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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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its theoretically possible the government could be running a policy that is harmful to everyone or harmful to a subset of people and neutral to everyone else and so removing such a policy would leave no one worse off. there is also bunch of literature in economics about pareto improvements (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency). though, i think they there is a larger possible space of such improvements if you tax the winners of improvements and compensate the losers so the losers are no worse off. also, i think there is some term for doing this but then not doing the compensation because of 'efficiency' or some other reason.

An old economics professor once told me that "unfortunately, the only actual Pareto improvement I know of is to allow right turns on red"

Right on red intersections have like 30% more pedestrians run over by cars, I'm not sure that's a good example of a pareto improvement. Did the prof have legs?

Well there you go, I guess there are no Pareto improvements in the world.