Category: Philosophy

With Hurricane Isaac bearing down on the gulf coast, news outlets are interviewing non-evacuating residents in the path of the storm. Residents do not evacuate for a diversity of reasons, but one prominent reason is that many do not have the means: not enough money and nowhere else to go. We’ve seen this phenomenon before… Continue reading Hurricane evacuations and the capability approach

With Paul Ryan’s comical devotion to Ayn Rand in the news again, perhaps it would be worthwhile to discuss Randian and Nietzsche conservatism. I bring Nietzsche in because Ayn Rand was not an original thinker: she just clumsily channeled Nietzschean ideas and put them into long, boring novels. The jumping off point for this brand… Continue reading A defect of Randian and Nietzschean conservatism

A macroeconomic theory is said to be microfounded if it can be reduced to the actions of individual economic agents (that being what microeconomics focuses on). A short while ago, the topic of microfoundations ripped through the economics blogging community. Most of the heavy hitters in the community weighed in on whether microfoundations really matters… Continue reading Kwame Anthony Appiah’s take on microfoundations

I wrote about the recent blog battle concerning workplace coercion and libertarianism in a prior post. My take is that all discussions of procedural liberty devolve into meaninglessness up against the reality of scarcity. So long as scarcity is real — and it is — liberty-infringing coercion is literally impossible to avoid. Therefore, those who… Continue reading Workplace coercion and the capability approach

A three-author piece on libertarianism and workplace coercion has been ripping through the popular political blogs in the last few days. The piece is long, and its points are varied, but the biggest one is that laissez-faire capitalism — the favored economic form of libertarianism — generates conditions of coercion that violate the very liberty… Continue reading On libertarianism, workplace coercion, and scarcity