Category: Posts by Mark D. White
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Mark D. White David Brooks has a fascinating article on new research on human nature in today's New York Times (a condensation, of sorts, of his wonderfully written piece in The New Yorker in January–and, apparently, his new book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, which was reviewed recently in The…
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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…
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Mark D. White The New York Times has a great little piece today on Monopoly (the game), Milton Friedman, and monetary economics, which ends with this description of a particular game which took place in a University of Chicago dorm in the late 1970s: The precise details of our classic game are blurred by the…
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Mark D. White Today, Judge Roger Vinson of Florida reiterated Judge Henry E. Hudson's opinion from last month that the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. From The Wall Street Journal: In his ruling, Judge Roger Vinson, a Republican appointee, said that the law's requirement to carry insurance or pay a…
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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 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…
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Mark D. White An article from The New York Times reports on changes in the food industry's labelling standards with respect to calories, salt, fat, ands sugar, which presumably are intended not only to provide better information to consumers but also to encourage food manufacturers to lessen such aspects of its products (as Wal-Mart agreed to do not…
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Mark D. White In the latest New York Review of Books (Feb. 10, 2011), Ronald Dworkin asks "What Is a Good Life?", offering an answer drawn from his book, Justice for Hedgehogs. From the article: We have a responsibility to live well, and the importance of living well accounts for the value of having a critically good…
Mark D. White 