Like many of you, I have been enjoying recent posts on Cato Unbound about “bleeding-heart libertarianism,” as well as on the similarly-named blog. What follows are some half-formed thoughts they prompted. This post is not meant as an explicit critique of anybody; everyone involved knows way more about philosophy than I do. Most philosophers (and [...]

Tags: armchair, Arrow, bleeding-heart libertarianism, Cato Unbound, meta-ethics, moral anti-realism, philosophy, sloppy
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Welcome to the third installment in our series of discussions of the Most Insightful Articles in economics. Today we are discussing Ken Arrows’s 1950 article A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare. If you’re interested in politics, you may have done the following thought experiment. Suppose there are three voters—1, 2, and 3—and three [...]

Tags: Arrow, Coase, Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare, economics, impossibility theorem, Levine, Most Insightful Articles, Plott, Problem of Social Cost
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Welcome to the second installment in our series of discussions of the Most Insightful Articles in economics. This post is going up a little later than I had planned, but hopefully you have stuck around. Today we are discussing Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 article The Use of Knowledge in Society. Whereas Coase invites us to consider [...]

Tags: Arrow, Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare, economics, Hayek, local knowledge, Most Insightful Articles, price system, Use of Knowledge in Society
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