Confusing Things

The “academic” ones are mainly questions I asked tutors/lecturers and never got good answers to.

Business

• Professional service firms (lawyers, consultants, accountants) and SaaS firms both need to do lots of sales. Why do they approach it in such different ways?
  • At professional services (PS) firms, the job of the partners is to bring in work by doing lots of networking, etc. They are the best-paid people in the company, and also (not coincidentally) very high-status.
  • At SaaS firms, there is an army of sales reps who (at least according to quick searches and my impressions) are worse-paid and lower-status than people working on building the actual product.
  • Speculation on potential reasons:
    • More competition for software contracts vs PS ones, more randomness so each lead is less valuable
    • Something to do with information / lemons problem & signalling competence - maybe easier to judge value of a SaaS product so firms don’t need to spend as much on smooth-talking partners to sell their stuff
    • Acquiring a new customer is less valuable for a SaaS company than a PS one, either because of annual revenue or because customers are much less locked-in to SaaS than PS (so lower lifetime revenue). (I don’t know how many enterprise contracts Salesforce has vs how many clients Deloitte does, and per-customer annual revenues, but I’d guess they’re similar order of magnitude?)

Economics

• Why would anyone use a central bank digital currency?
• Why actually are there people sleeping rough?
  • Can’t the government just pay for hotels?
    • I think the problem is many of them have complex needs, addictions, childhood trauma.
    • So they might need lots of support, which would be much more expensive than the accommodation
    • But they managed to “get everyone in” during Covid…
• Do we have lots of empty homes? Are they a big contributor to housing shortages?
• Why do so many taxi drivers wait outside train stations? Why do STEM graduates charge so little for tutoring?
• What are the “social welfare benefits from America’s tolerance for high drug prices”
  • OK, so apparently the claim is that pharma companies wouldn’t invest lots in R&D if not for high US drug prices (reasonable), and even though the benefits of this mostly accrue to non-US countries who get the fancy new treatments for less money, on the current margin it would be harmful for the US government to try and lower drug prices considering US interests alone.
  • Unsure whether the second part is true or how you’d check.

Academic

• In the Solow model, why mathematically is it that $\frac {\partial F(K,L)}{\partial K}:=MP_K- \bar d$? Or, what is the meaning of $MP_K$ “net of depreciation” (see intro to macro slides 1.3:9)
• What’s wrong with setting the dual-mandate sensitivity parameters to infinity?
  • Q5 in the 2019 Trinity prelims econ paper touches on this.
• If we’re using rational not adaptive expectations, what do we replace the Philips curve with?
• According to the Jones textbook, in the combined Solow-Romer model, “changing any parameter [including $\bar z, \bar l, \bar L$] will cause transition dynamics”
  • But I don’t think that’s right - what are the transition dynamics from a change in the technological growth rate $\bar g$?
  • In terms of per-effective worker variables, sure, but for the per-capita and total variables there’s just an immediate growth effect, like you have in the pure Romer model?

Politics

• Why are some people stubbornly Conservative?
  • I’m thinking of those who said they wouldn’t even consider voting for Labour when I was phonebanking.

Academic

• What is this all about? ¹

betas cannot be used for comparison between models because their effects are calculated relative to the effects of variables in the same model

• How is balancing of free speech interests and other interests different to utilitarian-style aggregation?
  • Caleb Yong

  Note that this is not an instance of ad hoc balancing: it is a claim that relative to the central concerns that motivate the FSP itself, the claims of speakers to speak are weak in these cases.

  • SEP

  This alternative framing holds that the balancing occurs before we specify what rights are; on this view, we balance interests against each other, and only once we’ve undertaken that balancing do we proceed to define what our rights protect… This balancing need not come in the form of some crude consequentialism; otherwise it would be acceptable to limit the rights of the few to secure trivial benefits for the many. On a contractualist moral theory such as Scanlon’s, the test is to assess the strength of any given individual’s reason to engage in (or access) the speech, against the strength of any given individual’s reason to oppose it.

  • Pascal suggests it’s saying something like the balancing occurs at the rule level (i.e. finding categories of speech where dignity interests outweigh free speech interests). Maybe, though then you have to deal with collapses like in Lyons’s objection to indirect utilitarianism.
• How on earth does withering away of the state work?
• Is the interpretation of Rousseau in Jones (1987) that nobody can be worse off under a decision made by the general will correct?
  • if so, I am confused about how the volonté général and volonté de tous can come apart.
  • Possibly it means you’re not allowed to make any interpersonal tradeoffs in the negative direction? i.e. with negative utilitarian flavours, which doesn’t make much sense.
• Why does Rousseau think that people talking to each other in the legislature leads to factionalism? As Sparknotes points out,

Because citizens in the assembly are not meant to voice personal interests, there is no sure way of finding out that the unpopular choice is in fact unpopular.

Philosophy

Academic

• What is animalism all about?
  • Can’t you just replace the word “animal” with “student”, and show that that doesn’t make sense?
• How does psychological continuity with q-memories, etc, deal with sleeping and being in a coma?
  • It seems like it can’t, yet sources say it does (e.g. IEP, the Polity book)

  Appeal to causal and cognitive connections which relate not only memory but other psychological aspects is sufficient to eradicate the problem

  • Sure, you can talk about having the capacity to have memories & beliefs, but then how do you distinguish between that and a corpse?
• What does Mill mean when he talks about expediency?
• What does Mill mean when he distinguishes between intentions and motives?
• Isn’t the second paragraph here equivocating between two different notions of rationality?
  • Rough notes, discussed more in tutorial: their presentation of instrumental rationality involves substantive reference to a specific goal (preference satisfaction) which is different to the account of welfare they seem to assume rational egoism adopts (i.e. welfarism). Otherwise, what is the relevance of talking about an “uncompensated sacrifice” which satisfies your preferences?

French

• Why are these the right prepositions?

Elle est partie vivre à Cuba

Ils habitent au Caire.