> My intuition is that people would be willing to pay that to understand that some theory is correct or incorrect. When doing this sort of calculations, you ha

> My intuition is that people would be willing to pay that to understand that some theory is correct or incorrect. When doing this sort of calculations, you have to take into account that you're taxing THE WHOLE population: completely destitute people, people near the poverty line, children who ear exactly $0, etc. For some of these poeple, $40 can be way too much. In practice, if you tax a child that doesn't earn an income, you're taxing the parents. Of course it's possible that on average you can tax $40 from each person, but that might require taxing $400 from some people and $0 from other people. That said, there might be better ways of spending that money than on this.