Richard P Phelps

Two outstanding situations sometimes warrant government intervention in the marketplace. First, “natural monopoly” providers, such as public utilities, would charge all the market could bear without government regulation. Second, unprofitable markets, such as those for orphan drugs and certain types of research and development, would not exist to meet certain public needs absent government subsidies or donor contributions.

Average course grades tend to be lower in some college subjects than others. Engineering and the “hard” sciences, for example, retain reputations for being “harder” subjects than the humanities and social sciences, even though a naïve observer could just as well assume that students in the latter subjects are smarter. Do score-average comparisons really matter, though, in practical terms? After college, most graduates will be compared to one another from within their chosen fields.

I was once required to testify in a court case. My lawyer gave me a few pieces of advice, but he repeated one  several times, which may be why I remember it. “Never say never,” he said. Or, conversely, never say always. Declarations of absolutes present opposing attorneys too wide an opening. They need to identify only a single example to contradict. In trial courts, one cannot get away with making reckless absolutist claims unchallenged. In academic scholarship, however, it happens all the time.