holmak's comments

I agree with your assessment -- utility with respect to time is the first explanation I thought of as well. People (and firms) have a limited ability to anticipate or defer purchases. (I can't wait 50 years to buy a lifetime supply of food to feed myself!)

You also mention that this limited ability to defer purchases in the face of deflation is what makes short bouts of deflation not catastrophic -- it is somewhat difficult to get the deflationary spiral going if you can't actually wait to purchase things.

Given all this, the interesting question to me is, how much deflation does it take to actually cause a deflationary spiral? The answer is likely complicated, given that it depends on the specific utility functions for each consumer of all the goods and services that they consume.

Empirically, we seem to be able to cope with a decent amount of deflation, at least when it is limited to certain goods, like video game consoles, computing power, other manufactured goods, etc. (In some cases, even over very long timespans.)

> Ask yourself: why buy today what can be bought tomorrow cheaper?

I know the the correct, rational answer to this question: "I won't buy it today, or ever, because it will always be cheaper the next day." (And then the deflationary spiral begins!)

But if this is really true, why has anyone bought a Playstation 4 or Xbox One? They will undoubtedly be cheaper in two or three or ten years. Well, consumers might be totally irrational; what about firms? Why has any company in history ever bought a computer when the price of computing power has been falling rapidly and (mostly) predictably for fifty years?

I don't think the question "Why buy today what can be bought tomorrow cheaper?" fully explains the behavior of people in the face of increasing purchasing power; there seems to be something else going on. Any thoughts?

> European pharma co. Novartis made in 2012 revenues of $19.7bn in Europe vs $18.6bn in the US (and a total of $56.7bn). Novartis invested 21% of sales into R&D.

> U.S. pharma company Pfeizer, total revenues of $59bn in 2012, U.S. was $27bn and international $36bn. Pfeizer invested $7.9bn in R&D (c. 13% of revenues).

Do you know what fraction of those revenue figures are profit? It is entirely possible that the companies could have different profit margins in different areas.

Whenever the income inequality of the US is discussed, I wonder about the global income distribution. The US is no longer a closed system, so it may not be meaningful to consider the US income distribution on its own. Does anyone here know how income inequality is doing globally?

Those alternatives are indeed all taxpayer funded, but not all act as a subsidy to employers. There was a paper contrasting EITC and guaranteed minimum income, and one of the notable differences is that EITC is a slight subsidy to employers, while GMI is actually the opposite. GMI creates (some) disincentive to work, requiring employers to pay more to attract the same employees.

> it feels like Clojure went all liberal on one end, just to get super-conservative on the other.

In the brief time that I used Clojure, I also thought that the contrast between immutability and dynamic typing was very strange. Ultimately, I think it makes more sense than having the entire language be highly dynamic (or highly static).

I think Clojure's choice is not inconsistency, but that there is a kind of budget for craziness in a language. In Clojure, you can go crazy with dynamic types on the foundation of immutability, transactions, etc. In Haskell, you can go crazy with really awesome static typing tricks that would be utterly unfathomable if the language wasn't very rigid in every other way -- immutable, referentially transparent, side-effect-tracking. These two pack all their craziness into one corner of the language.

On the other hand, other languages -- Python, Javascript, Ruby -- seem to spread the craziness (I am not sure I picked the best word for this!) around, instead of having one super dynamic feature and everything else very inflexible. These languages tend to lack the really big flashy features: macros, typeclasses, etc.

It seems that you have a lot of flexibility as a language designer on how you spend your craziness budget, as long as you don't go too high (and become incomprehensible) or too low (Java?).

This is backtracking a bit, but what are the goals of raising the minimum wage?

The implied goal seems to be to help the poor, but as others have pointed out, other policies (EITC, guaranteed minimum income, negative income tax) are better suited to that goal. So, do proponents of the idea have a different (or additional) goal in mind? Do proponents believe that these other policies are not more effective solutions?

I would like to hear others' opinions on the answer to this question, especially if you support the raise.