A couple of requests for CT readers

1. I’m running a half-marathon in Philadelphia at the weekend and raising money for an East Africa Famine appeal in Australia. The Australian government will match donations dollar for dollar, and you may also be able to claim a tax deduction, so this is a real bargain. You can sponsor me here – I’m currently a dollar short of halfway to my target of $5000
2. I’m writing a piece about social democratic responses to what Colin Crouch has called the “strange non-death of neoliberalism“, and I’m looking for books that focus on restoring more equality in market incomes, for example by rebuilding unions or constraining the financial sector, as opposed to redistribution through the tax/welfare system. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

* I’ll ask nicely, but I refuse to bl*g

I presume that most CT readers know that Occupy Wall Street was, to use the police euphemism, “cleared and restored”:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/nyregion/police-begin-clearing-zuccotti-park-of-protesters.html?hp yesterday. Consider this an open thread to talk about it. While it’s a minor part of the story, the “confiscation of the OWS library”:http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/892805-264/occupy_wall_street_library_removed.html.csp (as best as anyone can tell, the 5,000 odd books are now residing in a dumpster somewhere) hit me particularly hard. Trashing libraries is a very particular kind of political statement.

If you’re not reading “Aaron Bady”:http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/the-grass-is-closed-what-i-have-learned-about-power-from-the-police-chancellor-birgeneau-and-occupy-cal/ on this, you need to be.

bq. This was a very modest lesson in how power works. On Wednesday, several thousand UC Berkeley students learned a much bigger lesson, but in many ways it was exactly the same lesson: the rule is what the people with the force to enforce it say it is. And it becomes the rule when you either obey it, or when they use their force to make you obey it.

bq. …The person on the left is a colleague of mine, and I’ve seen his swollen hand and watched him limp and talked to him about what happened. I saw how physically shaken up he was, several hours after being beaten, and I went with a friend to get an Ace bandage for his hand. On the right, you can see someone I know who acquired several cracked ribs. I could go on. Or this video, in which you see the police yanking the director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities to the ground by her hair, applying choke-holds with batons, and punching people in the face.

“Jesse Kornbluh”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-kornbluth/the-police-riot-at-berkel_b_1091208.html?ref=college&ir=College adds that police broke the ribs of a 70 year old poet at the demonstration. Aaron “suggests that people contact Berkeley’s Chancellor Birgeneau”:http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/sunday-reading-24/ at

Email: chancellor@berkeley.edu
Phone: (510) 642-7464
Fax: (510) 643-5499
200 California Hall, MC#1500
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-1500

“to suggest to him that this angers you and that he shouldn’t do it again, or perhaps that he should resign, yesterday.” I’m of the ‘he should resign, yesterday’ school myself. At the very best he is an _ex post_ apologist for the brutality of the riot police he called in, and he is plausibly directly culpable for it. If anyone knows the email addresses for the board of trustees (who I am guessing are politically appointed, but still), or other pressure points, feel free to provide them in comments, and I will modify the main post accordingly.

The only reason Catholics like Joe Paterno and Darío Castrillón Hoyos are able to commit such uniquely awful crimes is because they are ethical in a way that run-of-the-mill godless folk cannot understand. Plus, I hereby stipulate that raping children is, admittedly, bad, mumble.

Even shorter: I don’t doubt that people whom I have just admitted committed evil acts are, in fact good, because [makes mysterious, several-part gesture with hand and wrists which magically resolves obvious contradictions.]

* A few days ago, Australia’s Parliament passed legislation implementing a carbon tax (strictly speaking, a fixed price for carbon emissions permits, intended to convert to an emissions trading scheme in a few years). Here’s a piece I wrote for the Australian Financial Review on what this will mean for the doomsayers (that is, those who falsely predict economic doom as a result of this measure).

* Another opinion piece, in the New York Times, on Trichet, Draghi and the ECB

* Social scientists have known for a couple of decades that, contrary to its national myths, the US is a country with low intergenerational economic mobility, by international standards. Back in 2001, when I reviewed The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism by Bob Goodin and others, I mentioned that this was already well known. More recent evidence has shown that social mobility is not only low but declining. Yet until recently, popular discussion in the US seemed impervious to this evidence. Now suddenly, the issue is everywhere. Time Magazine had a front page story, there’s another in Salon and even the National Review is talking about it. Surely Occupy Wall Street has played a role here, but the lead time for a piece like that in Time would presumably predate #OWS. The experience of the Great Recession seems finally to be breaking down the power of zombie ideas.

I’m at a workshop, unable to blog properly, and saving my eurozone energies for revisions to a piece for _The Nation_ (the ending of which has changed dramatically twice, and which is likely to change dramatically again before its Friday deadline). But this “piece in the FT”:http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/000cb4ae-0abc-11e1-b9f6-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1dEBeOEIu is not very far from what I would be writing if I had the time.

bq. Apparently, the answer to the huge problems of the eurozone is the replacement of elected premiers with economic experts – approved officials dropped from European institutions. In Greece, Lucas Papademos, a former vice-president of the European Central Bank, has been pushed hard for the job; in Italy, Mario Monti, another economist and a former EU Commissioner, is much mentioned. They may lack a democratic mandate but they’re fantastically well regarded in Frankfurt. It remains to be seen if either will clinch the role. But what exactly is the great attraction of technocrats?

bq. If ever modern Europe needed brave, charismatic leaders to carry their nation through turbulent times, it would seem to be now. Instead, it is as if the crew of the Starship Enterprise had concluded that Captain Jean-Luc Picard is no longer the man for the job and that it is time to send for the Borg. Efficient, calculating machines driving through unpopular measures across the eurozone with the battle cry “resistance is futile” are apparently the order of the day. Faced with a deep crisis, once-proud European nations are essentially preparing to hand over power to Ernst & Young.

Cosma Shalizi and I have an article on “Thaler/Sunstein and democratic politics”:http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228376.500-nudge-policies-are-another-name-for-coercion.html in the current issue of _New Scientist._ The title is a bit misleading (our problem with nudging isn’t that it’s coercive; it’s that it doesn’t have much in the way of feedback), but we’ll stick by the main text.

bq. “Nudging” is appealing because it provides many of the benefits of top-down regulation while avoiding many of the drawbacks. Bureaucrats and leaders of organisations can guide choices without dictating them. Thaler and Sunstein call the approach “libertarian paternalism”: it lets people “decide” what they want to do, while guiding them in the “right” direction.

bq. …This points to the key problem with “nudge” style paternalism: presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct, the technocrats’ prescriptions. This leaves the technocrats with no systematic way of detecting their own errors, correcting them, or learning from them. And technocracy is bound to blunder, especially when it is not democratically accountable.

bq. … democratic arrangements, which foster diversity, are better at solving problems than technocratic ones. Libertarian paternalism is seductive because democratic politics is a cumbersome and messy business. Even so, democracy is far better than even the best-intentioned technocracy at discovering people’s real interests and how to advance them. It is also, obviously, better at defending those interests when bureaucrats do not mean well.

Soon after reading this (via Chris’ post) I read this (bia BoingBoing). I would pay good money – albeit probably only a small amount – for a videogame designed by Horkheimer and Adorno.

“”We realized that if we incentivized things that were inherently boring,” Butterfield told me, “people would do them again and again—it showed up in the logs—but that they would secretly hate us.”

“This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.”

Just wanted to give our Ohio readers a chance to tell us how inordinately pleased they are with themselves. And to tell anyone who doesn’t yet know that, in an exceptionally high turnout, Ohio voters defeated their state government’s union busting legislation by a large majority. Well done everybody. And, from your friends in Wisconsin, thanks. Fantastic.

Chris’s “post below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/11/08/a-new-communist-manifesto/ reminds me that I’ve been meaning to disagree with this “claim”:http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/10/utopia_is_creep.php by Nick Carr.

bq. Works of science fiction, particularly good ones, are almost always dystopian. It’s easy to understand why: There’s a lot of drama in Hell, but Heaven is, by definition, conflict-free. Happiness is nice to experience, but seen from the outside it’s pretty dull.

bq. But there’s another reason why portrayals of utopia don’t work. We’ve all experienced the “uncanny valley” that makes it difficult to watch robotic or avatarial replicas of human beings without feeling creeped out. The uncanny valley also exists, I think, when it comes to viewing artistic renderings of a future paradise. Utopia is creepy – or at least it looks creepy. That’s probably because utopia requires its residents to behave like robots, never displaying or even feeling fear or anger or jealousy or bitterness or any of those other messy emotions that plague our fallen world.

[click to continue…]

At The Utopian there are details of a project by Adorno and Horkheimer for a new Communist Manifesto:

bq. Horkheimer: Thesis: nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings. In this situation it is mankind’s dream that we should do away with both work and war. The only drawback is that the Americans will say that if we do so, we shall arm our enemies. And in fact, there is a kind of dominant stratum in the East compared to which John Foster Dulles is an amiable innocent.

bq. Adorno: We ought to include a section on the objection: what will people do with all their free time?

bq. Horkheimer: In actual fact their free time does them no good because the way they have to do their work does not involve engaging with objects. This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.

h/t Brian Leiter.

We went to see Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem on Saturday, with Mark Rylance playing the role of “Rooster” Byron. It was one of the most overwhelming experiences I’ve had at the theatre. The production was superb, and Rylance extraordinary, inhabiting the character of drunk, drug-dealing outsider Byron with love and energy throughout. Englishness is the theme, but hardly the house-trained Englishness of which the Daily Mail would approve, since the action is set on Byron’s last day before eviction from his illegal encampment by Kennet and Avon council, and Byron is a “gippo” and a “pikey” (Americans might call him “trailer trash”). The inhabitants of the little box houses on the “new estate”, many of whom have hung around Rooster’s caravan as adolescents themselves, want him out. If I were being pretentious I might use terms like Dionysian (ok I just did). The play problematizes peace, “progress”, order and prosperity and projects a view of what matters that won’t appeal to Steven Pinker or the average economist. Well too bad for them. I hear the play was well-received on Broadway. I wonder how well the Wiltshire underlass travelled to New York? No spoilers here, but I have listened to Sandy Denny singing “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” about 100 times in the past couple of days, often with tears running down my face.