In response to your question, where do I think I'm going with all this. I'll try to give you a few more thoughts ranging from a couple of details to the wildly abstract. So it best belongs under the "musings" category.

I really like all the stuff you're posting. It's exactly the sort of experimental mix I'd hoped you'd put together. It's got lots of variety. Some headlines, when they've got serious implications, like the withdrawal of NGOs from Iraq. The quotes on democracy both make a great set of points and are useful to have stuffed away in the "filing cabinet." And the set of pieces that ask fundamental questions on Iraq are excellent and deserve some followup, as I mentioned I'd give on the Posner piece.

Wondering what "neuroeconomics" is but afraid to ask? With the word floating around various posts, links and abstracts, it's getting a bit like nano-anything. Though a lot less ubiquitous.

Here finally is a great thumbnail -- not toooo cryptic, but not chapter-length. Courtesy Kevin McCabe at George Mason University who posts (infrequently) to his cleverly-named Neuroeconomics blog.

Neuroeconomics is an interdisciplinary research program with the goal of building a biological model of decision making in economic environments. Neuroeconomists ask, how does the embodied brain enable the mind (or groups of minds) to make economic decisions? By combining techniques from cognitive neuroscience and experimental economics we can now watch neural activity in real time, observe how this activity depends on the economic environment, and test hypotheses about how the emergent mind makes economic decisions. Neuroeconomics allows us to better understand both the wide range of heterogeneity in human behavior and the role of institutions as ordered extensions of our minds

Now that wasn't too painful was it?

All joking aside, the neural cognition metaphor is a potential breakthrough for social sciences more generally and economics especially. The vocabulary and metaphors we use are the basis of all explanatory narratives, from classical history to quantitative financial economics, regardless of whether our hypotheses are testable through experimental techniques. In turn, those narratives form the background against which we make decisions, from the most personal ways we choose to live our lives to the most public decisions of war and peace.    more »