Category: Posts by Mark D. White
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Mark D. White I'm fascinated by the recent trend of academic bloggers reflecting on what it is they do, and the latest comes from linguist Lynne Murphy of the Separated by a Common Language blog, writing in the Impact of Social Sciences blog run by the London School of Economics. (Thanks to Andrea Doucet for…
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Mark D. White As pointed out by Lynne Kiesling at Knowledge Problem, Nobel laureates Peter Diamond and Joe Stiglitz, along with (this year's ASE/ASSA keynote speaker) Robert Shiller and Brian Arthur, discussed "The Future of Economics," which moderator Martin Wolf summarizes at the Financial Times' The World blog. Kiesling condenses Wolf's summary (as reproduced below): First,…
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Mark D. White Classes start for me on Monday (though our spring semester starts today–that's right, on a Friday), and my first class will be one of my favorites to teach. legal philosophy. And luckily for me (and for my students), I was given the perfect news item to start the class and motivate our…
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Mark D. White When economists debate the neutality of money, they are concerned with its effects on real output and growth. But other scholars, such as philosophers and sociologists, consider the social neutrality of money–that is, whether the pervasive use of money in society has a qualitative effect on the way we think about both…
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Mark D. White There seems to be a bit of discussion in the air about acacdemic blogging lately (and not just at the wonderful dinner I shared with Jonathan Wight last night at the ASSA conference!). In addition to the pieces I highlighted several days ago, I just found this post by my friend Dan…
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Mark D. White I've been meaning to mention the first piece for a while, but when I saw the second piece today I decided to pair them up. First is an article from last week's The Economist regarding the importance of the blogosphere in criticizing mainstream economics from the viewpoint of heterodox scholars, in light of…
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Mark D. White Anne Barron (LSE, Department of Law) has an interesting paper in the latest issue of Law and Philosophy (31/1, January 2012) exploring a Kantian approach to copyright law: Kant, Copyright and Communicative Freedom Abstract: The rapid recent expansion of copyright law worldwide has sparked efforts to defend the ‘public domain’ of non-propertized information,…
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Mark D. White In today's Wall Street Journal, there is a book review by Burton Malkiel of Models. Behaving. Badly., a critique of excessive reliance of mathematical modeling in finance and economics, written by Emanuel Derman, a key player in developing the very techniques he now criticizes. Judging from Malkiel's review, Derman's book echoes themes which…
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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 A fascinating article in the latest issue of Utilitas (23/4, December 2011) by Toby Handfield (Monash University) titled "Absent Desires" takes up the issue of absent desire in relation to satisfied and frustrated desire, arguing that having absent desires is incommensurable with having satisfied desires: What difference does it make to matters…
Mark D. White 