Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011
Christopher Hitchens has died. Here is a brief profile at Vanity Fair. Here his is at his best in this rousing, witty, and impassioned defense of free speech:
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Subprime mortgage crisis — history flowchart
Here is a simplified flowchart, developed for my business ethics courses, reflecting my understanding of subprime mortgages’ contribution to the crisis. Let me emphasize that this is only about the subprime contribution of the overall crisis. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enabled much spillover into non-subprime mortgage sectors, government-set capital requirements and other regulations enabled
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Seminar: Philosophy and the Evolution of the Mixed Economy
One of my talks at Francisco Marroquín University was on making sense of our mixed economy–an unwieldy combination of market and socialist elements. The 28-minute talk integrates themes from my intellectual heroes–Smith, Mill, Mises, Hayek, Rand, Popper, Friedman, Buchanan, and Tullock–and connects market economics, politics, ethics, history, and public choice to explaining our semi-coherent mixed
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TEDx: Captcha and Duolingo — massive-scale online collaboration
Great talk from TEDx at Carnegie-Mellon University: “After re-purposing CAPTCHA so each human-typed response helps digitize books, Luis von Ahn wondered how else to use small contributions by many on the Internet for greater good. At TEDxCMU, he shares how his ambitious new project, Duolingo, will help millions learn a new language while translating the
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Deregulation? The Federal Register’s size
Following up on my post entitled “When was the financial sector deregulated?” Another crude measure of regulation or deregulation is to count the number of pages in the U.S. Federal Register. The Federal Register is the government’s daily publication of new and proposed rules. Some of the rules are trivial and some have large impact;
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More: Do conservatives really value economic liberty?
Some do, sort of. But most of its major representatives do not. Another example is GOP hopeful Newt Gingrich. In his 1984 book, Window of Opportunity, Gingrich attacks laissez-faire and proposes what he calls “opportunity society conservatism”: “The opportunity society calls not for a laissez-faire society in which the economic world is a neutral jungle
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Explaining Postmodernism 2nd and 9th at Amazon Kindle
At Amazon’s Kindle books section, my Explaining Postmodernism holds two of the top ten places for books on postmodernism. The first edition is second, and the expanded edition is ninth [update: now seventh]. They are neck-and-neck with The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism and The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, two traditionally strong-selling series. Also: Both editions
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When was the financial sector deregulated?
One popular meme is that the financial crisis was caused by deregulation in the banking and financial sectors. Accordingly, suggest the memists, free markets should take the blame and more government regulation is the solution. When did this deregulation take place? One measure of the degree of regulation is how much the federal government spends
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