DISQUS

A 4.5% conversion rate for a donation page is terrific. Most e-commerce sites hover between 2% and 6% from qualified search traffic.

I read that post yesterday as well and decided that I disagreed, in general, with his assertion that you can't treat supply and demand as a curve. I think that there are probably very few cases where you raise prices by 5% or 10% and you lose a substantial chunk of your customer base forever. Even if it were true that Seth's insurance company lost a substantial chunk of customers during that price increase, it's probably because the Insurance company jumped too far up the curve where the curve looks more exponential. That would be a result of anticipating the curve incorrectly -- and as you point out in your 'comment,' testing is a great way to help define the curve so you know what to expect with price changes.

I do think it could happen with trust more easily; with the most extreme cases being a bank that skimps on some software and ends up constantly giving all their customers' money away to someone else. Although car companies kill hundreds of people a year due to shotty design and they are still in business -- so who knows?

My first thought is whether or not the futarchy proposed policy would fare well in its own system, or whether the betting market would estimate a failure...i have my opinion...

I haven't read the 8 pager, and probably won't, but I did want to point out that the excerpt you reprinted is full of politician speach that makes it painful for me to listen to politicians.

I am as a big an Obama fan as the next intelligent American, but it bothers me when they talk about their views without saying anything and just using words that everyone agrees with.

"drove it over a cliff", "So what we need to bring about is the end of the era of unresponsive and inefficient government and short-term thinking in government," "the foundation for the market to operate effectively and for every single individual to be able to be connected with that market and to succeed in that market"

It seems to me that every politician and president would agree that we want an 'efficient' and 'responsive' goverment and one that thinks in the 'long-term'. It also seems like every president would want the market to 'operate effectively' and for people to be able to 'succeed'

The trick is when using language like that for people to think "Oh yeah, I guess I am for an efficient government...go Barack!" -- This is a common thing people do in the businessplace as well.

The real question and the real difference comes in when they begin discussing HOW the government could be more efficient or HOW to make people more able to succeed in the market place -- which I'm sure the paper that I won't read talks about =)

Great Post!

I think you make a good point about sustainability and the difficulty for business leaders when they are stuck between the duty to shareholders and the personal desire to work toward sustainability.

Certainly government regulation is one way of approaching the issue, but I wonder if maybe there's also hope through businesses who have the money and the market presence to create a value out of sustainability for customers.

So, perhaps today it is more profitable to make a widget without regard to sustainability, but if a company like Google, who doesn't sell widgets, can use their market presence and influence to instill the value of sustainability in the purchasers of widgets, then the competitive advantage of widget making might change for the better.

I didn't like this argument when I read it a couple of years ago. Like many arguments for the existence of God, it plays tricks with large near-infinite numbers.

It seems to me that you could come up with any large number of potential reasons for our existence that a sufficiently advanced race of beings might have created us for.

Ex: It could also be that species that achieve a certain level of technological maturity infect new planets with young DNA in order to watch them develop. I could then make the exact same argument about our existence, assuming a sufficiently large number of planets, that we are likely a seedling race from some other technologically advanced race.

Many, many other 'causes' for existence could exist when you start to take technology out to its limits and add in recursion, all of which could create similar existence arguments.

Also, don't forget WWII pulling us out of the Great Depression by providing lots of jobs. Generally war is considered a bad thing as well.

Not really sure what is being argued here. GDP seems to be an economic indicator and the argument about whether an improving economy makes people happy is a much harder question to answer...people dying today or getting robbed today or having their homes destroyed by earthquakes today seems bad. But really, if it ends up stopping starvation or joblessness down the road, is it bad in the long run? Sounds like a utilitarianism question to me.