Juvenile delinquency is a serious and common problem but not hopeless: it has been on the decline for a number of years, yet, juvenile courts continue to assess millions of cases per year. There are times when this subject seems hopeless such as when we read about a horrendous crime committed by a minor. The […]
After centuries of debate, there is no agreement about whether ‘knowledge’ must be essentially conceived as a cognitive state of individual minds, or must be attributed to some collective entity, i.e., whether it’s me , or we , who ‘really’ knows. A promising analytical approach to this problem has emerged in recent years, which is […]
What does reason consist really in? What it is for? And why are humans, of all the millions of species having populated the earth, the only one that enjoys such a wonderful capacity? The French psychologist Hugo Mercier and anthropologist Dan Sperber (though in both cases the labels are poorly informative of the multifarious work […]
Gary Becker presented a first economic approach to criminal behavior. In a very standard neoclassical framework he studied this apparently non-economic problem. In particular, Becker assumed rational criminals responding to variables such as the probability of being caught, the severity of the punishment and the labor-market opportunity cost. After this seminal work, a large empirical […]
November 25, 1858, was a very cold day in Concord, Massachusetts. It was then that Henry David Thoreau discovered at Walden Pond some frozen fish he had never seen before, which were “shaped like bream, but had the transverse bars of perch”, as he wrote the following day. “Are they not a new species?” he […]
This post summarizes the article “Confirmation bias with motivated beliefs”, by Charness and Dave, published in Games and Economic Behavior in 2017. Confirmation bias (CB) can be defined as an agent’s tendency to seek, interpret and use evidence in a manner biased toward confirming her existing beliefs or hypotheses. This constitutes a misjudgment that limits […]
This article summarizes the Babcock et al . (2017) , recently published in the American Economic Review. Among the different reasons to explain the gender gap in the labor market one is the process by which men and women advance in the workplace, and among the variables that can affect this advance is the time […]
In the previous entry , I described Nick Bostrom’s argument for the ‘simulation hypothesis’, i.e., the conjecture that we are very, very likely living not in a ‘real’ world, but within some kind of computer simulation, and ended offering some skeptical doubts about its structure by comparing it to Bertrand Russell’s prankish argument about whether […]
One important principle of any sensible social epistemology is that the fraction of crazy-sounding ideas that are really crazy is extremely high. Of course, a lot of crazy-sounding ideas have turned out being right (e.g., the evolution of different species from common ascent, the earth’s being a planet turning around a star, the atomic composition […]
The last issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives published the article Is China Socialist? by Barry Naughton , which I summarize here. In order to address the question, the first thing Naughton does is to provide a working definition of socialism. Under a broad conception, a plausible socialist system would be judged on four […]