From the monthly archives:
(as an analytic approach mind you, not as a way to behave).
“Chris”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/09/08/getting-the-microfoundations-right-some-comments-and-a-bleg/ and “Lenin”:http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/09/rational-choice-marxism.html argue back against my defense of rational choice theory for lefties (and John Quiggin has some criticisms scattered through comments too). Below the fold is my clarification of my argument, at Holbovian length, with some responses folded in.
Scott “reluctantly capitulates”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee305 to the e-reader revolution.
I recently had the pleasure of attending the “European Society for Philosophy and Psychology conference in Bochum, Germany”:http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/philosophy/espp2010/index.html . The highlight for me was attending a talk by “Michael Tomasello”:http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/ of the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig on pre-linguistic communication. Getting home, I ordered a copy of Tomasello’s “Why We Cooperate”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262013592/junius-20 in which he argues, on the basis of detailed empirical work with young children and other primates, that humans are hard-wired with certain pro-social dispositions to inform, help, share etc and to engage in norm-guided behaviour of various kinds. Many of the details of Tomasello’s work are controversial (the book is essentially his Tanner Lectures and contains replies by Silk, Dweck, Skyrms and Spelke) and I lack the competence to begin to adjudicate some of the disputes. But this much is, I think, clear: that work in empirical psychology and evolutionary anthropolgy (and related fields) doesn’t – quelle surprise! – support anything like the Hobbesian picture of human nature that lurks at the foundations of microeconomics, rational choice theory and, indeed, in much contemporary and historical political philosophy.
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Not only is Christian nationalist libertarianism a problematic philosophy, but old DC Romance comics have issues as well.
From Heart Throbs: The Best of DC Romance Comics. Tragically out of print but I snagged an old copy cheap – ‘for Belle’ – as I like to say. (Damn, I wouldn’t buy the hardback at that price
I was going to snark about a week-old Jonah Goldberg column. “I confess, if Beck wasn’t a libertarian, I would find his populism terrifying.” But I see Will Wilkinson already said it: “If Mr Beck’s libertarian streak, such as it is, is all that keeps his demos-whispering puppetmastery from reducing Mr Goldberg to a quivering heap, it seems to me this weekend’s pageant of platitudes should not have been reassuring at all.” Cato’s loss.
The problem for Beck – and Goldberg – is obvious: it doesn’t make sense just to join Christian nationalism with libertarianism at the hip, and leave it at that. Conservatism as secular-theocratic/communitarian-individualistic/tribal-cosmopolitan philosophy. Conservatives will respond that it is the genius of conservatism to nurture a ‘fruitful tension’ hereabouts. My complaint against ‘fusionism’ is standard, and so is the stock ‘hobgoblin of little minds’ brush-off of my complaint. But let me try to say something brief about this that I haven’t seen said briefly in quite this way.
The rhetorical advantage of having a set of ‘principles’ that is, in effect, massively over-productive of permissions and prohibitions, is that you can take a ‘principled’ stand for pretty much anything, or against it, in roughly one step. You can call for vast individual sacrifices for the greater good. You can denounce any and all such calls for sacrifice. You can come out in favor of heavy-handed statism and paternalism. You can denounce everything except the minimal, night-watchman state. So it goes.
Your ‘principles’ are functioning as a volume knob on your preferences. If you like something, turn it up to 10. If you don’t like it, mute it out. You don’t have anything doing the job principles are generally thought to do: namely, acting as any sort of critical check.
Is this unfair to Beck – or Goldberg? After all, it’s probably true that political wisdom consists in judiciously balancing incommensurable values. Edmund Burke meets Isaiah Berlin-ish stuff. Yes, but the paradigm of respecting the crooked timber of humanity shouldn’t be treating your principles as servants that get you what you want, then melt discretely into the woodwork. You have to see, at a minimum, why Hayek wrote “Why I Am Not A Conservative”. If you don’t acknowledge that this makes serious trouble for Christian nationalist libertarianism, you simply aren’t a libertarian. Or a Christian nationalist. You’re just self-indulgent and/or a professional facilitator of self-indulgence in others.
(I am reminded of a post from a few years back in which Goldberg solved the riddle of how Hayek could fail to be a conservative by claiming he wasn’t talking about American conservatives. Which is, to put it mildly, a misreading.)
UPDATE: Yes, I know the rhetoric was rather blandly interfaith. But this is an example of what I am talking about, not a counter-example to it. If you think about it.
Last time I looked at a proposal to spend $50 billion on infrastructure to stimulate the economy, I thought it was a great idea. This time, I think it’s scarcely worth the bother. Why have I changed my mind?
It’s always somewhat embarrassing to agree with Thomas Friedman. So when he switches from trumpeting the US as the new hyperpower to the end of hyperpower argument I was making all along,, it struck me that it might be time to reconsider whether I need to change my own views. But, that would be excessively contrarian.
As an aside, looking back at Friedman’s 2004 piece, the Gulliver trope is lifted straight from Josef Joffe who I linked in my earlier post. But then Joffe lifted it himself, apparently from this piece by Daniel Bourmaud in 1998.
A central lesson of this experience (of course, not one that Friedman or Joffe is ever likely to learn) is that the whole idea of a military hyperpower is a nonsense. The idea that military force can be used for any positive purpose (that is, other than as a defensive response to the use of military force by others) persists despite a lack of any significant supporting evidence. The US crusade in Iraq has cost, or will cost $3 trillion (not to mention the lives of thousands of American, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis). That’s more than the US would spend on official development assistance for the whole world in 100 years at current rates (and the lion’s share of ODA goes to supporting military/geopolitical goals – the poorest countries get less than $10 billion a year between them). Things have gone pretty badly in Iraq, but even supposing that the ultimate outcome had been a stable and prosperous democracy, it’s clear that the benefit-cost ratio would be very low. You get a similar answer if you look at the whole period since Macarthur pushed on to the Yalu river back in 1950. And by comparison with other countries that have tried to use military power to pursue foreign policy goals, the US has done much better (or rather, much less badly) than anyone else .
In my post on EU-US convergence, I found that the US was similar to the leading eurozone countries in both productivity (output per hour worked) and employment-population ratio, so that the difference in income per person is mostly explained (in some cases more than explained) by differences in hours worked per employment person. I didn’t take the distribution of income into account, since the data sources I was using there did not provide anything useful. But commenter Detlef found a blog post by Maximilian Hagemes at the World Bank site which links to a useful paper by Piketty and Alvaredo on cross-country comparisons of income concentration. For most eurozone countries, they show that the top 1 per cent of households gets about 8 per cent of total income (the presentation is graphical, but in any case, there is no point in going for spurious precision with numbers like this). For the US, the most recent data gives an 18 per cent share. So, the share of national income going to the remaining 99 per cent is about 10 per cent smaller in the US than in the eurozone.
There are a couple of ways of looking at this.
This “essay”:http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100824/ART/708239962/1200/REVIEW on Eric Rauchway’s _Banana Republican_ by Ben East is rather dim-witted. Not because it displays no evidence whatsoever of actually having read the book under discussion (instead being a review essay based on a couple of sentences in someone other’s review), although it does not. Nor because it makes a sweeping judgment that “critics” (the plural is a stretch, since the only critic mentioned is Joe Queenan of the New York Times) have dismissed the book as not well written (as it happens, Queenan’s “issue”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/books/review/Queenan-t.html is that the writing is _too_ good to plausibly reflect the thought processes of Tom Buchanan). Nor yet because elevates a purely personal crochet into a universal aesthetic principle, although it does that too. It’s because it completely misses the point.
bq. Without believable characters, novels are nothing. So it isn’t particularly surprising that sometimes, authors take the somewhat safer option. They “borrow” characters from other writers’ works – the more famous, the better – and place them in their own books. … So why do authors continue to use well-known characters? Is it a self-imposed challenge to carry on somebody else’s iconic work, or just an easy way to make a quick buck? … Banana Republican, gives Tom Buchanan – the racist, snobbish, despicable excuse for a human being in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – a second chance. … The New York Times called it a gimmick: “It’s as if Rauchway wrote a generic farce about a long-forgotten revolution and then decided the book might get more attention if he recast the narrator as a refugee from The Great Gatsby,” wrote Joe Queenan. … Perhaps, I suggest, the difficulty is that readers often feel authors are writing with somebody else’s characters because they know they have a ready-made audience. That, well, they’re being just a little lazy and unimaginative. … “
There’s a very obvious reason why Rauchway has “borrowed” the character of Tom Buchanan. He’s riffing on a famous “borrowing” that sought to do for nineteenth century British imperialism what Rauchway wants to do for the early twentieth century version – the exploits of “Sir Harry Paget Flashman, VC”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Paget_Flashman. Flashman was, of course, the bully who gets sent down from Rugby in Thomas Hughes’ _Tom Brown’s Schooldays._ McDonald Fraser appropriates this character from a novel that is in every way inferior to his own books, problematic though they are in some ways, and transforms him from a thick-headed boor into an intelligent, charming, selfish and completely cowardly representative of the British upper classes. Queenan notes the broad resemblance between _Banana Republican_ and the Flashman novels, but seems completely ignorant of the fact that Flashman is himself a borrowing from another novel, suggesting that he needs to pay a little more attention to the stuff that he’s reading. That East elevates this misreading into a fundamental principle of aesthetics (that those who use other’s characters in their own novels are lazy, unimaginative, and timorous and that their novels, with a tiny list of exceptions are failures), suggests that his problem is rather more fundamental. Indeed, if one wanted to apply adjectives to a critic who doesn’t seem to have actually _read_ the book he’s trying to take down (East makes _no_ independent judgments of the book in the course of the review-essay), lazy, unimaginative and timorous might be excellent ones to start out with. Matt Yglesias wrote somewhere that _the National_ pays remarkably well for book reviews. If I were them, I’d be asking for their money back.
[updated to clarify argument]
Education Next is celebrating its tenth birthday with a poll to uncover which are the most important education books of the decade. The short list of 40 titles is curious (and what is curiouser, given EN’s political leanings, is that Linda Darling-Hammond’s and Diane Ravitch’s books are currently way ahead of the pack). Several, but I’ll only single out Karen Chenoweth’s It’s Being Done, and Jay Mathews’ Work Hard, Be Nice, really have no business on any such list at all. Others (like David Cohen and Susan Moffitt’s outstanding book The Ordeal of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools?
The striking thing is that several key books, some of which must be contenders, are missing. Regular readers will be able to guess the three absentees which top my list, and which would have competed only with The Ordeal of Equality for my permitted three votes if they’d been there. But to ensure there’s no mystery, here they are:
1. Richard Rothstein, Class And Schools: Using Social, Economic, And Educational Reform To Close The Black-white Achievement Gap
2. Again Richard Rothstein, this time with Tamara Wilder and Rebecca Jacobson, Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right
Ravitch’s likely winning entry draws on very heavily on both of the above books, so, really, they must be important if hers is.
3. CT favourite, Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life
Perhaps it was the curse of a positive Brighouse mention on CT that sunk them (but then why is The Global Achievement Gap on the list?). Feel free to recommend other absentees from the list in comments.