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Topic

Policy

A collection of 5 issues

Limits of Harms From Affirmative Action

Stories abound about unqualified people getting admitted to highly selective places because of quotas. But the chances are that these are merely stories with no basis in fact. If an institution is highly selective and if the number of applicants is sufficiently large, quotas are unlikely to lead to people

Not Normal, Optimal

Reports of blood work generally include guides for normal ranges. For instance, for LDL-C, in the US, a score of < 100 (mg/DL) is considered normal. But neither the reports nor doctors have much to say about what LDL-C level to aspire for. The same holds true for things

Building Code: Making Government Code Publicly Available

Very little of the code that the government pays for is open-sourced. One of the reasons is that private companies would rather the code remain under wraps so that the errors never come to light, the price for producing software is never debated, and they get to continue to charge

Market Welfare: Why Are Covid-19 Vaccines Still Underfunded?

“To get roughly 70% of the planet’s population inoculated by April, the IMF calculates, would cost just $50bn. The cumulative economic benefit by 2025, in terms of increased global output, would be $9trn, to say nothing of the many lives that would be saved.” https://www.economist.com/leaders/