Category: Liberal Arts

  • Shortage and storage

    Frank McIntyre

    With the recent spike in food prices, a three year old post demands new life. Here it is: Clearly, were there to be a famine, a one year food supply in the basement would look really good. What may be slightly less obvious is that the presence of food storage, even if nobody ever uses…

  • Coase on Abortion

    Frank McIntyre

    Estimates suggest that, on average, Americans behave as if they value a year of their life at, more or less, $100,000. This would put an average American life at a “revealed preferred” value of somewhere around $7 million.

  • Religious Pragmatism

    Dave Banack

    Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote, “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” [1] In various writings, he expanded that claim, contrasting a natural law approach to justifying legal and ethical rules of conduct with his own more modest approach rooted in history and experience and falling under the broad…

  • Summer Seminar update

    Jim F.

    For those interested in the BYU summer seminar, I’ve revised the post, adding the titles of and abstracts for the papers.

  • BYU Summer Seminar

    Jim F.

    The annual summer symposium, this year “Joseph Smith and His Times,” will be held on Thursday, August 9, 2007. The symposium will feature papers by twelve summer seminar fellows on the theme “Mormon Thinkers, 1890-1930,” covering topics ranging from the influence of Herbert Spencer on Mormon thought to Mormonism and Modernity.

  • Economics and the Vicious Dating Scene

    Frank McIntyre

    Diminishing Returns: Once things start going downhill, bail. Increasing Returns: It can only get better.

  • Markets and Consumer Activism

    Frank McIntyre

    With fair regularity, one hears someone talking of efforts to buy less of some commercial product, either out of a desire for global conservation or because he doesn’t like how it is produced or whatever. Invariably, he comments that his own effect on the market is small, but he wishes to “send a message” or…

  • Why a Second Coming?

    Jim F.

    It might seem that there are few Hegelians in the world today.

  • Preserving the Veil from Survey Data

    Frank McIntyre

    Suppose I find that being Mormon raises income, makes your children nicer, and does all sorts of wonderful things. In fact, suppose God blessed every person who converted instantly and spectacularly with beautiful hair and perfect teeth.

  • Science and Nihilism

    Jim F.

  • Santa-god and the Second Naivete

    Jim F.

    I spent all of September and a good part of October finishing an essay on community for a journal on the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and it nearly killed me.

  • Fixing the Minimum Wage

    Frank McIntyre

    It seems pretty clear that we are heading for a hike in the minimum wage. For the many of us who care about poverty reduction, which would be basically all of us, this could be a big deal. The problems with the minimum wage are that it:

  • The Opportunity Cost of Publishing

    Frank McIntyre

    In this excellent post, Rosalynde talks about the gender differences in subject material among Deseret Book writers. This renews the discussion brought up by Taryn Nelson-Seawright on the same difference existing in other Mormon outlets. Explanations abound for this phenomena, ranging from differing preferences to piggy discrimination, but most of them are sort of boring.…

  • Why Europeans look lazy

    Frank McIntyre

    It is a well established fact that Europeans perform vastly less formal market work than Americans. A less known fact is that this is a recent development— in the late 50s, Europeans worked about 10% more hours, but this has been in steady decline for 40 years, until now they work about 30% fewer hours…

  • Camels, Needles, Heaven

    Frank McIntyre

    Rich people who pay tithing are, by all accounts, still losers compared to the poor. Or, anyway, though their ten percent is a lot more money, it is money that had little effect on their life and so is not a very impressive sacrifice. Thus their salvation is put in jeapardy by diminishing marginal returns!…

  • How Wrong is it to Compare Yourself with Others?

    Michael McBride

    A growing body of research (mine own included) in various social sciences finds that people report higher happiness levels when they do better than the people around them.

  • O’Dea’s The Mormons Part II: The Edited Volume Retrospective

    Michael McBride

    The Mormon Social Science Association, under the direction of editors John Hoffman, Cardell Jacobsen, and Tim Heaton of BYU’s Department of Sociology, is currently putting together a volume of essays that retrospectively assess O’Dea’s 1957 classic The Mormons.

  • O’Dea’s The Mormons Part I: Strain and Conflict in the Church

    Michael McBride

    Thomas F. O’Dea’s The Mormons (1957) is a classic text in Mormon studies. So much that the Mormon Social Science Association is currently putting together an edited volume

  • Who took the LD out of LDS?

    Patrick Mason

    -or- What ever happened to the good ol’ last days? -or- Where have all the millennialists gone?

  • History and Scripture

    Jim F.

  • Peak oil and taxes

    Frank McIntyre

    On the Urban thread, Jonathan Green pointed out that the major issue with oil scarcity may not be how much oil we have in the ground, but how much we can pump in a given year. If we are maxed out on supply for a year, any oil disaster creates a huge crunch.

  • The Real Danger?

    John Fowles

    [NOTE: After initially posting this, I soon removed it because I was made aware that it was unnecessarily divisive. This was not my intent. However, I am putting it back up, unaltered, in the interest of debate. Additionally, one commenter pointed out that it was unfair to delete the post after people had commented, something…

  • Tomorrow morning, at 2 AM

    John David Payne

    Once a year, after enduring a grueling six hours of church in one day, I lay down to sleep knowing that during the wee hours of the night I will be robbed of one whole hour. It is time to forever abolish Daylight Saving Time.

  • Defining terrorism

    John David Payne

    By request, this morning I am going to talk about defining terrorism. The first important thing you need to realize is that there is no single widely accepted definition, either in academia or in the policy world. Everyone uses their own. So we’re going to talk about how you can build your own definition of…

  • Prophecy vs. History

    John Fowles

    Not too long ago, I stumbled across the PBS presentation of Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel (2d ed. 1999). It reminded me of dealing with the book at college and enjoying the ideas presented and the sweeping take of world history that it offered. But while watching the presentation and contemplating the message…

  • Market Dominant Minorities in the Book of Mormon

    John Fowles

    Market Dominant Minorities

  • And Justice for All

    Jim F.

    I apologize in advance for writing about a topic that is at least closely related to, if not the same as Nate’s. But it is his fault. He made me start thinking about the question of freedom and its relation to justice.

  • The Mormon Bankrupt

    Frank McIntyre

    Utah has a very high rate of bankruptcy. In 2000 it hovered at around 7 filings per thousand people– twice the national average. This lonely fact has launched a thousand explanations for why Mormons have such a problem with defaulting on their creditors. Clearly, the thinking seems to be, this shows some of the rot…

  • The Quotidian

    Jim F.

  • Is Poverty Satanic?

    J. Nelson-Seawright

    One of the most important scriptural texts for the theological consideration of poverty is to be found in Alma 32. This chapter discusses Alma’s mission to the Zoramites. During a sermon on the hill Onidah, Alma is approached by a group of impoverished individuals who were “poor in heart, because of their poverty as to…