December 2015

Imagine that you’re a person who is obsessed with airplanes. Naturally
you’re excited when everyone starts talking about this big new book,
*Aviation in the 21st Century.* You get your copy and start
reading. Just as you’d hoped, there’s a detailed discussion of the
flight characteristics of a vast variety of plane types and a
comprehensive record of different countries’ commercial fleets, from the
beginning of aviation until today, plus a few artfully chosen
illustrations of classic early planes. But long stretches of the book
are quite different. They are devoted to the general principle that, in
an atmosphere, heavier objects fall faster than light ones, building up
to the universal law that lighter-than-air objects will float. Finally,
in the conclusion, you find some bleak reflections on the environmental
consequences of air travel – hardly mentioned til now – and a plea for
the invention of some new technology that will allow fast air travel
without the use of fossil fuels. How do you feel, when you set the book
down? You would be grateful for the factual material – even if the good
stuff is mostly relegated to the online appendices. You would be
impressed by the rigorous logic with which the principle of buoyancy was
developed, and admire the author’s iconoclastic willingness to break
with the orthodox view that all motion takes place in a vacuum. You
probably share the author’s hopes for some way of eliminating the carbon
emissions from air travel. But you might also find yourself with the
uneasy feeling that the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts. [click to continue…]

A friend asked me last week how I watch cricket. Do I sit for 8 hours at a time, or watch highlight reels, or what? So I explained that when possible I watch live during breakfast when the kids have left the house, and actually take a short lunch break if there is live cricket to watch. If I am cooking, or cleaning the house, I have it on, turned up loud, in case anything unmissable happens (only if my cooking is uncomplicated enough to . But, if I know a game is likely to get tense and exciting, and will not be able to see it at all — teaching, days of meetings, etc — then I try to avoid learning what happened, and watch either highlights or, sometimes, long parts of innings, later (sometimes much later). He scoffed. How hard can it be to avoid learning what happened in a Test match when you’re in Wisconsin? [1] He, much more impressively, has to avoid learning the scores in a Packers game (I didn’t say that, in fact, this is something I manage to do all season every season, with no effort at all). Anyway, he told me that when he was a kid, on days that his dad couldn’t see a game, he (the dad) would come home and say “We’re in the cone of silence. Nobody say anything” and expect complete cooperation from everyone in his herculean effort to avoid learning the score.

Well, every Briton over the age of 40 knows what comes next. But surely there must be an episode from an American sitcom with exactly the same plot, no?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXoKl3Hpsh0

[1] During the World Cup I had the misfortune of teaching a class with a smart and lovely Indian lad, who did his absolute best to keep results to himself, but…well, his best often wasn’t good enough.

As I’ve argued on my own blog, it seems likely [^1] that the global agreement on reached at COP21 in Paris will mark the turning point in efforts to stabilize the global climate. If so, it will mark the defeat of the right in one of the most bitterly contested arenas of their long-running culture war, and also one of the hardest to explain. There’s no obvious reason, apart from tribal hostility to “enviros” why this should have been a culture war battleground at all.[^2]

There was, by 1990 or so, a well developed literature on “free market environmentalism” which pushed the idea that environmental problems were the result of inadequate property rights, and that the solution was to create such rights: in this case, tradeable emissions permits. Environmentalists were generally hostile to the idea, preferring direct regulation. Eventually most environmental groups came around to the view that a carbon price was essential to solving the problem. Instead of claiming victory, the right opposed the idea ferociously and effectively, with the result that the policy outcome has included much more intrusive regulation, and much less reliance on markets, than would have been optimal. The oddity of a supposedly market-oriented government in Australia preferring “Direct Action” over price-based policies is by no means unusual.

Has the climate change culture war helped or harmed the right? The harm is obvious enough. The scientific and economic evidence on climate change is so clear cut that mounting a case against it requires a huge amount of willing gullibility (the fact that is labelled “scepticism” is one of the smaller ironies of the story). The result has been a big contribution to the lowering of intellectual standards that allows someone like Donald Trump to become a plausible candidate for the Republican nomination in the US.

The intellectual damage has been particularly severe for libertarians, who have traditionally thought of themselves as the smart, logical types, deriving their policy positions from rigorous deduction. As the case of climate change has shown, you can get any answer you want if you make up your own facts. Now, we have the sorry spectacle of self-described libertarians making the kinds of spurious claims, in relation to the health effects of wind power, that were once the province of the least credible environmentalists, and demanding the appointment of highly paid government regulators. At the turn of the century, libertarianism had a plausible case to be the way of the future. Now, as far as I can see, it has disappeared from view in the US and survives in Australia only because of the vagaries of the Senate electoral system.

Against that, the struggle to save the planet from dangerous climate change has chewed up a huge amount of energy and effort on the left. Arguably, that has distracted attention from economic issues, and allowed the steady rise of the 1 per cent to go unchallenged. That analysis fits with the widely held view that the culture wars are just a device to keep the rightwing base agitated enough to turn out, losing time after time, but still providing the votes needed to keep pro-rich politicians in office.

[^1]: A Republican win in 2016 would certainly be a major problem. But the momentum is such that it would probably not make much difference. Even if a Republican Administration weakened environmental standards, no one is going to build a new coal-fired power station in the US, knowing that it might have to shut down after the next election.

[^2]: There was, initially, some significant support from fossil fuel interests (notably Exxon) through bodies like the Global Climate Coalition. But that dropped off quite early as most big corporations worked out that they were better off changing their business models to incorporate renewables than fighting to save the old ways of doing things. For at least the last decade, the economic issues have been secondary – it’s all culture war all the time.

Early in *Capital*, Thomas Piketty writes:

> [H]istorical experience suggests that the principal mechanism for convergence [of incomes and wealth] at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge. In other words, the poor catch up with the rich to the extent that they achieve the same level of technological know-how, skill, and education. (p. 71).

Yet when he turns to policy prescription in part IV of the book, his
treatment of education is relatively brief and mainly forms a part of
his discussion of the “modernization of the social state.” By this he
means that ‘the tax and transfer systems that are the heart of the
modern social state are in constant need of reform and modernization,
because they have achieved a level of complexity that makes them
difficult to understand and threatens to undermine their social and
economic efficacy.’ Given the emphasis Piketty places on education as a
force for equality in the opening section of the book, the brevity of
the final discussion disappoints. He might have said much more. In what
follows, I will summarize Piketty’s educational policy prescriptions,
comment on the theoretical framework underlying them, and then point to
what I take to be an even more important source of education’s
egalitarian effects. [click to continue…]

Benedict Anderson has died. I’m hoping someone like Henry or Chris writes something more substantive in the coming days about his contributions. While I read Imagined Communities, it never touched me in the way it has so many other scholars and students. Reading people’s comments on Facebook and Twitter, I’m struck by how intellectually diverse his audience was, how ride-ranging his reach. All morning, people from so many different fields and persuasions have been testifying to Anderson’s impact upon them and their work. Which leads to a thought: I’d put Anderson up there with Clifford Geertz and, increasingly, Jim Scott as among the most influential scholars of the last half-century. All of them scholars of Southeast Asia. I’m sure other people have noticed this and/or perhaps written about this, so forgive my saying the obvious, but what is it about that region that has made it such a site of transformative scholarship and fertile reflection?

Update (10:45 am)

Somehow or other, it seems, Henry actually has already posted here on Anderson’s death. Weirdly, I only just saw it. Maybe he and I were writing at the same time? Anyway, read Henry.

Obituary here. His _Imagined Communities_ was an important book to me, as it was, I suspect, to many other people in the Crooked Timber community. Indeed, it’s the book that made me decide to do graduate studies in political science (how could it not be wonderful to work in a discipline where one could read novels and newspapers to reach grand conclusions about political and social life; I was to find out). He was of Anglo-Irish stock – how much that double alienation (membership of an unintegrated but socially privileged minority within a state based on the usual national myths) shaped his viewpoint has been the subject of a lot of amateur speculation. I liked his book on international anarchism (review here, combined with a review of Scott’s Art of Not Being Governed), but more for the details than the whole. There’s a funny anecdote in it about an assassination attempt on a Captain-General:

bq. With the help of two Asturian anarchists, a young Cuban nationalist called Armando Andre hid a bomb in the roof of the ground-floor toilet of the Captain-General’s palace. The device was supposed to explode when Weyler sat down on the pot, bringing the whole second floor down on his head. The plotters were unaware, however, that Weyler suffered so severely from haemorrhoids that he almost never used the facility, preferring an earthenware field-potty when he had to relieve himself. The bomb went off, but no one was hurt, and Weyler decided to inform Madrid that the explosion had been caused by stoppages which prevented the latrine’s gases from escaping normally.

with further references to how the General was “partly relieved” and to the “diehard colons” of the revolution. I like that he had a low (if somewhat pince-sans-rire) sense of humour, despite his formidable learning and clipped Etonian accent – I can only imagine that he took great delight in smuggling the story and dubious jokes into an otherwise serious and densely researched academic book. More of us should be like him.

I would like to raise two related questions to Thomas Piketty. The first
concerns his repeatedly declared conviction that economic theory cannot
explain trends in inequality by itself, that policies and institutions
are equally important, and that economists must therefore put forward
their hypotheses and explanations with this interdependence in mind.
Given what I have understood Piketty’s main thesis to be, I wonder up to
which point he is actually committed to that claim. The second concerns
Part Four of _Capital_, where Piketty sketches a proposal for how to
regulate capital in the 21st century. In a nutshell, my concern about
Piketty’s proposal is that there seems to be a friction between the
diagnosis offered in the rest of the book (which seems to draw a rather
bleak picture of the power of capital in the early 21st century) and the
suggested cure (which seems to rely on the optimistic hope that, once
well-minded citizens will have recognized the problem, the only hurdle
will be to find the right policy to fix it). To put it provocatively,
both my questions are inspired by the suspicion that Piketty seems to
hold on to a social-democratic optimism of sorts at all costs, whereas
his findings seem to push him in a different direction. With the label
‘social-democratic optimism’ I mean two things: on the one hand,
optimism about the role of policies and institutions in taming capital
on the one hand; on the other, the persuasion that what politics is
fundamentally about is making citizens understand what the problems are
in a well-minded, reasoned dialogue, and then they will be persuaded to
do the right thing. [click to continue…]

Thomas Piketty’s *Capital in the Twenty-First Century* is an important and valuable contribution to political economy, both empirically and philosophically. Piketty grounds his theory in vast empirical data,rather than settling for elegant mathematical models. He courageously embraces the fact that economic theory is inevitably value laden, and proposes a theory of the historical dynamics of wealth accumulation in order to offer an updated moral critique of capitalism. Grounding his prediction in the historical data and profoundly simple mathematics, Piketty projects that economic inequality is likely to increase and to favor those who own inherited capital over time. He advances the normative judgment that rising inequality is unjust and must be
contained. Although Piketty raises important concerns about the
possibility of growing wealth inequality, he fails to normatively ground
or argue for his presupposition that this inequality is unjust. Since
relative poverty can coincide with high levels of objective or
subjective well-being, this presupposition is brought into question.
However, there are causes of inequality (including wealth inequality)
that clearly can be shown to be unjust. By considering other forms and
causes of inequality and oppression, we can distinguish between those
forms of wealth inequality that are unjust and those that are
normatively benign. In this way Piketty’s concerns about growing wealth
inequality from inheritance can be partly justified, though of course
not empirically verified. Piketty’s argument for the injustice of
growing economic inequality has two parts. The first part is an
empirical, economic argument for the claim that returns from inherited
wealth will far outstrip income. This argument can be summarized as
follows. Let *r* be the rate of return on capital, and *g* be the growth
rate of the annual flow of national income.

1. If *r>g*, then (wealth) inequality will grow over time.

2. Individuals who own a greater amount of capital earn a larger *r.*

3. Growth, *g*, is likely to be slower in future.

4. If *r* is great enough and g is low enough, then there will be ever
more capital from older, inherited wealth, than from wealth saved
from income.

5. Hence, (wealth) inequality will increase, and inherited wealth will
make up the greatest amount of capital. [click to continue…]

Thomas Piketty’s *Capital in the 21st Century* tells us a great deal about the evolution of inequality in wealth and income over a long period and how that distribution is likely to evolve unless we intervene. What Piketty does not do is to tell us why inequality is bad or why people care about inequality, although we can glean some knowledge of his personal beliefs here and there. In what follows I draw on some aspects of Rousseauvian moral psychology to suggest that the reasons people care about inequality matter enormously and that because some people value inequality for its own sake, it will be harder (even harder than Piketty thinks) to steer our societies away from the whirlpool of inequality. [click to continue…]

Here. You have a few weeks to listen. You can celebrate Viv Stanshall day every day for a while.

What a marvelous and ambitious book this is. I share all the reasons for
praising it: its breadth, its ambition, its grasp of history, and its
use of hard-earned statistical series. And I love the way Piketty relies
on various novels to paint the picture of class and economic strategies
in periods long gone. I also share many of the criticisms, particularly
by my brethren in political science, political theory, and political
sociology: its failure to comprehend the complexity of power, politics
or institutions. [click to continue…]

Thomas Piketty traces widening inequality in rich countries since the
early 1970s to increasing shares of income claimed by the top 1%. This
trend is decomposed into the increasing share of income accruing to
capital ownership, and the increasing share of labor income claimed by
corporate executives and financiers. Piketty shows that the increasing
share of labor income claimed by the top 1% is neither deserved nor
economically useful, in the sense of stimulating better products and
services, increasing economic growth, or providing other benefits to the
99%. Because he defines *r,* the return on capital, as the pure return
to passive ownership (excluding returns to capital that could be traced
to entrepreneurial activity or business judgment), it is evident that
capital’s share of income is also undeserved. But is it economically
useful? Piketty misses an opportunity to connect his analysis to a
critique of the ideology and associated politics that have driven
increasing inequality since the early 1970s. While he rightly claims
that the distribution of income and wealth is a deeply political matter,
and connects increasing economic inequality to the increasing political
clout of the top 1%, he does not identify political decisions, other
than cuts in marginal tax rates on top incomes, that lie behind
inequality trends. Filling in the ideological and political stories
gives us some clues as to policy instruments, other than the tax code,
needed to reverse the ominous trends he documents.
[click to continue…]

I taught Science Fiction and Philosophy this semester. One thing I realized I didn’t know – but I wished I did – was the history of semi-popular trends in the philosophy of mind (for lack of a better term.) A lot of science fiction is tied up with speculations about the nature of mind, of course. It would be surprising if all that didn’t reflect trends in aspirationally non-fictional speculations (again, for lack of a better term.) Crudely, I’ll bet there is more ESP in sf in eras when lots of people think that might be a thing. [click to continue…]