This paper explores the relationship between federalism and individual liberty. It is shown that a complete treatment of the relationship between federalism and individual liberty should consider two countervailing effects. On the one hand, a federalist structure enhances individual liberty by enlarging the choice set of the citizens. On the other hand, however, a federalist system leads to institutional diversity, a fact that per se leads to higher exit costs, which a citizen must bear if he or she (...) decides to change jurisdictions. This effect on individual liberty is a negative one, since a consequence of every increase in the exit costs is a decrease of individual liberty. The optimum range of diversity of jurisdictions is shown to lie where the two effects counterbalance each other. (shrink)

The purpose of the research is to study the feasibility of using the combined modeling method in evaluation of business value. Modern approaches and methods of evaluating business value and the possibilities of combining them are explored. The peculiarities of the methodology of evaluating the business value by methods of Gordon Growth Model and Exit Multiple are disclosed. During the research the fair value of Luxoft company and the reasons for its deviation from the cost of sale are found. (...) Luxoft’s business value forecast is calculated by 2023. Recommendations for further development of the field of knowledge of modern business analyst are given. (shrink)

Dieser Aufsatz untersucht das Verhältnis zwischen Föderalismus und individueller Freiheit. Es wird gezeigt, dass eine vollständige Analyse des Verhältnisses zwischen Föderalismus und individueller Freiheit zwei entgegengesetzte Effekte mitberücksichtigen muss. Auf der einen Seite verstärken föderalistische Strukturen die individuelle Freiheit indem sie die Auswahlmöglichkeiten der Bürger erweitern. Auf der anderen Seite führt jedoch ein föderalistisches System zur institutionellen Vielfalt, ein Faktum, das per se zu höheren Abwanderungskosten führt, die ein Bürger tragen muss, wenn er oder sie entscheidet, die Jurisdiktion zu wechseln. (...) Dieser Effekt auf die individuelle Freiheit ist ein negativer, da jede Erhöhung der Abwanderungskosten die Minderung der individuellen Freiheit zur Konsequenz hat. Der optimale Grad der Vielfalt der Jurisdiktionen befindet sich dort, wo die beiden Effekte sich gegenseitig ausgleichen. (shrink)

Contemporary republicanism is characterized by three main ideas: free persons, who are not subject to the arbitrary power of others; free states, which try to protect their citizens from such power without exercising it themselves; and vigilant citizenship, as a means to limit states to their protective role. This book advances an economic model of such republicanism that is ideologically centre-left. It demands an exit-oriented state interventionism, one that would require an activist government to enhance competition and resource (...) class='Hi'>exit from dominating relationships within markets of all types, be they marital, labour, or residential. The substantial intervention and redistribution necessitated by such an approach make it leftist, while its tendency to work with rather than against the grain of markets makes it centrist. It is, in short, a contribution to progressive republican political thought, but one that is less social-democratic than market-democratic in character. (shrink)

Consequentialism is a state of affairs centered moral theory that finds support in state of affairs centered views of value, reason, action, and desire/preference. Together these views form a mutually reinforcing circle. I map an exit route out of this circle by distinguishing between two different senses in which actions can be understood as bringing about states of affairs. All actions, reasons, desires, and values involve bringing about in the first, deflationary sense, but only some appear to involve bringing (...) about in a second, rationalizing sense. I demonstrate that the views making up this circle hold, implausibly, that all reasons, values, desires, and actions involve bringing about in both senses, and that failure to distinguish these senses obscures the implausibility of these views as a set. I demonstrate, in addition, that the distinction blocks two common arguments that otherwise threaten to leverage us back in to the consequentialist circle. (shrink)

The literature on pluralism in economics has focused on the benefits expected from the plurality of theories, methods, and frameworks. This overlooks half of the picture: the costs. Neither have the multifarious costs been systematically analyzed in philosophy of science. We begin rectifying this neglect. We discuss how the benefits of plurality and diversity in science presuppose distinct types of plurality and how various benefit and plurality types are associated with different types of costs. Finally, we ponder (...) how the general mechanisms that give rise to the costs of plurality and diversity are aggravated by various disciplinary characteristics of economics. (shrink)

Decision theorists generally object to “honoring sunk costs” – that is, treating the fact that some cost has been incurred in the past as a reason for action, apart from the consideration of expected consequences. This paper critiques the doctrine that sunk costs should never be honored on three levels. As background, the rationale for the doctrine is explained. Then it is shown that if it is always irrational to honor sunk costs, then other common and uncontroversial (...) practices are also irrational. Second, it is argued that there is no satisfactory way to make a distinction between the two kinds of cases. Third, a proposal is developed which would explain how it could be rational, under certain circumstances, to honor sunk costs. (shrink)

Demographic diversity might often be present in a group without group members noticing it. What are the epistemic effects if they do? Several philosophers and social scientists have recently argued that when individuals detect demographic diversity in their group, this can result in epistemic benefits even if that diversity doesn’t involve cognitive differences. Here I critically discuss research advocating this proposal, introduce a distinction between two types of detection of demographic diversity, and apply this distinction to the theorizing on diversity (...) in science. Focusing on ‘invisible’ diversity, I argue that in one common kind of group in science, if group members have full insight into their group’s diversity, this is likely to create epistemic costs. These costs can be avoided and epistemic benefits gained if group members only partly detect their group’s diversity. There is thus an epistemic reason for context-dependent limitations on scientists’ insight into the diversity of their group. (shrink)

This article considers some different views of fairness and whether they conflict with the use of a version of Cost Effectiveness Analysis (CEA) that calls for maximizing health benefits per dollar spent. Among the concerns addressed are whether this version of CEA ignores the concerns of the worst off and inappropriately aggregates small benefits to many people. I critically examine the views of Daniel Hausman and Peter Singer who defend this version of CEA and Eric Nord among others who criticize (...) it. I come to focus in particular on the use of CEA in allocating scarce resources to the disabled. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is with the claim that knowledge is a mental state – a claim that Williamson places front and centre in Knowledge and Its Limits. While I am not by any means convinced that the claim is false, I do think it carries certain costs that have not been widely appreciated. One source of resistance to this claim derives from internalism about the mental – the view, roughly speaking, that one’s mental states are determined by (...) one’s internal physical state. In order to know that something is the case it is not, in general, enough for one’s internal physical state to be a certain way – the wider world must also be a certain way. If we accept that knowledge is a mental state, we must give up internalism. One might think that this is no cost, since much recent work in the philosophy of mind has, in any case, converged on the view that internalism is false. This thought, though, is too quick. As I will argue here, the claim that knowledge is a mental state would take us to a view much further from internalism than anything philosophers of mind have converged upon. (shrink)

Purpose of review: What is the relationship between rationality and mental health? By considering the psychological literature on depressive realism and unrealistic optimism it was hypothesized that, in the context of judgments about the self, accurate cognitions are psychologically maladaptive and inaccurate cognitions are psychologically adaptive. Recent studies recommend being cautious in drawing any general conclusion about style of thinking and mental health. Recent findings: Recent investigations suggest that people with depressive symptoms are more accurate than controls in tasks involving (...) time perception and estimates of personal circumstances, but not in other tasks. Unrealistic optimism remains a robust phenomenon across a variety of tasks and domains, and researchers are starting to explore its neural bases. However, the challenge is to determine to what extent and in what way unrealistic optimism is beneficial. Summary: We should revisit the hypothesis that optimistic cognitions are psychologically adaptive, whereas realistic thinking is not. Realistic beliefs and expectations can be conducive to wellbeing and good functioning, and wildly optimistic cognitions have considerable psychological costs. (shrink)

In contemporary political discussions, it is depressingly common to see people criticized for expressing impure beliefs. Moreover, those who sometimes defect from their tribe are criticized for failing to be firmly enough on the side of the angels. We consider explanations for this behavior, including its relationship to moral grandstanding. We will also argue, on both moral and epistemic grounds, in favor of a norm against “blocking the exits.” We should not use social pressure to discourage people from publicly changing (...) their minds. (shrink)

Kerr coined the term ‘HARKing’ to refer to the practice of ‘hypothesizing after the results are known’. This questionable research practice has received increased attention in recent years because it is thought to have contributed to low replication rates in science. The present article discusses the concept of HARKing from a philosophical standpoint and then undertakes a critical review of Kerr’s twelve potential costs of HARKing. It is argued that these potential costs are either misconceived, misattributed to HARKing, (...) lacking evidence, or that they do not take into account pre- and post-publication peer review and public availability to research materials and data. It is concluded that it is premature to conclude that HARKing has led to low replication rates. (shrink)

-/- This chapter evaluates the ethical issues that using cost-effectiveness considerations to set animal health priorities might present, and its conclusions are cautiously optimistic. While using cost-effectiveness calculations in animal health is not without ethical pitfalls, these calculations offer a pathway toward more rigorous priority-setting efforts that allow money spent on animal well-being to do more good. Although assessing quality of life for animals may be more challenging than in humans, implementing prioritization based on cost-effectiveness is less ethically fraught.

The diversity in agronomic practices being used by sugarcane producers in Brazil determines differences in economic performance and cost structure. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the cost of six systems of agronomic practices using fixed or variable rates for soil amendment, fertilizer, and defensive applications and assess the profitability of these systems at three scales of sugarcane production. We then describe the data sample related to the 2019–2020 harvest season and collected from fifty-five sugarcane producers in the (...) central-south region of Brazil. Thereafter, using a quantitative approach, a cost analysis was performed, and the cumulative frequency of the net revenue for the three scales of production (small, medium, and large), was calculated using a Monte Carlo simulation. The cost analysis indicated that fertilizer had the highest cost considering the agronomic practices adopted at the three scales of production analyzed. The cumulative frequency analysis results from the Monte Carlo simulation showed the highest net revenue per hectare for medium sugarcane producers. In addition, the presence of economies of scale was not confirmed because the lowest cost was found in small-scale sugarcane producers and the highest net revenue was obtained by medium-scale sugarcane producers. (shrink)

According to truthmaker theory, particular truths are true in virtue of the existence of particular entities. Truthmaker maximalism holds that this is so for all truths. Negative existential and other ‘negative’ truths threaten the position. Despite this, maximalism is an appealing thesis for truthmaker theorists. This motivates interest in parsimonious maximalist theories, which do not posit extra entities for truthmaker duty. Such theories have been offered by David Lewis and Gideon Rosen, Ross Cameron, and Jonathan Schaffer. But these theories cannot (...) be sustained, I’ll argue, and hence maximalism comes with a serious ontological cost. Neither Armstrong’s invocation of totality facts nor the Martin-Kukso line on absences can meet this cost satisfactorily. I’ll claim that negative facts are the best (and perhaps only) way out of the problem for the truthmaker maximalist. (shrink)

This enquiry attempts to establish Walter Pahnke's categorization of the mystical experience as the specific phenomenological process Socrates refers to as dialectic in the Republic's allegory of the cave. Aside from a comparative analysis of the numerous connections between Plato's most prolific allegory and Pahnke's mystical experience, I define the symbol bearers as oppressive religious authority and tie the symbols of the cave to the post-industrial drug-war and for-profit organization of spirituality observable throughout a world so far removed from the (...) holistic model of the Eleusinian Mysteries. (shrink)

This article develops a detailed, empirically driven analysis of the nature of the transition costs incurred in becoming disabled. Our analysis of the complex nature of these costs supports the claim that it can be wrong to cause disability, even if disability is just one way of being different. We also argue that close attention to the nature of transition costs gives us reason to doubt that well-being, including transitory impacts on well-being, is the only thing that (...) should determine the wrongness of causing or removing disability. Non-welfare considerations also defeat the claim that it is always wrong to cause disability. The upshot of these conclusions is that closer attention to the nature of transition costs supports disabled people who strenuously contest the assumption that their well-being is lower than nondisabled people. It also suggests that, in addition, disabled people should contest their opponents’ narrow account of how we should make ethical decisions regarding causing or failing to prevent disability. (shrink)

Cooperative behaviors within a group face the risk of being exploited by `free-riders,' individuals that reap the benefits produced by cooperators without paying the costs of cooperating. Free-riders are often perceived as a burden to the group, since the group's survival depends on tasks performed by cooperators. However, this paper challenges this perspective, arguing that an excess of cooperators may actually lower the efficiency and persistence of groups. The perspective presented in this paper has ramifications to broader issues in (...) philosophy, particularly the challenge of how to balance self-interest with the collective interests of the group. Ultimately, this paper seeks to highlight some of the subtle ways free-riders positively impact their groups, an aspect of free-riding that is often overlooked in discussions about cooperation. (shrink)

A familiar part of debates about supererogatory actions concerns the role that cost should play. Two camps have emerged: one claiming that extreme cost is a necessary condition for when an action is supererogatory, while the other denies that it should be part of our definition of supererogation. In this paper, I propose an alternative position. I argue that it is comparative cost that is central to the supererogatory and that it is needed to explain a feature that all accounts (...) agree is central to the very notion of supererogation: optionality. Perhaps because of this agreement on its importance, few attempts have been made to clarify and explain the notion of optionality. I argue that giving an account of the optionality of supererogatory requires drawing a line between doing the bare minimum permissible and going beyond the bare minimum and that this line ought to be drawn based on comparative cost of alternative permissible acts. Having outlined my account and motivated it, I discuss and reject two concerns that might be raised: firstly, that it is extreme cost, not comparative cost, that matters and, secondly, that in fact no cost is needed for an act to be supererogatory. (shrink)

Civil disobedience, despite its illegal nature, can sometimes be justified vis-à-vis the duty to obey the law, and, arguably, is thereby not liable to legal punishment. However, adhering to the demands of justice and refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience may lead to a highly problematic theoretical consequence: the debilitation of civil disobedience. This is because, according to the novel analysis I propose, civil disobedience primarily functions as a costly social signal. It is effective by being reliable, reliable by being (...) costly, and costly primarily by being punished. My analysis will highlight a distinctive feature of civil disobedience: civil disobedients leverage the punitive injustice they suffer to amplify their communicative force. This will lead to two paradoxical implications. First, the instability of the moral status of both civil disobedience and its punishment to the extent where the state may be left with no permissible course of action with regard to punishing civil disobedience. Second, by refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience, the state may render uncivil disobedience—illegal political activities that fall short of the standards of civil disobedience—potentially permissible. (shrink)

The deliberative systems approach is a recent innovation within the tradition of deliberative democratic theory. It signals an important shift in focus from the political legitimacy produced within isolated and formal sites of deliberation (e.g., Parliament or deliberative mini-publics), to the legitimacy produced by a number of diverse interconnected sites. In this respect, the deliberative systems (DS) approach is better equipped to identify and address defects arising from the systemic influences of power and coercion. In this article, I examine one (...) of the least explored and least understood defects: the exclusion of non-speaking political actors generated by the uniform privileging of speech in all sites within a system. Using the examples of prefigurative protest, Indigenous refusal to deliberate, and the non-deliberative agency of disabled citizens, I argue that the DS approach allows theorists to better understand forms of domination related to the imposition of speech on those who are either unwilling or unable to speak. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that friendship can constitutively require epistemic irrationality against a recent, forceful challenge, raised by proponents of moral and pragmatic encroachment. Defenders of the “encroachment strategy” argue that exemplary friends who are especially slow to believe that their friends have acted wrongly are simply sensitive to the high prudential or moral costs of falsely believing in their friends’ guilt. Drawing on psychological work on epistemic motivation (and in particular on the notion of “need for closure”), I (...) propose a different picture of what friendship requires in the doxastic realm. I argue that contrary to what the encroachment strategy suggests, exemplary friends’ belief formation ought not be guided by a concern with accuracy or error avoidance, but instead by a need to avoid a “specific closure” – namely, a need to avoid concluding in their friends’ guilt. I propose that exemplary friendship often generates a defeasible, doxastic obligation to exemplify such a need, despite its inherent corrupting effects on exemplary friends’ epistemic faculties. (shrink)

This study demonstrates the combinations of multiple causal factors that formulate a startup’s strategy to successfully “exit”, namely “recipes for a successful exit,” in the clean- and hard-tech sector. We identify seven key causal factors (i.e., causal conditions) that impact startup success, including commercial readiness, investor interactions, favorable industry, non-financial support, straightforward development path, experienced team, and visibility to investors. We also investigate the combinations of selective causal conditions that can provide further synergetic impact. We conduct the fuzzy-set (...) qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) on seven U.S. clean- and hard-tech startups that exited between 2005 and 2016. The successful companies all demonstrate distinctive characteristics based on three general categories (1) robust ecosystem; (2) heavy-lifting team; or (3) external opportunity. Across these three categories, commercial readiness and strong investor interactions are necessary conditions for all exit cases. But there are important differences that drive success in each category, such as the interaction with non-financial support (in the robust ecosystem case), experienced team (in the heavy-lifting team case), and favorable industry (in the external opportunity case). Our findings are meant to support entrepreneurs in reaching an exit by optimizing the given internal and external circumstances, and policymakers to build a robust ecosystem that can increase the success rate of the clean- and hard-tech development. (shrink)

In his editorial, Nir Eyal argues that a nudge can exploit our propensity to feel shame in order to steer us toward certain choices. We object that shame is a cost and therefore cannot figure in the apparatus of a nudge.

Business and Economic textbooks warn against committing the Sunk Cost Fallacy: you, rationally, shouldn't let unrecoverable costs influence your current decisions. In this paper, I argue that this isn't, in general, correct. Sometimes it's perfectly reasonable to wish to carry on with a project because of the resources you've already sunk into it. The reason? Given that we're social creatures, it's not unreasonable to care about wanting to act in such a way so that a plausible story can be (...) told about you according to which your diachronic behavior doesn't reveal that you've suffered, what I will call, diachronic misfortune. Acting so as to hide that you've suffered diachronic misfortune involves striving to make yourself easily understood while disguising any shortcomings that might damage your reputation as a desirable teammate. And making yourself easily understood to others while hiding your flaws will, sometimes, put pressure on you to honor sunk costs. (shrink)

Suppose that you are trying to pursue a morally worthy goal, but cannot do so without incurring some moral costs. At the outset, you believed that achieving your goal was worth no more than a given moral cost. And suppose that, time having passed, you have wrought only harm and injustice, without advancing your cause. You can now reflect on whether to continue. Your goal is within reach. What's more, you believe you can achieve it by incurring—from this point (...) forward—no more cost than it warranted at the outset. If you now succeed, the total cost will exceed the upper bound marked at the beginning. But the additional cost from this point is below that upper bound. And the good you will achieve is undiminished. How do the moral costs you have already inflicted bear upon your decision now? (shrink)

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) may be the most important health law statute in American history, yet much of the most prominent legal scholarship examining it has focused on the merits of the court challenges it has faced rather than delving into the details of its priority-setting provisions. In addition to providing an overview of the ACA’s provisions concerning priority setting and their developing interpretations, this Article attempts to defend three substantive propositions. First, I argue that the ACA is neither (...) uniformly hostile nor uniformly friendly to efforts to set priorities in ways that promote cost and quality. Second, I argue that the ACA does not take a single, unified approach to priority setting; rather, its guidance varies depending on the aspect of the health care system at issue (Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, Medicare, essential health benefits) and the factors being excluded from priority setting (age, disability, life expectancy). Third, I argue that cost-effectiveness can be achieved within the ACA's constraints, but that doing so will require adopting new approaches to cost-effectiveness and priority setting. By limiting the use of standard cost-effectiveness analysis, the ACA makes the need for workable rivals to cost-effectiveness analysis a pressing practical concern rather than a mere theoretical worry. (shrink)

This paper examines a looming reproducibility crisis in the core of the hard sciences. Namely, it concentrates on molecular modeling and simulation (MMS), a family of methods that predict properties of substances through computing interactions on a molecular level and that is widely popular in physics, chemistry, materials science, and engineering. The paper argues that in order to make quantitative predictions, sophisticated models are needed which have to be evaluated with complex simulation procedures that amalgamate theoretical, technological, and social factors (...) – leading to problems with reproducibility. Thus, for methodological reasons, the predictive success causes a reproducibility problem. (shrink)

We know that Homo sapiens will not exist forever. Given this, how should our species end? What are the reasons, if any, to delay our extinction? In this paper, I show that the pre-eminent reasons which favour prolonging the existence of the species are partial: they will arise from the particular attachments and projects of the final few generations. While there may also be impartial reasons to prolong the species, these reasons are liable, with time, to reverse their valence: we (...) can be reasonably confident that they will ultimately recommend hastening the demise of the species. Consequently, it is likely that our descendants will eventually face a difficult -- possibly tragic -- conflict, between partial duties that recommend living on, and an impartial duty to extinguish the species. (shrink)

Benefit/cost analysis is a technique for evaluating programs, procedures, and actions; it is not a moral theory. There is significant controversy over the moral justification of benefit/cost analysis. When a procedure for evaluating social policy is challenged on moral grounds, defenders frequently seek a justification by construing the procedure as the practical embodiment of a correct moral theory. This has the apparent advantage of avoiding difficult empirical questions concerning such matters as the consequences of using the procedure. So, for example, (...) defenders of benefit/cost analysis (BCA) are frequently tempted to argue that this procedurejust isthe calculation of moral Tightness – perhaps that what itmeansfor an action to be morally right is just for it to have the best benefit-to-cost ratio given the accounts of “benefit” and “cost” that BCA employs. They suggest, in defense of BCA, that they have found the moral calculus – Bentham's “unabashed arithmetic of morals.” To defend BCA in this manner is to commit oneself to one member of a family of moral theories (let us call thembenefit/cost moral theoriesorB/C moral theories) and, also, to the view that if a procedure is (so to speak) the direct implementation of a correct moral theory, then it is a justified procedure. Neither of these commitments is desirable, and so the temptation to justify BCA by direct appeal to a B/C moral theory should be resisted; it constitutes an unwarranted short cut to moral foundations – in this case, an unsound foundation. Critics of BCA are quick to point out the flaws of B/C moral theories, and to conclude that these undermine the justification of BCA. But the failure to justify BCA by a direct appeal to B/C moral theory does not show that the technique is unjustified. There is hope for BCA, even if it does not lie with B/C moral theory. (shrink)

This study addresses the issue of maintaining nutritional quality amidst financial hardship faced by families in Plateau State, Nigeria. Surveys research designed was used for the study. The study covers 3 local government areas in Plateau State, ensuring diverse representation. The sample size of 400 families residing in Plateau State was used. Questionnaire was used to collect data for the study which capture the demographic information, dietary habits, household budget allocation for food, and perceptions of nutritional value. Mean and standard (...) deviation was used to present result for the findings. The findings of the study revealed that that there should be cost-effective meal planning strategies in promoting healthy eating habits. Also, socioeconomic factors impact cost-effective meal planning in promoting healthy eating habits. Based on the findings, stakeholders, policymakers, and community organizations should implement interventions that support cost-effective meal planning, enhance nutritional literacy, and alleviate financial burdens on families in Plateau State. This study may empower families to make informed dietary choices and achieve better health outcomes despite economic constraints. (shrink)

The costs of doing science have no longer been limited to investments or expenditures in relation to scientific experiments or conducts.

In this paper I discuss the costs and benefits of confabulation, focusing on the type of confabulation people engage in when they offer explanations for their attitudes and choices. What makes confabulation costly? In the philosophical literature confabulation is thought to undermine claims to self-knowledge. I argue that when people confabulate they do not necessarily fail at mental-state self-attributions, but offer ill-grounded explanations which often lead to the adoption of other ill-grounded beliefs. What, if anything, makes confabulation beneficial? As (...) people are unaware of the information that would make their explanations accurate, they are not typically in a position to acknowledge their ignorance or provide better-grounded explanations for their attitudes and choices. In such cases, confabulating can have some advantages over offering no explanation because it makes a distinctive contribution to people’s sense of themselves as competent and largely coherent agents. This role of ill-grounded explanations could not be as easily played by better-grounded explanations should these be available. In the end, I speculate about the implications of this conclusion for attempting to eliminate or reduce confabulation. (shrink)

Costly scientific work and its publication and declining funding rates worldwide make it not easily affordable for scientists, especially those from low-resource contexts.

The distinctly contemporary proliferation of pornography and hate speech poses a challenge to liberalism's traditional ideal of a 'marketplace of ideas' facilitated by state neutrality about the content of speech. This new study argues that the liberal state ought to depart from neutrality to meet this challenge.

I’ve argued that those who endorse the argument from divine hiddenness must give up all pure de jure objections to theism, and this means that endorsing the argument is costly for atheists. Benjamin Curtis claims that this isn’t a significant cost for atheists. I show that—contrary to Curtis—there is a significant cost, and spell out why this is so. Furthermore, I show that my argument functions as a new argument for affirming reformed epistemology—the view that if theism is true, belief (...) in God is probably rational. (shrink)

The costs of agricultural inputs added to those of labor represent almost a third of the total cost of Brazilian sugarcane production. This study analyzes the behavior of the price per ton of sugarcane in Brazil, relating it to the main production costs of this cultivation. Twelve price indicators from January 2015 to December 2020 were evaluated. First, the data were adjusted to a multiple linear regression model to identify the significant variables on variation in the price per (...) ton of sugarcane. Then, the Monte Carlo simulation was used to measure the level of certainty of occurrence of these variables, and forecasts were obtained from the adjustment of ARIMA models. The results showed the influence of the costs of diesel oil, two agricultural pesticides, and daily laborers on the price of sugarcane, besides an increasing trend of its, providing relevant short-term projections for decision-making about investments in the agribusiness sector. (shrink)

There are many good reasons to learn about the lives of people who have less social privilege than we do. We might want to understand their circumstances in order to have informed opinions on social policy, or to make our institutions more inclusive. We might also want to cultivate empathy for its own sake. Much of this knowledge is gained through social scientific or humanistic research into others' lives. The entitlement to theorize about or study the lives of marginalized others (...) is often granted under the presumption of academic freedom. This paper will not question whether academic freedom licenses us to do so in the first place ; instead, I will... (shrink)

the animal self: from Eden to Apocalypse and after.

Since the last ice age, when ice enveloped most of the northern continents, the earth has warmed by about five degrees. Within a century, it is likely to warm by another four or five. This revolution in our climate will have immense and mostly harmful effects on the lives of people not yet born. We are inflicting this harm on our descendants by dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We can mitigate the harm a little by taking measures to control (...) our emissions of these gases, and to adapt to the changes by, for instance, building sea walls around coastlines threatened by rising sea levels. But these measures will be very expensive, and the costs will be born by us, the present generation, whereas the benefits will come to future generations. How much should we sacrifice for the sake of the future? Economists and philosophers have independently worked on the question of our responsibility to future generations. This book brings their work together and applies it to global warming. It suggests a programme for future research on the economic and ethical issues. The book is intended for economists, and for philosophers and other social scientists who have a little knowledge of economic methods. (shrink)

We often remember in the company of others. In particular, we routinely collaborate with friends, family, or colleagues to remember shared experiences. But surprisingly, in the experimental collaborative recall paradigm, collaborative groups remember less than their potential, an effect termed collaborative inhibition. Rajaram and Pereira-Pasarin (2010) argued that the effects of collaboration on recall are determined by “pre-collaborative” factors. We studied the role of 2 pre-collaborative factors—shared encoding and group relationship—in determining the costs and benefits of collaborative recall. In (...) Experiment 1, we compared groups of strangers who encoded alone versus together, before collaborating to recall. In Experiment 2, we compared groups of friends who encoded alone versus together, before collaborating to recall. We found that shared encoding abolished collaborative inhibition in both Experiments 1 and 2. But prior relationship did not influence collaborative inhibition over and above the effects of shared encoding. Regardless of encoding condition, collaborative group recall contained fewer intrusions than nominal group recall, and these benefits continued in subsequent individual recall. Our findings demonstrate that pre-collaborative factors—specifically shared encoding—have flow-on benefits for group and individual recall amount, but not recall accuracy. We discuss these findings in terms of self- and cross-cuing in collaborative recall. (shrink)

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is a central concept in climate change economics. This chapter explains the SCC and investigates it philosophically. As is widely acknowledged, any SCC calculation requires the analyst to make choices about the infamous topic of discount rates. But to understand the nature and role of discounting, one must understand how that concept—and indeed the SCC concept itself—is yoked to the concept of a value function, whose job is to take ways the world could be (...) across indefinite timespans and to rank them from better to worse. A great deal, therefore, turns on the details of the value function and on just what is meant by “better” and “worse.” This chapter seeks to explicate these and related issues, and then to situate them within the evolving landscape of federal climate policy in the United States. (shrink)

Many find it reasonable to take our past actions into account when making choices for the future. In this paper, I address two important issues regarding taking past investments into account in prudential deliberation. The first is the charge that doing so commits the fallacy of honoring sunk costs. I argue that while it is indeed irrational to care about sunk costs, past investments are not sunk costs when we can change their teleological significance, roughly their contribution (...) to our excellence as temporally extended, reasons-responsive, and goal-directed agents. I suggest some general principles for evaluating such significance. Second, it’s a live issue whether we should care about the fate of our past projects, even if we can now affect it. I reject Dale Dorsey’s recent answer, and argue that the puzzle he addresses turns out to be merely apparent, if we take seriously the fact that we are temporally extended. (shrink)

Decision-making regarding healthcare expenditure hinges heavily on an individual's health status and the certainty about the future. This study uses data on propensity of general health exam (GHE) spending to show that despite the debate on the necessity of GHE, its objective is clear—to obtain more information and certainty about one’s health so as to minimise future risks. Most studies on this topic, however, focus only on factors associated with GHE uptake and overlook the shifts in behaviours and attitudes regarding (...) different levels of cost. To fill the gap, this study analyses a dataset of 2068 subjects collected from Hanoi (Vietnam) and its vicinities using the baseline-category logit method. We evaluate the sensitivity of Vietnamese healthcare consumers against two groups of factors (demographic and socioeconomic-cognitive) regarding payment for periodic GHE, which is not covered by insurance. Our study shows that uninsured, married and employed individuals are less sensitive to cost than their counterparts because they value the information in reducing future health uncertainty. The empirical results challenge the objections to periodic health screening by highlighting its utility. The relevance of behavioural economics is further highlighted through a look at the bounded rationality of healthcare consumers and private insurance companies in using and providing the service, respectively. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 or Gemini, which are now incorporated in a wide range of products and services in everyday life. Importantly, it considers some of their hidden human costs. First, is the question of who is left behind by the further infusion of LLMs in society. Second, is the issue of social inequalities between lingua franca and those which are not. Third, LLMs will help disseminate scientific concepts, but their (...) meanings' dissemination is at risk. Fourth, is the issue of information security and how nations and individuals might adapt. Fifth, is the issue of the environmental cost of LLMs for future generations. At the dawn of the conversational AI era, it would be wise to ponder what inequalities and empowerments will be co-created with LLMs. (shrink)

Book synopsis: Held every five years under the auspices of the Kant-Gesellschaft, the International Kant Congress is the world’s largest philosophy conference devoted to the work and legacy of a single thinker. The five-volume set Kant and Philosophy in a Cosmopolitan Sense contains the proceedings of the Eleventh International Kant Congress, which took place in Pisa in 2010. The proceedings consist of 25 plenary talks and 341 papers selected by a team of international referees from over 700 submissions. The contributions (...) span 14 sections: Kant’s Concept of Philosophy; Theory of Cognition and Logic; Ontology and Metaphysics; Ethics; Law and Justice; Religion and Theology; Aesthetics; Anthropology and Psychology; Politics and History; Science, Mathematics, and the Philosophy of Nature; Kant and the Leibnizian Tradition; Kant and the Philosophical Tradition; Kant and Schopenhauer; and Kant’s Heritage. Thanks to cooperation from the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft, the 2010 conference was the first in the history of the International Kant Congress to include a session on Kant and Schopenhauer. (shrink)

Bioethicists sometimes defend compromise positions, particularly when they enter debates on applied topics that have traditionally been highly polarised, such as those regarding abortion, euthanasia and embryonic stem cell research. However, defending compromise positions is often regarded with a degree of disdain. Many are intuitively attracted to the view that it is almost always problematic to defend compromise positions, in the sense that we have a significant moral reason not to do so. In this paper, we consider whether this common (...) sense view can be given a principled basis. We first show how existing explanations for the problematic nature of compromise fall short of vindicating the common sense view, before offering our own explanation, which, we claim, comes closer to vindicating that view. We argue that defending a compromise will typically have two epistemic costs: it will corrupt attempts to use the claims of ethicists as testimonial evidence, and it will undermine standards that are important to making epistemic progress in ethics. We end by suggesting that the epistemic costs of compromise could be reduced by introducing a stronger separation between ethical debate aimed at fulfilling the epistemic role of ethics, and ethical debate that aims to directly produce good policy or practice. (shrink)

Background: Critically ill patients often require complex clinical care by highly trained staff within a specialized intensive care unit (ICU) with advanced equipment. There are currently limited data on the costs of critical care in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). This study aims to investigate the direct-medical costs of key infectious disease (tetanus, sepsis, and dengue) patients admitted to ICU in a hospital in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam, and explores how the costs and cost drivers can (...) vary between the different diseases. -/- Methods: We calculated the direct medical costs for patients requiring critical care for tetanus, dengue and sepsis. Costing data (stratified into different cost categories) were extracted from the bills of patients hospitalized to the adult ICU with a dengue, sepsis and tetanus diagnosis that were enrolled in three studies conducted at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in HCMC from January 2017 to December 2019. The costs were considered from the health sector perspective. The total sample size in this study was 342 patients. -/- Results: ICU care was associated with significant direct medical costs. For patients that did not require mechanical ventilation, the median total ICU cost per patient varied between US$64.40 and US$675 for the different diseases. The costs were higher for patients that required mechanical ventilation, with the median total ICU cost per patient for the different diseases varying between US$2,590 and US$4,250. The main cost drivers varied according to disease and associated severity. -/- Conclusion: This study demonstrates the notable cost of ICU care in Vietnam and in similar LMIC settings. Future studies are needed to further evaluate the costs and economic burden incurred by ICU patients. The data also highlight the importance of evaluating novel critical care interventions that could reduce the costs of ICU care. (shrink)