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Assorted links
1. Charles Kenny on development vs. growth (intro plus 184 pp.); Felix Salmon summarizes.
2. Ethicists aren't especially ethical.
3. Reinterpreting Alan Blinder on outsourcing.
4. Titlenomics.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 16, 2009 at 11:44 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
Irony dictates that preference utilitarians are to be excluded from the set of unethical ethicists.
Posted by: SUR at Jun 16, 2009 12:11:15 PM
When I was in the academy as an ethics professor, I used to say that I studied ethics so carefully because it didn't come naturally to me. It was sort of a joke, but really not so much. A lot of us are fascinated by the subject because it's not intrinsically obvious. The habitually saintly may be less likely to find the study of ethics interesting.
I certainly would never have thought my fellow ethics students and professors were more moral than others. I remember one of my graduate school teachers saying "[The academic study of] Ethics is a dog eat dog world." That was much funnier than mine, and very true.
Posted by: Kent at Jun 16, 2009 12:30:33 PM
What Krugman (especially Krugman 1979, 1980) showed was that one does not need macro-level differences to generate trade. Firm-level differences will do.
For that "contribution" he got a Nobel Prize?
Posted by: AADL at Jun 16, 2009 1:41:16 PM
The study of ethics is to ethical behavior what the study of ballistics is to playing baseball. Once in a while you may encounter a situation in which deeper understanding is useful, but most of ethical behavior amounts to executing on common sense. (I've heard the suggestion that studying ethics might degrade one's behavior; studying the hard cases leads to a certain moral nihilism. I'm not fully sold on that, but offer it as an interesting idea.)
I do wonder whether ethical studies might have helped people who get themselves in trouble gradually, slightly bending a rule in a way that everyone else does, and then following that with something a little worse, and eventually trying to hide massive fraud by putting a hit on a potential witness, and wondering at the trial where they went that badly off the tracks.
Posted by: dWj at Jun 16, 2009 1:57:26 PM
Looking at the ethics/ethical behaviour divide (from the student's POV), I wonder how many 'Intro to Ethics' students go in thinking that it's a self-help course.
Posted by: Rob at Jun 16, 2009 2:45:57 PM
This was posted by C.J. Maloney at the Liberty and Power blog:
"To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble."
(Paul Krugman, NY Times, August 2, 2002)
Where is H.L. Mencken when we need him?
Posted by: AADL at Jun 16, 2009 4:31:57 PM
"Legal ethics" are code-based in most states. And "businses ethics" is nothing more than following applicable laws.
After studying both, my conclusion was that "business ethicists" were PhDs who wanted to be able to charge lawyer rates, without being lawyers.
Posted by: anon at Jun 16, 2009 8:49:10 PM
Wait a minute. You cannot just say "Hail Scott Sumner" as assorted link number 5. Do you, or do you not support NGDP futures targeting?
Posted by: Giedrius at Jun 17, 2009 2:40:02 AM
"And rapid income growth doesn’t guarantee faster progress. Two things that do increase in line with GDP per capita are consumption and pollution. But across countries, there is little or no relationship between rates of GDP per capita growth and progress in health, education or human rights."
-Charles Kenny
Does that contradict a point you make in your textbook, that if you want to increase health outcomes, one of the best things you can do is have economic growth?
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