Posner — Why the market needs supervision

Here’s a book that will relegate Judge Posner to be adjudged as  a sure fire liberal:
In “Catastrophe: Risk and Response” (2004), he took up the problem of low-probability, high-impact events. The financial meltdown certainly qualifies. In this compact and bracingly lucid volume, he offers a simple, but not simplistic, primer: “a concise, constructive, jargon- and [...]

An admonition to those who created/sold financial derivatives

Actually, this admonition applies to all who say they can deliver a future full of wealth:
See, I am against those who prophesy lying dreams, says the Lord, and who tell them, and who lead my people astray by their lies and their recklessness, when I did not send them or appoint them;  so they do [...]

Regulatory Transparency – will it change your behavior?

A relatively new policy tool, mandatory disclosure of infromation with a regulatory intent, is being proposed as a means to deal with the net neutrality issue.  In an article announcing Obama’s choice of Leibowitz as FTC chair,  Cnet reports:
On the issue of Net neutrality, Leibowitz stood out from his colleagues in June 2007 when the [...]

Internet Privacy – FTC worried self regulation not working

Lots of tangents from the story on new FTC study on industry policing and advertising their privacy policies:

FTC has two votes for regulation or legislation (doubts cast upon self regulation as a tool – public failure)
Study thinks companies make the information regarding their privacy policies too difficulty for the average person to find/comprehend (market failure [...]

Unintended Consequences of COPPA

Parry Aftab notes that when COPPA first became effective, a lot of children’s websites simply went away — assumingly because the owners could not manage or understand the COPPA requirements. And, for those that remain:
While the sites want to do the right thing, they are often adopting “do it yourself” methods that violate the law [...]

The word is “Data”

Stephen Baker of Newsweek, starts this week’s essay with the following line:
About three minutes into his speech on Jan. 20, President Barack Obama spoke a word never before uttered in a Presidential inauguration speech: “data.”.
The Obama campaign managed data like no other campaign before.  One would expect, and hope, that data, and the interpretation thereof, [...]

The word for this decade “information”

Yeah, plastic is definitely, definitely out.  Information is in.  Got any?  Want some?
Just as plastic raises concerns regarding negative environmental consequences, information raises, metaphorically speaking, similar environmental concerns as individuals and corporations stress over who controls access to information.
Health Care Information Technologies (HCIT) is an area that offers seemingly “low hanging fruit” in terms of [...]

Just because you model it wrong, doesn’t mean it failed

Do markets really fail, if the failure is really in the fact that the financial system had the wrong belief?  In other words, the market does note suffer a failure simply because the model you use to predict market performance is wrong.
Interesting essay in the NYT magazine today, which leads with:
Among the most astonishing statements [...]

Market Failure, Public Value Failure

When the two failures occur simulatanously, you have a serious problem.  See What you don’t know about a drug can hurt you in the WSJ.
“What’s happening in oncology is happening in all other fields of medicine,” says study co-author health economist Scott Ramsey at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who checked more [...]

Cybersecurity – Market Failure or Public Values Failure or both?

The Center for Strategic and International Studies is delivering a report, “Securing CyberSpace for the 44th President,” which notes, among other things, :
“We believe that cyberspace cannot be secured without regulation,”
The report, which offers guidance to the Obama administration, is a strong indictment of government and private industry efforts to secure cyberspace to date. “The [...]