Law and Econ Project, Update VIII

Well, three months have passed since I last recorded my progress to date and proclaimed my intended next steps. I have been busy with some other projects -- a trip abroad, moving house, being ill -- that have crowded out, to some extent, Law and Econ. The goals I previously set looking one week forward, however...

(1) to finish reading Museums Matter, by James Cuno; (2) to revise the first two chapters of the L&E manuscript; and (3) to produce a new version of "The Museum of Law and Economics"...

 ....have been accomplished, if not in one week, at least within three months. I managed to read, as hoped, The Upside of Irrationality, by Dan Ariely. I also wrote a new Conclusions section to the L&E manuscript, and have upgraded Chapter Five (on behavioral law and econ, essentially), along with slight revisions to the rest of the manuscript.

The next couple of months will involve producing a draft of a paper on Behavioral Economics and Drug Policy, so that also will cut into Law and Econ time. (I am thinking of reviving predecessor blog Five Drafts for the purpose of producing the new paper.) What I would like to do pretty soon, however (recall that the manuscript is supposed to be in continuous improvement mode), is to revise the Kaldor-Hicks and Wealth Maximization stuff in Chapter One in a pretty serious way, to think about revising the material on organ markets in light of Michael Sandel's book, What Money Can't Buy, and to print out a new, complete version of the manuscript. Not sure I have any Law and Econ reading I want to commit to, but I do hope to spend lots of time with Kaplow and Shavell's Fairness Versus Welfare -- a book that will help guide me, I think, in those envisioned Wealth Maximization changes in Chapter One.