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.