I don’t have time to do a review of Thomas Piketty’s magisterial work on income and wealth inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but fortunately, everyone who’s anyone has already done it for me. While I continue to slog my way through its 700 pages, here are several illuminating reviews: Randall Holcombe’s continuing series of posts at The Beacon are generally good, but his second was … Continued
I chatted with Kyle Platt of Liberty.me about the consequences of superstition and pseudoscience that I outlined in my article “What’s the Harm?”. We talked liberal science denial, bad bureaucracy, and the dreaminess of Matthew McConaughey. Video and brief excerpts below. KP: You say the cost of [scientific] misinformation is too large to ignore, and that it’s “a … Continued
Over at the Washington Blade blog, Mark Lee raises an important question about the recent Brendan Eich/Mozilla debacle: are we more interested in punishing our enemies than we are about changing the social and political landscape? He argues, “It is astonishing that in the midst of winning hearts and minds on the most essential elements … Continued
I’ve been vocally and financially supporting legalizing gay marriage for a long time, so I’ll admit to some schadenfreude when OKCupid called out Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for supporting Prop 8’s ban on same-sex marriage. But lest we forget, most Californians did. Are we to cut off business, social, and political relationships with all of them? There’s been … Continued
For thousands of years, nobody noticed that there are two different Flood stories in the Bible.
$664 billion is spent on public education, and only 1 in 5 public high school seniors are proficient in science.
A Holocaust of Ignorance I’m often confronted by people who are outraged by skeptical criticism other people’s ideas about medicine, biotech, and science: “You ought to respect their beliefs!” Other people simply shrug off popular pseudoscience and say, “Why bother? What’s the harm?” The answer is that the cost of this kind of misinformation is too large to … Continued
It’s quite common to hear people say that they don’t trust vaccines because “Big Pharma only cares about profits” or other appeals to fear of greed. Never mind that vaccines are just about 3% of US pharmaceutical sales — and so are relatively unimportant to drug companies — let’s see where this logic takes us. If making billions … Continued
