Daniel Little
Technologies and technology systems have deep and pervasive effects on the human beings who live within their reach. How do normative principles and principles of social and political justice apply to technology? Is there such a thing as "the ethics of technology"? There is a reasonably active literature on questions that sound a lot like …
Continue reading "Ethical principles for assessing new technologies"
Earlier posts have focused on the role of inadequate regulatory oversight as part of the tragedy of the Boeing 737 MAX (link, link). (Also of interest is an earlier discussion of the "quiet power" through which business achieves its goals in legislation and agency rules (link).) Reporting in the New York Times this week by …
I've been interested in the economic history of capitalism since the 1970s, and there are a few titles that stand out in my memory. There were the Marxist and neo-Marxist economic historians (Marx's Capital, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Robert Brenner, Charles Sabel); the debate over the nature of the industrial revolution (Deane and …
The discipline of experimental economics is now a familiar one. It is a field that attempts to probe and test the behavioral assumptions of the theory of economic rationality, microeconomics, and game theory. How do real human reasoners deliberate and act in classic circumstances of economic decision-making? John Kagel and Alvin Roth provide an excellent …
Continue reading "Experimental sociology of norms and decision-making"
It is of both intellectual and practical interest to understand how organizations function and how the actors within them choose the actions that they pursue. A common answer to these questions is to refer to the rules and incentives of the organization, and then to attempt to understand the actor's choices through the lens of …
We think of artifacts as being "functional" in a specific sense: their characteristics are well designed and adjusted for their "intended" use. Sometimes this is because of the explicit design process through which they were created, and sometimes it is the result of a long period of small adjustments by artisan-producers and users who recognize …
An increasingly pressing consequence of climate change is the rising threat of flood in coastal and riverine communities. And yet a combination of Federal and local policies have created land use incentives that have led to increasing development in flood plains since the major floods of the 1990s and 2000s (Mississippi River 1993, Hurricane Katrina …
An earlier post highlighted Alexandre Kojève's presentation of Hegel's rich conception of labor, freedom, and human self-creation. This account is contained in Kojève's analysis of the Master-Slave section of Hegel's Phenomenology in Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the "Phenomenology of Spirit"; link. Here are the key passages from Hegel's Phenomenology on which Kojève's …
The Federal agency responsible for investigating chemical and petrochemical accidents in the United States is the Chemical Safety Board (link). The mission of the Board is described in these terms: The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the agency’s board members are appointed by the …
Serious nuclear accidents are rare but potentially devastating to people, land, and agriculture. (It appears that minor to moderate nuclear accidents are not nearly so rare, as James Mahaffey shows in Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima.) Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are disasters that …
Understanding Society 