Don Marti

Sun 02 Sep 2012 07:36:57 AM PDT

Sunday morning MLP: religion and politics

Politics department, part 1: John Cusack and Jonathan Turley on Obama’s Constitution. He was never motivated that much by principle. What he’s motivated by are programs.

Part 2: a moral hazard roundup from Washington's Blog. Top Economists: Iceland Did It Right … And Everyone Else Is Doing It Wrong

Jason Santa Maria: Stealing Sheep. What made me a Goudy superfan is that he did all this and more after he was 40 years old. Before that he busied himself keeping books for a realtor in Chicago.

Prof. Mahmoud El-Gamal: Can Political Islam Reform "Islamic Finance"? Essay on the prohibition of usury, the rise of Islamic political movements, and bizarre mashups of permitted transactions to create supposedly interest-free financial products.

Productivity department, part 1. Hillary Rettig: No Such Thing as “Good Procrastination”.

Part 2, another productivity idea, from Ethan Zuckerman: “Long Flights” – a somewhat serious business idea

Francis Spufford on Christianity: The trouble with atheists: a defence of faith.

Philosopher's Beard: Economics for ethics Ethicists think economists are clumsy buffoons with an impoverished view of human nature and morality, obsessed with incentives and markets as the answer to everything. Economists think ethicists are obsessed with discovering mystical intrinsic values, at the expense of systematically thinking through their real world relevance. These are caricatures with some truth to them. But to the extent that they prevent ethicists and economists from taking each other seriously, they block the real scope for mutual learning.