Mark D. White

Writer, editor, teacher

recent posts

about

I’m a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, where I teach courses in philosophy, economics, and law, and the author/editor/co-editor of several books.

Category: Academia

  • On academic (and specifically economic) blogging

    Mark D. White I've been meaning to mention the first piece for a while, but when I saw the second piece today I decided to pair them up. First is an article from last week's The Economist regarding the importance of the blogosphere in criticizing mainstream economics from the viewpoint of heterodox scholars, in light of…

  • The overseas superstar status of Michael Sandel and what economics can learn from it

    Mark D. White Thomas L. Friedman had an interesting piece in The New York Times last week describing the rock star reception given in Asia recently to Harvard political philosopher Michael J. Sandel, author of Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? and lecturer in the accompanying PBS series (available here). In the piece, Friedman…

  • A fascinating first-person account of the health care reform battles

    Mark D. White Regardless of where you stand on the law, economics, or politics of the Affordable Care Act, I highly recommend Ilya Shapiro's new paper "A Long, Strange Trip: My First Year Challenging the Constitutionality of Obamacare" (forthcoming in Florida International Law Review), in which the CATO scholar details his year of writing, speaking,…

  • The changing purpose of faculty sabbaticals [UPDATED]

    Mark D. White Over at Prawfsblawg, Elizabeth Dale, who teaches history and law at the University of Florida, has an extremely thought-provoking post about sabbaticals for full-time professors, wondering if the original purpose–scholarly rejuvenation and renewal–has been replaced by "catching up" with work one wasn't able to complete during the normal academic terms and breaks.…

  • Follow-up on “The Role of Economists and Their ‘Ethics’ in the Financial Crisis” (EEA 2011 session)

    Mark D. White Yesterday I attended the "The Role of Economists and Their 'Ethics' in the Financial Crisis" session at the Eastern Economic Association meetings in New York, which I previewed earlier. One of the presenters didn't attend, but the three remaining presentations, by Martha Starr (editor of Consequences of Economic Downturn: Beyond the Usual Economics), George DeMartino…

  • CUNY bans smoking on all campuses–the unintended consequences

    Mark D. White Wow. The New York Times reported yesterday that the board of trustees of the City University of New York (CUNY) voted to ban smoking on all 23 of its campuses. The article notes that the ban won't mean much for the urban campuses, since the university cannot ban smoking on the public…

  • Alain de Botton on the modern university’s neglect of the wisdom in culture

    Mark D. White In The Wall Street Journal today, the very prominent popularizer of philosophy from across the pond, Alain de Botton, writes of the modern university's neglect of the wisdom that can be imparted to students through the study of culture, rather than just intellectualizing it all to death. From the article: The modern…

  • Questioning Economic Forecasting (Finally)

    Mark D. White There's a fantastic article in The Wall Street Journal today by Mark Whitehouse (!) explaining how, given the current crisis, more economists are finally starting to doubt the efficacy of mathematical modeling to predict movements in the economy. Of course, some want to build even bigger models, but others, such as Roman Frydman and…