Category: Other blogs
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Mark D. White Please excuse the flippant title, and get ready for a bit of a rant. (Listen–it's almost Friday, and it's been a rough couple of weeks.) I'll start with a old joke: Two campers are in the woods when they spot a bear heading toward them. One camper starts running while the other…
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Mark D. White At this blog, we stress the ethical issues that underlie economic reasoning in theory, practice, and policy. In yesterday's post at The New York Times' Economix blog, Catherine Rampell made the same point in response to Peter Orszag's call for improving policymaknig by vesting more power in technocratic committees rather than elected,…
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Mark D. White The latest blow to the Affordable Care Act came yesterday from a U.S. appeals cout in Atlanta–let me merely repeat what The Wall Street Journal quoted from the opinion today, which makes the case exceptionally well: [The individual mandate] is "breathtaking in its expansive scope," the court wrote. "The government's position amounts…
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Mark D. White At the New York Times' Economix blog this morning, David Leonhardt reports on a recent NBER study that studied the health outcomes of low-income people who either were or were not granted access to Medicare through a lottery, and good golly gosh, guess what they found: those with health insurance had better…
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Mark D. White Carl Bialik at The Wall Street Journal has an article in today's edition and a blog post from last night, both very evenhanded, about the attempts by governments to measure the happiness of its citizenry, and the skepticism of some regarding the efficacy of this. For a critical look at the theory behind happiness studies,…
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Mark D. White Ilya Shapiro at the CATO Institute brings yet more tragic news of eminent domain abuse in his latest CATO @ Liberty blog post – please read it, and make sure to read his earlier material on eminent domain linked in the piece. Despite what the Supreme Court decided in Kelo, this cannot…
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Mark D. White Check out "The Krugman" on Swimming Against the Mainstream, by Christopher Stiffler (obviously a Poe man's economist). An excerpt: With inquisitive expression quickly I began to question “How do we end this recession and full employment to restore?”Not shaken up nor shaven was the economic maven Quoth the Krugman, “Spend some more.”…
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Mark D. White Ed Glaeser's Economix/New York Times blog post from yesterday, "The Moral Heart of Economics," argues that a belief in the value of freedom is "at the core of our discipline." While I appreciate that someone of Glaeser's stature and influence is highlighting the role of ethics in economics, I find his claim regarding the…
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Mark D. White Thanks to Larry Solum's Legal Theory Blog, I became aware of F. Patrick Hubbard's new paper "'Do Androids Dream?': Personhood and Intelligent Artifacts," forthcoming in Temple Law Review, which considers the issue of granting the status of personhood to an artificial intelligence: This Article proposes a test to be used in answering…
Mark D. White 