Word: distortion
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...regardless of the intentions of politicians, subsidies and price controls tend to produce unintended consequences. They distort normal consumption patterns and subvert the law of supply and demand. When oil supplies are low and crude prices rise, consumption falls, bringing prices back down as demand and supply balance out. But if consumers are insulated from the market, paying an artificially low price for fuel, they tend to use as much or even more - which strains supplies further and forces oil prices even higher...
...with workers overseas - not only lower-skilled factory and phone-center workers but also engineers, lawyers and doctors. Public opinion has reacted to this with increasing distrust of free trade, a wariness that both Obama and Clinton have echoed in their campaigns. But this is touchy territory: trade may distort the income distribution, but economists remain almost unanimous in warning that restricting trade would slow overall growth. There are similar concerns about using the tax code to address inequality, although Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels demonstrates in his new book, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded...
...subsidies are one of those rare issues on which everyone from the staunch free market advocate to the ardent proponent of social justice can see eye to eye. A cursory reading of Mankiw’s Principles of Economics will reveal subsidies are, as a general rule, inefficient; they distort incentives and create deadweight loss. While they can produce artificially low prices at the grocery store, the funds paying for this difference come straight out of consumers’ wallets in the form of tax dollars. Ultimately the costs outweigh the benefits. American farm subsidies are no exception, and have...
...forcing breakdowns of coordination in his dancers, McGregor hoped to gain an insight into the relationship between their physical and cognitive functions. To this end he submitted the dancers to "perturbations," assigning them tasks like counting backwards while dancing, and making them wear prisms over their eyes to distort their spatial awareness...
...around Saturn is eccentric," Mitchell says. It's just enough off of circular that the effect of gravity on the moon is different from one point to another, and different from the planet's other moons. "That difference in the tug would be enough to cause the body to distort differently as it goes around Saturn." The friction created when sides of the tiger stripes are pulled apart or pushed together at different points during orbit may be creating the heat that ultimately causes the eruptions...