I’m not going to write a real post about this. Erik Voeten at The Monkey Cage has basically said all there is to say. Go read and comment there.

To be held at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands
On Thursday, July 1st, 2010 from 9.30-17.30.

Speakers:

Ann Cudd (University of Kansas, USA): Commitment and Explanation: Sen’s Philosophy of Social Science

Mozaffar Qizilbash (York University, UK, and Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan): Amartya Sen’s Criticisms of Utilitarianism

Henry S. Richardson (Georgetown University, Washington, USA): Mapping out Improvements in Justice: Comparing vs. Aiming

Ingrid Robeyns (Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands): Equality of Root Capability

Amartya Sen (Harvard University, USA): Discussion

This symposium is aimed at philosophers, or other scholars with a philosophical background, and with an expertise or a strong interest in the work of Amartya Sen. The registration fee is 35 Euro and includes coffee and lunch. A reduced registration fee (20 Euro) is available for Master students and PhD students/scholars without a wage or bursary. For registration, please contact Roebin Lijnis Huffenreuter at Sensymposium at fwb.eur.nl, who will provide the details of further registration and all other practical information. Please note that the number of participants is limited.

On Wednesday 30th of June, at 4.30 pm, Amartya Sen will give a public lecture, entitled ‘On Global Justice’, in the Aula of the Campus Woudestein at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. This lecture is aimed at a broad audience. Attendance is free and open to all interested, and reservations are neither needed nor possible. Doors open at 4.10 pm. Directions to Campus Woudestein can be found here

For any practical questions regarding the symposium, e-mail Roebin Lijnis Huffenreuter at sensymposium at fwb.eur.nl
For other questions regarding these events, contact Ingrid Robeyns at robeyns at fwb.eur.nl

Both events are organized by the Faculty of Philosophy of the Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics (EIPE).

I think this is a great loss for the social-democratic party, a great loss for Dutch politics and public life, but an amazing supporting signal for the kind of feminist movement which I endorse. A top male politicians says: “Enough. I don’t want to have children and a wife whom I never see.” And he uses the right word: “major responsibility”, not just something he fancies doing. His decision will serve to an increasing acceptance that both men and women are entitled to combine having a family with doing paid work – even if this implies that they need to quit a top position.

I’ve seen many short interviews today with other Dutch politicians and other public figures. And it’s interesting that most of them said they “understood” his decision, adding that he made enormous sacrifices to his family life in the last years. Of course, it is likely that other motives played a role too – but I don’t see any serious grounds for doubting his official reason as being the main reason for his decision. When about six years ago, he was ‘merely’ an MP (and not yet a Minister of Finance), he choose to use his legal right to parental leave and thus was home with his baby one day a week. I therefore think that the few public figures who have today said that his was just ‘an excuse’ and that he should give his ‘real reasons’ for quiting politics are wrong and should be deeply ashamed of themselves. If a woman were to give ‘time for family’ as the reason we would believe her; if a man, who earlier on in his political life took parental leave, gives the same reason, we should similarly believe him. Anything else would be wrong and sexist. I hope he and his kids will enjoy the time together.

This picture is taken in the suburbs of Utrecht, which is one of the four ‘big’ Dutch cities (big by Dutch standards, of course). I’m not going to translate this – that would spoil the fun of guessing!

I don’t think we’ve discussed her work here on CT before, which is a shame, really, since her book What Children Need is an excellent book on the topic of its title. The book focuses especially on the question what children from working parents need. How can we make sure that the care that children get when their parents have to work is good enough?
It is quite difficult to find a balanced overview of discussions related to these issues, since many people have strong opinions. What I liked so much about Waldfogel’s book, is that she doesn’t try to come up with a one-sentence simplistic view, such as “children are better off in parental care until they are three” or “children under one should never be in daycare, since this will harm them.” Instead, she points out the different aspects at work – for example, that extending parental leave has beneficial effects on children up to one year, but that extending it for longer has not shown to have any effects, and has harmful effects for women as workers; that the problem with non-parental child care under the age of one are related to it being full-time and the care being of low quality, which in combination with insensitive parental care may lead to bad health and behavioural outcomes for children; but that the higher income of working mothers may offset some of these effects. What I found especially enlightening in her chapter on infants, is the importance of the quality of parental care for the effects of nonparental care; if parents are sensitive caregivers, then the children do much better in nonparental care. Also interesting, but not surprising, was her conclusion that we don’t know anything about the effects of working fathers on infants, since this has not been studied.

Waldfogel also discusses what older children need, like after school programmes which will keep them off the street in case there is no-one to care for them after school. She argues, convincingly in my view, that if we want the needs of children to be adequately met, that we need the following policies (I copy them from the book): allowing parents more flexibility to take off time for family responsibilities; break the link between the employment and essential family benefits, such as health insurance; give mothers and fathers the opportunity to spend more time at home in a child’s first year of life; improve the quality of care for infants and toddlers; improve the quality of care and education for preschool-aged children; increase access to high-quality out-of-school programs for school-aged children and teenagers; and increase the role of the schools by extending the school day and year.

I think all of this make eminently sense and looking at European states shows us that this is not financially impossible, as long as the political community is willing to invest money in children and their future. And that is probably where, for the US at least, the problem lies, since the government is too often not perceived as enabling opportunities and supporting vulnerable people (such as children) but rather as getting into the way of families.

My only quibble with the book is that it separates the agenda of what we need for children and families, from the agenda how to create a more gender just world. I can see that for political-strategic reasons it may be wise to separate the two; but if the children’s agenda is implemented without thinking about how this will work out for the gender constellation, it may have unintended negative effects on that front.

In any case, highly recommended for anyone interested in thinking about policy making for children and the family.

But despite time shortage, one thing I am happy to throw in cyberspace is a prediction that this will not be good for Belgium. Not a very hard-to-make prediction indeed. In the last years I’ve blogged here, once in a while, on the political instability of Belgian politics, indeed perhaps even the instability of the very future of Belgium; and Van Rompuy seemed to have been the only one able to bring calm back, and at least lead a more-or-less functioning government. His professional skills and talents in making compromises in extremely difficult situations will certainly be very useful in Babylonian Europe; but who will rescue Belgium? How long will it take for the Belgian government to have a new PM, and is there anyone to be found with the same authority that Van Rompuy has been able to command? Tonight Belgium will celebrate that this little country has been able to achieve something powerful, but tomorrow it will wake up with headackes…

As far as I am concerned, the firing by the University is an independent matter. The university authorities could have kept him even if the City council fired him. But they decided not to do so. The grounds which they give is that by working for Press TV, a broadcasting company funded by Iran, he was legitimising the oppressive authoritarian Iranian regime, independent of his intentions, and independent of the actual content of the talk show he was hosting on Press TV. They fired Ramadan two days after they found out that he worked for Press TV. In an interview with Dutch TV, professor Lamberts, who represents the university authorities, said that they did not want to wait 3 weeks till Ramadan came back from holidays and had time to discuss the matter with them. The university authorities fell there was an urgency – an urgency that Ramadan didn’t acknowledge (he was unwilling to interrupt his holidays to go to Rotterdam to discuss these matters). Lamberts said that the university wanted to give a clear signal that Ramadan’s work for Press TV was morally incompatible with his affiliation at the university. There are several Dutch news shows on this affair, with this NOVA programme probably being the most instructive – those of you who understand Dutch can watch the first 7.36 minutes where the university authorities defend themselves; Ramadan responds to the whole affaire in English from 7.36-17.05 minutes.

So I think there are (at least) two questions to be asked: (1) was Ramadan legitimising the Iranian brutalities by continuing to work for Press TV after the bloodsheds in April? (2) Is doing work that is (directly or indirectly) paid by an oppressive regime a sufficient reason to fire someone on the spot? The university authorities answered ‘yes’ to both questions. But is this the only possible way to judge this case?

I doubt it. I have two concerns: the danger of using the notion of ‘legitimacy’ as a valid ground to fire someone, and the failure by the university authorities to recognise the ‘dirty hands’ character of Ramadan’s situation.

The notion that legitimising an oppressive regime is enough to fire someone on the spot can be quite a dangerous principle, since who is to decide when one is legitimising an oppressive regime? Is my university legitimising the Chinese government (which is also violating human rights on a large scale) by supporting student and staff exchanges with Chinese universities? ‘Legitimising’ is such a subjective notion, that one would need to be vary careful before concluding that someone is legitimising an unacceptable actor and its unacceptable behaviour. Only when there is very little evidence for alternative interpretations, could one draw this conclusion.

So, is Ramadan, by working for Press TV, where he claims that he can work independently and is not censured, legitimising the killing and oppressing of the demonstrators? I don’t see how this necessarily follows. It would follow if he would make claims in support of the Iranian rulers in his programme on Press TV, called Islam and Life. Yet I watched a few of these programmes, and did not see anything in this category. On the contrary, what I saw was a very careful, and often indirect, putting on the table of topics that are not openly debated in all sections of Islam. Ramadan has said in interviews that he has repeatedly condemned the brutalities by the Iranian rulers, and that one shouldn’t forget that the Iranian regime is not homogenous and thus one should try to support the democratic and more liberal streams within it. In an interview he gave the day after he was fired on Dutch TV, he said that he was trying to create openings, open up space; that was indeed what I saw in his shows. Reform from within, so to speak. Admittedly, he has to discuss ‘liberal’ topics in a very indirect way, but what if that is the only way to start making any changes? It is a very pragmatic approach, but what other approach is there? Forcing new ideas on people doesn’t work; one has to gradually open up debate to make things first debatable – one step at the time get the ideas out of the taboo sphere into the sphere where it is debatable, then into the sphere where one tolerates certain views and ideas, and, perhaps, finally move it into the sphere where people will accept the ideas. But jumping from taboos to forced toleration or to forced endorsement doesn’t work, since socio-cultural change has to start from within.

If the claim that pragmatism is the only viable strategy is true, or at least one very important strategy that we cannot do without, then it implies that anyone who wants to work on social change in morally difficult circumstances will often get dirty hands. I think this is precisely what happened to Ramadan. His decision to work for Press TV can be explained as using a powerful media that was offered to him for trying to open up discursive space for social change. He could use the air-time he had with Press TV to contribute to reforming Islam; and when the Iranian regime committed the bloodshed, he had to choose between two evils – either giving up his airtime and thus his media-power to work on social change, or else to run the risk of legitimising an oppressive regime. The University authorities, on the other hand, have not acknowledged the possible ‘dirty hands’ character of Ramadan’s situation, and have not given Ramadan the benefit of the doubt. Quite to the contrary, they have said that there cannot be any doubt that continuing to work for Press TV after the bloodsheds on the Iranian streets is unacceptable since it legitimises these brutalities and the regime, independent of Ramadan’s intentions.

The university authorities do have another argument to their defence, though – but again I think it is playing the legal card and is not a very strong argument. They have argued that according to university regulations, each academic staff member has to declare their public activities outside the university, whether remunerated or not. I think that for paid staff this is a fair and good rule. But for guest professors, or ‘extra-ordinary’ professors who work (paid or unpaid) for one day a week sponsored by a company or organisation (religious or otherwise), this seems an unacceptable requirement. Through these ‘extra-ordinary professorships’ the university gets some extra funds and/or free teaching, and a company or organisation gets (more) research or teaching in their area of interest. Since they generally work only one day a week for the university, and are not always paid for that work, it seems unfair to me to put the same requirements on these people. In any case, it is very likely that a significant number of full professors at the Erasmus University do not declare to their deans all their non-university public activities; so if this were the only reason left to fire Ramadan, then (a) it would be hugely out of proportion, and (b) we could fire a significant percentage of the University staff.

Note that nothing in my argument has ruled out that Ramadan has written horrible things. But if that’s the case, than either he should not have been hired by the City Council and offered a guestprofessorship by the University in the first place, or else he should be fired because he himself has unacceptable views that conflicts with human rights and democratic principles or the Dutch constitutions or something similar. But that’s not the reason that has been given. Quite to the contrary, the University has stated that he has done excellent work as a professor.

Ramadan is gone, there has been a public meeting in the university where the University authorities restated and confirmed their views and the critics (which include virtually all academic staff and student who spoke up) could voice their protests and arguments, and then… all went back to normal. At least, that’s how it looks like on the surface. But if my analysis is right, then this affair should really trouble us deeply. If one can get fired on such weak grounds, and if it is not recognised that academics too sometimes are confronted with dirty hands dilemmas, then which professor with inconvenient views will be next?

Sometimes you make a picture that you feel like sharing. Quiet Sundays are a good time to do so. Here’s one. It’s a wall painting, taken in a small street in Utrecht, with a row of bicycles in front of the wall painting. I love wall paintings – I prefer poetry on walls and windows rather than in libraries, and art outside in public spaces rather than in musea (the metal flowers carved in the pavement around St. John’s College in Cambridge are another example that makes me happy). Enjoy.

According to the Dutch-language Belgian newspaper De Standaard, Belgian politicians have decided that the best qualified candidate for the position to lead the Belgian National Office for Pensions will not be appointed. The reason? He is Dutch-speaking, and it was decided that appointing him would bring the balance of francophone versus Dutch speaking high office public servants in danger.

Strictly speaking this is not the case, since the official parity rule (that the positions of General Director are 50/50 split between the Flemish and francophone language groups) is respected. But apparently if one takes the Adjunct-General Directors of all Belgian Departments and Offices into account, a francophone needs to be appointed in order to have a 50/50 balance at these two levels taken together.

The obvious solution would be to require all top-level public officials to be bilingual, as private firms in Belgium tend to do too; but apparently a proposal to that effect in a major set of federal reforms in 2000 didn’t pass.

Apart from the obvious comment that 50/50 may not be needed since the Belgian population is not 50/50 francophone/Flemish but rather roughly 40/60, it is simply mindblowing that such an important position in a crucial welfare state institution is not given to the best qualified person. Surely the financial sustainability of the state pensions must matter to francophones as much as to the Flemish, so they have an equal stake in the best person making sure that the system remains viable. No francophone candidate passed the selection procedures, so the solution one has chosen for is to start searching again, and only francophone candidates can apply.

I tried to search in francophone Belgian newspapers (Le Soir, La Libre Belgique, la Derniere Heure) to read the views ‘from the other side’. I couldn’t find a single mentioning to this affair. No surprise that the two language communities have such different understandings of the eternal Belgian political crisis if such news is only reported in one part of the country.

The Faculty of Philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, where I teach, has a Research Master in Philosophy and Economics. In the Netherlands, and I suppose all over the EU, Research Masters are postgraduate programmes similar to the British MPhil system – a 2 years master programme resulting in a shorter PhD track for those who continue. My contribution to the programme is to teach the economic issues within normative political philosophy. This year I thought a course on Justice and Egalitarianism, yet I’ve decided that I want to rotate that course with a course that’s (even) more focused on economic questions, hence something like ‘Ethics and Economics’.

Despite having Masterdegrees in both economics and philosophy, I have never had a course in Ethics and Economics myself. And despite having studied at four universities in three European countries, I cannot recall ever having been at a university where a course on Ethics and Economics was offered, certainly not an entire graduate course. And in contrast to ‘Justice and Egalitarianism’, where google provides within one hour at least a dozen different course outlines which may be used as sources of inspiration or as reminders of papers one had long forgotten about but should indeed be on the reading list, this is not the case for ‘Ethics and Economics’. I have a number of ideas, but it does feel like starting more or less from scratch (which, I must admit, is in a certain way also a pleasantly adventurous feeling).

So this brings me to two questions. First, if anyone has, at a graduate level, taught a course on Ethics and Economics, and would like to share information or experiences, than that would be brilliant and much appreciated. A more modest question is about books. I want to fill in the gaps in our University library, so that students taking this course will have all the books they need to write a term paper on a topic of their choice. In general I’m not ordering books that belong to history of economic thought since that’s been taken care of by our professor in the history of economic thought. I have already ordered many books, mainly based on literature that I already knew and references taken from relevant entries at the Stanford Encyclopedia, but more book references are also very welcome. Self-promotion is encouraged, if on-topic. I will merge all that I already have together with new suggestions, and post them as a separate post next week, which should hopefully be useful for any philosopher (or philosophically-inclined economist) setting up a new course or starting research in Ethics and Economics.

Here’s one. A few weeks back I joined the Friends of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). For philosophers, but also for other academics or thinkers/writers/readers who sometimes want to check out a philosophical theory, term, subfield or canonical thinker, this is a true gift. I use it in my teaching and have so far only had positive remarks from students. The SEP contains high quality refereed entries, generally well-written and enlightening, and always freely available to anybody on Earth with access to the internet. Anybody supporting the Open Access movement, or anybody seriously concerned about educational equality of opportunity on a global level, should therefore support the SEP if they can (the membership fees are $5 for students and $10 or 25 for professionals – much less than the fees of most academic associations). So now there is an easy way to support the SEP, and you’ll get something in return for your membership – nicely formatted PDFs of the entries. I hope many thousands worldwide will join, and that the people working hard at creating and maintaining the SEP will take it as a big ‘thank you’ for their work.

There is now empirical evidence supporting this line of reasoning, coming from Namibia, where in 2004 a coalition of churches, trade unions, NGOs and AIDS organisations decided to run a pilot project to figure out what a small BIG would do to the lives of the extreme poor.

The BIG Coalition raised money which allows them to give a BIG of 100 Namibian Dollars to each individual which was registered in July 2007 as living in the Otjivero-Omitara area, about 100 kilometres east of Windhoek (pensioners were excluded as they get an unconditional state pension). The amount is small, since the food poverty line stands at 152 Namibian dollars per capita, whereas the poverty line counting “the severely poor” stands at 220, and the official poor are all those living on less than 316 Namibian dollars per month.

As the study of the effects of the BIG after one year clearly demonstrate, the effects are strikingly positive. The percentage of those falling below the food poverty line has dropped from 76% to 37%. The percentage of those being able to get a job or become successfully self-employed has increased from 44 to 55%, and the amount of non-BIG income per capita rose from N$ 118 to N$ 152 (indicating a virtuous economic growth cycle). The number of underweight children has dropped from 42 to 10%. School attendance has gone up, and teachers report that the children are better able to concentrate. The health clinic receives many more patients (for illnesses that would otherwise not have been treated). Average household debt fell from N$ 1,215 to N$ 772. Crime rates fell by 42%, and there is no evidence that alcohol-abuse (which is a serious problem in many poor areas) has worsened. (Further details are in the report, together with interviews documenting the experiences of the people who have been given the BIG).

The authors claim that the funds needed to implement this across Namibia could be raised within the existing fiscal constraints, and that thus the only remaining question is one of political will. To me their story made complete sense and I found the empirical evidence compelling. Yet am I overlooking something? Some to-be-expected unintended negative consequences when this would be implemented on a larger scale, for example?

Here’s an example. In the Netherlands there is no distinction between research-intense and other universities. With a few exceptions, every university lecturer is also supposed to be an active researcher (we do not make the distinction between those who do research, and those who teach, except for people who are hired as postdocs for projects). Where I am based (faculty of philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam), a standard teaching load for someone with a full time appointment is 4 courses a year. Most courses are 10 weeks, 2 hours a week; graduate courses are 15 weeks. All teaching staff supervise a few (roughly 3-5) BA and one or two MA dissertations annually, and mark an equal number of dissertations supervised by others. Class size varies between 10 students (MA courses) and about 100 students (some first year courses). We tend not to have teaching assistants, hence all the marking of essays/exams, course preparation, etc. is done by the teachers (there are rare exceptions to this rule). PhD ‘students’ are not regarded as students but as staff, and in any case most lecturers supervise one or two of them, with a few professors supervising half a dozen. I’d be curious finding out where this load is situated on an international and interdisciplinary comparison. My suspicion is that it’s an average load, but I may well be wrong.