It may be that Google is being, at least in part, high-minded. After all, it’s motto is “Don’t be evil” & it is reported that Sergey Brin’s aversion to totalitarian states played a role here. Yet, it is not Google’s fiduciary duty to be high-minded: rather the organization must act in its shareholder’s interests.

But there are two points to be made in favour of Google’s China stance:

First, Google was getting clobbered in the Chinese market & so perhaps it is giving up less than one might think, & China wasn’t a significant part of its business anyway.

Second, Google makes its money by figuring out exactly what we’re interested in and then selling the ability to target ads aimed at us. For that to work well requires us to provide Google with a great deal of personal information, and we are all the more likely to do that if we trust Google.

Google, then, may have decided that fighting to protect our privacy, and to be seen to be doing so, might have immediate negative consequences for its bottom line, but might pay off in the long run. This seems to be born out by the latest detective work Google has undertaken to protect those who protest a Chinese mine in Vietnam.

Perhaps then, and only perhaps, a case can be made that Google’s China confrontation will bring sufficiently material long-term benefits to justify any short term costs.

The US Republican party is taking that bet, having decided to not merely vote no on almost everything, but to slow or prevent executive appointments, and most recently, to reduce Federal agencies capacity to undertake hearings:

The Senate Commerce Committee postponed its oversight hearing of the Federal Communications Commission’s national broadband plan… There is a little-known rule in the Senate stating that hearings can’t happen after 2:00 p.m. each day without unanimous consent. However, every day… the Senate generally agrees… to waive this rule and continue with the necessary business of holding hearings. Republicans, however, are now refusing to give unanimous consent and are blocking the hearings. Benton Newsletter

An opposition party has a certain freedom. It can raise its voice in ways unconstrained by the reality of governing. This is a good thing, even if it leads to voter cynicism on finding that the previous opposition is not quite as high minded as it seemed.

Opposition also can be frustrating. Constructive engagement allows the government to take good ideas and claim them as their own, but most often there are few other avenues for influencing policy. Thus, there is a tendency for polarization, which is perhaps not ideal, but vocal criticism is valuable.

In the US, the Republican Party has taken the role of opposition to an extreme. The consequences for the American people as well as their political parties may be interesting, if not necessarily happy.

Most calculator aps replicate the real world object, which is handy as most of us know how to operate physical calculators, but that that should not constrain the developer.

Soulver does not have an equal key: output appears next to the input as you type.

This means there is a record of your inputs.

Soulver also allows separate calculations on different lines, & like a spreadsheet you can refer to different lines. This makes scenario calculations and comparisons v easy.

I love it!!

[I should have added that you can also save your calculations.]

Our paper provides evidence for what we consider a surprising outcome: in the case of the new prescription drug program for Medicare enrollees, moving consumers from cash-paying status to membership in an insured group lowers optimal prices for branded prescription drugs below what they otherwise would be. This is surprising because the standard effect of insurance is to create inelastic demand and therefore elicit higher prices from a seller with market power (Duggan and Scott Morton 2006). However, the insurers that we study bundle insurance with a formulary and other mechanisms to create elastic demand. An individual consumer typically does not know which drugs are acceptable therapeutic substitutes; the consumer’s physician typically has poor knowledge of prices, especially negotiated prices; and any one consumer is too small a share of demand to negotiate with a pharmaceutical company. A prescription drug plan can potentially surmount all three hurdles.

Our evidence leads us to conclude that the formulary and other mechanisms perform the special role of allowing buyers to move market share among drugs with patent protection, thereby raising cross-price elasticities and lowering purchase prices (or reducing price increases) for branded drugs. This result contrasts with the common intuition that an uninsured consumer, paying at the margin for her own purchases, is the best tool with which to create competition in the market and impose pricing discipline on sellers. Certainly, this reasoning is at least part of the rationale behind many current policies in health care such as tax-free health care savings accounts (R. Glenn Hubbard, John F. Cogan, and Daniel P. Kessler 2005). Our evidence suggests that this picture is incomplete; for maximum effect, the consumer also needs to be part of a group that can substitute one provider for another.

Mark Duggan and Fiona Scott Morton, 2010, The Effect of Medicare Part D on Pharmaceutical Prices and Utilization, American Economic Review, 100(1) 590 – 607.