Pigouvian taxes
What to do when the interests of individuals and society do not coincide? The fourth in our series
LOUD conversation in a train carriage that makes concentration impossible for fellow-passengers. A farmer spraying weedkiller that destroys his neighbour’s crop. Motorists whose idling cars spew fumes into the air, polluting the atmosphere for everyone. Such behaviour might be considered thoughtless, anti-social or even immoral. For economists these spillovers are a problem to be solved.
This article appeared in the Schools brief section of the print edition under the headline “The lives of others”
From the August 19th 2017 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionMore from Schools brief
LLMs and diffusion models are all the rage
But the designs of deep neural networks continue to evolve
The race is on to control the global supply chain for AI chips
The focus is no longer just on faster chips, but on more chips clustered together
AI firms will soon exhaust most of the internet’s data
Can they create more?
A short history of AI
In the first of six weekly briefs, we ask how AI overcame decades of underdelivering
Finding living planets
Life evolves on planets. And planets with life evolve
On the origin of “species”
The term, though widely used, is hard to define