Tag: Epistemic Institutional Design

  • Epistemic Institutional Design (A reply)

    A brief rejoinder to the blogger at St. Angilbert Press [EDIT: The blog is now parked by spammers, so I have removed the link] who claims that Ratzinger’s letters regarding the treatment of homosexual priests (which for him would include the so-called ephebophile priests who molested post-pubescent boys) are not infallible because they seem… to be…

  • Epistemic Institution Design Part Two: Pedophilia and Pathology

    It’s been a few months since I promised a series of posts on the Catholic Church and epistemic institutional design, but I have been working on it. As the Pope marks the end of the aptly named “Year of the Priest” today, I thought I’d return to it. In this post, I will show that…

  • Democracy, Bureaucracy and the Fear of Statisticians

    Often when I am trying to explain problems in the modern political landscape or my own approach to political philosophy, I will return to Max Weber’s account of bureaucracy as more efficient than private office. Yes, I’ve heard all the jokes about “efficiency” in bureaucracy, but Weber’s argument rested on the contrast between private and…

  • Epistemic Institutional Design and the Roman Catholic Church, Part One

    The Catholic Church has been having a rough time of it lately. In a series of posts, I want to take up some of the implications of this trouble for epistemic institutional design, that is, for building institutions that ‘get it right.’ First, some background: what has previously been a primarily American problem of sexual abuse…

  • Elizabeth Warren on the Consumer Financial Protection Agency

    I’ve linked to Warren before, but my favorite public policy theorist/practioner has a new lecture on regulating consumer financial markets, which is only ten minutes long and very persuasive: Elizabeth Warren on Consumer Protection (MMBM) from Roosevelt Institute on Vimeo. Also, from this recent interview: The consumer credit market is broken. While the average credit…

  • Appreciative Thinking

    I’ve been having a debate on a friend’s Facebook page about the value of Martha Nussbaum’s work (I’m a fan) and serendipitously I found this post on “appreciative thinking” via Tyler Cowen. It’s a kind of inverted critical thinking, from Seth Roberts: When it comes to scientific papers, to teach appreciative thinking means to help…