-1=e^ipi

Maybe, but then how do you explain the real interest rate being so low? Should the social rate of time preference be roughly the inverse of the working life of a person? Maybe, but then that would suggest a time preference of ~2%. Here is a good paper on this: http://www98.griffith.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/handle/10072/21590/52378_1.pdf?sequence=1 Page 17 derives the Ramsey equation. If you want to explain why Ramsey's equation does not hold or why my empirical values are off, I'm open to new arguments/evidence. Btw, according to the world bank, the average real interest rate of the USA since 2000 was 3% and the average real GDP per capita growth rate was 1%. This suggests that discount rate = 3% - μ*1%

A few additional points about post #92: - One reason why I should restrict myself to post 1990 data is prior to 1990, the USA central bank had a very different policy compared to the policy today of trying to have stable 2% inflation. - It might make more sense to look at the 1 year bond rate or even the overnight rate rather than the 10 year bond rate, since 10 year bonds are less 'liquid'. If I do this, the interest rate drops by about 1%, which suggests that my rate of social time preference should be 1% lower than my earlier estimate. - The bond rate is a nominal value, rather than a real value, so I should take inflation into account. Inflation over the post 1990 era is ~2%. - However, the prime rate of a consumer at a bank is generally higher than the overnight rate at a central bank or even the rate of a 1 year bond. It probably makes more sense to use the prime rate of a bank since that is closer to what affects consumers. The prime rate is ~2% higher than the overnight rate. Put this together and it suggests that it would make sense to use rates of social time preference that are 1% lower than post 93. So for example, if the coefficient of relative risk aversion is 1 then the appropriate rate of social time preference is 2%. And using the same data I get a rate of social time preference of ~1.3% for a coefficient of relative risk aversion of 1.5. This is more in line with the values used by Nordhaus.

I looked through the DICE 2013 manual again. Looks like Nordhaus was choosing r and μ to roughly satisfy the Ramsey equation.

Liquid Nitrogen has been around since 1883. Superconductive materials that can be superconductive at the boiling point of liquid nitrogen has been around since 1987. Congrats, this technology is 28 years old.

It looks cool, but it's expensive and impractical, though a good way to dupe money out of the scientifically illiterate. From what I can tell, the hoverboard is just a bunch of super conductive material cooled by liquid nitrogen. It uses superconductivity to hover over metal. Most likely there is metal right below that cement, water, etc. It makes more sense to make a hoverboard out of a quadcopter since that doesn't require everything around you to be covered in metal, is cheaper and can arguably even fly. Philip Mason did a video on another of these recent 'hoverboard' claims that are based on superconductivity.

There is a way to try to measure μ from the tax structure of a country. It is quite flawed and by definition doesn't allow for a μ less than 1, and can't deal with individuals getting transfers from the government or a negative tax rate, but basically it suggests that: μ = log(1 - MTR)/log(1 - ATR), where MTR is the marginal tax rate of a society and ATR is the average tax rate of a society. In another thread, I calculated that for Canada MTR is roughly 55.87% and ATR is roughly 50.31%. This suggests that for Canada, μ is roughly 1.17.

How you define happiness, benefit or utility is totally up to you. Although perhaps I should have said 25% richer throughout your entire lifetime, if that helps you deal with the savings issue. To be fair, these higher income people would still generally like an extra dollar. One reason why happiness may not be correlated with income after a certain point is perhaps due to people having to work longer hours and a more strenuous job for a higher income. Perhaps people earning ~$70k/year have the best work-life balance. Yes, that's the point. I'm curious what the distribution over the people in this forum will be though.

There is no correct answer, but I'm curious what people on this forum would get. Suppose I gave you an extra dollar. You would benefit from that extra dollar and could use it to buy stuff to make yourself better off. Now suppose you were suddenly 25% richer, and then I gave you an extra dollar. As with before, you would benefit from that extra dollar and could use it to buy more stuff, but the benefit might be smaller than before since you are richer. So now I ask you to compare those two benefits from 1 additional dollar. How many dollars would you need if you were 25% richer to obtain the same change in benefit as you currently do from 1 additional dollar at your current income? Please be honest with yourself and pick the best value from the poll. You can try to argue what the 'best' value is if you want. If the question is still unclear, let me know.

Really? You think I didn't know that the person was a transman, or that I think people can give birth without a uterus? Says the transphobe. ^ Look I can do lefty name calling too!

In how many other parties did the vast majority of members think it was a good idea to vote for a person with 0 policies, but nice hair and a fancy last name? Unless there is a convenient terrorist attack by ISIS. So ultimately the results of this election will be determined by ISIS.

Maybe a global tax of around $15 per metric ton of CO2, which increases exponentially at a rate of about 3% per year, would make sense. This is based on the results of this thread plus the results of Nordhaus' DICE model. What you do with all that tax revenue, I have no idea. Waldo has been convinced since the beginning that I am a 'concern troll' and will never concede a single point.

The transman may disagree. A transman isn't a woman, you transphobic bigot.

Yep. They probably hired some people to look at different targeted tax credits and figured that this would buy them the most votes.

Which doesn't counter my counter point to WestCoastRunner that some couples make decisions about pregnancy together, so there are cases where the women will tell the man she is pregnant.

The probability of that is essentially zero and I put it in the same category as a giant flying spaghetti monster suddenly appearing and raining meatballs down on us, destroying cities. Should we invest billions into an anti-meatball defense system just in case? Again, you are invoking the precautionary principle to avoid looking at empirical evidence. The people (or rather the descendants of humans) in 1 million years will have dyson sphere around the sun as far as I am concerned, so will be able to synthetically create whatever resource they want. I don't think this is an accurate model of reality. Could you please provide empirical evidence, preferably from a peer reviewed study, which supports your assertions? So you are saying that no mitigation is necessary? The problem will just take care of itself. Or are you saying that anything that affects you will take care of itself, where as mitigation policies should be implemented, but just not on you? This doesn't refute my point on how long society can last on fossil fuels and nuclear. No it isn't. How many people died from nuclear reactors in Canada? 0. How many people died due to Fukushima? 0. How many people died in the 2011 Tsunami and Earthquake? 16,000. Costly to maintain? It's one of the cheapest forms of energy! I wonder what your definition of high is. How much CO2 emissions per GWh of energy counts as high to you? Do you not think that wind turbines and solar panels don't also need to be constructed? We have enough fossil fuels and uranium 235 to last humanity at least 250 years. You don't think that's enough time to figure out how to get thorium reactors to work? Because we were talking about non-renewables and you are the one advocating that we have to go full renewable in the near future even though there are enough fossil fuels and nuclear reserves to last humanity centuries. No he really hasn't, and neither has the IPCC. CMIP5 predictions are 2 years from being falsified if current trends continue. Hansen continually makes ECS and ESS estimations outside of empirical evidence, and his sea level rise models can't even explain historical evidence and are unphysical. This is factually incorrect. You might as well be arguing the Earth is flat. No-feedback climate sensitivity is well understood and is ~ 1.15 C. CMIP5 models have a median climate sensitivity of 3.2 C. How do you get from 1.15 C to 3.2 C? Magic? Yes there was. It was called an interglacial. We are currently in one. There has been 'rapid' ice loss over the past 20,000 years since the last glacial maximum. Please define 'rapid'. How many mm per century counts as 'rapid'? I cannot confirm or deny this since it would be very difficult to quantify all of the reports. 1. We are adding CO2 to the atmosphere, 'carbon' is vague. 2. It's a matter of how much CO2 will remain in the atmosphere after a given time. The decay time excess atmospheric CO2 is about 100 years, which means that after 100 years only 37% of the excess atmospheric CO2 will be left. This means that in 1000 years, about 0.0045% of the excess CO2 will remain. To be fair though, Oceans only absorb 85% of emitted CO2, so after 1000 years ~15% of emitted atmospheric CO2 will remain. I'm not even sure what you are trying to claim here? Are you saying that because most of the world's surface is ocean, most of the additional radiative forcing from excess greenhouse gases will occur over oceans? The idea that the temperature-greenhouse gas feedback exceeds 1 is well outside empirical evidence and disagrees with basically the entire scientific community. Please back up your absurd claim.

I don't. Most of the people I know don't including many people planning to vote NDP. 100% public health system has just become one of those issues where it has become 'conventional wisdom' that any party that challenges it will lose, thus no party tries, so it never gets challenged which reinforces the conventional wisdom. It's also reinforced by a false dichotomy that there are only 2 options: the US system and the Canadian system.

This is incorrect. There are some men that give birth. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2111259/The-man-given-birth-times-With-broad-smiles-Beaties-look-like-normal-happy-family-Nothing-truth-.html

Okay, I've tried to estimate the rate of social time preference and the coefficient of relative risk aversion from the Ramsey equation using real interest rate of the Federal Reserve 10 year bond rate (https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DGS10/#) and the growth rate of real GDP per capita (https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA#). I get r = 6.46%, μ = 0.01 for data from 1962-2014. The value of μ is absurdly low. Perhaps older data is of poorer quality. If I restrict the years to 1990-2014 I get: I get r = 4.45%, μ = 0.26, which is better. One issue is that the Ramsey equation is based on the expected GDP growth rate, rather than the actual GDP growth rate. So there is uncertainty in the actual growth rate. However, one can use the previous year's growth rate to predict future growth rate. If I fit the model that the growth rate in a given year is equal to a constant plus another constant times the growth rate in the previous year (i.e. a simple autocorrelation model), I get that the year to year autocorrelation factor is about 0.30, which I can use to estimate expected GDP growth rate for a given year (assuming you did not know the year's growth rate in advance). Using this as the expected growth rate, and fitting the Ramsey equation to data from 1990-2014 I get: I get r = 3.15%, μ = 0.89 Which gives reasonable values of both rate of the social time preference and the coefficient of relative risk aversion. Edit: a 3% discount rate doesn't seem so unreasonable anymore. Edit 2: Although it only makes sense if you are doing a social welfare approach. If you are doing a more traditional cost benefit analysis, as the social cost of carbon calculations made by the Obama administration do, then a 5% discount rate would make more sense.

How can you give someone a gift if it's not yours to give? Lancel being the 'gift' to Olenna doesn't make sense since Petyr has no control over Lancel and it doesn't free any of the Tyrells.

Fine I took it. Here is what I got (no joke): NDP: 5% Liberals: 5% Green: 4% Libertarian: 4% Conservative: 4% Communist: 1% Bloc Quebecois: 1% Christian Heritage: 1% To be fair, 16/24 of my responses were 'other'.

Well sorry, I can only read what you write, not your mind. I apologize for taking what you wrote literally.

What? Are you saying that heterosexual couples that have an unexpected pregnancy and where both individuals agree that they aren't ready to start a family don't exist? Some are. Don't generalize.

None of them. They all suck. All of these parties try to derive political positions based on a priori knowledge and fail. They approach things dogmatically and try to look for evidence that fits their desired conclusion rather than make conclusions based on empirical evidence. Once you accept that the answers to most political questions are a priori indeterminant, and that you need empirical evidence to properly answer them, the current set of political parties does not seem very desirable.

Here is some more evidence that may add to the idea that Little Finger has Gendry. - Why did Gendry leave King's Landing in the first place? Well apparently his master decided that he didn't want him around anymore so sent Gendry to the wall. But why would a master get rid of a very skilled apprentice, and right before the chaos in King's Landing was about to occur. It seems very unlikely unless someone paid the master to send Gendry to the wall. Who would have the money and motive to pay off Gendry's master in order to keep Gendry alive? Little Finger. - Little Finger did keep around a hoar who had a child with King Robert. So clearly he understands the sons of Robert to be useful pawns

Women outrunning men in marathons has been known for a long time. Here is a random '97 study on this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9044230