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Credit bureau are beneficial to the consumer using credit responsibly, because they offer incentives for consumers to change their behavior, operate as a locus of information and disseminate information to members, while rewarding moral actions. The Consumers Union and Ralph Nader's US Public Interest Research Group reports are replete with flimsy techniques and explicit exaggeration. The Arthur Anderson and Co study, commissioned by the Associated Credit Bureaus in June 1991, reveals that the accusation of consumer groups are baseless and that grave mistakes are rare.

Thomas Schelling has described how each of us is made up of conflicting impulses. The art of managing these impulses Schelling dubs |egonomics'. The idea of egonomic calamity underlies paternalism (or, breaking convention, what I call |parentalism'). The paper argues for laissez-faire in matters egonomic. The rationalizations I give for this libertarian sentiment are old ones, such as accentuating the dignity of the individual and letting the individual learn from example and from his own experience. Also I note, as H. L. Mencken did, that parentalist measures often have unhappy unintended consequences, sometimes are counter-productive, and rarely are borne of sincere good-will.

In this paper, we investigate whether a statement like "the reform ought to be favored" is practically the same as "the reform would yield positive net consequences." The first statement, featuring "ought," is one that many economists would deem "normative," the second, "positive." But if the two statements are practically the same, where does that leave the positive-normative distinction? We advance the idea that any statement that is apt to be deemed "normative" can be recast as a statement that is practically the same but apt to be deemed "positive." We generated empirical evidence on the idea by creating a set of surveys, fielded to economics professors. We sent out 3000 and received 574 completed surveys (19.1 percent). The key aspect of the surveys was that most of them contained both a "normative" formulation and a "positive" formulation, enabling investigation and assessment of practical sameness between the two formulations. When we sum all of the intra-individualrespondent differences between his or her "positive" answer and his or her "normative" answer--over all forms of the "positive" formulations, "for humankind (worldwide, present and future)"--we arrive at a sum of differences remarkably close to zero, a result consistent with the contention that so-called normative questions are practically the same as suitably formulated so-called positive questions. An online webpage contains numerous appendixes, allowing full replicability and including a kappa analysis and other ways of viewing our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American academy discusses on the matters of national policy and social and cultural influence, supporting only one side of the political spectrum. However, the rest of America has evoked calls for a more balanced curriculum, imparting a greater diversity of ideas.

Ostension is the act or process of showing, as in showing a child a fossil while saying "fossil." Here collected are 59 quotations about language, discourse, ostension, and semantics. A theme is the "facts are theory-laden" spiral between language and discourse, between explananda and explanation – the philosophy-of-science problem (and the pervasive political problem) of justifying our judgment in favor of one over against another outlook. The collection highlights individual personage – and hence history, or historicity – as conditioning the content of a theory (or the complex that spans explanandum and explanation). The individual personage infuses meaning into words or signs in showing his own doings including speech acts (discourse, parole). Multiple quotations are authored by Thomas Kuhn, J.G.A. Pocock, Karl Kraus, Adam Smith, Josep Pieper, Friedrich Hayek, Oliver Wendall Holmes, Sr., Otto Jespersen, Iain McGilchrist, and Steven Mithen. A single quotation is authored by John Milton, Edmund Burke, Gershom Carmichael, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Søren Kierkegaard, Kenneth Burke, Michael Polanyi, Thomas Schelling, Wayne Booth, and William Graham Sumner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adam Smith infused the expression 'impartial spectator' with a plexus of related meanings, one of which is a super-being, which bears parallels to monotheistic ideas of God. As for any genuine, identified, human spectator, he can be deemed impartial only presumptively. Such presumptive impartiality as regards the incident does not of itself carry extensive implications about his intelligence, nor about his being aligned with benevolence towards any larger whole. We may posit, however, a being who is impartial and who holds higher levels of intelligence and of benevolence, and then converse over what her sentiments would be about the matter under discussion. It is natural to conceive of a being who is unsurpassable in such qualities, who is morally supreme, and who naturally takes the definite article the without having been definitized by the writer (because unnecessary, just as we speak of 'the world'). Signal passages, new to edition 6, suggest that Smith formulates the man within the breast as a representative of the always present and everywhere morally supreme impartial spectator. When Smith speaks of the man within the breast as 'the supposed impartial spectator' (all new to edition 6), we interpret 'supposed' as sup-pos-ed (purported), not sup-pos'd (posited). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jordan Peterson says that postmodernists say no interpretation is better than another. I would no sooner identify Peterson’s adversaries as those who have been misled by “postmodernism” than I would identify them as misled by “sustainability,” “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” or “intersectionality.” Such fare is mainly symptomatic. “Postmodern” invocations are often like “sustainability” invocations: inessential. This piece is not a defense of postmodernism. It is a critique of PoMo-bashing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The name Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783-1847) is little known outside of Sweden, but the volume Freedom in Sweden: Selected Works of Erik Gustaf Geijer (Geijer 2017) translates choice works and presents Geijer to modern readers. In this essay we provide an introduction to Geijer (pronounced yay-yer). We raise the question of whether his declaring, in 1838, in dramatic fashion, for liberalism was an ideological migration or a coming out of the closet. We discuss the scope and flavor of his discourse, and suggest that he belongs in the company of moral philosophers and historians of civilization such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Alexis de Tocqueville. We highlight his essay “An Economic Dream,” which prefigured Hayek’s likening of the price system to an allegory of society-spanning communication and intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]