Last week I was in the Public Records of Victoria (PROV) looking at records of the Melbourne mint. My substack about the Sydney mint by rights should come first, but I’m fresh-ish off the plane so I’m doing this one first.
It was a bit extravagant building two mints in Australia. As I flicked through the massive file of equipment to order and repair I wondered why they built another one. I’d assumed it was just that Melbourne was much closer to where most of the gold turned out to be.
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Colleagues Cyril Hédoin and Pablo Paniagua are running a symposium on “PPE” (philosophy, politics, and economics) over there. They follow James Buchanan’s classic question, from 1964, of “What should economists do?” Given that Crooked Timber is, arguably, situated at least in part in this field, I thought I’d repost my response to their introductory essay here, with their permission.
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From the Fall of the Berlin Wall until about a decade ago my animating intellectual question was pretty much, ‘how did a small number of natural sciences become qualitatively more impressive than the social sciences?’ Because I met the late George Smith relatively early in my thinking about this (as an undergraduate), I often formulated this question in terms of evidence; he liked his version of my question as ‘how to turn data into high-quality evidence?’ And his striking answer was (to simplify) that deviations from theoretically significant expectations through theory-mediated measurement were made informative in an iterative process over time in the sciences that succeeded in achieving lift-off. While I was much more interested in the social organization of the sciences than George, I never did much better than he did in answering my own question. But I did make sure his version was published in the best possible form and with full detail (see his ‘Closing the Loop.’)
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(This is an updated version of something I posted 20 years ago, on the 20th anniversary, and 10 years ago, on the 30th anniversary, of my friend’s death)
About 43 years and 3 weeks ago the soon-to-be late lamented You and Yours had one of those “off to University” shows, helping parents and about-to-be new undergraduates to understand what the first few weeks of University was going to be like.[1] Although fitting the latter category, I only listened because at the time You and Yours was among my regular listening. One comment struck me, and has stayed with me ever since. A woman in her thirties, commenting on Freshers’ Weeks, said that “in that first week of college you meet people who will be your friends for the rest of your life”.
I was skeptical. And it hasn’t been true for me. I’ve kept in much closer touch with several friends from secondary school than anyone from college (I did meet CB sometime in 1984, but only for a few minutes, and not again till Sept 12, 2001, so he doesn’t count; I’ve recently reconnected with someone else I was close to, but we hardly saw each other for 35 years). My first day at Bedford College was spent almost entirely with a girl called Alison who decided the next day to leave (not, I hope, because she spent the first day with me, but because she was trying to escape her home town of Egham, to which my college suddenly announced it was moving).
But it was also that week that I met Adrian.
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When I posted a piece on the latest failure of the US Navy a while back, I predicted that I wouldn’t be changing any minds. That was one of my safer predictions, confirmed almost immediately by Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money. Farley declined to respond, saying “whatever his other virtues, Dr. Quiggin is not a serious voice on naval questions”.
I wasn’t surprised by this. Farley is the epitome of the navalist view that serious expertise on the technology of naval warfare is a crucial requirement for commentary, whereas being right is irrelevant.
Given this respect for credentialed expertise, however, I was a bit surprised to see Farley endorse a piece by Bret Devereaux making the claim that “the United States Navy is a load-bearing component of the global economy”. You might think that the relevant expertise here included at least some knowledge of both transport economics and the global economy. Devereaux, who is an “ancient and military historian”, has neither. Still, I’m not going to pull academic rank here. Let’s see what Devereaux has to say and how well it stacks up as a piece of economic analysis.
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Chris just let me know that Alan Thornett has died. International Viewpoint has a long obituary here. I doubt The Graun will carry an obit, and The Times certainly won’t.
I got to know members of the Oxford branch of what was then the Socialist Group (a successor of the Worker’s Socialist League, via a fusion with, and then a split from, the International-Communist League), through the Oxford Miner’s Support Group, of which they were the backbone, in the wake of strike’s defeat in 1985. I saw Perry Cullen and Ted Heslin several times a week for the whole of that autumn, and spent less, but quite a lot of, time with Alan; and kept up with them for several years after leaving for the US. Autumn 1985 was when the Workers Revolutionary Party started to fragment, after Gerry Healy’s history of sexually assaulting comrades came to light. (For what it is worth, the SG comrades knew nothing of this, though obviously had experienced serious abuse themselves including, in one case, kidnapping, at Healy’s bidding). The Socialist Group were at that time briefly, and I thought absurdly, hopeful of reconciliation with the less terrible offshoots of the the WRP, so they were in a moment of muted (and unwarranted) optimism.
Nevertheless they were mostly realistic about what it meant to be a revolutionary in the mid-1980’s (or ever, perhaps), and Ted and Perry shared with Alan a dry and self-deprecating sense of humour that doesn’t come out at all in the International Viewpoint obit. We once went to some agitprop performance of a play about the Silesian Weavers Strike, and Ted commented to me “This is going to be awful. I like real plays, and musicals. But, you know, you have to go. For the cause”. Another time, on a particularly rainy day, after 3 hours of shaking tins together, Ted said “You do realise that I’m not going to do any of this after the revolution, right? I want to have an allotment, and enjoy growing vegetables once we actually have communism”.
Alan once told me this about Healy. “For years we were envious of the other groups. Cliff and Grant wrote books, and the IMG had all those intellectuals. But Healy just gave speeches. He was a great, great speaker, but we never really understood what he was saying. So we decided to transcribe some of the speeches, and turn them into books. We did that for about four speeches, and then we pored over them, trying to make sense of them. But we were all working class, uneducated, and couldn’t make head nor tail of them. We just assumed we were stupid, and couldn’t keep up with his brilliance. It was only much later that we realised the problem might have been with him, not us”.
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Having alighted from the bus in an industrial area I’d never been before, I found the right building and descended the stairs. As instructed by email, I rang the doorbell. I was immediately met by the two cutest dachshunds you’ve ever seen. My first words to the Westpac archivist:
“This is already the best archive ever!”
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We have been granted ethical approval by review committees at our institutions.
(A piece I ran in The Guardian)
The recent panic about a breach of Medicare computer security by an “AI agent” contrasts sharply with other recent cases such as the Telstra and Optus outages that left many Australians unable to reach Triple Zero. In those cases, no one blamed the computers involved. The mistakes were clearly sheeted home to the corporations that operated them.
This wasn’t always the case. When the term “artificial intelligence” was coined some 70 years ago, the first mainframe computers (absurdly primitive by modern standards) were viewed with the same awe and concern as the AI agents of the present day. There were even “algorithms” (though the term wasn’t used in that way at the time) that were supposed to pick ideal dating matches.
Failures were inevitable, and blame-shifting became routine. “The computer made a mistake” was the 1960s equivalent of “your email must have gone to junk”. Gradually, however, we realised that the problem was not with the computer but with incorrect information fed into it or badly written programs invoked as a result.
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People here often ask me what part of England I grew up in, which isn’t a particularly easy question – I was born in the north, but then lived in South Wales and then various place in the South all of which were west of London. Oxford is sort of familiar to everyone (though not my part of it), Aylesbury to no-one, and Slough… well, on Friday the person I was chatting with stole my usual line, which is “The British version of The Office is set in Slough, and that tells you a lot about the place”. He told the leader of our research project that she should watch the British version because it is much better than the American version.
Personally, I think the British version is, indeed, brilliant. Because of that I was excited to watch the first few episodes of the America version when it came out, and found it almost unbearable. I expected it to fail, as I think most sitcoms that move from the UK to the US do. In fact, though, it transformed itself and succeeded. And I admired the writers and the star, Steve Carell, for understanding how to make that happen.
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These days, methodological nationalism is finally sparking a heated debate in philosophy. A flurry of new papers has recently been published in open access: Baycan, 2026; Beaton, 2026; Milioni, 2024; Sager, 2021; Ujlaki, 2026. Naturally, some of them question the relevance of the critique of methodological nationalism to political philosophy. As I myself argued that nationalism is a cognitive bias (that is, a factor that systematically distorts judgements), let me explain why I believe it is a cognitive bias that heavily affects the ethics of migration.
There is a simple method to detect and weigh bias in philosophical debates about justice (Dumitru, 2023). It has three steps: [click to continue…]
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I’m mostly a descriptivist when it comes to the meaning of words. If everyone uses “literally” to mean “figuratively”, that’s fine by me. Same if there is no likelihood of confusion, as with “aggravate” for “annoy” as well as “exacerbate”. But that still leaves me plenty of room to gripe about the way in which words are used, so it’s time for a good old whinge.
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