Moral Hazard and Health Insurance
A 2005 New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink, convincingly debunks the moral hazard argument that informs the thinking of private health insurance plan advocates. Link: The Moral-Hazard Myth: The bad idea behind our failed health-care system.
Bhutto’s assassination
Tariq Ali and Manan Ahmed provide incisive analysis on Bhutto’s assassination. PAKISTAN: The Three Faces of Benazir and The Bhutto Dynasty
An excruciatingly long yet largely pointless 1993 New Yorker profile of Benazir Bhutto by Mary Anne Weaver, author of the middling ‘Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan’. New Yorker authors are famous for waxing verbose and this article is no exception. Link: Bhutto’s Fateful moment by Mary Anne Weaver
The $2500 car is finally here. The unveiling of Nano was covered extensively by the media. Read the brief yet elegantly written Economist report about it.
Knowledge@Wharton reports on convergence in corporate governance structures due to pressures from globalization and contends that not all is for the good.
Amy Waldman, a former correspondent for The New York Times and now a writer for The Atlantic, writes about the (ab)use of religion in buffeting cases against alleged would be terror plotters.
Steven Pinker, psychologist at Harvard, wrote an essay on The Moral Instinct for the NY Times Sunday Magazine. Pinker has written an erudite account that highlights some of the key psychological biases that prevent choices that do the most good from emerging as the most moral ones. Morality, as our contributor to the blog – Vinay- has pointed out, should be tractable empirically and based on some conception of its ability to provide the most good for society. The associated corollary is that morals, which offer little or no good to the society, aren’t particularly moral.