anotherpanacea

Tag: The Business End

  • Where are the start-ups in the Liberal Arts?

    Yesterday, George Mason University economists Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen announced MRU, a modular course design platform that they’ll be using to offer free and potentially paid courses in economics, online. I’ve learned a lot from their blog since I started reading during the run-up to the financial crisis, and I plan to at least…

  • Transitioning to BIG+VAT

    John Quiggin raises some interesting questions about the BIG+VAT in the comments to the last post: I’m unconvinced by your transition strategy, though of course the nature of a transition strategy depends on the starting point. I don’t see how a ‘small’ [UBI*], say $3000/person/r or $1 trillion per year in the US context let’s…

  • Another Badly-Aimed Attack on the Basic Income Guarantee from Crooked Timber

    John Quiggin has been taking up the case against the basic income guarantee at Crooked Timber recently. See here and here. Unfortunately, he is attacking a weak man version of the policy. It doesn’t look like he actually opposes the BIG, in theory, but his objections all appear to demonstrate that a Basic Income is…

  • Consider the Bathroom Break (Workplace Domination Part Three)

    The virtue of the Crooked Timber bloggers’ objections to the Bleeding Heart Libertarians’ line is that it implicitly suggests the difference between liberal and republican conceptions of freedom. Libertarians have usually substituted theories of interference and coercion for a full-blown theory of domination. When Chris Bertram stopped by, he suggested that they wanted to avoid…

  • Academically Adrift: How a First-Year Seminar Can Get the Academy Back on Course

    What follows is a proposal I’ve been working on to convince my university to switch from its General Education requirements to a first-year seminary, given the data in Academically Adrift. Executive Summary The best research available suggests that courses with demanding reading and writing requirements are the only way to teach the core competencies required…

  • New Rules

    I’m thinking of adding rules and a FAQ to my syllabi. Thoughts? Read More. Write More. Think More. Be More. Do the homework and come to class. [Woody Allen has said that “80 percent of success is showing up.” But be sure to show up for your homework, too; there will be approximately two hours…

  • Did the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act “Bend the Cost Curve” on Campaign Spending?

    Apparently, it did! On Thursday, I produced a graph and some older papers in economics that made the case that there is a pretty clear trend in campaign spending that was completely unaffected by the 2002 BCRA. However, I’m a philosopher, not an econometrician, so I left off the most important part: comparing growth in…

  • Democratic Facts and Norms: Testable Hypotheses about Citizens United

    So I’ve just completed grading 55 papers on Citizens United v FEC, and though I’d kind of like to reflect on it a bit, I’m also finding that grading has totally exhausted my interest in the legal questions. (But seriously: the personhood question is a red herring!) Maybe later this week I’ll post the best arguments…

  • The Commons: Restore or Build New?

    Most discussions of the Commons assume that common-pool resources are supplied by nature, like the English fields that were available to locals for grazing, cultivation, and hay-cutting until the Inclosure Acts. However, it is equally possible to create new common pool resources for local control. Kojo Nnamdi spent an hour on his radio show yesterday…

  • 23 Things about Capitalism

    In his new book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, Ha-Joon Chang offers a progressive explanation for what Tyler Cowen calls “The Great Stagnation,” the slowing growth in public goods available for consumption or redistribution. Between his various jibes at a strawman version of the standard economic model, Chang offers a persuasive analysis…