“Reason is man’s only absolute,” Ayn Rand famously declared. Similarly, Murray Rothbard thought that reason uniquely vindicated the non-aggression principle on pain of self-contradiction, for “the preservation and furtherance of…
I wrote another post at the Princeton University Press blog. This summarizes the theories of rational ignorance and rational irrationality, while also explaining some findings in political psychology. http://press.princeton.edu/blog/2012/09/17/jason-brennan-on-why-were-dumb-at-politics/ Excerpt:…
Many philosophy departments have a “Why Study Philosophy?” section on their home pages. Many of them argue that philosophy must do an unusually good job developing students’ intellectual skills. As…
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new essay up on Friedrich Hayek. This is good news. Here’s some even better news: it is written by David Schmidtz. For those of you…
Systems for human development evolve based on the fitness characteristics of those systems relative to the environment in which they evolve. The current teacher training system selects for students willing…
The traditional interpretation of human capital is formal education leading to increased earning power. But investments in human capital, in the broadest sense, are resources devoted in the present in…