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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

I love it when everyone works together to make a lose/lose/lose situation happen.

Yup. Politicians and governments are, by and large, oblivious to the fact that laws induce behavioral changes. Like extending unemployment benefits to 99 weeks, then somehow being surprised when the rate increases of people staying on unemployment rather than finding jobs. Or creating a tax credit for low-income families who have children, then being surprised when the low-income birth rate increases. In the politician's world, if a $100 million business exists and a tax rate of 7% is imposed, that is obviously $7 million in revenue, because no company would ever think to try to work around the tax structure or would lose business to competitors not subject to that tax.

> Yup. Politicians and governments are, by and large, oblivious to the fact that laws induce behavioral changes.

Come on. Politicians are some of the smartest people in the society. Do you really think they are oblivious or do you think they're just looking out for #1?

> Politicians are some of the smartest people in the society.

[citation needed]

Not that I necessarily disagree, mind you; nor do I want to drag the whole social vs. whatever we call it now intelligence.

I'd say it takes a certain degree of smarts to be able to manipulate people as well as politicians do!

But are they really looking out for themselves by doing so? A captain that helps sink the ship he's on (and keeps him from drowning) is not "looking out for #1" long-term.

He is if he has a dinghy no one else knows about.

The problem with this is that there is no such dinghy in real life. Immigration is hard (try it sometime), and there's no guarantee that there will be anywhere better to go.

The closest answer would be willful obliviousness. Like how voting for war funding means borrowing the money from sometime in the future. Politicians know these consequences on some level, but willfully just push them out of consideration.

Whatever politicians pushed this in California were counting up the tax revenue that would be collected from Amazon. They couldn't have truly been ignorant that Amazon would pull out, but just kind of put the thought aside to push through the tax plan.

edit: I like btilly's point in the child post too.

You have an excellent point and I think that it is even more cynical than that. They know full well that they wouldn't collect that revenue, but by passing the bill they can pretend that they will, and then they can add that line item to the budget to make it easier to balance on paper (which it has to be before it can be passed).

Nothing that happens after you're out of office matters.

I'm trying to understand how anyone votes for these people.

I don't think politicians are nearly as ignorant of the situation as you claim. They know full well what they're doing, however their main objective is to get reelected, so they're going to do things like extend unemployment benefits, because their unemployed constituents will no doubt vote for them come reelection, and the negative consequences are abstract and vague, thus easily dismissed.

> extending unemployment benefits to 99 weeks ... people staying on unemployment rather than finding jobs

> tax credit for low-income families who have children ... low-income birth rate increases

Citations please

http://cei.org/news-releases/extending-unemployment-benefits...

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=428343#

http://youngilkim.webs.com/Kim_2009.pdf

https://editorialexpress.com/cgi-bin/conference/download.cgi...

>http://cei.org/news-releases/extending-unemployment-benefits...

I think the poster was looking for evidence that this actually occurred, not someone else saying that it will.

I didn't look at the others.

> The University of Chicago’s Bruce Meyer and Harvard’s Lawrence Katz found that for every week that unemployment benefits are extended, the average duration of unemployment goes up by 0.16 to 0.20 weeks. According to a paper coauthored by Alan Krueger, President Obama’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, the unemployed more than triple the time they spend job-hunting, from 20 minutes per week to 70 minutes per week, in the weeks right before benefits expire.

Should read passed the title next time.

The referenced papers (which aren't actually referenced) are hard to find.

I did find this though:

One of the best-known empirical results in public Önance and labor economics is the ìspikeî in the exit rate from unemployment around the expiration of jobless beneÖts (see e.g., Robert Mo¢ tt, 1985; Lawrence Katz and Bruce Meyer, 1990a; Katz and Meyer, 1990b). This sharp surge in the hazard rate is widely interpreted as evidence that recipients are waiting until their beneÖts run out to return to work

However, from the same paper:

Our main finding is that the way in which unemployment spells are measured has a large e§ect on the magnitude of the spike at exhaustion, both in existing studies and in our Austrian data...

We conclude that most job seekers in Austria are not waiting to return to work until their UI benefits are exhausted. Rather, a large fraction simply leave the unemployment registry once their benefits end and they are no longer required to register to maintain their eligibility for benefit

http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~card/papers/unemp-hazards.pdf

Like extending unemployment benefits to 99 weeks, then somehow being surprised when the rate increases of people staying on unemployment rather than finding jobs.

Wow. I've never seen a better example of the phrase correlation does not imply causation.

It might be a win for non-Amazon retailers, if the removal of Amazon's affiliate program reduced the total % of internet book-related links that go to Amazon versus other booksellers (keeping that % up is of course one reason Amazon has the program in the first place).

I doubt if Amazon competitors collect sales tax that their prices will remain competitive with Amazon.

Many of them already do, e.g. local booksellers. They might not be price-competitive, but if Amazon provides the linker with no incentive to link Amazon versus linking some other bookstore (say, their favorite local bookstore), some percentage of linkers will (I would guess) defect from choosing to link Amazon.

For example, I have a site with some book reviews which currently links the Amazon page for all the books, because they pay me. If Amazon terminates its affiliate program in my state, why would I continue to link Amazon, rather than someone else? I would first look into alternate affiliate programs, like AbeBooks. If I couldn't find any worth using, I'd probably change it to just link the official publisher page for each book. Or maybe to a local-bookstore aggregator like indiebound.org. Or the Wikipedia article, when one exists.

Even if I were making money on Amazon's affiliate program and it got cut I would continue linking to Amazon. For the reader using my site to find information going to an online location where they can purchase the book easily will help them come back to my site.

Especially if I have diverse traffic from around the United States or bigger linking to a retailer that is more likely to ship to my readers will let me keep their eyeballs.

Like many here, I have many book reviews myself that link to amazon. I link to amazon because that's what's most convenient for most people. I do not use an affiliate link because it's a conflict of interest. In the past magazines would have honest product reviews that sometimes were negative. Nowadays nearly every magazine only has glowing reviews and no negative ones. Editors tell writers that bad reviews will result in lost advertising revenue since publishers/manufacturers threaten to stop advertising in magazines with bad reviews of their products. Contrary to this I have many reviews that rip apart products and point out their numerous defects. I also have reviews that praise good products. Perhaps some people who read my reviews notice this and find the integrity refreshing or bizarrely archaic. In any case I certainly don't need the pitiful income from affiliate links, it makes more sense for me to just use a plain link.

That's assuming that people's choice of bookstore is influenced by links. When I buy a book from a website (or pretty much anything from a website) I always check the price on Amazon. So the only way the affiliate program helps them to sell to me is by encouraging bloggers to write reviews. I'd guess that's true for a lot of people.

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