2. Health and safety fears: stepladders banned from Oxford's Bodleian library. Book still are kept on very high shelves, however.
4. Is setting goals counterproductive?
5. Beauty, education, and caste trade-offs in Indian marriage markets.
6. Critique of Paul Collier on causation; and here is Easterly on causation and foreign aid.
Reason and Rationality is not that new. There is a new one on Tocqueville that I really hope to read soon:
http://www.amazon.com/Alexis-Tocqueville-First-Social-Scientist/dp/052174007X/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241995346&sr=8-5
“The Constitution was created to serve the purpose of creating a working legal framework for the country, but now Constitutionality is considered a goal in and of itself, rather than subordinate to the betterment of the country as it should be.”
Right. Which is why the government should be able to warrantlessly wiretap suspected terrorists, and no one should complain about it.
One might say this has happened with the American constitution, actually. The Constitution was created to serve the purpose of creating a working legal framework for the country, but now Constitutionality is considered a goal in and of itself, rather than subordinate to the betterment of the country as it should be.
Right on, this is what I thought when I read The Trial. Sure Josef K. may have gotten the short end of the stick, but maybe everyone else was better off!
Some people are spectacularly missing the point. As illustrative examples: If you oppose things like wiretapping or ex post facto laws, you should be able to come up with perfectly good reasons why they’re bad aside from “unconstitutional!” And if you know someone who wants to make the US a theocracy, he needs a better justification than “the Constitution is based on Christian principles!”
Constitutional, limited government IS the goal. Due process IS the goal. Those founding cats were pretty clever–it’s not impossible to change The Constitution, but it’s supposed to be harder than hiring enough lawyers to reinterpret, issue signing statements, or outright ignoring it when you don’t feel like putting forth effort because you have convinced yourself that your idea makes everyone better off.
Property rights combined with limited government do make people better off than tax-funded welfare. Government making people better off is not the goal BECAUSE it is the market that does it.
Expect to see the link between tallness and success to increase, at least in the UK.
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