Recycled goods. They seem to have two states—filled and sealed for sale, and clean, empty and sorted for recycling. The period in between, where they are in the process of being consumed, is often only a tiny fraction of the lifespan of, say, a glass beverage bottle.
Broken windows theory. Under this crime-fighting theory, the existence of “crime breeds crime.” So if you can invest in sprucing up and enforcing the law in a crime-ridden neighborhood, it will tend to become and stay a safe neighborhood. Those that accumulate damage will spiral out of control.
Factors like economic shifts or changes in policing policy might cause the equilibrium to shift from one stable regime to the other.
This suggests an empirical prediction: the majority of neighborhoods will cluster into low-crime or high-crime categories, with relatively few neighborhoods in a zone of moderate crime. Of course, a believer in BWT should specify the size of the zone in which BWT is expected to operate. Will we find crime clustered by city? By neighborhood? By block? By building? If we don’t find crime clustering at the level of the city, should this shake our confidence in BWT? Or is the theory that crime clusters at the level of the neighborhood only?
The Matthew Effect. “For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”
Most recently, I’ve been exploring this in the context of academic publishing. The distribution of citations has been explained by several models, one of which is the Matthew Effect. Personal crises in a researcher’s life might cause them to shift from a high citation index to a low one. A dramatic success might cause movement in the reverse direction.
Good economic examples in 2 & 3. I find 1 particularly novel—it works surprisingly well as a bistable equilibrium, with the “in recycling bin” equilibrium more stable. If a container is near that state—e.g. it’s mostly empty and sitting around in some random spot—then usually someone will empty it and throw it in the bin.
Recycled goods. They seem to have two states—filled and sealed for sale, and clean, empty and sorted for recycling. The period in between, where they are in the process of being consumed, is often only a tiny fraction of the lifespan of, say, a glass beverage bottle.
Broken windows theory. Under this crime-fighting theory, the existence of “crime breeds crime.” So if you can invest in sprucing up and enforcing the law in a crime-ridden neighborhood, it will tend to become and stay a safe neighborhood. Those that accumulate damage will spiral out of control.
Factors like economic shifts or changes in policing policy might cause the equilibrium to shift from one stable regime to the other.
This suggests an empirical prediction: the majority of neighborhoods will cluster into low-crime or high-crime categories, with relatively few neighborhoods in a zone of moderate crime. Of course, a believer in BWT should specify the size of the zone in which BWT is expected to operate. Will we find crime clustered by city? By neighborhood? By block? By building? If we don’t find crime clustering at the level of the city, should this shake our confidence in BWT? Or is the theory that crime clusters at the level of the neighborhood only?
The Matthew Effect. “For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”
Most recently, I’ve been exploring this in the context of academic publishing. The distribution of citations has been explained by several models, one of which is the Matthew Effect. Personal crises in a researcher’s life might cause them to shift from a high citation index to a low one. A dramatic success might cause movement in the reverse direction.
Good economic examples in 2 & 3. I find 1 particularly novel—it works surprisingly well as a bistable equilibrium, with the “in recycling bin” equilibrium more stable. If a container is near that state—e.g. it’s mostly empty and sitting around in some random spot—then usually someone will empty it and throw it in the bin.