Category: Posts by Mark D. White
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Mark D. White Just a brief note to draw your attention to a terrific new article forthcoming in the European Journal of Philosophy that summarizes the literature on the ethics of imposing risk, an omnipresent problem with no easy solution but which is of critical concern to anyone dealing with issues of harm, whether from…
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Mark D. White In his column in today's New York Times, David Brooks explores "The Limits of Empathy," arguing that empathy may help us feel for other people, but it is not enough to actually spur us to action and help us make tough ethical decisions, and in the end may amount to little more…
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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 The Economist published a short note recently summarizing the results of a forthcoming paper in Cognition that reports that experiment participants "who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness" (from the paper abstract). The experimenters presented subjects with variants of trolley dilemmas–either…
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Mark D. White As this New York Times article celebrates, the U.S. military's "don't ask don't tell" policy is officially over. Military personnel who are gay or lesbian no longer have to suppress their identity and compromise their cherished virtue of honesty to serve their country. (H/T: Erica Greider.)
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Mark D. White In today's New York Times, David Brooks writes in "If It Feels Right" about a recent study of young adults in America that reveals their incapacity to think in moral terms: When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or…
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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…
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Mark D. White The latest blow to the Affordable Care Act came yesterday from a U.S. appeals cout in Atlanta–let me merely repeat what The Wall Street Journal quoted from the opinion today, which makes the case exceptionally well: [The individual mandate] is "breathtaking in its expansive scope," the court wrote. "The government's position amounts…
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In today's New York Times, food writer Mark Bittman continues his call for regulation of food choices through a comprehensive scheme of taxes and subsidies. While he takes pains to point out the savings in health care costs this would bring forth, he does not hide his desire to engage in social engineering, reorienting the…
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Mark D. White At the New York Times' Economix blog this morning, David Leonhardt reports on a recent NBER study that studied the health outcomes of low-income people who either were or were not granted access to Medicare through a lottery, and good golly gosh, guess what they found: those with health insurance had better…
Mark D. White 