Academia
Kevin Drum points to an obscure, but radical proposal to change the way the US government does benefit cost analysis. The Office of Management and Budget has released draft guidance saying One practical approach to implementing weights that account for diminishing marginal utility uses a constant-elasticity specification to determine the weights for subgroups defined by […]
I had an odd intellectual experience recently. A US high school student wrote to me as part of an assignment, asking for my thoughts on Brave New World, and its current relevance. I replied talking about the role of “Our Ford”, and Gramsci’s contemporary concept of Fordism. That got me thinking about post-Fordism, and then […]
This is why food in the US and Britain will never be quite good enough.
I recently caught up with an activist friend I’ve known for twenty-five years. We got into this stuff at the tail end of what were then called the crypto wars, a set of legal and policy battles to free strong encryption from the US and UK’s security services and allow it to be used to […]
It is reported that Geoffrey Hinton “the godfather of AI” is leaving Google and has voiced some serious worries about the future of humanity as AI continues to develop. I don’t have anything interesting to say about grey gloop or paperclips or AI robots waging wars, but I have been thinking a bit about the […]
When we announced several new timbers last Fall we promised more to come. So, now we are delighted to welcome on board the newest member of the CT collective: Elizabeth Anderson. Liz will be well known to the philosophers who read CT, as author of numerous papers and of the recent books The Imperative of […]
A federal judge recently ordered a briefing on whether the 13th Amendment grounds a Constitutional right to abortion. Legal academics such as Michele Goodwin, Peggy Cooper Davis, and Andrew Koppelman have made serious originalist arguments for a right to abortion on 13th Amendment grounds. I am no originalist. But I believe that a deeper historical […]