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by jerf 5674 days ago
It's not that simple; you have to take into account the customers who would not have purchased at $100 but did at $50. Failing to account for price sensitivity is a major elementary economic mistake.

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_Cha...

1 comments

Perhaps, but I doubt many choose to time their death to minimise estate taxes ;-)
I was only talking about how the metaphor is actually radically more complicated that the thing it is putatively explaining. People mostly aren't timing their deaths (though history has shown it isn't quite the zero you might expect: http://www.nber.org/papers/w8158), and government taxing simply occurs, there's no customer participation. The metaphor, by introducing those concepts, actually goes wrong.