Tag Archives: economics

Capitalism’s lost social capital

A few years ago Francis Fukuyama wrote Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity. The short of it is that modern economies tend to be “high trust,” you can rely on more than simply your family to get … Continue reading

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UNICEF, boo!

What’s different about Kiva: Contrast Kiva with, for example, UNICEF. Kiva makes it possible to trace the path of your donation, to the extent that such tracing is realistic (and it largely turns out to be more along the lines … Continue reading

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The Commanding Heights

U.S. Is Finding Its Role in Business Hard to Unwind: But one year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off a series of federal interventions, the government is the nation’s biggest lender, insurer, automaker and guarantor against risk for … Continue reading

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Social science & engineering

A recent Bloggingheads.tv featured two philosophers, and was titled “Explaining and Appraising Moral Intuition”. A considerable proportion of the discussion involved the utility of cognitive and evolutionary psychology in probing the reflexive roots of our moral intuitions, and how that … Continue reading

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Faith-based financing

I almost thought there must have been a typo in this Miami Herald headline–Obama thanks Crist for support of stimulus plan–since the stimulus proposal bears so uncanny a resemblance to God.  It is a projection of human needs and desires, … Continue reading

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Knowledge & the Second Bank of the United States

Reading about the controversy surrounding the Second Bank of the United States, I get the sense that we know more about how economics operates today than we did 180 years ago. But how much more? Enough to matter? I assume … Continue reading

Posted in culture, economics, history | Tagged , , , | 15 Comments