Moral foundations, economic principles, & critical thinking
In a famous 1972 article, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” philosopher Peter Singer compared global poverty to a child drowning in a pond: [I]f it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it. An application of this principle would be as follows: if I am walking […]
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What caused the Great Depression? There’s no shortage of popular theories. Some say it was an inevitable consequence of capitalism. Others claim it was the big stock market crash of October 1929 that started it. Yet another hypothesis says that the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff, highest in U.S. history, turned a recession into a depression. All these explanations are false. Economists […]
Read moreWhat duties do businesses have toward others, apart from refraining from violating their rights or otherwise treating them poorly? Do they have a responsibility to help solve social problems? Milton Friedman answered this question in a famous 1970 essay, “The Social Responsibility of Business,” with a resounding “No!” Was he right? Friedman says that managers of businesses owe their jobs […]
Read moreLast week, I discussed the book Gaming the Vote by William Poundstone with the Ethics & Economics Challenge students at MVHS. It’s a nice, readable book that drapes some heavy-duty political science in engaging story-telling. One of the concepts we discussed was the Arrow Theorem, discovered by economist and mathematician Kenneth Arrow. The Arrow Theorem shows us why there’s no […]
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