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?

A string of them echoed Caplan’s argument that

From a labor market perspective, though, Quiggin’s incarceration adjustment would only make sense if you thought that most or all of the people in jail would be unemployed if they were released.

Caplan has missed my main point. I’m not suggesting that incarceration is disguised unemployment (though obviously it reduces measured unemployment). Rather, I’m saying that, like unemployment, incarceration should be regarded as a (bad) labor market outcome. If you want to evaluate the performance of the labor market, you need to look at both.

There’s nothing radical or leftist about this viewpoint: it’s one that is at least implicit in all economic models of the labor market of which I’m aware, and is most particularly explicit in that of the Chicago School*. Most of the crimes for which people are imprisoned in the US can be understood as reflecting economic choices which in turn are determined primarily by the labor market in which those choices are made. This is obviously true of property crime and drug dealing, and it’s true, directly or indirectly, of lots of violent crime as well. As Gary Becker put it (quoting from memory here) “a burglar is a burglar for the same reasons as I am a professor”. (You don’t have to buy Becker’s assumption that criminality is a “rational” choice, to agree that it is a choice and that choices reflect the attractiveness of the available options).

There’s plenty of statistical evidence from scholars like Glenn Loury to show that criminals, and particularly those who end up incarcerated, are drawn disproportionately from groups with bad labor market prospects: poor, disproportionately black, facing low wages and high risk of unemployment. But well-done case studies are often more convincing, so I’ll point to the Venkatesh study of Chicago drug dealers reported in Steve Levitt’s Freakonomics. Venkatesh found that most street dealers were making less than minimum wages, and were motivated by the very low probability of surviving to attain the only high-paying job realistically available to them, that of the local kingpin. Even more striking was the observation that, when gang members learned Venkatesh was a university professor, they approached him in the hope that he would be able to wangle them a job as a janitor – otherwise an ambitious, and probably unattainable aspiration.

The Chicago theory on which the case for flexible labor markets is based predicts that the lower is the return associated with the “outside options” of employment or reliance on social insurance, the higher will be the incentive to engage in crime as a way of making a living. The only way to offset this is to make crime still less attractive, or less feasible, through high rates of imprisonment and long prison terms. That is, other things equal, low wages and weak or non-existent unemployment benefit systems can be expected to lead to higher crime rates, higher rates of imprisonment of both. So, any consistent advocate of the Chicago theory should treat both incarceration rates and unemployment rates as labor market outcomes.

Unfortunately, as has been shown by the current debate, there’s not a lot of willingness to explore the logical implications of the Chicago line to a position that might undermine its policy conclusions. Loury has noted the destructive effects of imprisonment (in Chicago terms, it causes rapid depreciation of human capital). There’s no good reason a priori to suppose that a labor market in which wages are low and unemployed are treated badly will do better, when both unemployment and incarceration are taken into account than one with higher minimum wages and more generous social welfare.

So, I would argue, my interpretation of my bet with Bryan Caplan is the more relevant one in terms of policy evaluation. The proportion of bad labor market outcomes is better measured by the sum of unemployment** and incarceration (expressed as a proportion of the labour force) than by unemployment alone.

• Or maybe shmibertarian: as we saw during the Bush era lots of alleged libertarians are quite comfortable with extreme use of state power as long is doesn’t touch their bank balances. On the other side of the coin, I should note that the Cato Institute has done some very good work on this subject, including publishing this Glenn Loury piece.

** I’m leaving aside issues about the best definition of unemployment, underemployment and so on, which have been canvassed extensively in earlier discussion.

The average European unemployment rate for 2009-2018 (i.e., the next decade) will be at least 1 percentage point higher than U.S. unemployment rate. The bet will be resolved when Eurostat releases its final numbers for 2018.

I think the bet is fair, since unlike 1993, the EU-15 is starting ahead. Also, although EU geographical mobility is still much less than in the US, it has increased dramatically over the past fifteen years, and that is likely to continue, particularly if some countries recover from the current crisis faster than others.

Looking to the short term future, the big question is whether, as I argued recently, the EU system is characterized by lower variance than the US, which would suggest EU rates should be lower during the global recession. The alternative view is that the EU is just not as far into the cycle as the US and that the US will recover earlier and faster.

Thinking about the bet more generally, if you regard it as supporting the view that the proposition “in the long-term average US unemployment rates are about 1 percentage point lower than average EU-15 rates” is an even money bet, that has a number of implications.

First, since the EU-15 countries are quite disparate, this suggests that the US is likely to be, on average, around the middle of the pack of developed countries as regards unemployment rates (adding in non-EU countries like Japan and Australia wouldn’t change this much).

Second, although the US is middling on unemployment outcomes, it’s an outlier on a range of measures that have been presented as important in promoting high employment. In addition to higher geographical mobility, it has very low minimum wages (lower now in real terms than it was in the mid-1950s), very weak trade unions, almost no restrictions on hiring and firing, and very limited welfare benefits for unemployed workers*. It’s quite surprising, even to me, that all of these things should add up to a difference of only one percentage point in unemployment. In part, I suspect that these institutions create their own kind of dual labor force structure.

In political terms, it’s hard to see how the pressure to adopt “more flexible” * labour market institutions can be justified by reference to the US example. While lower unemployment is better, it’s hard to see why a country with a decent minimum wage, strong union movement and good social welfare systems would want to scrap those things to achieve a one percentage point reduction in unemployment.

• As far as I can determine, in most US states, childless adults who have exhausted their unemployment benefits (or were ineligible) don’t have any access to cash benefits, and aren’t, in general, eligible for Medicaid or even, in some cases, food stamps. Can someone confirm or correct my understanding?

If you have been reading public health blogs for a couple of years, you probably know, and miss, Confined Space, a blog about worker health and safety issues. If you don’t, you missed a great blog, the kind that really educates you about an issue that it’s hard for non-professionals to learn about otherwise. … Confined Space closed up shop a bit over a year ago when Jordan Barab, who wrote it, went to work for the House Education and Labor Committee. … From the Effect Measure post that I linked above, which is aptly titled “Miracle at OSHA”:

“Jordan Barab has been named Deputy Assistant Secretary for OSHA and until a permanent OSHA Director is named he will be Acting Assistant Secretary (i.e., OSHA Director) (…)If you go back through the archives of Confined Space you’ll find post after post taking the Bush administration OSHA to task for falling down on the job of protecting workers’ health. Now the hand that typed those posts will be running the agency. The bottom line here is that workers who would have died under the old regime will now live. Mirabile dictu!”

Indeed.

I’m probably not breaking any news if I tell you that American business really hates unions and, thus, really hates the Employee Free Choice Act. Thus, even though John Boehner is trying to destroy the American economy, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is squarely focusing its fire on pro-EFCA Democrats. Your typical business executive would rather let the world burn, or see his children fed to a pack of wild boars, then see a union form at his firm. And it makes a certain amount of sense—businessmen appreciate the value of class solidarity. If you run your company into the ground, you get a nice severance package and another job at another company. But if you let your company be unionized, you’d be dead to your brethren. An attack on one is an attack on all, and they all stand together on this point.

Adam Smith, 233 years ago:

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people.

According to Wikipedia, yesterday was the 100th International Women’s Day (I started writing this post yesterday, but spent most of that day at a feminist meeting and having a women’s night out. Sorry. But here it is – better late than never). Last year, here at CT, we discovered that in some countries this is not celebrated as a social or political event (as it is in Europe) but rather as a day to give your wife or girlfriend chocolates or flowers. So I felt it’d be good to post an old-fashioned political poster, stolen from the very same wikipedia site. Isn’t it awesome?

International women’s day originated from political activism related to women’s rights, especially their rights as workers. With the current economic crisis, several of women’s concerns, such as wage discrimination and gender segregation, or parental concerns that in reality often boil down to mothers’ concerns, such as family-friendly working hours, paid maternity leave etcetera, are probably not very high on the agenda of labour unions and other types of workers’ interests groups. Yet why should we keep considering care issues as luxury issues, or as complicating factors – rather than the core business of politics? So yesterday, on international women’s day, I thought that what we really need is to put the world on its head, and ask how the relevant policies and sciences would look like if, when we are theorizing and designing policies and reflecting on life and society, we would start from care and than add what is now standardly conceived as the core issues of policies and the socio-economic system, namely the formal economy in which money goes around and GDP is measured.

Of course, care issues are not synonymous with women’s issues – there are enough women who try to make their lives as carefree as possible, and there are men whose interests would also be better served if we were to put care central. Moreover, there are many women’s issues that are not care issues – problems such as domestic violence and sexual aggression may be somewhat linked to care, but are in large part about other issues.

Perhaps all these musings reflect my own shift in research interests from issues of gender to issues of care. Not that I think the former are any less important than I felt when I wrote my PhD dissertation on gender inequality around the turn of the century. Yet they are of a different nature. In the case of gender, one could reasonably argue in favour of abolishing gender as a system of social stratification. But we will never be able (or willing!) to abolish care. So it’s a fundamental issue, and we need to take it much more seriously than we do. Perhaps we could also start celebrating an International Carers Day, if that doesn’t exit yet?

The ‘Go Galt, Go!’ Manifesto

We proudly salute “Dr. Helen,” Glenn Reynolds, and Michelle Malkin, for identifying the only possible response to Barack Obama’s victory – ‘going Galt.’ By withdrawing their creative and intellectual achievements from the economy and stopping tipping waitstaff, the schmibertarian right can surely bring the parasites and Democrats to their knees. We look forward to these three thought leaders striking the obvious first blow, by refusing to blog for the ungrateful masses and withdrawing to a secret compound until the world capitulates to their demands! Only a universal wingnut blogging strike can bring the moochers to their senses. John Galt lives!

¹ We also have a Crooked Timber group by the way.

The reinvention of this tactic after more than half a century probably owes less to the historical memory of the union (considerable though that is in the case of UE) than to the example of actions in Brazil and Argentina that followed the slogan “Occupy, Resist, Produce.”

Either way, it’s an instance of moral economy reasserting itself amidst crisis. I see that interpretation comes up in the short article that Nelson Lichtenstein (author of a biography of Walter Reuther) and Christopher Phelps (now working on a book about strikes and social thought) wrote earlier this week for the CNN website:

Factory occupations are rare because they violate the everyday laws of property, and for the most part American workers are law-abiding people. They occur only when workers feel morally aggrieved, when they sense that ownership has itself violated the law, when the boss has become the outlaw in their eyes and in that of the community as well….

It is hardly surprising that Republic’s workers have laid temporary claim to the factory in which some have given decades of their lives. Its owners and creditors have forfeited their own claims, both moral and legal, to rightful stewardship.

As Sen. Robert Wagner said in response to the 1937 sit-downs, “The uprising of the common people has come, as always, only because of a breakdown in the ability of the law and our economic system to protect their rights.”

Workers at Smithfield Packing Co. voted in favor of unionizing, a stunning victory for labor organizers who have waited 16 years to gain a presence in the world’s largest hog processing plant. … Tonight’s victory marks a major inroad for organized labor in North Carolina. … After the union was defeated in the 1990s, the voting results were challenged with allegations that management harassed and intimidated workers. In May 2006, a federal court ruled that Smithfield must stop anti-union tactics and allow a vote.

(Longtime CT readers may remember a disgracefully dishonest Economist story on how great the Smithfield plant was for immigrants from a couple of years back and a series of increasingly ludicrous posts from Megan McArdle, then writing at said journal, defending same)

Folbre formulates four questions which she sets out to answer: (1) Why should we care about spending on the children? (2) How much money and time do parents devote to children? (3) How much money do taxpayers spend on children? And (4) who should pay for the kids (in other words, which share of the costs of children should be borne by parents and by the government)?

In answering the first question, Folbre rightly points out that children do not fit well as a category in economic thinking. Economists have often described child rearing as an investment (expecting to generate a flow of future happiness) or similar to a pet or a durable consumer good. Yet unlike these other categories, children cannot be bought or sold. And, Folbre argues, children provide important benefits to future fellow workers and taxpayers. Parents thus provide not only services of great value to the children, but also indirectly to those who will benefit from these children’s future societal contributions. Acknowledging this crucial (re-)productive role of parents prompts us to reconceptualise households as units of primarily producers of human capabilities, rather than as consumers. This creation and maintenance of human capabilities is argued to benefit the economy as a whole. Reconceptualising the economy to take this into account thus raises questions of both efficiency and fairness – and this is why we should care about spending on the children.

Folbre knows that in this world one has to measure things to make them count – and hence in the middle part of the book she provides estimates of the costs of children. I found this the most exciting part of the book – and a very valuable contribution to knowledge on parenthood, the economics of families, and public policies affecting families and children.

Children remain to a significant extent invisible in economic studies. Of course, for many decades mainstream economics has provided estimates of the private costs of children. The problems with these estimates can perhaps best be illustrated by looking at the standard construction of household equivalence scales. These are the factors economists use if they want to compare the welfare of households with different composition. For example, a common equivalence scale to compare households with different sizes divides household income by the square root of the number of household members. So a household of two members is considered to have exactly the same material welfare if it has 1.4 times the income of a person living alone. At first sight, this seems to make sense, since there are large economies of scale from joint household consumption (e.g. a couple needs the same number of durable consumption goods like a TV or a refrigerator as a single adult). Yet equivalence scales typically give children the same weight as adults (as in the just mentioned scales) or give them smaller weights as adults – following the assumption that children need less food and other such items. The scales treat children as if their needs are far lower, or at best the same, than adults. But this assumption ignores the large costs for childcare and education that children need. Either childcare has to be bought in the market, or else its costs are the forgone lifetime earnings of the person caring for the child – in either case significant sums of money. The underestimation (in equivalence scales) or the entire neglect (in GDP) of the cost of family childcare is important for several reasons, including the fact that these equivalence scales are used to calculate poverty statistics. All other things equal, the number of children in poverty will be underestimated. Moreover, ignoring nonmarket work in GDP calculations leads to the conclusion that countries which have commodified childcare are, all other things equal, better off than those where parents and relatives are caring for children. There are many reasons to doubt that this is the case – for example, according to UNICEF Dutch children are the happiest in the world, yet the Netherlands has by North-american standards very high levels of nonmarket family childcare.

Folbre then moves on to provide estimates of the cost of children, which fall into two main categories: expenditures and family work. Data needed to calculate the per-child expenditures in the USA in 2000 are provided by the US consumer spending surveys, and range on an annual basis from $ 6,700 per infant in families with three or more children, to just over 12,000 for teenagers in one-child families. In a one-child family, the total cost of expenditures for a child during their entire childhood will amount to $205,383. For a child in a family with three or more children, this lowers to just under $128,000. High-income parents spend more than low-income parents, but whatever the family size and household income, parents spend large sums on raising their children.

Using time diaries administered by the Child Development Supplement of the US Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, and the American Time Use Survey, Folbre estimate the time parents devote to family work (child care and domestic work), and what this work would be worth in financial terms. The first hurdle to take is to sort out the conceptual questions – what counts as work, and what counts as leisure, and what is a useful typology of family work? Folbre proposes to distinguish between a number of different conceptual categories for parental care: “participation with a child in a primary activity, participation in a secondary activity, supervisory responsibilities, being on call, and engaging in tasks that indirectly benefit the child (such as cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, or making appointments and arrangements for special activities)” (p. 106). Folbre produces a very interesting overview of the time spent on the different components of family care by parents, and how it differs according to the age of the children (aged between 0 and 11), and on the number of parents in the household. These detailed statistics allow us to compare children and parents in different situations. For example, the younger the child, the more she is engaged in activities with her parents. A child with two parents present enjoys on average 32 hours a week of active parental care (with either or both of the parents present) whereas for children of single parents this number is 23 hours. Children spend much less time alone with their fathers than with their mother: in two-parent households children aged 0 to 2 spend 19.5 hours with their mother alone, and 7.9 hours with their father alone – and this parental gap remains significant when they get older (e.g. 11.4 versus 4.3 hours when they are aged 9-11). I would have been very interested in finding out if this parental inequality in family child care is also present in gay couples: but the data did not allow for such analysis, nor for an analysis for different racial/ethnic groups, where fatherhood may be experienced differently.

How could these time allocations be translated into a monetary value? Folbre argues that the replacement cost approach is the most appropriate way of valuing labour inputs: use the wage rate required to hire a replacement for the work done, rather than the actual or potential wage rate of the person doing the work. Folbre opts for a lower bound estimate. In her estimates she values the hours of active care by the wages of an average child care worker ($7.43 in 2000, which is low compared to the median for all workers at $13.74). For the passive care hours she uses the federal minimum wage. In both cases she assumes the presence of two children. Sleeping time and overlapping parental time are not included in these estimates. Under these, in my opinion very modest assumptions, the annual cost of parental family care in a two-parent two-child household would annually amount to $13,352; in a one-parent family $11,024. (p. 129). If we add to these the direct monetary expenditures, then the total parental expenditures annually average $23,243 in two parent households, and $17,125 in one-parent households. The time cost of parenting takes about 60 to 65% of this total cost.

Having analysed what parents spend on their children, Folbre moves on to investigate what the government spends on children. She shows that in the US federal policy provides better protection for the old than for the young and that there are great inequalities in access to health care and education. Folbre also lays out the different US public policies that affect parenting and children; for a non-American audience this is a very useful overview for those wanting to start getting a grip on the different types of American family-related policies.

If I have one criticism on this book, then it is the way Folbre has answered the fourth and final question: Who should pay for the kids? Which share of the large cost of raising children should be borne by parents and society? Folbre outlines that there are three related but distinct reasons for public spending on children: social investment, intergenerational reciprocity, and moral obligation. The social investments argument highlights that investments in children’s health and early childhood development programs provide benefits that far exceed their costs. Concerning intergenerational reciprocity, Folbre argues that most of us are repaying the older generations for what they spent on us, or making equivalent gifts to the next generation – but that “we do so unevenly, in an institutional structure that reproduces existing inequalities and rewards reproductive free riding.” (p. 183). As for the moral obligations, “parental efforts should be rewarded in ways that both honor and reinforce the profound moral commitments they represent” (p. 183). My concern with this concluding chapter of Valuing Children is that these are huge questions in moral philosophy – and I know of several people who have been breaking their heads over these issues for years, and are still struggling with finding the answers. Although as a parent I hope Folbre’s answers are the right ones, as a political philosopher I am not so sure. For one thing, stressing the argument that children will provide future societal contributions may lead to the morally perverse effect that we will steer public resources to the most potentially-productive children, and that we value children for what they will be, rather than worrying about their well-being right now independent on how that affects them as future-adults. And what do we do if there are trade-offs to be made in policies aiming at children-as-children versus children-as-future-adults? Moreover, philosophically speaking, even the most radical views such as those of David Benatar who argues that we are harmed by coming into existence require serious consideration: if Benatar were right, what would be the implications for Folbre’s analysis? Also if one wishes to develop a more pro-family argument relative to the current political arrangements, it needs to be developed carefully and confronted with all possible objections if it wants to stand the test of critical scrutiny.

Folbre has provided a very valuable contribution to knowledge in revealing the size of parental expenditures and family work and in arguing for their relevance in economics and public policies; yet as far as the normative justifications of public spending on families are concerned, more work is needed. It is time that those philosophers who have been procrastinating with their unpublished thoughts, books and papers, contribute their share of the work needed to be done in thinking about the value of children and parenthood (… alas, this procrastinating crowd includes me too).

Now, I am not entirely sure where to look for empirical evidence which can confirm, refute or help me to refine or revise this claim. Perhaps in a psychology or sociology of care literature? I have come across plenty of anecdotal evidence, but haven’t come across a study that has investigated this claim in a qualitatively-grounded quantitative way (or a similar claim, perhaps focusing on just one type of care situation). Anyone suggestions for literature? Anyone views on the plausibility of this claim?

Many a true word

Is slurred

which I’ve always thought was a translation tinged with genius.

Also, two very good appreciations of writers. First, Julian Barnes has a lovely piece on Penelope Fitzgerald both as a person and as a novelist. I fell in love with The Blue Flower, less for the portrait of Novalis than for the quiet tragedy of Karoline Just, and read everything else by her that I could get my hands on. As an aside, while she may seem as far from genre as a writer could be, her pastiche of an M.R. James short story in The Gate of Angels is uncanny and brilliant. Second, Kathy G. has a great discussion of Tom Geoghegan. His Which Side Are You On? (Powells, Amazon ) is a wonderfully written contrary class of a book about the union movement. As Kathy says:

a lot of people just don’t get his charmingly idiosyncratic writing. He writes about politics, and about policy, but God knows his books and essays don’t read like formal scholarly papers or dry think tank reports—they’re far more fluid, inventive, and playful than writing about policy has any right to be. But the problem is, political types often don’t appreciate the literary qualities of his writing, and the literary types don’t get the politics.

I suspect that’s right – his books don’t have arguments so much as they are arguments – going backwards and forwards between different points of view, looking at different aspects of the issue, proposing viewpoints and counter-viewpoints. For those who haven’t read him, he’s really wonderful; one of the best and most original political writers alive.

I was kind of reluctant to blog this too. After all, there are others at CT who do sociology or economics or family policy and I don’t do those things. And I’m not an American resident either. Still, it struck me as pretty compelling. I wonder how similar the change has been in the other OECD countries?

Part-time academics can expect to get a part-time teaching load. This doesn’t seem to create much of a problem, since each course corresponds to a number of hours, and a part-timer simply teaches a percentage of the full-time number of hours (in theory, that is). From what I’ve observed among my colleagues (I only teach very little since I’m employed on a research grant), this part of the part-time work constellation seems to work fine.

Part-time academics might also get only part of the normal share of committee duties. I don’t know whether this is realistic – what is 80% of 2 committee posts? I doubt that in the allocation of committee duties large part-timers (say, those who work 75 or 80 %) are given fewer duties. Many other duties related to administration and management also require the same work from part-timers compared to full-timers: reading faculty reports, managing project administration, etc. etc. Similarly for other tasks that are normally expected from academics, such as commenting on work from PhD students and colleagues (of your own university or (inter-)nationally): if they ask you to read a piece, will you tell them you can’t, because you are working part-time?

But my biggest doubt whether part-time work is such a splendid idea for academics who are doing research has to do with the nature of research: whether one works on a full-time contract or a part-time contract, the literature that one has to follow to keep up to date with one’s area of research remains the same. There are ‘fixed costs’ (in terms of time and effort) for each line of research that one pursues. The consequence is that a part-timer spends as much time (in absolute number of hours) on keeping up to date with the literature, implying that she has fewer hours left for actually developing new research.

If these doubts make sense, then why would an academic who is actively pursuing research want to work part-time (and thus receiving a part-time wage), if she could get a full-time position? I can see two reasons. One is that an academic may be in a stable (tenured) position with no ambitions to get promotion or no strong passion for research. For those people, academic work becomes like any other 9 to 5 job, which can be done part-time indeed. The other reason is that part-timers work on fixed days, say, from Monday to Thursday. Friday can then be used for other things: doing voluntary work, seeing friends, enjoying a time-intensive hobby, or spending time with the kids. A part-timer is entirely entitled to be absent at meetings or other events at work on her non-work-day; if one works full time it is much harder to structurally spend time with the kids, since one is only allowed to take days off during the academic year if there are no urgent or important faculty meetings that day. (At least, that’s how it works in Dutch academia- and I’d be interested to find out whether the same applies in other countries.)

I am one of those people who (normally) doesn’t go to work on Fridays (and for the next couple of months I have one extra day off so as to be able to spend more time with our baby). I do enjoy the time I can spend with the children, and the fact that this extra day off slows us down a little. But I also sometimes feel I’m cheating myself, since it seems I am doing at least as much work as many people who are working on a full-time contract (with the difference that much of my work gets done in the evenings). In the end I am just not sure whether part-time work in academia is, all things considered, a good idea for those academics who are actively and passionately pursuing research agendas.