Tag: Epistemic Institutional Design
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Epistemic Institutional Design and the Roman Catholic Church, Part One
The Catholic Church has been having a rough time of it lately. In a series of posts, I want to take up some of the implications of this trouble for epistemic institutional design, that is, for building institutions that ‘get it right.’ First, some background: what has previously been a primarily American problem of sexual abuse…
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Elizabeth Warren on the Consumer Financial Protection Agency
I’ve linked to Warren before, but my favorite public policy theorist/practioner has a new lecture on regulating consumer financial markets, which is only ten minutes long and very persuasive: Elizabeth Warren on Consumer Protection (MMBM) from Roosevelt Institute on Vimeo. Also, from this recent interview: The consumer credit market is broken. While the average credit…
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Appreciative Thinking
I’ve been having a debate on a friend’s Facebook page about the value of Martha Nussbaum’s work (I’m a fan) and serendipitously I found this post on “appreciative thinking” via Tyler Cowen. It’s a kind of inverted critical thinking, from Seth Roberts: When it comes to scientific papers, to teach appreciative thinking means to help…
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The Will-Be/Ought Gap: Marking Ideas to Market and Moral Realism
(What follows are some reflections on two related problems. One is Robin Hanson’s discussion of prediction markets to counteract status quo bias, and the other is my friend Leigh Johnson’s meditation on strong moral relativism. Because of length, I have cut my extended reflections on Dr. J’s “strong relativism” for a post tomorrow.) If there’s…
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“More Light!” Lying, Police Work, and the Exclusionary Rule
In the 1961 case Mapp v. Ohio, the Supreme Court declined to protect the the possession of pornographic material, but instead decided to exclude all evidence gained through unconstitutional searches. Last month, the Supreme Court revisited that decision in Herring v. United States, where they reconsidered the rule of evidence that excludes evidence gained unconstitutionally. Exclusion,…
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Democracy and Coffee
Jakob Norberg synthesizes some of the thinking on coffeehouses that hangs at the edges of contemporary democratic theory. Without reifying it as a miraculous commodity, he works through some of the ways that Habermas and Carl Schmitt used the figure of the coffeehouse to represent the pretensions and triumphs of the middle-class after the industrial…
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Cost-benefit analysis of drug policy
Here is why I love the economic analysis of policy. It’s an article by Mark A. R. Kleiman, detailing some simple rule changes and common sense redistributions of law enforcement budgets in order to maximize the efficiency and fairness of our drug enforcement policy. Imagine if we asked the DEA, the FBI, and the Army…