Mark D. White

Writer, editor, teacher

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about

I’m a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, where I teach courses in philosophy, economics, and law, and the author/editor/co-editor of several books.

Category: Social economics

  • Jonathan Wight’s 2014 Presidential Address to the Association for Social Economics

    Mark D. White Because he's too bashful to tell you, I'll tell you that Jonathan Wight's 2014 Presidential Address for the Association for Social Economics, delivered at January's ASSA meetings, has just been published in the Review of Social Economy, and the link has been posted to the ASE blog. The title is "Economics within…

  • David Brooks and Downton Abbey on Big Data

    Mark D. White Ever since Nate Silver pulled a Babe Ruth 527 times on election night, the virtues of "big data" have been hailed widely in the press. But David Brooks strikes a cautionary note in today's New York Times, correctly noting that data by itself cannot solve problems and making the point that qualitative…

  • Why hasn’t social economics focused more on the family?

    Mark D. White A question occurred to me this morning as I did some basic research on alimony after reading Alexandria Harwin's New York Times op-ed "Ending the Alimony Guessing Game": why don't social economists focus more on the family? Ms. Harwin's article interested me more at first due to her discussion of judicial discretion…

  • David Brooks’ false dichotomy regarding autonomy and sociality

    Mark D. White Last week, David Brooks' column "It's Not About You" in The New York Times spoke to the challenges that new college graduates face as they enter "the real world," focusing on the change in the imposed structure that has shielded them from life to this point: More important, their lives have been perversely…

  • Inequality: Confusing the Issue

    Mark D. White The topic of today's "Room for Debate" feature at The New York Times is inequality, prompted by a recent paper by Mike I. Norton and Dan Ariely that shows a large number of Americans would prefer to live in a society with a more equitable distribution of wealth (like Sweden). Norton himself…

  • The End of Cost-Benefit Analysis?

    Mark D. White Today, the editors of The Wall Street Journal commented on the fine print of President Obama's recent executive order requiring all regulatory agencies to submit their rules to cost-benefit analysis in an effort to streamline government and reduce regulatory burden on business. They note that the order requires that agencies include in…

  • The Ambiguity of “Dignity” in Embryo Research and Judicial Decisions

    Mark D. White An article in the new issue of Bioethics (25/1, January 2011) by Inmaculada de Melo-Martín titled "Human Dignity in International Policy Documents: A Useful Criterion for Public Policy?" examines several EU documents governing enbryo research to see if their regulations motivated by proecting human dignity are useful, informative, and/or effective. From the…