A Defense of Irrational Taxation?
Here’s a behavioral puzzler: Why might it be more efficient for Connecticut to change its sales tax rate from 6 percent to e^2 percent ?
Or more generally, why might using irrational numbers as tax rates be less distortionary than rational tax rates?
A hint comes from a great article of Amy Finkelstein, “E-ZTax: Tax Salience and Tax Rates.” Her simple and powerful idea is that as the salience of tax rates declines, taxes will produce fewer distortions because taxpayers will not pay as much attention to the taxes. Read More »
Baby Einstein's Refund: Not so Smart?
Roughly 15 years ago, before there was such a thing as Baby Einstein, I had a business idea that emerged from a dinner conversation with a linguist. We got to talking about how hard it was for adults learning foreign languages to ever sound like native speakers.
One reason for this is, apparently, is that there are sounds that occur in some languages and not others. If you are raised hearing only English in your first year or two of life, your brain loses some of its ability to discern the sounds that don’t arise in spoken English. Read More »
Sorry About That
Gizmodo lists eight “Regrettable Tech Inventions” and their inventors’ apologies for them, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s apology for the double-slash in web addresses — “Really, if you think about it, it doesn’t need the //. I could have designed it not to have the //” Read More »
Pray for Me: I'm Going on The Daily Show Tonight
The first time I went on The Daily Show, nearly five years ago, I dreaded it for weeks in advance. I had a terrible fear of going on TV and had avoided it scrupulously, even in publicizing our first book. When Jon Stewart came knocking, however, it was impossible to come up with a credible reason to give the publisher as to why I couldn’t do it. I had no choice. Read More »
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