Post-growth strategies can be more feasible than techno-fixes: Focus on working time

Can there be more predators than prey?

One of the few general “theorems” of ecology is the statement that in a given habitat there can be no more species present than the number of limiting resources. Our aim is to examine several of the versions of this “theorem” present in the literature, to compare them and to consider the underlying assumptions and definitions so as to decide to what ecological situations the theorem is applicab...

Can Virtual Humans Be More Engaging Than Real Ones?

Emotional bonds don’t arise from a simple exchange of facial displays, but often emerge through the dynamic give and take of face-to-face interactions. This article explores the phenomenon of rapport, a feeling of connectedness that seems to arise from rapid and contingent positive feedback between partners and is often associated with socio-emotional processes. Rapport has been argued to lead ...

Unchecked Exceptions Can Be Strictly More Powerful Than Call/CC

We demonstrate that in the context of statically-typed purely-functional lambda calculi without recursion, unchecked exceptions (e.g., SML exceptions) can be strictly more powerful than call/cc. More precisely, we prove that a natural extension of the simply-typed lambda calculus with unchecked exceptions is strictly more powerful than all known sound extensions of Girard’s Fω (a superset of th...

Can risk-based premiums be more equitable than social insurance?

We examine the proposal by Peter Zweifel and Michael Breuer to combine risk-based premiums with a subsidy for individuals whose expenditure for health insurance exceeds a certain share of income. Assuming a maximin social welfare function and optimal linear income taxation, we find that this proposal is superior to social insurance if the correlation between productivity and health is not too l...

Higher Efficiency in Operations Can Be Achieved with More Focus on the Operator