Dwight Lee in the current issue of Regulation magazine offers “The Two Moralities of Outlawing Price Gouging.” In the article Lee endorsed economists’ traditional arguments against laws prohibiting price gouging, but argued efficiency claims aren’t persuasive to most people as they fail to address the moral issues raised surrounding treatment of victims of disasters. Lee wrote, “Economists’ best hope …
Michael Giberson “Get the prices right!” was the rallying cry of some economists in the aftermath of the break up of the Soviet Union. Don’t plan the transition, stop planning and let markets sort it out. Similar advice goes out to developing economies around the world. Don’t ease your way to liberalization, throw open the …
Adam Smith Opposes “Shock Therapy” for Developing and Transitioning Economies Read More »
Michael Giberson Some techniques for checking the tendency toward extreme partisanship, which can be a ready source of intellectual errors (source): •Take opposing points of view at face value. It is more comfortable to treat opposing points of view reductively. That is, rather than deal with a different viewpoint, we prefer to explain it away. …
Michael Giberson At Reason.com, social psychologist Jonathon Haidt writes about the foundational moral concerns that animate the Zuccotti Park protestors. Working from a Moral Foundations Theory* perspective, which Haidt and several others have developed, he said, “In my visit to Zuccotti Park, it was clear that the main moral foundation of OWS is fairness, followed …
What Do the Occupy Wall Streeters Care About? Haidt on the Moral Foundations of Ows Read More »
Michael Giberson Several days ago we discussed Jonathan Haidt’s research on libertarianism (see post). In his New York Times column, John Tierney discusses Haidt’s work on political bias among social psychologists: Some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting. … It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, …
Haidt on Political Bias Among Social Psychologists Read More »
Michael Giberson Robin Hanson observes that prospects are not promising for health-case cost containment, in part due to a normal reluctance to give up on sacred values in exchange for money. I wonder if this same psychological factor is activated in emergency conditions which present opportunities to trade the sacred for cash, and if it …
Michael Giberson Last I checked, James Kwak had 147 comments on his blog post on price gouging and the corrupting influence of Econ 101. Other bloggers have jumped into the fray: Adam Ozimek at Modeled Behavior, the Undergraduate at Observations of a Naive Undergraduate, and David Beckworth at Macro and Other Market Musings. Quite a …
Price Gouging, Ethics, Markets, and the Corrupting Influence of Econ 101 Read More »
Michael Giberson Bryan Caplan, in How Wise is Repugnance?, questions Leon Kass’s argument that “repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom.” (From Kass’s essay, “The Wisdom of Repugnance.”) Kass runs through a list of things that he thinks the reader will accept as obviously repugnant (incest, bestiality, mutilating corpses, cannibalism, and so on) and …
Michael Giberson Unfair Prices Daniel Little, at Understanding Society, asks about “Fair Prices?” In exploring the topic he draws some upon E.P. Thompson’s studies of the English working class: E. P. Thompson’s work on early modern Britain reminds us that there was a “moral economy of the crowd” that profoundly challenged the legitimacy of the …
Michael Giberson At Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson points out that the human instinct for cooperation has good and bad consequences. A handful of recent articles in reaction to Frans de Waal’s new book, The Age of Empathy, and other writing on cooperation have treated it as a good thing, as a helpful counterweight to human …
Price Gouging and the “Dark Side of Cooperation” Read More »
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