There is some cost to you in voting. While it may be small for some, it is significant for others. Some people go to a great deal of effort just to vote. What return do they get for this effort? Zilch! A single vote can only impact an election when there is a tie, which has essentially zero chance of happening in a state or national election. The typical response to this is "Well, what if everyone did that?" Of course, (...) that would be a disaster. But we are not talking about everyone, we are talking about ONE individual. (shrink)

It is said that society is in a moral crisis. And, what is worse, it seems to be deteriorating at an ever increasing rate. We all agree that something needs to be done. Our politicians and preachers say we need to help each other more, we need to have "family values", we need to contribute to society and we need to have high moral standards. But there is a fundamental logical reason why none of this is going to happen. This (...) article will explore that reason in detail. (shrink)

"For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few. Each citizen will have a thousand sons who will not be (...) his sons individually but anybody will be equally the son of anybody, and will therefore be neglected by all alike.". (shrink)

"We believe the government’s conduct in forfeiture cases leaves much to be desired. We are certainly not the first to be ‘enormously troubled by the government’s increasing and virtually unchecked use of the civil forfeiture statutes and the disregard for due process that is buried in those statutes’" (Quoting Judge George Pratt in US v. All Assets of Statewide Auto Parts, Inc., 971 F.2d 896, 905 (2d Cir. 1992)). US v. $506,231 in U.S. Currency, 125 F.3d 442 (7th Cir. 1997).

It has always seemed to me that the universe is a bit more diabolical than one would expect. There are just too many strange and frustrating incidents that can not be attributed to pure chance. Can there be some validity to the thousands of "Murphy's Laws" that we have heard about or been subjected to? Maybe. Murphy's Laws may not be the worst of it.

There is probably no other field of study by the human race that is as full of nonsense as the subject of Political Philosophy. I believe that it would give even Religion some strong competition!. Otherwise rational people, intelligent people, even people educated to the highest level from our most prestigious universities, blindly follow some of the most ridiculous beliefs when it comes to politics. If fact, we are so confused about how to solve the problems caused by politics and (...) governing that we waste billions of dollars and an incredible amount of effort absolutely uselessly. (shrink)

We are witnessing some incredibly baffling problems in the world today. It seems that as the countries of the world become more "civilized", more "democratic", societal problems and conflicts just get worse. The theme of this essay is that many of these problems are a result of an inherent and unavoidable paradox involving the conflict between the needs of the individual and the needs of the society that the individual is a member of. This class of problem, often called "Social (...) Dilemmas", while not unknown in the academic community has received little public attention. Yet these dilemmas may present insurmountable barriers to a peaceful world and harmonious societies. (shrink)

"All the limitative Theorems of metamathematics and the theory of computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Church's Undecidability Theorem, Turing's Halting Problem, Turski's Truth Theorem -- all have the flavour of some ancient fairy tale which warns you that `To seek self-knowledge is to embark on a journey which...will always be incomplete, (...) cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described. " - Douglas R. Hofstadter.. (shrink)

On May 3, 1999, at the Cato sponsored conference, "Forfeiture Reform: Now, or Never?", Representative Henry Hyde announced that he was, once again, introducing Forfeiture Reform legislation to Congress. For six years, he has been trying to get legislation passed that would..

The social phenomena discussed in this series of essays all center around the problem of individuals in groups faced with the choice of doing what is best for themselves or what is best for the group. Instances of the phenomena are called by many different names: "Volunteer's Dilemma", "Prisoner's Dilemma", "Collective Choice", "Rational Choice", "Social Choice", and "Voter's Paradox" to list just a few. Unfortunately, the academic programs that cover these various manifestations of the "individual vs. group" dilemma do not (...) fall under one discipline. You will not find the "Social Dilemma" department at any.. (shrink)

My Favorite Music I enjoy the original Country Music, BlueGrass, some Classical and Blues. But so what? Obviously, I would like to promote what I would like to hear (since I am a certified Selfish Person). It is quite annoying that I can find little good music on my radio.

"A class of men who are exceedingly tiresome are those who, having traveled, talk of nothing but their adventures, the countries which they have seen or traversed, the dangers, whether real or fictitious, which they have encountered, repeating the same things an hundred times over.

What I would like to say about politics does not fit the mold of common discourse and most political essays. Frankly, I have a rather negative and skeptical view of the concept that a group of people somehow has the knowledge to know what is best and the right to impose their will on the rest of the population. In fact, I think it is mankind's greatest folly to think that we can pick out a group of people from the (...) population at large -- known to be selfish, brutish and not necessarily very honest -- and to believe that these selected individuals will some how rise above the level from which they came, and to believe in these selected individuals so strongly that we will even give them guns and a monopoly over force! (shrink)

The hottest political news at the end of January, 2001, were the stories about President Bush establishing, by Executive Order, the "Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives" , and his push for allowing religious groups to receive public funds for social service efforts. Bush and his new Attorney General, Ashcroft, have been strong proponents for federal funding of "faith-based" charity organizations (in fact, Ashcroft, when he was a senator, was the prime mover of the "Charitable Choice" initiative in the "Personal (...) Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996"). (shrink)

"To be governed is to be watched,inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general (...) interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed;then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. THAT is government;that is its justice;that is it's morality." P.J. Proudhon.. (shrink)

Whenever you have a situation in which a person or group is in power over a community, some in the community will seek to obtain special favors at the expense of all others in the community. We are all familiar with this situation from our school days where some students would seek special favors -- like a high grade -- at the expense of the other students. Such behavior in the political/economic world is called..

There is a very simple reason why people act the way they do and it is given by the following maxim: Maxim #1: Individuals tend to do the things they are rewarded for doing and tend to avoid the things they are punished for doing. Before you discard this simple maxim as being too simple to be of any use, let me explain just a bit. For a given situation, this maxim puts you one step closer and in the right (...) direction to understanding why people behave as they do. Let us try it on a simple example: Why do government employees waste money? If you want to know the answer to this then see if you can determine how government employees are rewarded and punished. You will then have the answer to your questions and you will find that government employees are just acting according to this maxim -- just as we would do if we were in their place. (shrink)

"This talk of holding back in the face of strong temptation brings me to the climax of this column: the announcement of a Luring Lottery open to all readers and nonreaders of Scientific American. The prize of this lottery is $ 1,000,000/N, where N is the number of entries submitted. Just think: if you are the only entrant (and if you submit only one entry), a cool million is yours! Perhaps, though, you doubt this will come about. It does seem (...) a trifle iffy. If you'd like to increase your chances of winning, you are encouraged to send in multiple entries without limit. Just send in one postcard per entry. If you send in 100 entries, you'll have 100 times the chance of some poor slob who sends in just one. Come to think of it, why should you have to send in multiple entries separately? Just send one postcard with your name and address and a positive integer (telling how many entries you're making) to. (shrink)

In my online essay on Social Behavior, I start with the following statement: Maxim #1: Individuals tend to do the things they are rewarded for doing and tend to avoid the things they are punished for doing. Further elaboration on that simple maxim is what this essay is about.

If the answer is yes, then we should to be able to demonstrate that an individual sacrifice has a real effect on the common good. If my single, personal sacrifice can alter the final result, then I can say that my sacrifice produces more in rewards than my personal costs. But if my sacrifice makes no difference to the final result, why should I make it, especially if I receive the benefits of the sacrifice of others even if I make (...) no personal sacrifice? (shrink)

The "Prisoner's Dilemma" game has been extensively discussed in both the public and academic press. Thousands of articles and many books have been written about this disturbing game and its apparent representation of many problems of society. The origin of the game is attributed to Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher. I quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Puzzles with this structure were devised and discussed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher in 1950, as part of the Rand CorporationÂ’s investigations (...) into game theory (which Rand pursued because of possible applications to global nuclear strategy). The title "prisonerÂ’s dilemma" and the version with prison sentences as payoffs are due to Albert Tucker, who wanted to make Flood and DresherÂ’s ideas more accessible to an audience of Stanford psychologists. The Prisoner's Dilemma is a short parable about two prisoners who are individually offered a chance to rat on each other for which the "ratter" would receive a lighter sentence and the "rattee" would receive a harsher sentence. The problem results from the fact that both can play this game -- that is, defect -- and if both do, then both do worse than they would had they both kept silent. This peculiar parable serves as a model of cooperation between two or more individuals (or corporations or countries) in ordinary life in that in many cases each individual would be personally better off not cooperating (defecting) on the other. (shrink)

The most puzzling aspect of Social Choice theory[1] is that people cooperate much more than the theory suggests. There are several reasons why this is so, including the fact that people are not always rational -- particularly by the definition of "rational" used by the Social Choice theorists! Another obvious reason is that people act out of ignorance much of the time.

Some people voluntarily provide public goods while others take a free ride. Are the providers acting rationally? Should they instead follow the example of the free-rider? What are the rational and moral justifications for voluntary provision? This dissertation examines five ways to justify voluntary provision: rational prudence, social norms, group agency, fairness, and altruism. It suggests that altruism provides the best possible defense. Considerations of fairness may also provide a justification in some circumstances, but generally this argument is vulnerable to (...) the objection that free-riding is often a legitimate way of protecting oneself from exploitation by other free-riders. In places, the dissertation relies on simple game theoretic models and intuitive economic equilibrium notions to analyze public good situations. The dissertation closes with a discussion of the government's role in providing public goods. An argument is made that, for certain kinds of goods (those over which preferences are public, but whose benefits are private), the standard public goods argument is not appropriate to homogeneous populations. If this is correct, other justifications for governmental provision must be summoned for goods of this form. (shrink)

Suppose you tried to play a game in which the rules were arbitrary: each individual could set their own and could change them anytime. I doubt that you would want to play this game for very long. Most of us would rather play games that have a fixed set of rules that do not change during play. Logic is fundamentally a set of rules that we agree to use in our discussions. It is more than that, but that aspect of (...) it will be of great help in our discussions and our thinking. (shrink)

I have written a major essay on the problems that vagueness causes in governance and the way government and politicians take advantage of these problems. It is online at http://perspicuity.net/paradox/vaguegov.html.

We are walking too quickly down the road to physical and psychological utopia without pausing to assess the potential damage to our humanity from this brave new ...

Prior studies in business ethics highlight the role of philanthropy in shaping stakeholders’ perceptions of a firm’s underlying moral tendencies and values. Scholars argue that philanthropy-based character inferences influence whether and how stakeholders engage with firms. We extend this line of reasoning to examine the impact of philanthropy on firms’ contracting costs in the capital market. We posit that philanthropy-based character inferences reduce investors’ agency concerns, thereby reducing firms’ cost of capital. We also posit that the strength of the philanthropy–cost (...) of capital relationship is contingent on uncertainty regarding a firm’s character, visibility of a firm, and prevailing philanthropic norms. We test and find support for our arguments in a longitudinal study of philanthropy and the cost of capital. Our findings have implications for business ethics research on corporate philanthropy and corporate social performance and for organizational research on social judgment. (shrink)

Christopher Hom has recently argued that the best-overall account of the meaning of pejorative terms is a semantic account according to which pejoratives make a distinctive truth-conditional contribution, and in particular express complex, negative socially constructed properties. In addition, Hom supplements the semantic account with a pragmatic strategy to deal with the derogatory content of occurrences of pejorative terms in negations, conditionals, attitude reports, and so on, according to which those occurrences give rise to conversational implicatures to the effect that (...) the pejorative terms are non-empty, which explains the offensiveness of those occurrences. In this paper, I aim to defend this semantic strategy from several recent objections, and I will also present a novel objection, which in my view shows that we should understand the semantic account as a version of inferentialism, rather than radical externalism. (shrink)

Volume I provides a detailed analysis of cylindric algebras, starting with a formulation of their axioms and a development of their elementary properties, and proceeding to a deeper study of their interrelationships by means of general algebraic notions such as subalgebras, homomorphisms, direct products, free algebras, reducts and relativized algebras.

Wilson and Kass talked about their book, The ethics of human cloning, which is about the ethical debate over human cloning.

The work of mathematician and logician Alfred Tarski (1901--1983) marks the transition from substantial to deflationary views about truth.

ArgumentIt seems theoretically convenient to construe knowledge practices in financial markets and organizations as “applied economics.” Alternatively or additionally, one might argue that practitioners draw on economic knowledge in order to systematically orient their actions towards profit-maximization; models, then, are understood as devices that make calculative rationality possible. However, empirical studies do not entirely confirm these theoretical positions: Practitioners’ actual calculations are often not “framed” by models; organizations and institutions influence the choice and adoption of models; and different professional groups (...) in financial markets have diverging attitudes towards model calculations. In order to account for this diversity, this article proposes the concept ofcultures of economic and financial expertise; the concept focuses on the patterns of knowledge practices and knowledge-related self-definitions of groups within financial organizations and markets; it also facilitates an analysis of the relations between and, more specifically, the hierarchies among different practices and identities. The article then goes on to explore the process of foreign exchange forecasting in a particular bank. The description immediately reveals that two groups are involved in this process: economists and analysts. These groups maintain quite different practices and self-descriptions in relation to models: While the economists in the bank use the models as organizational resources for consistent forecasting procedures and observe data with the help of simple model structures, analysts approach model forecasts from the perspective of critics: They see limits in the variable-centered, as opposed to a “thematic” approach and they disregard a model's imposed temporality. Nevertheless, analysts use model forecasts as anchors for developing their own “paths” and stories about possible future expectation changes in the markets. The specific division of labor between economists and analysts, and specifically the dominant role of analysts in the forecasting process, fit into a larger picture: The rise of institutional investors in the foreign exchange markets and their demand for genuine market knowledge for speculative investment projects has contributed to the rise and dominance of analysts’ culture. (shrink)

Central banks have accumulated unparalleled power over the conduct of macroeconomic policy. Key for this development was the articulation and differentiation of monetary policy as a distinct policy domain. While political economists emphasize the foundational institutional changes that enabled this development, recent performativity-studies focus on central bankers’ invention of expectation management techniques. In line with a few other works, this article aims to bring these two aspects together. The key argument is that, over the last few decades, central banks have (...) identified different strategies to assume authority over “expectational politics” and reinforced dominant institutional forces within them. I introduce a comparative scheme to distinguish two different expectational governance regimes. My own empirical investigation focuses on a monetarist regime that emerged from corporatist contexts, where central banks enjoyed “embedded autonomy” and where commercial banks maintained conservative reserve management routines. I further argue that innovations towards inflation targeting took place in countries with non-existent or disintegrating corporatist structures and where central banks turned to finance to establish a different version of expectation coordination. A widespread adoption of this “financialized” expectational governance has been made possible by broader processes of institutional convergence that were supported by central bankers themselves. (shrink)

The Hungry Soul is a fascinating exploration of the natural and cultural act of eating. Kass brilliantly reveals how the various aspects of this phenomenon, and the customs, rituals, and taboos surrounding it, relate to universal and profound truths about the human animal and its deepest yearnings. "Kass is a distinguished and graceful writer. . . . It is astonishing to discover how different is our world from that of the animals, even in that which most evidently betrays that we (...) too are animals--our need and desire for food."--Roger Scruton, Times Literary Supplement "Yum."--Miss Manners. (shrink)

Even though disquotationalism is not correct as it is usually formulated, a deep insight lies behind it. Specifically, it can be argued that, modulo implicit commitment to reflection principles, all there is to the notion of truth is given by a simple, natural collection of truth-biconditionals.

This study examines the influence of mood on corporate philanthropic giving. Drawing on group emotions theory and affect-infused decision theory, we advance the argument that firms allocate greater resources to philanthropy when headquarters-based employees are in a more positive affective state. We also describe three boundary conditions in this relationship—executives’ embeddedness in the firm, executives’ latitude to engage in philanthropic giving, and the firm’s track record of corporate social irresponsibility. We test our arguments using a longitudinal dataset of philanthropic giving (...) by U.S. firms. Our study contributes to the literature by shedding light on the role of affect in shaping the decision to allocate resources to corporate philanthropy. (shrink)

Prior studies suggest that firms headquartered in areas with strong religious social norms have higher ethical standards. In this study, we examine whether the ethical standards associated with local religious norms influence the M&A announcement returns. We document that the M&A announcement returns of acquirer firms increase with the strength of religious social norms in the area surrounding firms’ headquarters. We also document that the relationship is attenuated when acquirer firms have strong corporate social responsibility credentials, is amplified when public (...) trust that firms act in the best interest of stakeholders suffers a negative shock and when the M&A deal has greater economic significance for the acquirer, and manifests predominantly in the lower tail of the distribution of M&A returns. Our findings are consistent with investor assessments of firms’ ethical standards driving the relationship between local religious social norms and M&A announcement returns. We find no evidence for the competing explanation—that investor assessments of firms’ risk preferences drive the documented relationship. (shrink)