February 2009

“Clive Crook”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/437694de-f602-11dd-a9ed-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1 suggests that they’re at least part of the problem.

I used to have no time for the idea that economists never agree, so economics must be a bogus science and a waste of time. Of course economists disagree, I would say. … But my earlier confidence that economists are not wasting their own and everybody else’s time is diminishing. Are the leaders of the profession measuring up to the standards I just mentioned? Are they helping to improve policy, or raise the standard of public understanding? You could easily argue the opposite. … This impression of disarray – that economics has nothing clear to say on these questions – is not the fault of economics as such. It is a mostly false impression created by some of its leading public intellectuals, Mr Krugman among them. …

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We’ve been discussing here at CT many, many times issues related to justice, care and the family, so I thought some of you may want to know that I’m organising a conference on that theme with some truly world-class scholars in this area. Information below the fold. There is a strictly limited number of seats, so if you’re interested, then immediate registration is highly recommended.
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My response to Nancy Rosenblum is “up at Cato Unbound“:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/02/06/henry-farrell/partisanship-and-extremism/ as is that of “James Fishkin”:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/02/09/james-fishkin/democracy-partisanship-and-deliberation/. It would be fair to say that we have significant political disagreements …

Me:

[Rosenblum] argues that these implicit biases also afflict the arguments of contemporary political theorists such as James Fishkin (also participating in this seminar), who prize political deliberation.

Again, blogs provide an interesting test case. Fishkin harks back to a Madisonian vision of politics that he suggests has been corroded by political parties more interested in winning elections than in thoughtful deliberation. He seeks to structure deliberation so as to minimize what he sees as disruptive partisan extremism and maximize the potential for disinterested discussion. Blogs are anathematic to this vision of politics. Bloggers are typically at least as interested in winning the argument as in discerning the truth. The empirical evidence that political bloggers and blog readers are sharply divided along partisan lines is emphatic. However, as Rosenblum suggests, partisan argument of the kind that blogs engage in can play a valuable democratic role. They help structure a “system of conflict” in which “discordant values, opinions, issues, and policies” are “identified, selected, and refined.

Fishkin:

if one is concerned about some minimally rational process of collective will formation, the impact of party ID is to make voting and policy choice predictable, not to make them thoughtful. A thoughtful process of collective will formation, whether by elites (representatives) or the mass public themselves, requires a disposition not to make a partisan judgment, but an independent judgment about the public interest. Of course, real world judgments reflect some mix of partisan interests and independent judgment. But to the extent one is just focusing on what will serve one’s party, what will contribute to electoral competitiveness and effective mobilization, one is not acting on the disposition that will assist deliberation in the public interest. Competitive elections can be won by misleading the public, by demobilizing it with negative ads (as my colleague Shanto Iyengar has demonstrated) by the MAD politics of the trivial but sensational sound bite — a politics of Mutually Assured Distraction. These techniques win elections and mobilize participation, but they do not add up to any collective weighing of substantive arguments about what should be done. Rather they add up to pseudo-mandates and a very thin form of democracy.

I’m pretty skeptical about many claims for the empirical benefits of deliberation, for a variety of reasons that perhaps I’ll cover in a future post. But it seems to me that much of this disagreement turns on a fundamental divergence as to what politics is about. I see it as involving stark divergences between people with very different interests and ideals, where the room for common agreement on the public interest is limited. Fishkin sees it as a realm where the potential for rational identification of extensive shared values and the public interest is obscured by television advertising and the other paraphernalia of competitive electoral politics. Different understandings of politics give rise, unsurprisingly, to different normative prescriptions.

From “an article on growing protectionism”:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123388103125654861.html in the Wall Street Journal:

bq. The U.S. is planning retaliatory tariffs on Italian water and French cheese to punish the EU for restricting imports of U.S. chicken and beef.

Well I guess Americans can just drink different water, and Europeans can eat their own beef and chicken. But the cheese thing, that’s just masochism.

We aren’t up to Part II of Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality, but I’m going to jump the gun. There’s this bit about something from Amartya Sen – ‘his celebrated Prude/Lewd example’ – which I had never heard tell of. I’ll quote Cohen’s narration of the case:

There exists a pornographic book that might be read by one or other, or neither (but not both), of Prude and Lewd.

Let’s pause to admire that sentence. I think that is a great first sentence for a novel, or at least a Donald Barthelme story. (But I’m getting ahead of the story.) [click to continue…]

Just back from seeing “Slumdog Millionaire”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1010048/ . Very good, I thought. No doubt those who know India and Mumbai would have a better critical perspective on the film’s portrayal of time and place, but as a piece of cinema it is superb. It isn’t a feel-good movie for the most part, though it is consistently funny when it isn’t being horrifying, and it does make you feel pretty good at the end. (I had tears in my eyes, but since that was also true of the closing scenes of Crocodile Dundee, you might not think that much of a test.) Of the three excellent films I’ve seen recently (the others being The Reader, good, and Baader-Meinhof Complex, terrific) this is the one I’d say that no-one should miss.

Update: please feel free to use the exercise below, or any adaptation thereof, with or without attribution, if you find it useful. (Prompted to post this by a conversation at Laura’s).

One of the first times I taught about the gendered division of labour in my Contemporary Moral Issues course, a student articulately challenged the relevance of the issue to her. I had assigned the key chapter of Susan Okin’s classic Justice, Gender, And The Family, which argues that the gender system is in violation of fair equality of opportunity, because girls are socialized to be carers (and boys aren’t), therefore end up disproportionately in caring (and therefore lower paid) labour, and, because they take the lion’s share of the burden of caring labour in the home, end up lower paid than their spouses; and yet face a high probability of a divorce after which they will not be able to share in their spouse’s greater earning power (I disagree with Okin about Rawls, but agree with her that if the mechanisms she identifies are at work there is a social injustice — more on that another time). For her empirical case, she relies heavily on Lenore Weitzman’s study of divorce. My student said this research was not relevant to her generation. Putting aside the methodological worries about Weitzman’s study, I was rather unnerved to figure out on the spot that the women she studied were in the generation of my students’ grandparents. I wouldn’t want to draw conclusions about my own life course from studies of my grandparent’s generation either, especially if I had had it drummed into me both by parents and teachers that my own circumstances were entirely different from those of my grandparents, and even more if I were aware (as some of the girls are) that so soon after admitting girls as equal participants universities now have to practice affirmative action for boys in admissions to get close to equal sex-ratios. I pointed this out, and then, again on the spot, tried to figure out a way of showing that the issues, if not the figures, probably are relevant to my students nevertheless. I was pretty happy that in 5 minutes I had them convinced that at least it might be relevant. Here is a slightly refined version of the exercise.

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I like their new cover of “Comfortably Numb”. What do you think?

Brink Lindsey has a “post”:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/02/04/brink-lindsey/partisanship-still-half-empty/ at _Cato Unbound_ criticizing Nancy Rosenblum’s “work on partisanship”:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/02/02/nancy-rosenblum/the-moral-distinctiveness-of-party-id (I’ll be contributing to the seminar myself in due course).

she cites findings from the political science literature that independents tend to be less interested in politics, less informed about the issues, and less likely to participate in the process than are their partisan fellow citizens … All fair enough. Yet knocking independents down a peg doesn’t change the fact that partisanship in America today is a dreadful mess. … under present circumstances at least, partisan zeal ought to be attacked rather than defended.

I’ll confine my bill of indictment to two charges. First, partisanship undermines clear thinking. Second, it undermines moral integrity. In both cases, the root cause is the same: the conflation of friend and foe with right and wrong. … partisans are vulnerable to believing fatuous nonsense. … their beliefs, whether sensible or otherwise, about a whole range of empirical questions are determined by their political identity. There’s no epistemologically sound reason why one’s opinion about, say, the effects of gun control should predict one’s opinion about whether humans have contributed to climate change or how well Mexican immigrants are assimilating — these things have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Yet the fact is that views on these and a host of other matters are indeed highly correlated with each other. …

Even when partisans know what the score is, they’re constantly tempted to shade the truth, or at least keep silent, in order to be a good team player. Recall, for example, the fury unleashed this past fall on the handful of conservative commentators who were willing to admit the obvious: Sarah Palin was obviously, embarrassingly unprepared for the office she was seeking.

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I guess Anthem is finally in public beta, under the guise of Microsoft SongSmith.

My colleague Sara Goldrick-Rab has a piece at Brookings arguing that the education money in the stimulus package should double funding for community colleges (from $6b to $12b) and should simultaneously add an accountability system, gather necessary data, and foster innovation. Here’s a quote, but read the whole thing:

Since 1974, only 149 new community colleges have been built, and many campuses today are bursting at the seams. While community college students tend to enroll part-time, even these students require space in which to learn. In the first two years, this spending would amount to just 1.4 percent of the proposed costs of the recovery package, and would support infrastructure upgrades that truly stimulate the economy. Over the longer term, it would add modestly to federal higher education expenditures, but would ensure that our nation realizes an economic payoff from increasing enrollments.

The federal government should not simply expand funding, but use these new resources explicitly to promote greater success for community college students. Colleges receiving enhanced funds would be required to track and report student results, such as completion of a minimum number of credits, earning a degree, and landing a good-paying job. Over time, a majority of federal dollars would be awarded based not on enrollment, but on colleges’ performance on these critical measures.

“Josh Cohen”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BRwebonly/cohen2.php has an interesting new piece up at the _Boston Review_ website where he sticks it to the libertarians, complaining that they’ve always been at the rearguard of struggles for rights because of their distaste for the state. There’s one argument that I want to pick up on.

we [liberals] think that chances for influence should not depend so much on resources, and that means regulating campaign finance. Now, we know (and share) the concerns about intrusive regulations, official distortions of speech, people spending on fancy cars instead of politics, and the troubles with drawing lines between regulable and non-regulable speech, especially in our political culture. But we see all of these concerns as conversation starters, not stoppers. The issue is whether we can figure out a system of electoral finance that would not simply dismiss the value of political equality. That is the question. But when we hear the idea of regulating the flow of money, we don’t assume that it will be perverse, or futile, or ruinous of all that is good

What’s interesting is that Mark Schmitt has a “piece”:http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=can_money__be_a_force_for_good in this month’s _American Prospect_ (which has just gone up on the website), arguing more or less the opposite case.
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I think maybe it was that rich crab dish – part of a delicious Indian dinner Belle and I shared last night with Neil, the Ethical Werewolf. Anyway, I had the most vivid and bad novelistic zombie nightmares all night long. But it was all oddly economically-themed. Zombies and the recession. Zombies and liquidity traps. (Obviously I’ve been reading way too much Crooked Timber recently.) Yes, I know: other people’s dreams are boring. But who among you has suffered actual, macroeconomically-themed nightmares over the past few months?

When I picked my wife up from work the other day, she told me about a (teenage, black) kid in afterschool. He was trying to do his homework on the computer, and she sat with him as he worked. She pointed out that his sentences were very good, and asked some questions, eliciting further sentences. He wouldn’t look at her, and didn’t believe that his sentences were good. He mumbled “I’d be doing it on my own”. “What”. “At my house. I’d be doing it on my own. No help in my crib”. She understood that he was thanking her.

Now, Lemuel and Righteous kindly alert me to a wonderful and old passage from Dinesh D’Souza:

Equal opportunity seems like a logical fulfillment of the equality principle in the Declaration of Independence. Yet it is an ideal that cannot and should not be realized through the actions of the government. Indeed, for the state to enforce equal opportunity would be to contravene the true meaning of the Declaration and to subvert the principle of a free society. Let me illustrate. I have a five-year-old daughter. Since she was born–actually, since she was conceived–my wife and I have gone to great lengths in the Great Yuppie Parenting Race. At one time we even played classical music while she was in the womb. Crazy us. Currently the little rogue is taking ballet lessons and swim lessons. My wife goes over her workbooks. I am teaching her chess.

Why are we doing these things? We are, of course, trying to develop her abilities so that she can get the most out of life. The practical effect of our actions, however, is that we are working to give our daughter an edge–that is, a better chance to succeed than everybody else’s children. Even though we might be embarrassed to think of it this way, we are doing our utmost to undermine equal opportunity. So are all the other parents who are trying to get their children into the best schools, the best colleges, and in general give them the best possible upbringing and education. None of them believes in equal opportunity either!

Now, to enforce equal opportunity, the government could do one of two things: it could try to pull my daughter down, or it could work to raise other people’s children up. The first is clearly destructive and immoral, but the second is also unfair. The government is obliged to treat all citizens equally. Why should it work to undo the benefits that my wife and I have labored so hard to provide? Why should it offer more to children whose parents have not taken the trouble?

There are numerous errors here, some, but not all, of which Timothy Noah’s comments briefly point out. Here are a few. First, it is entirely possible to believe in equal opportunity while pursuing maximal advantage for one’s own kid. For example, one might not make the mistake of believing that when two values conflict in a particular circumstance, the one that should give way has no value at all. Or one might believe that one’s own actions are morally suspect. Second, it does not follow from the fact that parents should have some freedom to pursue the good of their children, that they should be free to do whatever they want to pursue the good of their children. Would D’Souza be justified in bribing a jury to get his (innocent) daughter off a drug charge? Third, there are numerous reasons why the government should offer more to “the children whose parents have not taken the trouble”. For example, the fact the equality of opportunity is valuable. Or the fact that it is wrong to allow misery to persist that one can relatively easily, and costlessly alleviate. What freedom of D’Souza’s or his child’s, exactly, was the government undermining when it paid my wife to sit with that kid the other day? Fish in a barrel? Sure, but while almost no-one makes all of D’Souza’s mistakes at once, many people make one or another of them. [1]

Anyway, this is mainly an excuse for some shameless self-and-other promotion. Swift and I, regrettably ignorant of D’Souza, nevertheless point out his errors at great length in a paper we have just published legitimate parental partiality. It seems not to require a sub, or registration. I’m rather proud of it, more so than I would dare to be of anything I had done on my own. But then, of course, it’s much better than if I’d been doing it on my own.

[1] Note that I have refrained from worrying about his daughter’s well being on the grounds that with parents like that one might become very materially successful but an emotional cripple. That’s because I imagine he’s exaggerating the repulsiveness of his behaviour for effect, and if I’m wrong at least she’ll have funds to pay for therapy.