No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Tolerable Intolerance: An Evolutionary Model
Abstract
A cornerstone of liberal-democratic regimes is the right of free speech, granted even to nonliberals who manifestly oppose it. Communism and political Islamism are two primary examples of ideologies which are tolerated in spite of calls for the limits on the right of expression. Not surprisingly, it is often argued that a tolerant society needs laws preventing non-tolerant beliefs from attacking tolerance. Yet, does intolerance necessarily prosper in a tolerant society, or is deemed to decay? To address the question, I build an evolutionary model of competing (political and/or religious) beliefs. In the model, individuals are assumed to gain from having beliefs. The gain may increase with intolerance of the belief (premium). High intolerance, however, makes strong believers fragile in a society of tolerant people. Having examined evolutionarily stable states in two specifications, I demonstrate that (for any positive premium) heterogeneity cannot prevent intolerant beliefs from spreading out. A sufficiently small increase in intolerance, when premium exceeds losses from fragility, allows intolerance to spread. Intolerance is vulnerable only as long as the premium is non-positive. This finding can also be interpreted as follows: unless fundamentalist confessions are proved to be vital for individual human existence (positive premium), a tolerant society needs no intervention to preserve tolerance.
The paper presents facts on the ex-post efficiency of the Czech bankruptcy procedures. First, it briefly summarizes in what aspects bankruptcy systems differ across countries and introduces the main observations made about the Czech case so far. Second, international data are presented to assess the Czech standings in four aspects of bankruptcies' ex-post efficiency – duration, recovery rate, administrative costs, and continuation/liquidation decision. Third, the paper provides a summary of statistical observations on ex-post efficiency based on data on 903 Czech companies whose bankruptcies were completed during 2004 by the distribution of returns to the claim-holders. In the paper, understanding the ex-post efficiency is meant as an important prerequisite for an analysis from the ex-ante efficiency prospective.
When local public goods are provided by a centralized authority, spillovers may be coordinated, but heterogeneity in preferences may be suppressed. Besley and Coate (2003) have already solved this classic trade-off for a uniform tax regime. Here, we extend their approach by allowing for a non-uniform tax regime. We find that centralization with our tax system necessarily increases welfare in comparison to uniform-tax centralization. Importantly, with non-cooperative legislators coming from homogenous districts, our centralization dominates decentralization for any degree of spillovers. In other cases, it at least improves odds of centralization, if measured by utilitarian yardstick.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.