Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

At the end of August I wrote here about Francesco Orsi's 2015 book, simply titled VALUE THEORY. Here is a quote from the book, from a chapter called "Personal Value." "The agent-relativized structure can make sense of a range of situations where we think it morally significant that the agent was involved. I need to repay my debt to my creditor, but I learn that I could help B repaying her higher debts to her creditors . But if I do this, I will be unable to pay my debts.... I have an overriding duty to repay my debt. According to agent-relative consequentialism, this is because repaying my debt is better relative to me than repaying others' debts. Analogous examples can be multiplied at will." This  makes sense to me. How sympathetic do we have to make B's distressed circumstances in order to release the agent relativity here? Of course, as Orsi also says, this must be understood with a "ceteris paribus" clause.  He doesn't expand...

Almost exactly four years ago, economist Paul Krugman wrote the following explanation of the difficulty in defining the money supply for purpose of monetarist analysis. I think it is worth the resurrection. Surely we don’t mean to identify money with pieces of green paper bearing portraits of dead presidents. Even Milton Friedman rejected that, more than half a century ago. For one thing, a lot of those pieces of green paper are pretty much inert — sitting outside the United States, in the hoards of drug dealers and such. For another, checking accounts are clearly a close substitute for cash in hand. Friedman and Schwartz dealt with this by proposing broader aggregates –M1, which adds checking accounts, and M2, which adds a broader range of deposits. And circa 1960 you could argue that those aggregates were good enough. But now we have a large shadow banking system, in which things like repo serve much the same function as deposits; M3 used to capture some of that, but...

This name only recent came across my cognitive radar: Todd Zywicki. He's a George Mason University Law school professor, with controversial views about insolvency and bankruptcy. Let's just make this a link farm. Here is his GMU page. Here's a page at Mercatus. He's on Facebook. But he came across my radar courtesy of CreditSlips . I find CreditSlips a valuable source of ideas for blogging and for more lucrative writing as well. Some of my work on Argentina was more-or-less directly inspired by Creditslips' coverageof that particular insolvency. So I'm inclined to pay attention when they kvetch. And here they are, kvetching about Zywicki. That is their latest Zywicki-jab. But as you'll see if you follow that link, CS and Z have a history. Here's a bit more of it. If you follow that, you'll see that it concerns a dispute over "interchange regulation" (regulation of the fees charged for the use of a credit or debt ca...