorities Institute
We propose a new class of social quasi-orderings in a variable-population setting. In order to declare one utility distribution at least as good as another, the critical-level utilitarian value of the former must reach or surpass the value of the latter. For each possible absolute value of the difference between the population sizes of two distributions to be compared, we specify a non-negative threshold level and a threshold inequality. This inequality indicates whether the corresponding thr...| Global Priorities Institute
Do poor countries systematically over-borrow, leading to cyclical debt crises, or are the current debt difficulties caused by unusually large external| FinDevLab
Abstract This study examines the declining usage lifespan of household consumer durables in the United States between 1970 and 2018, situating the phenomenon within a heterodox political economy framework. While mainstream economic narratives attribute the rising rate of consumer durable waste over this time to “overconsumption” driven by consumer materialism, this study challenges that perspective […] The post Dillon, ‘Earning through Obsolescence’ appeared first on Capital As Power.| Capital As Power
I argue for a pluralist theory of moral standing, on which both welfare subjectivity and autonomy can confer moral status. I argue that autonomy doesn’t entail welfare subjectivity, but can ground moral standing in its absence. Although I highlight the existence of plausible views on which autonomy entails phenomenal consciousness, I primarily emphasize the need for philosophical debates about the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and moral standing to engage with neglected ques...| Global Priorities Institute
A decision theory is fanatical if it says that, for any sure thing of getting some finite amount of value, it would always be better to almost certainly get nothing while having some tiny probability (no matter how small) of getting sufficiently more finite value. Fanaticism is extremely counterintuitive; common sense requires a more moderate view. However, a recent slew of arguments purport to vindicate it, claiming that moderate alternatives to fanaticism are sometimes similarly counterintu...| Global Priorities Institute