Robot Only Chooses the Best Strawberries, and Other Links
Very smart robot: It picks only the ripest strawberries. (video) HT to Tyler Cowen.
David Friedman solution to the state pension crisis: A governor’s promises aren’t binding after he leaves office.
Do more frequent pay-for-performance reviews improve performance? No. (HT to Jason Shafrin)
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performance: They’re done a lot of studies about how paying people more actually makes them less effective because they spend to much time worrying about money.
Everyone agrees Medicare should pay for value but the problem with P4P is that the measures are often not good proxies for quality. Firms expend effort to boost the proxy measures but often don’t impact actual quality.
Robots are going to take over. Eventually we (and they) will realize they are a higher life form.
To David Friedman: What’s wrong with a general rule that with respect to entitlements, no legislative body can bind a future legislative body?
Professor Friedman’s proposal is tempting but way off base. The state is perpetual. The state faces agency problems far greater than those in private life, but that is an argument for limiting the size and scope of the state, not for allowing it to renege on its promises.
An important development from what North, Wallis, & Weingast call the “natural state” to the “fragile natural state” to the “basic natural state” to the “advanced natural state” and (finally ) to the “open-access order” is the idea that the current king’s commands are binding on the next king (“Violence and Social Orders,” Cambridge University Press, 2009). This occurs in the step from fragile natural state to basic natural state.
The rule of law would never persist if we allowed all laws to expire when the governor leaves office – just as no corporation could survive if the corporation reneged on its contracts whenever it changed CEOs.