From the monthly archives:
January 2016
The reason I haven’t been blogging is I’m in the depths and throes of book-making. We’re finally – finally! – bringing out a new edition of good old Reason and Persuasion (that’s Belle’s and my old Plato book. I’ve swept clean the old site to celebrate the new book. All we need to complete the celebration is: the new book.) The problem is that it’s literally impossible to proof a book. Typos. They go all the way down. No matter how many times you comb through, there are more. And then more, underneath that. I’m convinced every book manuscript contains an infinite number of – admittedly increasingly small – typographical errors. It’s Zenoesque. [click to continue…]
Life has been keeping me too busy. I’ll be back soon. But don’t forget! Tonight is the night Roy comes, to give toys to good girls and boys. Happy Incept Date!
I recently read Time and Time Again by Ben Elton. It’s about a time traveller who returns to 1914 Europe, aiming to prevent the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and, therefore, the Great War. Of course, the war isn’t prevented, and it turns out that there are vast numbers of timelines flowing from the summer of 1914, all more or less disastrous. This has inspired me to draft an alternate history I’ve long had in mind, where the War starts in 1911, as a result of the Agadir crisis.
I’ve changed the dates of some actual events, and the outcomes of some internal political debates, to bring more aggressive leaders and policies to the fore. I’ve also borrowed one improbable event from an earlier war. Still, the result seems to me no more improbable than the actual genesis of the War, beginning with the fatal wrong turn by Franz Ferdinand’s driver. Feel free to disagree, or to fill in some details of your own.
We have finished publishing our seminar on Thomas Piketty. The participants (with links to their responses) are below.
The whole seminar is available on the WWW here.
If you prefer to read the seminar in PDF form, it’s available here.
If you would like the raw LaTeX file for the seminar (e.g. to remix under the Creative Commons license – see the PDF for more), it’s available here.
Finally, if you spot any typos, feel free to let me know in comments!
Participants:
* Danielle Allen is a professor of government and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Education and Equality in the 21st Century.
* Elizabeth Anderson is the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. The Politics behind Piketty.
* Kenneth Arrow is the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics at Stanford, and is a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Which Inequalities Matter and Which Taxes are Appropriate?.
* Chris Bertram is Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Bristol. Piketty, Rousseau, and the Desire for Inequality.
* Ann Cudd is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Arts and Sciences at Boston University. A critique of Piketty on the Normative Force of Wealth Inequality.
* Henry Farrell is an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. Piketty, in Three Parts.
* Olivier Godechot is professor of sociology and Co-Director of the Max-Planck Sciences-Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies. Resurgence of Capital or Rise of the Working Rich? On Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century,
* Margaret Levi is the Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. A New Agenda for the Social Sciences.
* JW Mason is an assistant professor of economics at John Jay College, CUNY. It’s Bargaining Power All the Way Down.
* Martin O’Neill is a senior lecturer in politics at the University of York. Piketty, Meade and Predistribution.
* John Quiggin is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland. Piketty and the Australian Exception.
* Miriam Ronzoni is a senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Manchester. Where are the Power Relations in Piketty’s Capital?
* Thomas Piketty is Professor of Economics at EHESS and at the Paris School of Economics. Capital, Predistribution and Redistribution.
In my view, _Capital in the 21st Century_ is primarily a book about the history of the distribution of income and wealth. Thanks to the cumulative efforts of several dozen scholars, we have been able to collect a relatively large historical database on the structure of national income and national wealth and the evolution of income and wealth distributions, covering three centuries and over 20 countries. In effect, we have been extending to a larger scale the pioneering historical data collection work of Simon Kuznets and Tony Atkinson (see Kuznets, 1953, and Atkinson and Harrison, 1978). My first objective in this book is to present this body of historical evidence in a consistent manner, and to try to analyze the many economic, social and political processes that can account for the various evolutions that we observe in the different countries since the Industrial Revolution (see Piketty and Saez, 2014, for a brief summary of some of the main historical facts). Another important objective is to draw lessons for the future and for the optimal regulation and taxation of capital and property relations. I stress from the beginning that we have too little historical data at our disposal to be able to draw definitive judgments. On the other hand, at least we have substantially more evidence than we used to. Imperfect as it is, I hope this work can contribute to put the study of distribution and of the long run back at the center of economic thinking.
In this essay, I seek to discuss a number of implications of my findings, in particular regarding the optimal regulation of capital and the complementarity between the “predistribution” and the “redistribution” approach. I will also attempt to address some of the very valuable comments made by the participants to the Crooked Timber symposium. First, I will clarify the role played by r>g in my analysis of wealth inequality. Next, I will present some of the implications for optimal taxation, starting with inheritance taxation and then moving with annual taxation of wealth, capital income and consumption. Finally, I will emphasize the need to develop a multi-sector approach to capital accumulation. This will lead me to stress the limits of capital taxation and the complementarity with other public policies aimed at regulating the accumulation and distribution of capital (such as land use, housing policies, intellectual property rights, co-determination and participatory governance). [click to continue…]
Like many, I’ve long had a fascination with Albert Speer. Mine was awakened by Gitta Sereny’s Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth, which I read during a weeklong trip to Guatemala in 1997 and have since taught several times. More recently, Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction, which I also recommend, gave me reason to go back to Speer.
Now I’m knee-deep in Martin Kitchen’s new biography of Speer. Which paints a dramatically different picture from that which you get from Sereny. Where Sereny depicts a man heroically, if often self-deceptively, struggling with the truth, Speer comes off, in Kitchen’s biography, as arguably the greatest conman of the 20th century, as someone who threw the cultural pixie dust of the age—anxiety about technology, technocracy, and collective guilt (rather than personal responsibility)—over his past and thereby managed to save his hide and his reputation. The truth is that he was a ruthless and remorseless slave-driver, a cynical striver and careerist of the worst sort, draping himself in midcentury conceits about modernity.
Kitchen also has a couple of brilliant nuggets about the politics of taste in Nazi Germany, and the disjunction between the regime’s ideology and its henchmen’s practices.
Like this one, on Hitler, Speer, and furniture:
The style of furniture that was extolled in the professional journals of the day as ‘furniture for the German people’ that reflected ‘the honesty, solidity and directness of a natural lifestyle’ was not to be found in the new chancellery [designed by Speer to Hitler’s specifications]. Aping the style of bygone ages, particularly if foreign and essentially aristocratic, was roundly condemned. Such gaudy luxury and ostentatious grandeur had no place in the new Germany….Speer’s approach was radically different. His was the exact reverse of the Werkbund’s. He had no taste for furniture that was designed somehow to reflect German’s racial characteristics….
Ideologically sound National Socialist furniture makers, true to the ‘Blood and Soil’ ideology, insisted that Germans should have furniture made of German woods such as pine, beech or elm. For special occasions walnut, ash or larch might be considered. Hitler and Speer wanted nothing to do with such nonsense. Only mahogany, ebony, rosewood and other tropical woods, for which scarce foreign exchange was needed, were good enough for them. This at a time when the average German had increasingly to make do with plywood, laminates and hardboard as the Four-Year Plan extended its control over civilian production….Even in furniture there was a marked contrast between that of the leadership and the masses that revealed the true nature of National Socialism and exposed the concept of the ‘racial community’ as an empty sham.
There’s also this little tidbit on art in Hitler’s chancellery:
No one seemed to have the noticed the irony of Tintoretto’s painting of the discovery of Moses among the bulrushes hanging in the cabinet room.
On a different note, the the AC in the chancellery seldom worked.
Another theme in Kitchen’s biography is the relationship between capitalism and Nazism, a fraught and contested topic of several old posts of mine. While not breaking any theoretical or historical new ground, Kitchen has an eye for revelatory architectural details about that question. Like this:
Speer’s plan for Berlin underlined the fact that the headquarters of the Armed Forces and of Germany’s leading companies did not merely share the same address, but lived together in harmony….Ernst Petersen’s project for the washing powder manufacturer Henkel was next door to Herbert Rimpl’s building for the Hermann Göring Works. IG Farben was placed opposite Hitler’s palace. AEG was across the street from the Ministry of Propaganda. This sense of togetherness and of monumentality was strengthened by bunching these huge buildings together along the north-south axis.
In his Wall Street Journal review of the Kitchen biography, Tooze offers further details:
[Speer styled] himself as a pioneer of European integration for having promoted the outsourcing of production to his collaborator friends in Vichy France….Reading the shopping lists of luxuries that Speer ordered from Spandau jail, including a Group One Dunhill pipe, foie gras with truffles, Beluga caviar and a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch, one is tempted to invoke instead “American Psycho,” Bret Easton Ellis’s deathless evocation of a murderous, product-obsessed Wall Street yuppie….It is hard to think of any major industrial corporation that did not employ forced foreign labor. A shockingly large proportion even contracted with the SS for the use of concentration-camp labor, including Jewish camp inmates. Nor were the businessmen merely narrow-minded profit maximizers “doing their job.” As part of Speer’s organization, they actively shaped and mobilized the German economy for war. Most were nationalists committed to German victory. Some were Nazi ideologues. They all had reason to fear Stalin’s Soviet Union. But the system that Speer organized melded these impulses with a more abstract ethic: Its participants lived and died by the standard of ‘performance’ (Leistung). Statistics and production records were their religion, technological improvement their mantra and disruptive innovation their magic.
One last detail, which Tooze reveals in his review. One of the last books that Hannah Arendt read just before she died in 1975 was Speer’s diaries from his time in Spandau. It’s hard to resist the desire to construct what she might have made of the man. In some ways, he was the perfect target for her, more perfect even than Eichmann. Because Speer hailed from the professional upper middle classes that were Arendt’s lifelong bête noire.
Peter Hitchens is less well known in the United States than his late brother, but when asked to write for the New York Times, he delivers his Mail columnist goods, full-strength. Regarding Robert Tombs’s English and their History:
Even in free countries it is sometimes necessary to alter the past to suit the present. For instance, I recall the day at my English boarding school in the early 1960s when our sober, patriotic old history books were gathered up and carted away to a storeroom. In their place we were handed bright, optimistic replacements, with a good deal less to say about the empire, the Protestant martyrs or what we had been taught without embarrassment to call the Glorious Revolution.… Older English people look back fondly on 1940, when we supposedly stood alone. In fact we were a major industrial and exporting power with a global navy, more or less self- sufficient, nationally cohesive and bolstered by the tribute of a still-great empire. Now all of that is gone. Is it possible that, after a thousand astonishing years, our island story has finally come to a full stop? Will the next great history of our nation and people be written in Chinese?
Now that George MacDonald Fraser has died, the sources for such views of the empire and its history seem fewer each day.