Category: Posts by Mark D. White
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Mark D. White Many people, including in the media and academia, have wondered about the lack of criminal prosecutions stemming from the 2007-08 financial meltdown, especially related to fraud in the banking sector. In the new issue of Crime, Law and Social Change (61/1, February 2014), Henry N. Pontell, William K. Black, and Gilbert Geis…
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Mark D. White There’s been a lot of discussion of late regarding economics’ claim to be a science; Harvard economist Raj Chetty recently answered this question in the affirmative in The New York Times in response to mutterings about Robert Schiller and Eugene Fama sharing the 2014 Nobel Prize (with Lars Peter Hansen) despite having…
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Mark D. White I am extremely saddened to say that Professor Ronald Coase passed away on September 2, 2013. He had a tremendous impact on economics, writing two seminal papers, "The Nature of the Firm" and "The Problem of Social Cost," that paved the way for both law-and-economics and new institutional economics and were the…
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Mark D. White Recently it was David Brooks, today it's Peter Reiner writing at Slate, reporting that people are less opposed to nudges the more they align with their interests, and interpreting this as weakening the case for autonomy. Using the crowdsourcing website Mechanical Turk, we polled 2,775 people, asking them to what degree they…
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Mark D. White In today's New York Times, David Brooks comments on libertarian paternalism in "The Nudge Debate." There is not a lot in his article that is surprising or unreasonable, but it does suffer from some vagueness and misunderstandings. For instance, Mr. Brooks conflates interventions of a paternalistic nature (such as nudging people into…
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Mark D. White Recently, at The Weekly Standard, David M. Smick opined in a piece titled "The Death of Economics" on the decline of the field over the last 50 years, focusing on the last decade in particular and the increasing hubris among policy-oriented economists: For decades, hubris has been the common currency of the…
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Mark D. White The worst thing to do when I'm trying to write is have Twitter open. Not only is it distracting (obviously), but it can be positively engrossing. So why do I do it? Because it helps me keep me up-to-date on the state of the world and what smart people are saying about…
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Mark D. White In his New York Times column today, David Brooks hails the movement for same-sex marriage as an admirable step away from personal freedom and autonomy: …last week saw a setback for the forces of maximum freedom. A representative of millions of gays and lesbians went to the Supreme Court and asked the…
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Mark D. White At Psychology Today, I respond to the defense of paternalism offered this morning by Professor Sarah Conly (author of Against Autonomy) in her New York Times op-ed "Three Cheers for the Nanny State"—you can read my post here.
Mark D. White 