Shaping Public Opinion and the Law: How a “Common Man” Campaign Ended a Rich Man’s Law

Kornhauser recounts the legislation which enacted in 1934 required all income taxpayers to submit pink slips with their tax returns. The information required by the pink slip would then be made available for public inspection. The disclosure regime was repealed less than one year later, largely through the remarkably effective efforts of one person--Raymond Pitcairn, a wealthy lawyer. She describes a multifaceted public-relations campaign, orchestrated by Pitcairn, that would be sophisticated even by today\u27s standards. Two aspects of Pitcairn\u27s campaign were especially impressive. The first was his ability to enlist the zeitgeist in his efforts; the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby was proceeding as Pitcairn was advocating repeal of the disclosure requirement, and Pitcairn argued effectively that the disclosure requirement would encourage additional kidnappings. The second was his ability to convince Congress and the public that repeal was in the interests of the common man, despite the inconvenient fact that the income tax applied to less than ten percent of the population

On Candidate-Based Analyses of Assembly Elections.

Analyses of assembly elections often assume that voters have well-defined preferences over candidates, even though preferences over assemblies are the natural analytic starting point. This candidate-based approach is usually justified by an assumption that preferences over assemblies are separable. We show that if preferences over assemblies are themselves derived from underlying preferences over legislative or economic outcomes, then preferences over assemblies will not in general be separable.ELECTIONS;POLITICS;VOTING

Equality, Liberty, and a Fair Income Tax

This Article summarizes various formal theories of justice and of income taxation. It explores the nature of the American perception of justice. First, it provides an overview of the two political concepts that have shaped our country—liberty and equality. It then summarizes the American tradition, labeled moral economic individualism, that articulates the meanings of liberty and equality that resonate most strongly within the national psyche. It surveys empirical evidence of American beliefs about distributive justice and taxation. The Article concludes that American beliefs in liberty and equality support a mildly progressive hybrid income-consumption tax, rather than a pure income tax or a flat-rate consumption tax. Such a tax acknowledges the pluralistic meanings of liberty and equality under the unifying umbrella of a fluid and flexible conception of fair tax

The economic value of remote sensing of earth resources from space: An ERTS overview and the value of continuity of service. Volume 3: Intensive use of living resources: Agriculture. Part 1: Overview

Potential economic benefits obtainable from a state-of-the-art ERS system in the resource area of intensive use of living resources, agriculture, are studied. A spectrum of equal capability (cost saving), increased capability, and new capability benefits are quantified. These benefits are estimated via ECON developed models of the agricultural marketplace and include benefits of improved production and distribution of agricultural crops. It is shown that increased capability benefits and new capability benefits result from a reduction of losses due to disease and insect infestation given ERS's capability to distinguish crop vigor and from the improvement in world trade negotiations given ERS's worldwide surveying capability

Design Guidelines for Agent Based Model Visualization

In the field of agent-based modeling (ABM), visualizations play an important role in identifying, communicating and understanding important behavior of the modeled phenomenon. However, many modelers tend to create ineffective visualizations of Agent Based Models (ABM) due to lack of experience with visual design. This paper provides ABM visualization design guidelines in order to improve visual design with ABM toolkits. These guidelines will assist the modeler in creating clear and understandable ABM visualizations. We begin by introducing a non-hierarchical categorization of ABM visualizations. This categorization serves as a starting point in the creation of an ABM visualization. We go on to present well-known design techniques in the context of ABM visualization. These techniques are based on Gestalt psychology, semiology of graphics, and scientific visualization. They improve the visualization design by facilitating specific tasks, and providing a common language to critique visualizations through the use of visual variables. Subsequently, we discuss the application of these design techniques to simplify, emphasize and explain an ABM visualization. Finally, we illustrate these guidelines using a simple redesign of a NetLogo ABM visualization. These guidelines can be used to inform the development of design tools that assist users in the creation of ABM visualizations.Visualization, Design, Graphics, Guidelines, Communication, Agent-Based Modeling

Contracts between Legal Persons

Contract law and the economics of contract have, for the most part, developed independently of each other. In this essay, we briefly review the notion of a contract from the perspective of lawyer, and then use this framework to organize the economics literature on contract. The title, Contracts between Legal Persons, limits the review to that part of contract law that is generic to any legal person. A legal person is any individual, firm or government agency with the right to enter into binding agreements. Our goal is to discuss the role of the law in enforcing these agreements under the hypothesis that the legal persons have well defined goals and objectives.contract law, law and economics, contract breach, contract theory, incomplete contracts

DeepDriving: Learning Affordance for Direct Perception in Autonomous Driving

Today, there are two major paradigms for vision-based autonomous driving systems: mediated perception approaches that parse an entire scene to make a driving decision, and behavior reflex approaches that directly map an input image to a driving action by a regressor. In this paper, we propose a third paradigm: a direct perception approach to estimate the affordance for driving. We propose to map an input image to a small number of key perception indicators that directly relate to the affordance of a road/traffic state for driving. Our representation provides a set of compact yet complete descriptions of the scene to enable a simple controller to drive autonomously. Falling in between the two extremes of mediated perception and behavior reflex, we argue that our direct perception representation provides the right level of abstraction. To demonstrate this, we train a deep Convolutional Neural Network using recording from 12 hours of human driving in a video game and show that our model can work well to drive a car in a very diverse set of virtual environments. We also train a model for car distance estimation on the KITTI dataset. Results show that our direct perception approach can generalize well to real driving images. Source code and data are available on our project website

Concept, principle, and norm—equality before the law reconsidered

Despite the attention equality before the law has received, both laudatory and critical, peculiarly little has been done to precisely define it. The first ambition of this paper is to remedy this, by exploring the various ways in which a principle of equality before the law can be understood and suggest a concise definition. With a clearer understanding of the principle in hand we are better equipped to assess traditional critique of the principle. Doing so is the second ambition of this paper. I will argue that traditional criticisms are unpersuasive, but that there is a different, powerful argument against equality before the law. The third ambition of the paper is to argue that there is a sense, overlooked by both proponents and critics, in which the principle still captures something important, albeit at the cost of shifting from intrinsic to instrumental value