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Why I am still hopeful for Egypt’s revolution
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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="375" caption="The Day of Thugs (Image from Foreign Policy)"] [/caption] It is said that revolution is what happens when a police officer is transformed from a legitimate authority into a man with…
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Is more illegal immigration the best we can do?
Will Wilkinson on Bryan Caplan’s (false?) dilemma : Bryan Caplan lays down a challenge to liberaltarians: From what philosophic point of view is “maximizing growth + lots of redistribution + the immigration restrictions lots of domestic…
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Dworkin on Sen
Thomas Gregersen quotes Ronald Dworkin on Amartya Sen : It is not helpful, in the world of real politics, only to call for due consideration of a large variety of factors that everyone concedes relevant…
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Inequality of What? Socioeconomic Status and Amartya Sen’s Entitlements Approach
Responding to the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Socioeconomic Status , Peter Levine discusses some of the difficulties in measuring socioeconomic status : To take another example: you need wealth and family connections to be…
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Left for Dead: Equality of What, Equality for Whom?
There’s a pretty fantastic exchange happening in the blogosphere right now, started by Freddie DeBoer here and followed-up here . The substance of DeBoer’s criticism is that there are no legitimate “far left” bloggers, only…
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Psychologizing Politics
On the Diane Rehm Show today, Jill Lepore echoed Richard Hofstadter’s diagnosis of political violence : I went back and — a few years ago and reread an issue of Newsweek magazine that was published a…
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Conceptual and Practical Obstacles to Futarchy
In his comments on my post last week , Robin Hanson asked about the conceptual work still needed to advance the cause of prediction markets as tools for governance. To my knowledge, Hanson’s definitive statement…
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Cowen on Foucault
Tyler Cowen, a loyal reader of my e-mails, responds to my question on Michel Foucault . In the process, he recommends The Archeology of Knowledge twice, and notes that Foucault …goes astray by assuming, implicitly, explicitly or…
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Three Thoughts on the Tuscon Shootings
The immediate response to tragedy ought to be a cautious silence and a quiet search for understanding. Yet when I attended a vigil on Sunday at the US Capitol building , a reporter from WAMU…
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Hanson on doubt and justifying beliefs using markets
Robin Hanson channels and extends Thomas Reid : What can you do about serious skepticism, i.e., the possibility that you might be quite mistaken on a great many of your beliefs? For this, you might…