Law & Society Blog

Comment spam is still threatening to shut down our servers. While the Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins keep most of the crap from showing up in the comments, the comment spam still makes it into the database and puts strain on the server. One problem with Askimet, in particular, is that it optimizes the comment […]

Joseph Stiglitz succinctly outlines his views on prizes as alternatives to patents in this article Scrooge and Intellectual Property Rights in the British Medical Journal.
Intellectual property differs from other property—restricting its use is inefficient as it costs nothing for another person to use it. … Intellectual property rights, however, enable one person or company to […]

There is an animated discussion at PeaSoup in response to a post by Robert Johnson.
The standard view of Kantianism has been that it firmly denies that the right is grounded in the good. But recently it has become almost de riguer for Kantians to reject this priority of the right and embrace the good as […]

Because, according to Robert Nozick, intellectuals can’t get over the fact that school’s over.
It is surprising that intellectuals oppose capitalism so. Other groups of comparable socio-economic status do not show the same degree of opposition in the same proportions. Statistically, then, intellectuals are an anomaly. … Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued […]

Steven Landsburg, author of an excellent textbook on Price Theory, explains what he likes about Ebenezer Scrooge:
His meager lodgings were dark because darkness is cheap, and barely heated because coal is not free. His dinner was gruel, which he prepared himself. Scrooge paid no man to wait on him. In this whole world, there is […]

Amazing!Technorati Tags: music, mozart

We have discussed the theory of cultural cognition extensively on this blog in the past (for example here, here, and here)…. Cultural cognition, in the essence, posits a causal relationship between values (and factual beliefs.

As much as I sympathize with Singer’s recommendations, I find them hard to justify.

Economics starts with a simple premise about individual rationality: People have reasonably simple objectives and tend to choose the correct way to achieve them.

To avoid excessive comment spam (and the resulting server load), we had to restrict comments to those who have at least one pre-approved comment on this blog. This should not be too much of an inconvenience. So don’t be perplexed if your next comment doesn’t show up immediately. It will once we approve it. Subsequent […]