Category: Posts by Mark D. White
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Mark D. White The Wall Street Journal today features a paean to A.C. Pigou and good old-fashioned utilitarian economics, written by John Cassidy, author of How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. To Cassidy's (or the editors') credit, statements from other economists (such as Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises) are included for counterpoint,…
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Mark D. White In his recent column, "The Values Question," David Brooks definitely has the right idea in general regarding health care reform, making a bold statement that I completely agree with (especially the bolded part, emphasis mine): It’s easy to get lost in the weeds when talking about health care reform. But, like all…
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Mark D. White No economics here (not obviously, anyway)–just a topic I'm interested in, the ethical aspects of marital relations, infidelity, and divorce. From The Wall Street Journal last week comes an article by Alicia Mundy titled "Of Love and Alzheimer's" regarding the ethics of adultery on the part of spouses of Alzheimer's sufferers. It…
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Mark D. White Prawfsblawg featured a post today by David Schleicher (nspired by this NYT article) on the topic of Pandora, the online music service that suggests new selections based on the musical characteristics (tempo, style, etc.) of your current musical preferences. Schleicher compares this to a blind taste test for coffee, and argues that both…
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Mark D. White Just found 2006 Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps' recent First Things article entitled "Economic Justice and the Spirit of Innovation" – to give you a quick idea of where he goes, here are the last two paragraphs of the article: Most observers now acknowledge that capitalism, even in the midst of the 1930s depression,…
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Mark D. White Just as Frans de Waal's new book The Age of Empathy comes out (WSJ review here), Robin Hanson (at Overcoming Bias) posts (skeptically, I might add) that new studies show our natural sociality to be limited, especially when it concerns specific persons rather than people in the aggregate. Hansen quotes from a 2007…
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Mark D. White At the Austrian Economists blog, Steve Horwitz has a fascinating post on "Economists, Empathy, and Unerased Boards," which has generated quite a bit of commentary, much of it very revealing. Well worth a look!
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Welcome to Economics and Ethics, a new group academic blog which we hope will allow us—and you, our readers and commenters—to: Showcase and discuss new work in ethics-and-economics by scholars around the world, Discuss ways to include treatments of ethics in economics education, Announce new projects and initiatives in ethics-and-economics, including calls for papers for…
Mark D. White 