Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol

A paternalistic attempt to make Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome rock formation safer for hikers may have paradoxically backfired. In 2010, Yosemite began to issue permits through a random lottery to visitors who wanted to scale the famed 2700-meter-high Half … Continue reading →

There have been many calls to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. But what if, instead of abolishing ICE, we considered a more modest political proposal? What if we just abolished E-Verify instead, a costly and ineffective … Continue reading →

Check out this excellent essay by Anastasia Berg and Jon Baskin. (Hat tip: The Amazing Tyler Cowen.) This essay hit close to home, for it explores the moral amd strategic dimensions of intellectual and scholarly discourse, exposes the sheer hypocrisy … Continue reading →

Our colleague Jason Waller, who teaches philosophy at Eastern Illinois University, provides a detailed description of and step-by-step guide to Robert Nozick’s influential “taxation is forced labor” argument in this fascinating book by Michael Bruce and Steven Barbone, editors, Just … Continue reading →

That is the title of my most recent work-in-progress, and it is available here via SSRN. Inspired by my friend and colleague Brian Frye’s frontal attack on plagiarism norms, especially his thought-provoking paper “Plagiarism is not a crime,” my work … Continue reading →

Check out this visualization of the world’s forests, courtesy of Esri (the Environmental Systems Research Institute), a supplier of geographic information system software and geodatabase management applications. There are no forests in Australia! More details here. (Hat tip: u/ochang1980.) (Happy … Continue reading →

I’m interrupting my self-imposed one-week exile from blogging to pose three questions to Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and “behavioral economics” at Duke University (You see, we finally got around to reading the revised and expanded edition of his … Continue reading →

Alas, we still have a long ways to go, as we’re only up to page 538. Also, please note: we will take the rest of May off and resume our blogging duties on Monday, June 3rd.