Status Updates From The Philosophy of Economics...

News to me: There's some interesting work being done combining neuroscience with behavioral economics. Strength of preference for high-probability gambles, for example, has been linked to activity in a particular brain region, lesions to which result in a preference for low-probability gambles.

Robert Frank defends a claim I'd never considered before: The reason workplace safety laws are worth having is that without them, we'd cut corners on safety (a nonpositional good) to spend more on conspicuous consumption (positional goods), creating a tragedy of the commons.