Category: Policy
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Mark D. White New today from associate editor Brian Fung at The Atlantic is a piece on an experimental nutritional labeling system modeled on traffic lights. In use in the United Kingdom (where it was instituted by the British government's "nudge unit"), the revised nutrition labels would have color-coded icons for fat, calories, and other…
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Mark D. White Today on The Atlantic's website, Dan Ariely describes an experiment he conducted with Mike Norton in which they survey people about both the current distribution of wealth in the U.S. and what they thought the ideal distribution of wealth is. Not surprisingly, they find that most everybody underestimates the level of inequality of wealth,…
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Mark D. White One of the topics that fascinates me, but which I never seem to have time to catch up on, is the moral/political status of health and health care. In most cases (other than particularly infectious or contagious diseases), I consider health and health care to be matters of personal choice and responsibility,…
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Mark D. White With respect to the dissent in the Obamacare decision from Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito (starting on page 127 of the PDF), I want to note several phrases that struck me as interesting, both in relation to Justice Ginsburg concurring opinion as well as Chief Justice Robert's majority opinion (discussed in a previous…
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Mark D. White Even though Jonathan beat me to it, let me put my two cents in regarding today's 5-4 Supreme Court decision affirming the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act a.k.a. Obamacare. Pages 17-27 of Chief Justice Roberts' majority opinion contain a masterful counterargument to those who argued that the Commerce Clause justifies…
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Mark D. White In a New York Times op-ed this morning, Daniel E. Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, makes a strong case for our strong attraction to sugar, but a weak case for paternalistic action on the part of the government to limit our consumption of it. The problem is captured by the question he…
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Mark D. White That was fast–in a "Room for Debate" feature that went online Saturday evening, the New York Times asked "What's the Best Way to Break Society's Bad Habits?" The contributors, predictably, take the question at face value and answer accordingly. But the question is nonsensical and the answers beside the point. "Society" does…
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Oh, Mayor Bloomberg–you make writing a book about libertarian paternalism and nudges too easy. (Thanks!) But seriously, you help show why it's important to write this book, that's it's not just some pie-in-the-sky idea that lives only in the ivory tower, but one that affects the real world. Yesterday The New York Times reported that…
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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 This Non Sequitur comic appeared in this morning's newspaper (and online): Ha ha, we get it, economists are stubborn theorists who are holed up in their ivory towers with no sense of the real world, situational context, or empirical circumstances. I almost tweeted this comic, as I do with two or…
Mark D. White 