Man does not live by long Hayek posts alone!

Take this TLS piece on Frankenstein (via Andrew Sullivan). I love this stuff. I haven’t read the books being reviewed, but differences between the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein are a hobbyhorse of mine. It started with my interest in the history of sf, and the interesting way in which Shelley invented the genre, then un-invented it by rewriting the book to be less sf. Funny sort of backtrack. But that’s far from being the weirdest thing about the book. [click to continue…]

I’m a bit late, responding to Corey’s ‘Nietzsche’s Marginal Children’ essay (and post). But here goes.

In this post I will say what I think is right about Corey’s basic thesis. We can then – if you like – argue the degree to which I’m agreeing with what Corey actually said, or maybe substituting something that’s more my own, but clearly in the same vicinity, conclusion-wise. (We’ll be pretty tired by then, however. Long post.)

I know Nietzsche well, Hayek well enough – The Constitution of Liberty, in particular – and the rest of the marginalists not well at all. So this is going to be a Hayek-Nietzsche post.

The proper way to put the Nietzsche-Hayek ‘elective affinity’ thesis – that is a good term for it – is going to sound weak and disappointingly loose. But it’s actually interesting. Showing the interest, despite the looseness, is where it gets a bit tricky. [click to continue…]

I recently wrote a short ‘comment’ for the American Journal of Bioethics. The piece is 1788 words long, the names and affiliations of my co-author and myself included. So that will make for 3, perhaps 4 printed pages, right? Now, Taylor and Francis, the publisher of the AJoBE offered the possibility to make this piece Open Access. Price: $2,950. I say: ridiculous. One of my colleagues said: Obscene. Sure, you might say, but they need to pay the editorial office who guards the refereeing proces of the target article to which we respond. But who did the refereeing? Indeed: two (or three) scholars, for free. And where does the net profit of all this goes? Right, not to the author, not to the referees, not to the universities, not to the taxpayers in the case of publically funded research. I know it’s practically very difficult to boycot this commercial Open Access model, but my little revenge will be in making some free advertisement below for two wonderful Open Access initiatives.

The best news from the open access front that reached my desk is that Open Book Publishers, the Cambridge(UK)-based open access publisher (where – full disclosure- I also have a book under contract), has published its first philosophy book. And not just any philosophy book, but a book by the very eminent philosopher David Velleman, called Foundations for Moral Relativism. As with the other books published by Open Book Publishers, it can be read online for free, or bought as a PDF for a few pounds or bought at a low price as a bounded copy via print-on-demand. I love this model, and perhaps should go off the internet completely until I’ve finished my own book that will also be open access. In fact, if I can raise 3500 UK Pounds, I can make the PDF available for free too. I think that’s a much better way to spend (public) funds than $ 2950 for a 3 or 4 page piece.

But equally good news comes from Axel Gosseries and Yannick Vanderborght, who published a year ago a Festschrift for Philippe Van Parijs, called Arguing about Justice. The book was published in paperback by the Presses Universitaires de Louvain, and now, one year later, is available online, here or here. At a conference a few weeks ago, Axel said that this is what he negotiated with the publisher when they published the book with them a while ago. So that’s an Open Access model too—individual negotiation – that some of us can consider to pursue. In any case, the Van Parijs Festschrift has lots of interesting and provocative pieces, well worth browsing and subsequent reading. Enjoy!

Marianne Ferber died a few days ago, at age 90. Ferber was one of the founding feminist economists. There is a nice Obit by Frances Woolley here.

I remember Marianne from the IAFFE conferences that I visited as a grad student. One of the most striking memories I have about her is how she would, despite her seniority and fame/status in the field, talk to anyone – indeed, perhaps she even looked out for those who were young or new to the feminist economic community – a virtue one does not always see among the most senior/famous people in a field, and which was definitely not my experience at other economic events. I also remember some of our conversations – how courageously she was in thinking independently and fearlessly and taking the analysis where the argument goes, rather than where the model forces you to stop. As for other women of her age, you can only dream of how she could have been even much more influential if she had been given the same opportunities as men of her generation.

Marianne Ferber will be much missed, not only by her family and friends, but by everyone in the feminist economics community.

Throat-clearing:

1.

Never respond to reviews, they tell you, in the fiction-writing community, or at least my little part of it. This is probably good prudential advice, but also in its way quite satisfying; self-effacing and self-aggrandizing at once, in a Delphic sort of way.  One adopts a posture of: lo, there it is, the book, it speaks for itself or doesn’t, if there was more to say the book would have said it.  They don’t let you get away with that sort of thing at the day job.  Anyway this is now so ingrained in me that it actually feels vaguely transgressive to write this, like standing up to object at a wedding.

2. 

I am of course tremendously grateful to all of these very smart and thoughtful and talented writers for expending so much of their smarts and thoughtfulness on my books about Evil Trains; with particular gratitude to Henry Farrell for putting this together.  There’s more here than I can possibly respond to, and many interesting ideas that I need to spend more time thinking about.

3.

All the posters may well have read these books more recently than I have, certainly the first one, which is now ancient from my perspective; plus, they remember only the books that were actually written, whereas I also have in my head all the things that got cut, or were meant to go in but for one reason or another didn’t, and thousands of changes of mind.  It’s very strange to go back to them.

4.

Spoilers. [click to continue...]

A kind of coda and suggestion for future work regarding Corey’s essay on the links between Nietzschian thought and modern economics. In one respect, I’d ask whether there may be stronger connections than Corey suggests. In particular, I can’t help wondering whether Max Weber might be an interesting vector of contagion. His more sociologically inflected account of the economy clearly had great influence on the Austrians whom Corey is interested in, but his later work, especially Politics as a Vocation, has strong and explicit Nietzschian overtones. However, for Weber, politics rather than the market is the “theater of self-disclosure, the stage upon which we discover and reveal our ultimate ends.” His heroes are politicians, who attach themselves to an end, follow a particular god despite that end’s radical contingency – the value of politics is that it provides a ground in which these very few individuals can fully develop themselves through struggle with others holding equally strongly to other gods who are equally contingent.

Weber’s political aristocracy, however, has little directly to do with the actual aristocracy of German politics in the early twentieth century, despite his right wing views. It’s clear that those on the left, as well as those conventionally subject to contempt as journalists and scribblers can be as heroic as those on the right, as long as they recognize and embrace the paradoxes of political action. It seems to me at least possible that this account might have served as a bridge, through which Nietzschian influences might have escaped into economic thought. If this were so, though, it would suggest that the key was not marginalism, so much as a very particular interpretation of marginalism by Austrians, whose relationship to mainstream economics has always been rather awkward.
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Mash-ups are everywhere these days: zombies keep finding their way into historical novels, and softcore porn into Jane Eyre. Making genres and modes collide is hardly a new thing; what is Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, after all, but dear rational Sherlock Holmes startled to find himself set loose in Bronte-esque Gothic? But Holmes vanquishes his Gothic surroundings, so that we are all back on familiar, if not entirely comforting (poor Sir Henry Baskerville…) formula territory at the end. By contrast, the vogue for zombified historical novels, vampirized Austen, and sexed-up Dickens doesn’t resolve the conflicts between genres and modes so much as play them up for all their worth: yes, ladies and gentlemen, honest Abe hunted vampires. [click to continue...]

In The Rise of Ransom City, Felix Gilman attempts a couple of tricks one really shouldn’t try at home. First, he shows rather than tells how history is made by economics, politics and changes in popular belief, not the bravery of heroes. Second, he keeps much of the plot-driving action off-stage. The narrator Harry Ransom is a charismatic storyteller with a knack for coming close to the action but never quite bending it to his will. He says at the outset that he’s changed history four times. But when he explains how, you realize Ransom’s usually a part of someone else’s plan or that it’s something he failed to do that changes how things turn out. It’s all quite subtly done and my first read-through was spent in a fog of mild frustration. It wasn’t until I realized that Ransom is more Forrest Gump than secret agent that I started to get along with this book.
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This is, in a silly way, a footnote to my previous Kevin Williamson post, but, more seriously, to my contribution to our Erik Olin Wright event. In my post on Wright I remarked that, in a sense, he’s pushing against an open door: he wants Americans, who think ‘socialism’ is a dirty word, to be more open to utopian thinking. The problem, I pointed out, is that thinking ‘socialism’ is a dirty word is positively, not negatively, correlated with utopianism, because conservatives are, typically, very utopian, especially in their rhetoric – more so than socialists these days; certainly more so than liberals. Wright responded that his project “is not mainly directed at ideologically committed Conservatives whose core values support the power and privilege of dominant classes. The core audience is people who are loosely sympathetic to some mix of liberal egalitarian, radical democratic and communitarian ideals.” [click to continue…]

There's been a lot of excitement about the discovery of two Earth-like[^1] planets, a mere 1200 light years away. Pretty soon, I guess, we'll be thinking about sending colonists. So, I thought it might be worthwhile to a little bit of arithmetic on the exercise.

I'm going to assume (generously, I think) that the minimum size for a successful colony is 10 000. The only experience we have is the Apollo program, which transported 12 astronauts to the Moon (a distance of 1 light second) at a cost of $100 billion or so (current values). So, assuming linear scaling (again, very generously, given the need to accelerate to near lightspeed), that's a cost of around $100 trillion per light-second for 10 000 people. 1200 light-years is around 30 billion light-seconds, so the total cost comes out roughly equal to the value of current world GDP accumulated over the life of the universe.

Even supposing that technological advances made travel possible over such distances possible, why would we bother. By hypothesis, that would require the ability to live in interstellar space for thousands of years. A civilisation with that ability would have no need of planets.

On behalf of my fellow Australians, I'm going to make a counter-offer. For a mere $10 trillion, we can find you an area of land larger than a typical European country, almost certainly more habitable than the new planets, and much closer. We'll do all the work of supplying water and air, build 10 000 mansions for the inhabitants and guarantee a lifetime supply of food. I'm hoping for a spotters fee of 0.01 per cent.

On a related point, what should we be wishing for here? The fact that no-one has sent a detectable signal in our direction suggests that intelligent life forms similar to humans are very rare. If habitable planets are very rare, then this is unsurprising - interstellar distances preclude both travel and any kind of two-way communication. If on the other hand, the emergence of intelligent life is common, then the evidence suggests that its disappearance, through processes like nuclear war, must also be common.

[^1] Where Earth-like means somewhere between Venus-like and Mars-like.

I like the Los Angeles Review of Books quite a lot. I’ve given them real, actual money. But this article by James Harkin on Marx and public choice theory is, to put it plainly, shit. Below the fold, a lengthy and repetitive diatribe, which I’m posting less because I think it will be especially entertaining to readers, than to do my little bit to discourage others from writing similar articles in the future. Also, perhaps it might get LARB to rethink their quality filters.Taking various claims stated by the argument in turn …
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So much of the discourse around the US and genocide focuses on the sin of omission, the failure of the US to prevent or stop genocide elsewhere. Now that former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt has been found guilty of genocide and sentenced to 80 years in prison—a fact established by a UN truth commission in 1997 but often ignored in the literature on genocide and intervention, which tends to focus on Rwanda and Bosnia—perhaps we can attend to the sin of commission. For the US support for Rios Montt was extensive. I wrote about just a little of it in the London Review of Books in 2004:

On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. ‘Well, I learned a lot,’ he told reporters on Air Force One. ‘You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.’ It was also a useful meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him ‘a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy’, and claimed that the Guatemalan strongman was getting ‘a bum rap’ from human rights organisations for his military’s campaign against leftist guerrillas. The next day, one of Guatemala’s elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs, swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and umbilical cords on the ground.

The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City are tricky creatures. They object to being categorized. However much you might want to fix them to the corkboard (with a neatly typed label beneath, identifying species, and date and place of capture) they’re going to wriggle off their pins, if they haven’t already fluttered right back out of the killing jar. Books like this are not easily susceptible to chloroform.

The best I can do is to talk a bit about what they are not, and how (I think), they avoid a particular trap. Here, I disagree with Abigail Nussbaum, so you likely want to re-read her arguments again before you read mine. Also, I owe much of this to a long email conversation with Eleanor Arnason, (whom you emphatically shouldn’t hold responsible for what I say, though she equally emphatically deserves my gratitude). [click to continue...]

I know, I know, it’s just another of those ‘How many of you know that Saruman used to walk in the forest, a friend of the trees!’ posts by Kevin Williamson. (See also: Rand Paul at Howard.) But it’s the comments that get me, and make me sorry for all the times I’ve said, ‘A-ha! so there are two Confusatrons!’ rather than saving that line for a more special occasion.

To put it another way: the inability of conservatives to keep their alternative reality stories straight is inducing a kind of minority outreach-as-Crisis On Infinite Earths continuity collapse. There’s our world – call it Earth-1, or Nixonworld – in which Dems got better on civil rights in the 60’s, and Republicans got worse. The Southern Strategy. Then there’s Williamson’s World – sort of like Earth-3, a reverse earth. [click to continue…]