Archive for October, 2008
Free markets and morality
It’s taken me far too long to read through them but the Templeton Foundation’s conversation entitled Does the free market corrode moral character? gathered together a variety of philosophers of different stripes to comment. Most of the commentators seemed to support that idea that free markets are at least morality neutral or if not morally [...]
Abstinence pledges
In the New Yorker Margaret Talbot has an article on abstinence that has a couple/few interesting points to make:
More than half of those who take such pledges … end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse
communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s
if too many teens [...]
Accidents causing death…
The Economist has a nice table showing the likelihood of death by a variety of mundane and more unusual accidents. The stats, derived from the US National Safety Council, show that:
you’re 52 times more likely to be poisoned than drown in the bath;
falling will kill you 56 times more often than electrocution and;
your more [...]
Starting small
Couple of moderatly interesting papers ended up in the this week’s NBER newsletter:
#1 - Henry Sauermann & Wesley M. Cohen in What Makes Them Tick? Employee Motives and Firm Innovation write: “Overall, intrinsic motives, particularly the desire for intellectual challenge, appear to benefit innovation more than extrinsic motives such as pay.”
While the abstract is lean [...]
