by Henry Farrell on March 8, 2012
“Larry Lessig”:http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/18951520350/on-the-anonymous-donors-to-americans-elect argues (disagreeing with Rick Hasen) that there’s nothing wrong with the anonymity of the people behind the _Americans Elect_ non-partisan third-party initiative.
bq. I’ve come around to support Americans Elect now, but only because I believe it could be a platform for a real reform candidate. If it doesn’t produce such a candidate, I won’t support supporting the candidate it produces. But in this spin, I have never been too worked up about “their transparency problem.” …When we hear that an anonymous contributor has given $10 million to a superPac supporting a particular candidate, we are and should be concerned about that contribution. But that’s because of two distinct, and independent reasons: We assume that even though we don’t know who the contributor is, the candidate will, AND We assume that the contributor’s contribution will lead the candidate to be responsive in ways that we won’t understand. If those two conditions are not met, however, our concern about anonymity should be different, and, in my view, much less significant. … What could the contributor be getting if the candidate couldn’t know who the contributor was? … If there is no plausible way in which the contributions would affect the work or the positions of the candidate, the cost of anonymity is different. … This second point is why I don’t think #AmericansElect has a “transparency problem.” I can’t begin to imagine how the identity of the contributors could possibly matter to the positions that any candidate would take on any of the issues. AE is building a platform to select candidates. They are promising a process to get access to the ballot in all fifty states. Whether a candidate is selected to be on that ballot depends upon his or her winning in the primary/caucus process. A candidate’s alignment with or against the substantive issues of one of the anonymous contributors isn’t going to affect that candidate’s ability to get nominated by AE at all.
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by Ingrid Robeyns on March 8, 2012
Around 1996, when I had my first paid job in Leuven, and we were all still paying and being paid in francs, guldens, pesetas or deutschmark, I bought this wonderful piece of art from an emerging artist (she may actually still have been a student of art). As the picture shows, her name was Elke, and that’s all I remember, apart from the price (1.000 Belgian francs, which nowadays would be 25 Euros plus inflation). And I also recall that Elke was delighted that I bought her work. Elke, I hope you have made many more of these pieces of art, and that you allow me to reproduce this one here to celebrate International Women’s Day!
by Henry Farrell on March 7, 2012
NB that there are two differences between this post and my last one. First – there are substantial spoilers beneath the fold. Second, Stross’s book (Powells, Amazon)is a _very_ plausible Hugo nominee for this year (MacLeod’s book isn’t, for the obvious reasons of publication dates etc). Hugo nominations close this week – I’ll try to cover another couple of books that I think could be nominated tomorrow.
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by Daniel on March 7, 2012
Somewhat later than promised, I was motivated to write my follow-up post to the Greece choose-your-own adventure one. If you recall, the decisions in that post were motivated by advice from “Maynard”, your advisor working for “The One World Government”. In actual fact, there isn’t a One World Government, and the people who have jobs similar to Maynard’s all work for a variety of international organizations which are tasked with doing a job similar to what a global government would do, but without any power to make anyone do anything. Alan Beattie of the FT (full disclosure – a mate, we were at the Bank of England together) has spent the last fifteen or so years covering these international institutions and has now written a book called “Who’s In Charge Here?” (Americans), which in a typically punchy and exasperated style, sets out the complete mess which is the state of global financial institutions today. I will now review that book in the “London Review of Books style” – ie, by writing an essay on a tangential subject of interest to myself, and then tacking on a paragraph or so about the book at the end.
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by Chris Bertram on March 7, 2012
Julian Sanchez has a post up complaining about all us horrible lefties who are deriving great enjoyment from the fact that, in the Koch/Cato bunfight, shills for the rights of private property are being stiffed by those same private property rights. Corey Robin has a pretty good reply, so go read Corey.
Sanchez:
bq. when it comes to the ongoing Koch/Cato conflict, there’s a bafflingly widespread round of herp-derpery rippling through blogs on the left and the right, wherein people imagine it’s clever to point out the supposed irony of libertarian scholars failing to enthusiastically embrace a couple billionaires’ putative property rights over the institution. This is just strange. …I’m not arguing that Congress should intervene somehow. I’m arguing that exercising those rights as they seemingly intend to is a bad idea; that their direct control would, in itself, be damaging to Cato’s credibility; and that I’m not interested in working for the Republican talking-point factory that all evidence suggests they envision. Like rain on your wedding day and other infamous Alanisisms, that’s kind of crappy, but not “ironic” in any recognizable sense. I realize progressives think libertarianism is just code for uncritical worship of rich people, but as that’s not actually the case, the only irony here is that people think they’re scoring some kind of gotcha point when they’re actually exposing the silliness of their own caricature.
Well of course Sanchez is correct. Libertarians are as free as anyone else to criticize people for the way they exercise their rights, they just don’t think the state should coerce people to act in various ways. They can deplore Scrooge like selfishness just as sincerely as any leftie, they just think it would be wrong of the state to force Scrooge to be be nice to the poor. So it goes.
No doubt there are some soft and cuddly propertarians out there who insist on the rights to private property (and hence oppose enforceable positive duties) but who privately devote their time, money and other resources to helping the global (and local) poor. To those libertarians, I apologise in advance. However, to those libertarians who have spent ink and energy arguing that not only would it be _wrong_ to force to rich to help the poor but also that it would be _pointless_ or _counterproductive_ I do not. And then there are those libertarians who don’t even both with _pointless_ or _counterproductive_ but who argue that the strong helping the weak is just _wrong_, namely the Randians. So, pure-in-spirit rights-defenders (of whom Julian Sanchez may be one): just take it on the chin for now and spend some time arguing with the wealthy that, whilst they have a perfect right to spend their money funding Cato (or Heritage, or the AEI) they really could make better use of their rights by sending their cash to the sub-Saharan poor or similar. (See also, this “very old post of mine”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/14/if-youre-a-libertarian-how-come-youre-so-mean/ ).
by John Q on March 7, 2012
Sighted at Port Arthur, Tasmania, this quote from Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, by Isabella Beeton (emphasis added):
-It is true, says Liebig, that thousands have lived without a knowledge of tea and coffee; and daily experience teaches us that, under certain circumstances, they may be dispensed with without disadvantage to the merely animal functions; but it is an error, certainly, to conclude from this that they may be altogether dispensed with in reference to their effects; and it is a question whether, if we had no tea and no coffee, the popular instinct would not seek for and discover the means of replacing them. Science, which accuses us of so much in these respects, will have, in the first place, to ascertain whether it depends on sensual and sinful inclinations merely, that every people of the globe have appropriated some such means of acting on the nervous life, from the shore of the Pacific, where the Indian retires from life for days in order to enjoy the bliss of intoxication with koko, to the Arctic regions, where Kamtschatdales and Koriakes prepare an intoxicating beverage from a poisonous mushroom. We think it, on the contrary, highly probable, not to say certain, that the instinct of man, feeling certain blanks, certain wants of the intensified life of our times, which cannot be satisfied or filled up by mere quantity, has discovered, in these products of vegetable life the true means of giving to his food the desired and necessary quality.
by Henry Farrell on March 6, 2012
This is less a review of Ken MacLeod’s new novel, _Intrusion_ than a response to it. Ken is famous for having said that history is the trade secret of science fiction (also: for describing the Singularity as the “Rapture for nerds”) – but I can’t help wondering whether history is being overtaken by the cognitive and social sciences. Since Cosma Shalizi and I are both thinking and starting to write about some of the arguments that Ken takes on in his book, I’ll focus on drawing out the ideas. This is obviously dangerous if you do it naively – good novels of ideas play with their subject matter rather than expound it, and take care to leave a lot of space for ambiguity, counter-perspectives, the awkwardness of real human beings with human motivations and so on. And _Intrusion_ is a good novel of ideas. Even so, there may be value in drawing out the ideas that Ken is engaging with – I don’t think that the book mentions the names of Thaler and Sunstein once, but one significant skein of the book argues against them. NB that while I don’t _think_ that there are any major spoilers below the fold, some possible readers may reasonably want to preserve their reading experience from my conceptions and misconceptions of what the book is about. Certainly, people who have already read the book will get a lot more from this essay than people who haven’t. NB also that while I don’t know whether the book will have a US edition anytime soon, it can be ordered from the usual UK sources by US readers, who will also soon be treated to his robots-meet-Calvinism-and-contractarianism-and-the-illusion-of-free-will near future thriller, _The Night Sessions._
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by Tedra Osell on March 5, 2012
A public thank you to Kieran for teaching PK two new vocabulary words–“diaphoresis” and “micturition”–which should come in very handy. And for the delivery of a package this morning that prompted PK to get out of bed before noon.
by Tedra Osell on March 4, 2012
A “bad teacher” named William Johnson talks about the problems we’re having from the other side of the desk.
my job can be extremely difficult. Beyond the challenges posed by my students, budget cuts and changes to special-education policy have increased my workload drastically even over just the past 18 months. While my class sizes have grown, support staff members have been laid off. Students with increasingly severe disabilities are being pushed into more mainstream classrooms like mine, where they receive less individual attention and struggle to adapt to a curriculum driven by state-designed high-stakes tests. [click to continue…]
by John Holbo on March 3, 2012
Fortunately I didn’t contract with Chris in advance to contribute to the Graeber seminar, so I’m not in debt on this score, paying late and therefore a bad person.
Right. I’m only about halfway through the book – on audiobook: must have something to do on the bus – and quite enjoying it. Some skepticism about Graeber’s scholarship has been expressed in the wake of revelation of that embarrassing bit about Apple computers that he got totally wrong. I am not an expert on all the ancient and exotic anthropological and etc. evidence Graeber cites, but I’m not an absolute beginner. I started studying the history of ideas of debt, and related subjects, a few years back. See here and here. I started because it occurred to me the Plato I was teaching was, to a surprising extent, about debt, reciprocity and, generally, the convertability of moral into monetary categories, and vice versa. Euthyphro on piety. It’s ‘care of the gods’, which – this is his final suggestion – turns out to be the capacity to enter into healthy exchange relations. Meno on whether being good boils down to getting your hands on the goods. Cephalus, the old man, launches the mighty ship, Republic, with the thought that justice is ‘speaking truth and paying debts’, which morphs into the lex talionis thought that justice is payback – doing good to friends and harm to enemies. Plato, like Graeber, is really really concerned to shred this stuff, if he can. So I find Graeber interesting. I haven’t gotten to the bits where Graeber discusses Plato, but I see he does discuss him. And I haven’t found any flagrant inconsistencies between what he says about other ancient stuff and what I have read in other authors about ancient stuff. So I’m inclined to think the Apple slip was a one-off accident, not indicative of larger problems. As to the tribute system stuff. It sounds like Henry is right about that and Graeber is wrong. I haven’t gotten to that part of the book yet.
Right. Getting down to business. Here’s what seems to me a fundamental tension in the book. On the one hand, Graeber wants to emphasize that debt is a very specific relation. Everything isn’t debt, human relations-wise. More generally, everything isn’t exchange. For him, this is the larger significance of defeating the myth of barter and the double-coincidence and all that (go read the other posts if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) Money emerges as a way of accounting for debt, but not everything is debt. So money isn’t a way of accounting for everything. I’m simplifying, but this is the gist. (One of many gists, but enough for one post.) [click to continue…]
by John Q on March 3, 2012
by Henry Farrell on March 3, 2012
_Red Plenty_, which I’ve written about several times, is now available (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/biblio/9781555976040?p_ti, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/entity/Francis-Spufford/B001HCV3N8/?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&qid=1330745629&camp=1789&sr=1-1&creative=390957) in a US paperback edition. It’s a fabulous book which should apply to a wide variety of CT readers – a mosaic novel that simultaneously speaks intelligently to the Soviet calculation debate, _and_ has engaging characters. It’s beautifully written to boot – this bit, which I’ve quoted before, will give you some sense of how its more cerebral passages flow.
bq. But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on. That was Marx’s description, anyway. And what would be the alternative? The consciously arranged alternative? A dance of another nature, Emil presumed. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all.
Finally, we’re going to do a Crooked Timber seminar on it in a few months. This should give plenty of opportunity to those of you who want to join the discussion to get your hands on a copy and read it.
by Tedra Osell on March 2, 2012
So. That post I wrote about charter schools? Where I argued that liberal, educated, reasonably affluent parents (like me!) should keep our kids in public schools, advocate for public schools, not buy our way out of problems in the public schools, and so on? Dana Goldstein made a similar argument against homeschooling recently.
Only some things have happened since I wrote that post, and as it turns out, I’m homeschooling Pseudonymous Kid right now. [click to continue…]
by Maria on March 1, 2012
A month or so ago, in a pub in town, the chat was about Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. We were talking about books that transport you. Reading them seems like your real life, and everyday things just a rude irruption into it. It suddenly occurred to me that Lyra’s reading of her alethiometer is like many people’s relationship with fiction. Early in the story, Lyra intuitively interprets the tarot-like symbols of the truth-telling device, but as she matures she loses the gift and must re-learn it the hard way as an adult.
As a child, you can completely disappear into the world of the story and experience an emotional and imaginative totality. Many readers continue with that intense immersion through their teens, often through genre fiction (though all fiction is genre, if you ask me). But the high gets harder and harder to find and is nearly always attenuated in some way, not least by the cares of an adult life.
I got to thinking about how books can re-create that lost paradise for me. There are a couple of ways it can still happen; identifying strongly with the main character, being brought into another world, imaginative or historical, that is just strange and convincing enough to make me wistful for it (the Avatar phenomenon), or simply immersion in a ripping good yarn. Some books that have recently made me feel like that rarest thing, a happy teenager, are Tim Winton’s Cloud Street, Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book and Glen David Gold’s Sunnyside (which we did a seminar on last year).
I’m curious about what others think. Can you ever go back? What sort of books do it, and how?
