anotherpanacea

Tag: Believing What’s True

  • Deciding Whether or Not to Tell a Story

    When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “Truth and Beauty” with the poet Ann Lauterbach. It was basically a class on reading and writing essays, but I took it because I was a philosophy major and I thought it would be about aesthetics, i.e. about whether judgments about beauty can be true…

  • Did the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act “Bend the Cost Curve” on Campaign Spending?

    Apparently, it did! On Thursday, I produced a graph and some older papers in economics that made the case that there is a pretty clear trend in campaign spending that was completely unaffected by the 2002 BCRA. However, I’m a philosopher, not an econometrician, so I left off the most important part: comparing growth in…

  • Democratic Facts and Norms: Testable Hypotheses about Citizens United

    So I’ve just completed grading 55 papers on Citizens United v FEC, and though I’d kind of like to reflect on it a bit, I’m also finding that grading has totally exhausted my interest in the legal questions. (But seriously: the personhood question is a red herring!) Maybe later this week I’ll post the best arguments…

  • Philosophy and Occupation

    Today Dr. J encourages her readers to understand the Occupy Wall Street movement through the lens of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: The Occupy Movement is like our sense of sight. It’s not (instrumentally) valuable for what it allows us to see, but rather it’s (intrinsically) valuable in that it allows us to see. Like sight, it “brings to light many differences…

  • 23 Things about Capitalism

    In his new book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, Ha-Joon Chang offers a progressive explanation for what Tyler Cowen calls “The Great Stagnation,” the slowing growth in public goods available for consumption or redistribution. Between his various jibes at a strawman version of the standard economic model, Chang offers a persuasive analysis…