About

Me: Aaron Mamula.  I have a Ph.D in natural resource economics, I work for the government as a research scientist.

My research focuses on modeling complex economic-ecological systems and using empirical models to inform policy.  

My position affords me the opportunity to apply many types of mathematical and statistically motivated models to human behavior. The blog is a good outlet for commenting on the utility of various models.

The blog: The Samuelson Condition is a well known rule concerning the efficient provision of public goods. Many topics that interest me – natural resource management, education, government spending – are intimately connected to the properties of public and quasi- public goods. Additionally, the recent popularity of open source programming languages like R and Python are making technical knowledge increasingly public.

I created The Samuelson Condition as a place where I could comment on policy issues that interest me as well as contribute to the growing stock of public information on technical programming.

The obligatory disclaimer: this is my personal blog.  Rest assured no government resources (time, hardware, software, etc) were allocated to this undertaking.