From the monthly archives:

September 2006

Neuro Wine in Old Bottles

September 27, 2006

I have a longish essay today in TCS Daily on John Cassidy’s New Yorker article on neuroeconomics, arguing that neuroeconomics provides no special justification for paternalist policy.  My piece will make a lot more sense if you read Cassidy’s article first. So do that.

Read the full article →

A Vow

September 25, 2006

If I make any money off this travesty, I promise to spend it on light cigarettes.

Read the full article →

Moral Minds

September 24, 2006

Richard Rorty’s review of Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds is pretty good. Hauser argues for a fairly strong moral nativism, involving a dedicated moral capacity, analogous to a Chomsky-style linguistic capacity. (Rawls floats the idea in Theory of Justice.) Rorty’s pretty widely known, but not a lot of non-philosophers know he was a top-flight philosopher of [...]

Read the full article →

Growth is Good

September 20, 2006

If you happen to be a subscriber to the Prospect (the British one), you can read my article on why politicians who say they care about happiness have got to care about economic growth and economic freedom. Otherwise, you can read the first 2.5 paragraphs. I’ll let you know if they make it free for [...]

Read the full article →

Zygmunt Bauman on D.C.

September 18, 2006

I was reading a chapter on consumer capitalism in a 1998 book on globalization by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman at the recommendation of my intern, Andrew, and came across this passage about D.C.:
Contemporary cities are sites of an ‘apartheid a rebours’: those who can afford it, abandon the filth and squalor of the regions that those [...]

Read the full article →

Oh, Behave!

September 15, 2006

I have a new post up at Cato@Liberty about the politics of behavioral economics.

Read the full article →

Status Anxiety

September 12, 2006

I caught the last 2/3 of the BBC documentary of Allain Botton’s book Status Anxiety on PBS, and enjoyed it. Botton, like a good philosopher, emphasized the electivity of status-seeking, which I liked. He was, however, even somewhat more optimistic than I think I am about the possibility of stoic detachment from the evaluations of others. I [...]

Read the full article →

What I Blogged on 9/11

September 11, 2006

In the summer of 2001, I was experimenting with a sort of community journaling software my friend Carolyn Ray was developing just before the blog thing really took off. This is what I wrote:
In response to Tom… I too share his anger, and his retributive urge. But I believe now is a time to reign [...]

Read the full article →

Again: Why Worry About Inequality?

September 8, 2006

In his latest response to Paul Krugman on inequality, Greg Mankiw says:
Even if rising inequality is exogenous, the government could still respond to it by making the tax code more progressive. That is a coherent policy viewpoint, driven as much by political philosophy as economics, about which reasonable people can disagree. I am the first to [...]

Read the full article →

Well-Poisoning

September 8, 2006

I can discern no point of the NY Times article, “Wal-Mart Finds an Ally in Conservatives” than to not-so-subtly suggest that right wing think tanks are corporate shills whose scholars nefariously omit to disclose Walton Family Foundation funding to hide the fact of their intellectual corruption. Of course, the story doesn’t say this right out, and almost, kind [...]

Read the full article →

A Cold Compress for Status Fever

September 3, 2006

In the August 30 New York Times, Cornell economist Robert Frank writes about The Great Gatsby and happiness research. Frank worries a lot more about status-seeking than I think is warranted by the evidence. And I see this topic has caught fire on the blogowebs. So, here’s a few points that I make in a piece on positional competition I [...]

Read the full article →