Enough manipulation with the definition of man, and freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes (Matt Zwolinski) John Rawls (1921 - 2002) was one of the most important philosophers in the History of modern political philosophy. Robert Nozick, who is broadly considered an intellectual rival of Rawls even wrote that "political philosophers must work within Rawls's conceptual framework or explain why they don't". Rawls also ended the reign of utilitarianism as the most popular mora…

Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting. Economics Quid pro quo? Corporate returns to campaign contributions  A replication of Education and catch-up in the Industrial Revolution The practitioner's challenge Evolving_moloch The entire twitter account. Interesting stuff about cultural evolution The private production of roads The stupidity of libertarian privatised roads Does social insurance crowd out? The case of Bismarck's system of soc…

Kenneth Arrow wrote a paper in 1963, Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care. This paper tends to appear in debates regarding whether healthcare can be left to the market (like bread), or if it should feature heavy state involvement. Here I explain what the paper says, and to what extent it is true. So lets see what the paper says. Well, first of all, Arrow doesn't intent for the paper to be anything more than "an exploratory and tentative study of the specific differentia of medical care…

Two month ago there was an interesting debate on the effects of inequality on economic growth in the otherwise boring Spanish blogosphere. Here is my contribution to the debate, translated from Spanish. First, if you can read Spanish, and if you want to read the entire debate, read the posts linked here. If not, the summary goes like this: There are recent studies by the OECD (Cingano, 2014) and the IMF (Ostry et al. 2014) that are cited to support the thesis that inequality does harm growth (And, it is the…

Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting. Economics Are US companies too short-term oriented? No A somewhat skeptical writeup by Noah Smith here I wrote about this here Also at the ASI Summing up Noah Smith's thoughts on macroeconomics How important was colonial trade for the rise of Europe? Estimating the social return to higher education: evidence from longitudinal and repeated cross-sectional data I believe that higher education is to a g…

I lost some time arguing with a bunch of these climate change skeptics, and I thought it would be interesting to share what happened here for future reference. To give you some context, this happened in a political debate FB group. Someone posted a comment praising Trump for walking out the Paris Agreement. I immediately commented that global warming is real, and that it is man-caused. This was met by the following: Someone posted a picture of varying levels of CO2 throughout the millenia (Starting 600 mil…