Apologies for neglect of the blog for the past month or so. I’ve been busy writing a pile of academic stuff. For those interested, I have a review in this month’s Literary Review of Canada: Trading Fair: The Slippery Slope of Industry Self-Regulation

I also wrote an academic piece on the 2008 financial crisis (yes, we are still picking over the bones), which is now on my academia site: Mistakes Were Made: The Role of Catallactic Bias in the Financial Crisis. This “catallactic bias” thing is a meme that I’m trying to make happen, so far without much success. The reference is to the term “catallaxy,” used by von Mises and Hayek to describe market orders. So if you take that stuff too seriously, you wind up suffering from catallactic bias… get it?

Finally, I gave a talk at Dartmouth last week, called “On the Scalability of Cooperative Structures,” that I’m really happy with, but it won’t be in the “working paper” stage for a while still. It’s basically a long response to G. A. Cohen’s little book Why Not Socialism? — embarassingly, I think by the time it’s done it may be longer than the book that it is responding to.

As for the blog, you may be seeing some posts in the near future from our newest member, Vasiliki Bednar, who is Associate Director of the Cities research program at the Martin Prosperity Institute (yes, across the street from my office — we’ll try not to be too Toronto-centric). Also, Idil Boran will be attending the Bonn Climate Change Conference in June and is promising reports. Finally, Catherine Dauvergne takes up her position as Dean of the Faculty of Law at UBC on July 1 (congratulations Catherine!), but insists that she wants to stay on here, just in case she has some non-dean related stuff she wants to get off her chest. Finally, Daniel Weinstock is suffering from a pinched nerve that makes it very difficult for him to type, but promises to be back once he gets that sorted.