Alexander’s Dictum and the Reality of Familiar Objects

Alexander's Dictum--"to be is to have causal powers"--appears to furnish an argument against the reality of familiar medium-sized objects. For every time a familiar object appears to cause a familiar macro-event, it sets up a rival claim by its component microparticles to have caused the complex swarm of microphysical events that composes into that macro-event. But this argument, argues this paper, wrongly assumes that even after familiar objects are removed from the picture, there is a phenomenon of joint causation which unites all and only the microparticles within each familiar object.

Costly Revenue-Raising and the Case for Favoring Import-Competing Industries

A standard finding in the political economy of trade policy literature is that we should expect export-oriented industries to attract more assistance than import-competing industries. In reality, however, trade policy is heavily biased toward supporting import industries. This paper shows within a standard protection for sale framework, how the costliness of raising revenue via taxation makes trade subsidies less desirable and trade taxes more desirable. The model is then estimated and its predictions tested using U.S. tariff data. An empirical estimate of the costliness of revenue-raising is also obtained.