What We Learned Doing Fast Grants: by Patrick Collison, Tyler Cowen, and Patrick Hsu. “The original vision was simple: an application form that would take scientists less than 30 minutes to complete and that would deliver funding decisions within 48 hours, with money following a few days later.”
From The Economist on the 175th anniversary of the repeal of the Corn Laws. Donald Boudreaux and Douglas Irwin on free-trade tips from 1846: “Ending tariffs on grain lowered food prices and unleashed economic growth—and offers lessons for today.”
Jason Brennan: “The right to vote should be restricted to those with knowledge..Consider an alternative political system called epistocracy. Epistocracies retain the same institutions as representative democracies, including imposing liberal constitutional limits on power, bills of rights, checks and balances, elected representatives and judicial review. But while democracies give every citizen an equal right to vote, epistocracies apportion political power, by law, according to knowledge or competence…The idea here is not that knowledgeable people deserve to rule – of course they don’t – but that the rest of us deserve not to be subjected to incompetently made political decisions. Political decisions are high stakes, and democracies entrust some of these high-stakes decisions to the ignorant and incompetent. Democracies tend to pass laws and policies that appeal to the median voter, yet the median voter would fail Econ, History, Sociology, and Poli Sci 101. Empirical work generally shows that voters would support different policies if they were better informed.”
