Slowly getting back into the groove (No, not done yet - major truck casualty)
- We like people who talk like us.
- Rural re-districting and the new census. Not a good combo.
- More of the same for 2011; i.e. Corn Belt drought?
- Poker-playing physicists (Not an episode on TBBT - yet!)
- Good explanation of the foreclosure problem and how it happened.
- Bt free-riders. Remind me again how much I should pay for this trait.
4 comments:
Why would you label someone who studied the cost and returns of BT corn and decided it wasn't economical as a "free loader" ?
The "free-loaders" benefiting from all their neighbors planting Bt corn. So much Bt corn has been planted that it has had a serious impact on corn borer populations. It's the same mechanism that's keeping the children of anti-vaxers alive. So much of the population is immune to the effects of those diseases that, as far as the industrialized world is concerned, those diseases might as well no longer exist.
TM/Jay:
The term I used is "free-rider", not free loader. From Wikipedia:
"In economics, collective bargaining, psychology, and political science, "free riders" are those who consume more than their fair share of a public resource, or shoulder less than a fair share of the costs of its production. Free riding is usually considered to be an economic "problem" only when it leads to the non-production or under-production (in a collectivist sense) of a public good (and thus to Pareto inefficiency), or when it leads to the excessive use of a common property resource. The free rider problem is the question of how to limit free riding (or its negative effects) in these situations.
The name "free rider" comes from a common textbook example: someone using public transportation without paying the fare. If too many people do this, the system will not have enough money to operate."
I wasn't making a judgment particularly. Nor am I sure there is an economic inefficiency here.
free rider, free loader.
A distinction without a difference.
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