Blog Archives

The economy of ideas

Posted on 2013-12-27 by

Even the best of us have only a few ideas. Bill Gates, our era’s wealthiest entrepreneur, arguably had only one big idea. Giving wealthy people like him tax breaks will not suddenly encourage them to have more ideas. It is … Continue reading →

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Markets and other human institutions (quotation)

Posted on 2013-12-01 by

I thought the following quotation from Cosma Shalizi, one of my favorites, seemed appropriate in light of my previous post on Evangelii Gaudium: There is a fundamental level at which Marx’s nightmare vision is right: capitalism, the market system, whatever … Continue reading →

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Another pearl from Anderson’s article

Posted on 2013-09-27 by

To summarize thus far, opaque sentences require hard work to fully (as opposed to one-sidedly) interpret. Still, the typical six-year-old is conversationally fluent in them. In [] the high-stakes world of legal reasoning, it is surprising that all the king’s … Continue reading →

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How courts are like children

Posted on 2013-09-27 by

Besides courts, two other much-studied populations who have trouble handling opacity are children under the age of four to six and older children with diagnoses on the autism spectrum. —Jill Anderson, “Misreading Like a Lawyer: Cognitive Bias in Statutory Interpretation”, … Continue reading →

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