Common sense may suggest that increases in social welfare are more easily obtained by focusing resources on the mentally and/or physically handicapped, rather than using those resources instead to marginally improve non-handicapped individuals’ lives. The capabilities approach, as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, would also imply that resources are well-spent when devoted to …
Category Archives: economics-ish
thinking about academia like an economist
Today, some grad school advice I wrote for Kosmos went live. Check it out: Thinking About Academia Like An Economist
have your college and eat it too: consuming education
Today, I want to make what, to my economics-ish friends, are probably some painfully obvious points. However, I had never explicitly considered this angle on college/education before taking economics of education last semester, and I suspect that it’s something many others of even my rather intelligent friends and colleagues have also failed to consider in depth. …
book review: Schmidtz and Brennan's "A Brief History of Liberty"
Actually, this is more of a book recommendation than a book review. David Schmidtz is one of my favorite philosophers; it was his book “Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility: For and Against” (written with Robert Goodin) that first began to wake me from my dogmatic political slumbers circa 2006, when I was an undergrad back …
on the non-normativity of value-added analysis
As you are likely to have heard by now, the Los Angeles Times recently conducted and published a value-added analysis of some of the city’s elementary school teachers, using data that had been collected by the school district but never previously analyzed in this way. There was a nice summary of the value-added analysis and …
business-izing higher ed: I’m not scared
A few days back, this post about higher ed in the UK appeared over on one of my favorite blogs, Feminist Philosophers. Here’s the big quote: “Business secretary wants students and parents to be treated more like customers in proposals to overhaul higher education.” The original poster worries that “universities get put under a great …
my least favorite facebook group: "cancel student loan debt to stimulate the economy"
I found out about this little movement through its Facebook group, “Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy.” Basically, a guy named Robert Applebaum hatched an attractive-to-some but crazy plan to have the government bail out those carrying college debt by paying off their loans. This would, allegedly, cause all those formerly oppressed by …
