Anne Alstott, co-author of The Stakeholder Society, has just published another book called No Exit: What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents. The theme is one we’ve explored here before: what should the state do for people who decide to have and raise children? It’s a tremendously good book, written in a wonderfully accessible style, and very affordable for an academic hardback.
At the core of Alstott’s book is a proposal for a ‘caregiver’s allowance’ of $5000 a year, to be provided by the Federal government to the primary care-giving parent. The allowance would be a kind of voucher; the caregiver could use it for any of three purposes: paying for daycare while she goes out to work; supplementing her retirement savings, or investing in her own education. The grant would be paid to the parent annually until her last child turned 13, and would be save-able; if the parent wanted, for example, to save it during the toddler years and then spend it on full time education as soon as the last child started school, she’d be entitled to do that.
The book consists of an elaborate defence of this proposal (and another, supplementary, mechanism effectively insuring against the child having a chronic illness).
[What follows is basically a review of the book, timed to coincide with Laura at Apt 11D’s review so make sure you read her’s too. The Boston Review a while back carried an article based on the book which is still online.]
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by Eszter Hargittai on July 7, 2004
When I was in Paris I spotted a guy sitting on a corner on the ground just outside a bank with a laptop. It looked pretty random, but then it occured to me that perhaps this was the best location he could find for WiFi signals. Now I see that CTD over at ionarts blogged what he considers a possible “techno-geek historical first … ‘warboating'”. He and his brother went out on a fishing boat for signals. Not bad. I’m curious, what’s the craziest/weirdest thing people have done to find wireless connection?
by Kieran Healy on July 7, 2004
Just thought I’d let everyone know that the Great Barrier Reef really deserves its name.
On Parliamentary Questions the other day they played a clip of David Owen, recorded in 2003, admitting without embarrassment that when he was Foreign Secretary he seriously considered ordering the assassination of Idi Amin. There was no explanation of why the idea was rejected (it was a clip in a game show), but my immediate, and non-reflective, reaction was that it was the first good thing I had heard about Owen (whom I couldn’t stand when he was a real politician, even before reading Crewe and King’s fantastic biography of the SDP in which he emerges as a deeply unlikeable and destructive character). Without giving it a lot more thought, which I can’t do right now, I can make a very rough judgement that certain objectionable leaders are legitimate candidates for assassination (Hitler, Amin, both Duvaliers, Stalin) whereas others are not (Khomeni, Castro, Rawlings, Botha). I could tell a story about each, and probably be dissuaded on each of them (except Hitler). But I couldn’t give anything approaching necessary and sufficient conditions for candidacy. What makes a leader a legitimate target of an assassination attempt?
Clarification: as jdw says below we are talking about a government authorising the assassination of a foreign leader, rather than a citizen assassinating his/her own country’s leader, the assumption being that governments require more justification.
by Chris Bertram on July 6, 2004
“The latest parlour game”:http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20040704.shtml#82118 , via both “Norm”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/choose.html and “Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_07_01_archive.html#108912007834711318 .
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by Eszter Hargittai on July 6, 2004
I was sitting in the St. Louis Amtrak station yesterday (huh, that would be a glorified name for a shack[1]) and observing with curiosity people’s reaction to a soda machine that was sold out. Given the hot day and my tourist explorations of the morning that left me tired and thirsty, the soda machine was the first thing I looked for upon entry into the waiting room. The two machines I noticed at first were selling snacks and coffee. I couldn’t believe that there was no soda machine – unfathomable for this type of an establishment in the U.S. – so I circled the room. And there it was, of course. The first thing I looked for was to see how much the soda cost. However, instead of a price, I found the words SOLD and OUT flashing. Bummer. But now came the fun part: observing how other people reacted to the sold-out soda machine. At one point I was almost convinced we had a candid camera scenario. It was quite amusing to watch how few people bother to check signs. (This was second in a series that day after having watched just a few minutes earlier a woman in front of me exit – or try to do so in any case – a building through a door clearly labeled and also taped shut by a sign stating that the door was out of order. After pushing it a few times she noticed the sign at her eye-level letting her know that this was not going to work.)
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by Chris Bertram on July 6, 2004
Arguments, fights and feuds have their own inner logic, and they lead to people taking up positions and attitudes that make little sense on a rationalistic model of what beliefs we ought to have. But sometimes, even in the middle of such a quarrel, we get a sense of where it’s going, how it is defining and entrenching us and the other person. David Aaronovich “captures something of this”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1254827,00.html in today’s Guardian:
bq. I wrote a year ago that other peoples’ assumptions were turning me into a Jew. And now I began to wonder whether being attacked as being anti-Muslim because of my views on Iraq and secularism, and despite my views on Palestine and racism, wasn’t beginning to make me the thing that I was being accused of. Bugger it then, you half-think, if that’s what you want.
bq. But if that’s how I feel, wonderfully rational bloke that I am, what in heaven’s name is the effect on people from the Muslim community who are being wrongly stopped in the name of counter-terrorism? Doesn’t that mean the warnings about alienation are essentially correct? Last Friday’s announcement of the police stop and search statistics were like a bucket of iced water in the face. A 300% increase in the number of Asians stopped, and you just know that most of these will be young men. And we also know from the sus laws and the experiences of black BMW drivers, what the reaction is. Fuck you.
by Eszter Hargittai on July 6, 2004
It has been interesting to follow the various discussions about blogs and what types of communities and discussions they resemble. I thought I would post a note to remind people (or let people know) that the study of online communities[1] is one of the oldest topics explored by academics about the social aspects of information technology use. There are probably hundreds of papers written about Usenet, mailing lists and bulletin board systems. Of course blogs have some distinct characteristics, but overall the existing body of literature about online communities would probably yield some interesting and helpful reading to those interested in blogs. Let’s not reinvent the wheel. One place to look for such work is the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (almost a decade old), but a simple search in a library catalog will yield numerous sources on virtual communities. Of particular interest to those pondering the social network aspects of online communities may be some of the excellent work by Warren Sack and much interesting research done on Usenet by Marc Smith. I realize mapping the blogosphere is a somewhat different issue, but some of the questions that have been raised are relevant to other online communities as well. People have worked for years to find some answers, let’s not ignore them. A piece that seems especially related to some issues that have come up is “Community without Propinquity Revisited: Communications Technology and the Transformation of the Urban Public Sphere” [pdf] by Craig Calhoun.
fn1. When I use terms such as “online communities” and “virtual communities”, I do not mean to suggest that these exist in isolation from other types of communities. See this piece [pdf] by Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia for more on this point.
by Jon Mandle on July 6, 2004
I’m amazed how little comment there seems to have been on this front page story in the NY Times from July 4. That date explains part of the silence, no doubt, but this still strikes me as a Very Big Deal.
In May, 2003, the U.S. returned five terrorism suspects from Guantanamo Bay to Saudi Arabia “as part of a secret three-way deal intended to satisfy important allies in the invasion of Iraq.” In exchange, the Saudi’s later released five Britons and two others [a Canadian and a Belgian] who had been convicted of terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia.” According to the authors, Don van Natta, Jr. and Tim Golden, “The releases were public-relations coups for the Saudi and British governments, which had been facing domestic criticism for their roles in the Iraq war.”
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My first real encounter with Norman Geras’s writings was when I read his excellent Marx and Human Nature. I subsequently saw him give a talk on the book at one of the SWP’s Marxism conferences (87?), and was struck by the way that he kept his temper despite extraordinary provocation by the audience. This experience combined with my more or less simultaneous encounter with the work of the analytical Marxists, and a class I took with (my subsequent colleague) Andy Levine, to convince me that normative philosophy was worth doing — resulting in my exiting philosophy of language for political philosophy.
So I was delighted to discover that he writes about the greatest sport human beings have invented. I was pleased, but also incredibly frustrated recently when I had the good fortune to stay at the home of a friend who possesses a copy of Two Views from the Boundary. I got half way through the book — and had to leave on the next flight out. Now, the relative obscurity (sorry Norm) of his cricket writing means it is not readily available in the US, and it never occurred to me to seek the book directly from him till I found this ancient post on his blog. Now that I have selfishly secured shipment of numerous copies for myself, my dad (he doesn’t read CT, so it’ll be a surprise as long as you don’t tell him), my godfather, etc, I can advertise the offer to all. Email Norm at his site, and see if he’ll cut you a deal on his cricket writing.
by Chris Bertram on July 5, 2004
I “posted the other day”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002112.html about “Paul Krugman’s correct observation”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/opinion/02KRUG.html that many of the right-wing pundits who get exercised about Michael Moore apply lower standards to the spin coming out of the Bush administration. As I said in comments at the time, that _comparative_ judgement is compatible with thinking Farenheit 9/11 is a pretty bad movie. Elsewhere in Krugman’s piece he gives qualified approval to Moore as providing an essential public service and writes that this is despite the fact that Farenheit 9/11 is tendentious, promotes unproven conspiracy theories and that viewers may come away from the film “believing some things that probably aren’t true.” This “has somewhat upset Norm”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/the_morgan_rati.html , who compares Krugman’s defence of Moore to the line some took on behalf of Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, who published faked photographs of British solidiers mistreating Iraqi detainees.
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by Henry Farrell on July 4, 2004
The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/04/international/asia/04MONG.html?pagewanted=print&position= tells us today about some bloke who’s playing golf across Mongolia, treating the entire country as a course, and dividing it into eighteen holes. Par is 11,880.
Sounds impressive – until you consider the Surrealist Golf Course in Maurice Richardson’s “The Exploits of Engelbrecht”:http://www.abel.net.uk/~savoy/HTML/engelb.html (previously discussed in “this post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000981.html). According to Richardson
bq. To start with, a surrealist golf course has only one hole. But don’t get the idea that it’s any easier on that account. … Par is reckoned at 818181, but anything under 100,000 is considered a hot score. The hazards are desperate, so desperate that at the clubhouse bar you always see some pretty ravaged faces and shaky hands turning down an empty glass for the missing members.
These hazards include Sairpents, Vultures, the Valley of Dry Bones, Muezzins and Butlins Holiday Camp. In comparison, the Gobi Desert sounds like a cakewalk.
by Chris Bertram on July 4, 2004
The BBC commentators have been comparing Otto Rehhagel to Socrates and invoking Greece’s ancient past. And why not? “Moments like tonight”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3860105.stm are what make football the great sport it is.
by Henry Farrell on July 4, 2004
“Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/07/long_philosophi.html#more gives us a “long philosophical rant” about the inconsistencies in Spiderman 2. More power to him, I say – but he’s still very likely wrong. Spiderman is not only a really, really good movie, it’s not necessarily making the claims that Matt suggests it does. Warning: spoilers follow.
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by John Holbo on July 4, 2004
Brian Leiter posts on ‘philosopher’s tics’. Very true, very true. I just happen to have buried something similar in a long recent post you probably didn’t read, and just as well. So here it is. It’s from Imre Kertész’ novel – but I fear it’s his autobiography – Kaddish For a Child Not Born. The narrator is at some sort of forest retreat for writers and thinkers, trying to avoid the writers and thinkers. Alas, he is not successful. “The philosopher was nearing me in a pondering mood; I could see it in the slightly inclined pose of his head, on which his rascally visored cap perched; he approached like a humorous highwayman with a few drinks down his gullet, pondering whether to knock me down or content himself with the loot.”