Elizabeth Holmes: Scamming Silicon Valley In 1996, I published an article in the Ohio State Law Library on “vaporware” in Silicon Valley. Vaporware is the marketing ploy of preannouncing products that do not yet exist and may never come into existence in their described form. This was a common marketing practice in Silicon Valley at the time, but it carried […] View
Doing the Crime, Not the Time Recently a fired employee at my university, UT-Austin, was arrested and charged with six counts of tampering with government records (his time sheets) as law enforcement officials investigated him for fraud. It appears that Jason Shoumaker often claimed pay for hours worked in his job as a facilities director at the University of Texas School […] View
Sinking in the Swamp There’s been a lot of talk about draining the swamp recently, but not a lot of swamp is getting drained. According to our Ethics Defined video, “[c]orruption is the abuse of power or position for personal gain.” In behavior that could not be swampier, Steve Cohen, the president’s “personal attorney,” has, according to Fox News […] View
The Cost of the Libor Lies I just finished reading The Spider Network by David Enrich. It’s the story of the Libor-rigging scandal, by some people’s lights the biggest financial fraud in history. Just to remind you, Libor is the London Interbank Offered Rate. Libor was supposedly being set by many participant banks sending to a central authority their cost of […] View
Business Ethics Makes the Business I recently finished reading Professor Francis J. Schweigert’s Business Ethics Education and the Pragmatic Pursuit of the Good (2016). I commend this book to your attention. The book is an argument “that business schools should incorporate education for justice into their business and management curriculum as the pragmatic pursuit of the good. This argument is […] View
Political Party Foul: Trump & Mueller Affiliates The New York Times reported on Friday (1/26/18) that last June President Trump wanted to fire special counsel Robert Mueller but was thwarted when his attorney Don McGahn threatened to resign rather than carry out such an order. Although the newspaper’s reporting on the so-called Russia investigation has generally been proved accurate, I do not […] View
Adding Meaning Equals Happiness Recently I have used this space to report on new and interesting books I had read and I do so again. Although most of my blog posts are behavioral ethics-themed, because that is my key interest and most of our Ethics Unwrapped videos are related to behavioral ethics, I am ranging farther afield today to […] View
Cognitive Dissonance and the Case of the Unindicted Co-ejaculator I just read a very scary book, Mark Godsey’s Blind Injustice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes the Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Conviction (2017). I’ve written the script for an Ethics Unwrapped video on cognitive dissonance that we have not yet had an opportunity to film. However, the concept clearly has much to do with ethical […] View
Lessons from Wakey-Leaks My wife often tells people that there is nothing that I enjoy more than watching men argue with other men about sports. Therefore, I greatly enjoy ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption” (PTI) with Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon. Both men are funny, passionate, and knowledgeable, though Kornheiser has the great misfortune of resembling me physically. On […] View
Let’s Stop the Self-Inflicted Moral Wounds The front page of the New York Times (Austin edition) on Wednesday, October 11 was particularly depressing. The stories on California’s fires and Puerto Rico’s post-Maria suffering were brutal enough. Depending on your views regarding climate change, you may or may not believe that humans played a role in the severity of those events. But […] View