At any moment in time, you can ride a bike with least effort by cycling in first gear. But if you want to ride around the block with least effort, first gear will not be ideal. By failing to distinguish between these two different situations, economists have recommended the worst possible climate change policy to governments. Contrary to their belief, emissions trading will achieve decarbonisation at maximum cost, and minimum speed.

The economics used by governments is based on ideas from the 1870s, when economists adopted the language of science, but not the method. To make the maths easy to solve, they assumed the economy was simple, predictable, and static. Nobody believes these assumptions are true, but they still shape analysis that informs policy. When the economy is complex, uncertain, and changing, this kind of analysis can lead us to bad decisions.

Political factions at Carthage cannot be identified beyond a simple polarity: supporters and opponents of Hannibal’s family, ‘Barcids’ and ‘anti-Barcids’. At Rome, the richer naming system has encouraged prosopographic studies, conjectures about political alliances based on kinship, marriage ties, and shared local origins. But more than temporary existence of such ‘groups’ is doubtful. It is also disputed whether Republican Rome was any sort of democracy: Polybius controversially claimed that tribunes of the plebs were there to do the people’s will. In the second Punic war, where we rely on Livy, elections do not look very democratic, but there is a special and temporary reason for this: demography. Casualties in the 218−216 disasters produced a top-heavy senate for years to come. The trials of the Scipios (180s) do not support the idea of groups but rather exemplify the ruling class’s concern to prevent ambitious individuals from upsetting a competitive equilibrium.

This chapter provides an introduction to mathematical modelling in economics through the study of supply and demand sets, equilibrium and the effect of the imposition of an excise tax.

This chapter begins by applying the theory of the firm to the context of a medical practice. The concepts of profit maximization, inputs to production, and outputs from production are all applied to this example. Then the chapter moves on to discuss sources of efficiency in production and specific applications to medical care production. The chapter then develops the basics of supply curves, and how they are interpreted and used, and then brings supply together with demand to describe the basics of equilibrium in an efficient market. The last part of the chapter discusses threats to efficiency in markets, giving a brief overview of the largest sources of difficulty in applying efficient markets to the healthcare context. This sets up the rest of the book: the healthcare sector is filled with problems that make efficient markets unlikely, meaning that understanding the underlying economics is vital.

Utilitarian conservation focuses on a few ecological processes: population regulation in resource-limited systems, succession, predation, and competition. This approach assumes that nature tends toward equilibrium. According to this balance-of-nature mindset, populations are regulated by density-dependent processes. Exponential population growth can generate high numbers quickly, but competition for limiting resources generally keeps populations near the carrying capacity of their environment. In the absence of predation, however, populations may erupt, deplete their food supply, and crash. Similarly, plant associations go through predictable sequences of seral stages culminating in stable climatic climaxes that are able to reproduce themselves indefinitely unless in the absence of disturbances such as fire. Plant associations are groups of interdependent species that all react in the same way to their environment. Utilitarian conservation focuses on keeping populations of economically valuable species such as game animals and commercially harvested trees in balance with their environment.

The human nervous system contains more than 100 billion neurons. Each has a unique function enabling taste, smell, touch, sight, hearing, movement, respiration, cognition, and much more. In the setting of a neurologic emergency, patients may lose these unique capacities. It is the emergency physician’s responsibility to complete a neurologic history and examination to determine the type of deficit and the neuroanatomical location of the abnormality

Chapter 3 turns to the determinants of the supply of goods and services and to the way in which the “forces” of demand and supply determine prices and the quantities exchanged. Via the use of simple models, economists explain generalizations concerning how the quantities of goods and services supplied respond to prices. The accounts of demand in chapter 2 and supply in this chapter take prices as given, and additional modeling is needed to explain how supply and demand are equilibrated and what properties market equilibria possess. This chapter pulls together the discussions of the first three chapters to offer a general sketch of the causal structure and basic principles of mainstream economics. It takes issue with the view, which used to be dominant, that general equilibrium theory is the fundamental theory of contemporary economics. What I call “equilibrium theory,” not general equilibrium theory, is fundamental.

The economics used by governments is based on ideas from the 1870s, when economists adopted the language of science, but not the method. To make the maths easy to solve, they assumed the economy was simple, predictable, and static. Nobody believes these assumptions are true, but they still shape analysis that informs policy. When the economy is complex, uncertain, and changing, this kind of analysis can lead us to bad decisions.

At any moment in time, you can ride a bike with least effort by cycling in first gear. But if you want to ride around the block with least effort, first gear will not be ideal. By failing to distinguish between these two different situations, economists have recommended the worst possible climate change policy to governments. Contrary to their belief, emissions trading will achieve decarbonisation at maximum cost, and minimum speed.

This chapter develops the water balance equation and its solutions for various inputs to study temporal water fluctuations in the groundwater system. This equation is applied to a field aquifer for estimating the parameters and recharge. Subsequently, the well-mixed model for the solute and its analytical solutions for various input forms are developed. Further, the chapter discusses the hydraulic response, water retention, and chemical response time, pertinent to understanding energy propagation, solute advection, and mixing concepts. The application of the groundwater model to highway deicing salt application follows. The model for reactive chemical solutions comes next, considering chemical decay, first-order equilibrium, and nonequilibrium reactions. Their effects on solution output are discussed. We then introduce the Monte Carlo simulation, sensitivity analysis, and first-order analysis based on the well-mixed model to address uncertainty in the model outputs due to unknown parameters and inputs. Finally, its application to groundwater reservoirs’ effects on buffering acid rains in a lake is presented.

The new Constitution had existed for a short time before Madison and others became concerned about constitutional interpretations that were expanding the power of the national government. This early dialogue about federalism centered on what each state viewed as undesirable equilibrium: either forces that would weaken the relative authority of states or forces that would diminish national authority. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s financial and economic policies were broad expansions of national powers including assuming Revolutionary War debts and establishing a national bank. Anti-Federalists and others viewed these policies as part of a dangerous trend towards national consolidation that would eventually annihilate the states. Southern states, in particular, thought that without constitutional amendments to constrain the powers of a Northern majority, the South would be unable to protect slavery. When Virginia’s legislature passed the nation’s first interposition resolutions and a memorial in 1790 to sound the alarm to other states and Congress, it faced Federalist criticism that it was illegitimately intruding into the federal government’s sphere.

Chapter 6 unpacks the idea of reflexivity in judicial decision-making and its relationship with coherence. The chapter’s thesis is that coherence in legal reasoning and one’s commitment to reflexivity are intrinsically related notions. Reflexivity in adjudication is conducive towards coherence and, by extension, the degree of a decision-maker’s reflexivity can act as a useful indicator (though not a determinant) of the decision’s overall coherence. The chapter proceeds in two steps in particular. Firstly, it describes reflexivity as an overall desirable disposition for adjudicators to have. It identifies key components of reflexivity in practical decision-making, considers potential critiques, and ultimately establishes reflexivity as an indicator of coherence. Secondly, the chapter attempts to place the discussion in a practical context by way of a case study on the reflective thinking likely at play behind decisions addressing nationality planning activities by foreign investors. In so doing, the chapter also reviews instances where an arguably inadequate process of reflection may have negatively affected the overall coherence of an arbitral decision.