I cracked up when I got to the marathon example. When I ran a half marathon I realized about 80% of the way through that I was on track to finish under 2:30:00 and pushed myself to make it happen. I should have guessed that sort of behavior would show up in the statistics!
chantepierre 60 minutes ago [-]
After this year's Paris marathon, I ran the same per-minute graphs, and they match perfectly the "overall study" graphs with more than 9 million finishes in the article. I also added graphing by age category and gender. I don't want to deduce too much but I think it showed that young men are the most "competitive" (what I mean by that is targeting a specific time) since there are the clearest "goal time" peaks in the graphs.
mnahkies 2 hours ago [-]
The UK tax system also has a bunch of unfortunate cliffs, and tapers that create >60% marginal tax rates and worse. There's a calculator here that illustrates it well https://tax-cliffs.britishprogress.org/calculator
The childcare cliff edge is probably the worst, but the personal allowance taper isn't ideal either as it's compressed over a relatively short income range
And of course all the thresholds remain frozen, creating plenty of fiscal drag on top.
rwmj 28 minutes ago [-]
The Economist has this crazy graph of UK VAT thresholds and how they are causing companies to stay small, to keep their turnover under the threshold which avoids a lot of paperwork. It's the most infuriating thing, we are literally throttling our companies, the engines of growth, because of some accounting stupidity.
Same in slovenia for eg. kindergarten prices, 1eur over the line, 90eur more per month in fees.
christianbryant 2 hours ago [-]
I also appreciate discontinuities and while I won't comment on the data in the paper itself without cross-referencing, I will say that a couple of these examples hold true for me from applied observation over the years. When I was old enough to start caring about insurance for health and property, or became a parent and had to begin forecasting costs for college and what loans really represented, I began looking at observable data much differently. Working in the software industry, you begin to see the complicated systems at work at the C-Level, and the seemingly odd relationships with unrelated organizations start to become clear. Being an educated voter, a discerning consumer of products, and turning a critical eye on world news all require the ability to see processes, their patterns and the discontinuities within them. While there may not always be a useful explanation behind all of them, seeing them in the first place is essential to navigating so-called reality successfully.
initramfs 26 minutes ago [-]
yeah, slow phase-outs seems ideal- I have often wondered about that with gross and and taxable income.
dvh 2 hours ago [-]
Would test score problem be solved if teachers graded individual questions, not entire test?
irishcoffee 1 hours ago [-]
The reddit explanation in the post addresses your question I believe. If someone is at a 28 or 29 a few "charity" points can be found in subjectively-graded tests.
jameshart 9 minutes ago [-]
I think that really just reflects the fact that on subjectively graded tests the score really doesn’t have that many significant figures of accuracy. That a regrading can find 3 to 5 points by being more generous - or presumably take 3 to 5 off by being harsher - says that really you could save a lot of effort by treating the final grades as bucketing into 10 point bands and treating 25-35 as the actual cutoff.
dvh 34 minutes ago [-]
If you grade individual questions, you don't know the total score.
rvba 9 minutes ago [-]
The incentive to find the extra point would partially disappear.
PaulDavisThe1st 1 hours ago [-]
The opening story is fabricated and/or bullshit.
Last year (2025) there was no limit on income for health insurance subsidies. That ended for this year, but last year there would have been no reason for anyone who knew what they were doing to try to lose money to drop their income (especially in the cited range of $48-55k/year).
That is the case this year, in most states (thankfully not where I live), but that's not what TFA is talking about.
Suspicious? It certainly makes me skeptical that the author has got the details of the other examples correct.
forbiddenlake 14 minutes ago [-]
The post is from February 2020.
I can't see a date on the post (on mobile) but the archives link has month and year.
norseboar 39 minutes ago [-]
This might vary state-by-state, CA MediCal for instance did limit the subsidies based on income last year. I don't think it was an all-or-nothing cutoff, but I do think there were points around the 50k mark where the delta between your subsidy and the one for the lower bracket was higher than the loss you'd take by a few thousand dollars.
PaulDavisThe1st 35 minutes ago [-]
The subsidies were from the federal government, managed as part of your federal income tax return. They had nothing to do with additional state subsidies.
The basic story was that until the end of 2025, nobody in the USA had any reason to pay more than (roughly) 8.3% of their AGI for health insurance.
hsuduebc2 2 hours ago [-]
I never understood why taxes or similiar absolute points aren't gradients instead.
blharr 60 minutes ago [-]
I think because the gradient is simply too confusing for laypeople to understand.
Even for a simple system like US social security that has a gradient. For every $2 you make over the limit, you lose $1 in benefits. I've heard countless times misconceptions of people thinking they'd be losing money (as in literally having less money net) by working.
entrope 25 minutes ago [-]
A single benefit usually has an appropriate incentive structure, but a lot of people get multiple benefits -- even from different levels of government (local, state, federal) -- and adding up phase-outs in different systems can result in marginal phase-outs rates above 100%. It's hard to avoid that entirely given that we want to have a lot of transfers to the bottom of the income distribution while phasing those out by roughly the median. It would be easier to avoid phase-outs above (say) 80% of marginal income is we only had federal and state aid as predictable money transfers, but for various reasons we provide a lot of transfers in-kind or with limited authorized uses. Those limitations aren't necessarily wrong, but they do mean that transfers aren't fungible, so there's an incentive to provide transfers for other "good" uses, and that diversity is what makes it hard to bound the marginal phase-outs for everyone.
bostik 47 minutes ago [-]
This does happen in Finnish tax system. Your tax rate (percent with one decimal) is calculated based on your annual gross income. Rates are supposed to be calculated smoothly, and they are certainly calculated for each individual separately.
In reality they are step functions. It is surprisingly common to have people refuse promotions because if would put them above an income tax threshold, bump up their rate, and end up with less money after taxes in the end.
The UK tax system is far from fair but at least it has clear brackets: income above threshold X is taxed at rate Y.
Because that is a marginal system, (and unless they've messed up the calculations, which they haven't in this case) you should never end up with less from earning more. Can you give an example of two income amounts where the lower income ends up with more money after-taxes than the higher income?
Or is it the additional municipal, church, or health levies mentioned on that page which have the discontinuities?
initramfs 23 minutes ago [-]
I agree, but almost everyone today can use a computer or smartphone. They can type in their income, and the computer can calculate it, providing them an average number of what their percentage of actual taxable income was- I think Turbo Tax and other software might do something like this.
They don't have to understand how it works to do their own taxes.
encoderer 12 minutes ago [-]
You might just be taking people too literally.
I've heard the same thing -- if they take a job they will lose money. What they really mean is that if they take a job (trade time for money), they will lose some of the pension they have already earned. This is a real economic loss (even if they might have a few more bucks at the end of the week) to say nothing of their lost time.
marcosdumay 37 minutes ago [-]
It's very well established internationally that income taxes are defined by gradients. I have no idea why politicians want to reinvent them so often in other kinds of taxes.
KylerAce 1 hours ago [-]
Because that's harder to write the laws for
PaulDavisThe1st 1 hours ago [-]
Not if you assume people could understand basic math, such ... oh, any continuously valued polynomial ....
TimorousBestie 12 minutes ago [-]
I hear this explanation a lot but I think it's a convenient fiction. Lawmakers, at least in the US, don't seem to write their own legal texts very often. Sometimes they don't even read them [1]! Congress has no problem producing monstrously complicated laws, in any case.
I think it's likely that politicians and their funding sources have found ways to profit off of these discontinuities. The infamous Medicare "donut hole" [2] was arguably a "benefit discontinuity" of the sort mentioned by the author and pharmaceutical companies profited off of it (more than a hypothetical Medicare structure without a donut hole, not relative to the spending cap that replaced it—which profits them even more).
The childcare cliff edge is probably the worst, but the personal allowance taper isn't ideal either as it's compressed over a relatively short income range
And of course all the thresholds remain frozen, creating plenty of fiscal drag on top.
Graph: https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10... from this article: https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/04/22/how-to-fix-brit...
Last year (2025) there was no limit on income for health insurance subsidies. That ended for this year, but last year there would have been no reason for anyone who knew what they were doing to try to lose money to drop their income (especially in the cited range of $48-55k/year).
That is the case this year, in most states (thankfully not where I live), but that's not what TFA is talking about.
Suspicious? It certainly makes me skeptical that the author has got the details of the other examples correct.
I can't see a date on the post (on mobile) but the archives link has month and year.
The basic story was that until the end of 2025, nobody in the USA had any reason to pay more than (roughly) 8.3% of their AGI for health insurance.
Even for a simple system like US social security that has a gradient. For every $2 you make over the limit, you lose $1 in benefits. I've heard countless times misconceptions of people thinking they'd be losing money (as in literally having less money net) by working.
In reality they are step functions. It is surprisingly common to have people refuse promotions because if would put them above an income tax threshold, bump up their rate, and end up with less money after taxes in the end.
The UK tax system is far from fair but at least it has clear brackets: income above threshold X is taxed at rate Y.
Because that is a marginal system, (and unless they've messed up the calculations, which they haven't in this case) you should never end up with less from earning more. Can you give an example of two income amounts where the lower income ends up with more money after-taxes than the higher income?
Or is it the additional municipal, church, or health levies mentioned on that page which have the discontinuities?
They don't have to understand how it works to do their own taxes.
I've heard the same thing -- if they take a job they will lose money. What they really mean is that if they take a job (trade time for money), they will lose some of the pension they have already earned. This is a real economic loss (even if they might have a few more bucks at the end of the week) to say nothing of their lost time.
I think it's likely that politicians and their funding sources have found ways to profit off of these discontinuities. The infamous Medicare "donut hole" [2] was arguably a "benefit discontinuity" of the sort mentioned by the author and pharmaceutical companies profited off of it (more than a hypothetical Medicare structure without a donut hole, not relative to the spending cap that replaced it—which profits them even more).
[1] https://www.pennstatelawreview.org/penn-statim/dont-be-silly... (2013) ...which argues that this is a good thing!
[2] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/what-is-the-medica...