Here are some interesting articles I’ve come across recently, for your consideration:
Against economics: what the dismal science still gets wrong, despite all the evidence pointing away from its classic assumptions. (New York Review of Books)
The Fermi Paradox: ‘Fact A.’ [And one more example of the fact that talk of SETI is purely speculative, more a parlor game than a science.] (Medium)
Business education helps create a culture where the profit justifies the means. Business students learn about accounting techniques, but not enough about ethics. This is why corporate scandals persist. (Guardian)
Making a case for Cicero: was he the most influential writer of all time? (Medium)
It’s the era of the Twitter pile-on. Isn’t there something healthier we can do with our rage? After years of being told to ‘think positively’ we no longer know what to do with our negative feelings, so we blurt them out online. (Guardian)
Philosophy as a Way of Life
That said, I think there is a legit case to be made for behavioral economics. Of course, it does actual empirical studies.
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And, gack no on Cicero. The unknown writer of the Yahwhist, Muhammad or whomever took his dictation, St. Paul and the Buddha all come far, far in advance.
Even within philosophy, if we’re going to focus on Cicero the Stoic, no. Plato, Aristotle, Marcus within Stoics, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, and Marx in an intersection of economics (tho Marxism is pseudoscience even within economics) all are higher.
Within “Romana,” to invent a word, also no. Caesar would be first. Boethius could arguably be №2.
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On SETI, the Drake equations behind it and more, Paul Davies covered it in part in “The Eerie Science.” I briefly blogged about that, the questionable assumptions behind the “standard parameters” for many of the Drake equations’ variables and more here: https://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-on-why-drake-equation-is.html
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On Graeber? As with much that he writes, he has both good and bad points. A bad point? I think he’s wrong on Modern Monetary Theory, which I have elsewhere, based on the insight of left-liberal finance writer Doug Henwood, called a Maoist cult. https://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2019/03/mmt-is-maoism-or-new-ageism.html
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