Readers of this site know that in addition to my philosophy professorship I am the Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. We have launched a fundraising campaign for our 2012 activities. We are proud of what we have accomplished in our first four academic years — new courses on entrepreneurship, business ethics, […]
Fundraising campaign for 2012 Read More »
Two fun versions of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” song, one for math geeks and one for your inner accountant. Vi Hart’s clever doodle Gaussian Christmath song: And PNC Bank’s charming calculation of the cost to send your true love all of the gifts — partridges, pear trees, dancing ladies, the whole works. (For my
The twelve days of Christmath Read More »
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:
Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011 Read More »
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
Subprime mortgage crisis — history flowchart Read More »
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
Seminar: Philosophy and the Evolution of the Mixed Economy Read More »
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
TEDx: Captcha and Duolingo — massive-scale online collaboration Read More »
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;
Deregulation? The Federal Register’s size Read More »
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
More: Do conservatives really value economic liberty? Read More »