2013_10_30 Proposal Defense

Matthias Wingens

pointed to public sociology; maybe, social scientists taking a position on complex things is not so bad.

agreed, minimally, social scientists should have a stake in whether arguments are considered that should be considered. after the fact, informally: I did everything Matthijs asked for, he’ll no have to accept the proposal, Matthias thinks it’s likely.

Matthijs Bogaards

• it’s unclear whether this qualifies as a proposal, because I am not suggestion 1 year plan without qualitative data
• he’s still opposed to the table; cannot be understood, should be about a concrete tax, as in Kirchhof
• doubts the authority of McCaffery’s authority (weird), complaints that most of this is in working papers, “and law, to boot”.

Alexis

• is there available survey data on similar questions? (I doubt it that it exists at this level)
• make sure the sample size is sufficiently large, and random, to warrant the statistical power for interaction effects.

Franziska Deutsch

• Is there polarization on tax issues? (apparently, this is something that Fishkin expects) I might imagine there’s polarization on economy/state tradeoff or on taxing consumption
• be sure I can rule out other explanations other than the interventions Franziska explained this some more in early november: technically, what if the between-samples variance is so large that you can’t significantly attribute any treatment effect to the treatment?