Naomi Cahn’s new book, Test Tube Families: Why the Fertility Market Needs Legal Regulation, is reviewed by Anne Lyerly in this week’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. See here for an extract (subscription required for more).
In the Wall Street Journal, Judge Richard Posner takes on the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009:
The plan of the new agency reveals the influence of “behavioral economics,” which teaches that people, even when fully informed, often screw up because of various cognitive limitations. A leading behavioral economist, Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, wrote “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” last year with Cass Sunstein, who is President Barack Obama’s nominee for “regulatory czar.”
Mr. Thaler, whose views are taken seriously by the Obama administration, calls himself a “libertarian paternalist.” But that is an oxymoron. He is a paternalist with a velvet glove—as the agency will be. Through the use of carrot and stick, the agency will steer consumers to those financial products that it thinks best for them, whatever they naïvely think.
. . .
Behavioral economists are right to point to the limitations of human cognition. But if they have the same cognitive limitations as consumers, should they be designing systems of consumer protection?
At Baseline Scenario, Elizabeth Warren returns to blogging (many will remember that before she became head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, Warren was a frequent contributor to Credit Slips, which it seems just turned three – happy birthday Credit Slips!) to discuss “Three Myths about the Consumer Financial Protection Agency":
MYTH #1: CFPA Will Limit Consumer Choice and Hinder Innovation
MYTH #2: The CFPA Will Add Another Layer of Regulation and Increase Regulatory Burden
MYTH #3: Prudential and Consumer Regulation Cannot Be Separated
Warren also has a YouTube video on the proposed agency:
There’s been a lot of coverage of the Gates arrest, of course, including here at the Lounge. But a few sources you might not have seen include two (very different) posts over at Crooked Timber. One is by Brandon del Pozo, a captain in the NYPD (now working for Internal Affairs on internal police corruption cases, but with experience as a beat cop in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and as a police instructor). He is also a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at CUNY. He gives his perspective on police discretion and the Gates arrest.
In the second CT Post, Discretion and Arrest Power, Henry puts the Gates’ arrest in the context of Peter Moskos’ book, Cop in the Hood:
Moskos, a sociologist, spent a year as a beat officer in Baltimore. While police practice in the US varies substantially from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, some aspects are (I suspect) reasonably general, including the use by police officers of their zone of discretion to try to expand their authority beyond that which they are theoretically supposed to exercise.
Also on Gates, over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Eric Posner asks, “What is ‘disorderly conduct’ anyway?” and at The Daily Beast Elizabeth Gates interviews her father.
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