archive

Ethics for an age of commerce

Amirul Ahsan, Michael Skully and J. Wickramanayake (Monash): Determinants of Central Bank Independence and Governance: Problems and Policy Implications. An essay on Governing the Governors: A Clinical Study of Central Banks. Fed up: We've been told not to imagine a world without the Federal Reserve — maybe we should. Greenspan was a very bad Fed chairman: A review of Les incendiaires: Les banques centrales depassees par la globalisation by Patrick Artus. Claude Hillinger ( Munich): Science and Ideology in Economic, Political and Social Thought. From Adbusters, the neoliberal indoctrination of young economics students in universities around the world all starts with one textbook - - N. Gregory Mankiw's Principles of Economics. From The Economist, what to do when you don't know everything: A review of Imperfect Knowledge Economics by Michael Goldberg. More on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan. A review of The Market (Key Concepts) by Alan Aldridge. The introduction to The New Corporate Accountability: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Law. Bosses take note: A new study of the brain shows that rewards for good work satisfy us more when others get less. A review of The Moral Significance of Class by Andrew Sayer. The introduction to Regulating Vice: Misguided Prohibitions and Realistic Controls by James Leitzel. A review of The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce by Deirdre N. McCloskey. Serving Pellegrino at a dinner party no longer has the cachet it once did. The answer? Try BlingH2O, it's the P Diddy of uber-premium water — but why are we prepared to pay up to 100,000 times the going rate for something we can have on tap for free? From being a scorned symbol of the suburb, the shopping mall is now embraced for its security, predictability, and the corporate familiarity of branded space. Stop, stop shopping: Meet Reverend Billy, an actor, on a mission to save America from consumerism.