bookweevil

24 May 2009

How the Left turned to the Right – Times Online

Filed under: Uncategorized — bookweevil @ 3:03 pm

Re Anthony’s posting of: How the Left turned to the Right – Times Online. It’s very sad. “Left” so often seems to be a synonym for “weak in the head”. (Not in your case, though, obviously, Anthony. Your head is very strong, with an attractive yet durable high-gloss finish.) Many people who claim to espouse left-wing ideals have the most bizarre notions of what this means. Defending Muslims’ “right” to not be offended or insulted is just one of the idiocies they have succumbed to.

Other examples which spring to mind of the empty-headedness of allegedly “Left wing” politicians include the human-rights- and natural-justice-denying Anti-Social Behaviour Order system, which allows anyone to obtain a court order preventing anyone else from doing something that they find irritating, “alarming,” or “threatening”; and Tony Blair’s apparent inability to distinguish fiction from reality. (While PM, in the interests of promoting “a more diverse school system“, he tried to prevent a state-funded school, Emmanuel College, from being forced to provide an adequate education to children, instead of teaching them Creationist doctrines. In 1999, the New Humanist reported, his government “recruited a Feng Shui consultant, Renuka Wickmaratne, for advice on how to improve inner-city council estates. ‘Red and orange flowers would reduce crime,’ she concluded, ‘and introducing a water feature would reduce poverty. I was brought up with this ancient knowledge.’”)

Not that the political Right are any less guilty of imbecility, of course … but I really should be finishing an essay on project management methodologies, so I will have to leave the marvellous world of right-wing religious delusions for another time.

5 May 2009

Some literature on considerations of morality in economic theory

Filed under: Uncategorized — bookweevil @ 7:11 pm

Beckert, Jens, Bettina Hollstein, Edward W. Lehman, David Marsden, and Amitai Etzioni. 2007. Amitai Etzioni – Twenty years of ‘The Moral Dimension: Toward a New Economics’. Socioecon Rev (December 4): mwm021. doi:10.1093/ser/mwm021.

Bowles, Samuel. 1998. Endogenous Preferences: The Cultural Consequences of Markets and Other Economic Institutions. Journal of Economic Literature 36, no. 1 (March): 75-111. doi:10.2307/2564952.

Farina, Francesco, Frank Hahn, and Stefano Vannucci. 1996. Ethics, rationality, and economic behaviour. Oxford University Press.

Harsanyi, John C. 1955. Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility. Journal of Political Economy 63, no. 4 (January 1): 309. doi:10.1086/257678.

Hausman, Daniel M., and Michael S. McPherson. 2006. Economic analysis, moral philosophy, and public policy. Cambridge University Press.

Rabin, Matthew. 1998. Psychology and Economics. Journal of Economic Literature 36, no. 1 (March): 11-46. doi:10.2307/2564950.

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