From the monthly archives:
September 2024
Citizens’ assemblies are a hot topic these days in democratic theory. Hélène Landemore gave her Tanner Lecture at University of Michigan last semester, describing her experience on the governance committee of the French Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life. Her account of how ordinary citizens could not only deliberate seriously about a contentious issue, but even come to love one another despite their disagreements, was moving and inspirational. I agree with her that citizens’ assemblies offer a promising way to revitalize democracy and reduce the alienation of ordinary people from government–an alienation that factors into the cynicism, nihilism, and “shake things up” populist authoritarianism that is endangering many democracies today.
Here I want to add to her argument a more specific claim, which is the pivotal role citizens can play in directly strengthening the democratic structure of representative government. This can be seen in Michigan’s Independent Citizens’ Redistricting Commission. Unlike the many experiments in citizens’ assemblies that have only an advisory role, MICRC has genuine legislative power. It is charged with drawing fair (not gerrymandered) districts for the state legislature and Michigan’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, without interference by politicians. [click to continue…]
Announcements from major employers, including Amazon and Tabcorp, that workers will be required to return to the office five days a week have a familiar ring. There has been a steady flow of such directives. The Commonwealth Bank CEO, Matt Comyn, attracted a lot of attention with an announcement that workers would be required to attend the office for a minimum of 50% of the time, while the NSW public service was recently asked to return to the office at least three days a week.
But, like new year resolutions, these announcements are honoured more in the breach than the observance. The rate of remote work has barely changed since lockdowns ended three years ago. And many loudly trumpeted announcements have been quietly withdrawn. The CBA website has returned to a statement that attracts potential hires with the promise, “Our goal is to ensure the majority of our roles can be flexible so that our people can work where and how they choose.”
The minority of corporations that have managed to enforce full-time office attendance fall into two main categories. First, there are those, like Goldman Sachs, that are profitable enough to pay salaries that more than offset the cost and inconvenience of commuting to work, whether or not they gain extra productivity as a result. Second, there are companies like Grindr and Twitter (now X) that are looking for massive staff reductions and don’t care much whether the staff they lose are good or bad.
Typically, as in these two cases, such companies are engaged in the process Cory Doctorow has christened enshittification, changing the rules on their customers in an effort to squeeze as much as possible out of them before time runs out.
We might be tempted to dismiss these as isolated cases. But a recent KPMG survey found that 83% of CEOs expected a full return to the office within three years. Such a finding raises serious questions, not so much about remote work but about whether CEOs deserve the power they currently hold and the pay they currently receive.
I was going to write this super cool music thread with more songs in there than an Erik Loomis “I took time off writing my 1600th American grave post and 547th this day in labor history series to write a 27-part ‘I chance to have been listening to these songs,'” post where I talked about great bridges in songs, and start off with And Your Bird Can Sing which has the best bridge of all time, and motherf#@ker, that’s not even a bridge! Or rather, it has a perfectly excellent bridge, and that pleasant Paul McCartney fellow can certainly strum a bass and so on, but what it really has is a modified final chorus that causes horripilation every time with its glorious harmonies! And then a nice outro, all coming in at 2:01!
And what about so many other songs that I thought had great bridges, like Radiohead’s Karma Police, which actually has a great long outro.
“Phew for a minute there I lost myself, I lost myself.” My brother in Christ, it was not just for a minute. You lost yourself, well and truly. This is one of the most convincing “I am crazy” songs since Surf’s Up by Brian Wilson, or the full corpus of Syd Barrett. And yet it’s put on, I don’t actually think Thom Yorke is crazy for real. I mean, not that crazy, not like Jeff Magnum braying “I love you Jesus Christ” and then pulling the drumkit and a french horn on a stand over on top of himself while he strums furiously, lying on his back like a struggling turtle someone fed ketamine.
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Every few years the UN publishes one of these big papers on “world population prospects”, which are… exactly what they sound like: a best guess at what’s going to happen with the world’s population over the next few decades.
Nut graph after the jump:
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A class of a practical sequel (or, if you prefer, sequela) to my previous post on this topic. The great modern advocate of applied (as opposed to theoretical) Straussianism, is Tyler Cowen [update: Tyler Cowen says in email that he has a very different perspective on Straussianism – see here]. Plausibly, Straussianism provides a skeleton key to his recent posting, and a solution to a great mystery. Why is it that a scholar who has spoken eloquently of his commitment to the liberties apparently discovering that he has so much in common with those who oppose them? The answer – of course! – is that he is writing in the Straussian mode, saying just the opposite of what he believes, but in so outrageously exaggerated a manner that the cognoscenti will surely detect the true message.
Thus, when Tyler complains vociferously about J.D. Vance couch/sofa joke culture, and how “most intellectual commentators seem to be embracing it or at least tolerating it,” he is secretly offering an apologia for his own embrace/toleration of Elon Musk, and the ludicrous conspiracy theories and vile slanders about Black people and immigrants that Musk spews daily. The very title of the post – “I’m Tired of This” – gives the true game away. When Tyler responds to J.D. Vance’s and Donald Trump’s lies about Haitians eating dogs and cats with a rambling post about Haitian food, and a coda about Chris Rufo’s bounty program for videos, the sheer ridiculousness of the post is the giveaway. It’s the intellectual equivalent of someone in a hostage video pulling weird faces as they read out their assigned script. And when he denounces “Scholars in support of the Moraes Brazil decision against X” as advocates of censorship, he is tacitly communicating his unhappiness with how Twitter/X is spreading anti-democratic lies, and indeed his ferocious opposition to the entire Rufo censorship agenda of firing faculty with the wrong political views.
I suspect that some shorter post or another in his voluminous output is an anagram for something like “Help! I am being kept captive by a clique of anti-democratic Silicon Valley billionaires,” but I don’t have the deciphering skillz to be sure of it. Has anyone checked in on the situation in George Mason University econ department recently? I’m getting quite worried.
In an article published last year, I tried to show that our moral judgement is heavily biased when it comes to migration. For instance, an action that we regard as a minimum moral obligation towards compatriots becomes, towards migrants or foreigners, non-obligatory and even forbidden. I tried to show that even ethicists well disposed towards foreigners – cosmopolitans, so to speak – suffer from the same bias. Nationalism stifles creativity to such an extent that we are often unable to imagine doing to foreigners what it is a minimum moral obligation towards compatriots.
A new example is given by the US election campaign. [click to continue…]
Like most academics these days, I spend a lot of time filling in online forms. Mostly, this is just an annoyance but occasionally I get something out of it. A recent survey in which the higher-ups tried to get an idea of how the workforce was feeling, asked the question “Do you think of the University as We or They?”.
I will be brief. Straussianism is a set of interpretative practices along the following lines, as best as I understand it. The great philosophers and thinkers may have a specific private belief – let’s call it x. But they may not be able to say exactly what they want to say, especially when times are bad, and they risk making enemies. Hence, they need to write indirectly. This means that when a thinker is saying not-x, we should sometimes understand that they really mean to say x. They are communicating ambiguously – but the Truly Wise can grasp their real meaning.
The relationship between this esoteric tradition – Straussianism – and Leo Strauss is a little complicated. I’ve seen recent arguments that Straussianism has taken on a life of its own – has become vulgar, if you like, however much of a contradiction in terms Vulgar Straussianism might seem to be.
The obvious objection to Straussianism is the standard one. If you help yourself to the claim that when this or that Great Man is saying x, they may actually mean not-x or x, depending, you are making it harder to reach a shared understanding of the truth. If you further contend that only those who grok your particular hidden lore can distinguish sincerity from dissimulation, you can redefine the history of thought to mean whatever you want it to mean.
But there is a second – and perhaps more serious – objection. Straussianism – especially in its vulgar form – may present even more pernicious temptations to the writer than the reader.
If you conceive of yourself as a Straussian, and find yourself caught between the desires of different audiences with directly contradictory desires over what you write, you may adopt the following protocol. Write x to please Audience One, while throwing out subtle hints that actually you agree with Audience Two, and secretly believe, and are secretly arguing, not-x.
The dilemmas of this style of communication are the major theme of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Mother Night. Is Howard Campbell Jr, the American turncoat and Nazi propagandist, actually a secret anti-Nazi, who only boosts the arguments of evil people so that he can convey hidden messages that help the forces of good? Or is he a sincere Nazi, who sends coded messages as an aside or a failsafe? Nobody really knows, not even Howard Campbell Jr. He ends up in a horrible mess.
One could state the broader problem in game theoretic language. Straussianism makes it more difficult to reach a separating equilibrium in the communications game, which would allow you to clearly distinguish Nazis from anti-Nazis. And as with game theory more generally, you may also find yourself in infinite regress. Are communications about Straussianism themselves Straussian or non-Straussian? Is there any way to navigate the wilderness of beliefs, meta-beliefs and meta-meta-beliefs, except by assumption, so that expectations might actually converge on some shared truth? But since I think the problem of enacted Straussianism is practical, not abstract-theoretic, I’ll leave it at that, and say nothing further.
[Commercial announcement: My and Abraham Newman’s book, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy is still available for $2.99 on Amazon Kindle. Also, it is about to come out in paperback in the UK and US. We now return you to your scheduled programming. Also: this post was first published at Programmable Mutter].
After nuzzling up against a fishing trawler’s trolling line – a fairly obvious effort by Janan Ganesh to get outrage-clicks – I’m swallowing the bait. But I have an excuse! I’ve been planning to write this post for months anyway, and Ganesh is just serving up the occasion.
Ganesh argues that we should read highbrow books and lowbrow books, but not, under any circumstances, middle-brow ones.
It is rude to name names. But if we imagine a writer called something like Elena Murakami or Patrick O’ Le Carré, someone whose prose is neither the most expeditious nor all that deep, who doesn’t trade in incident-driven high jinks or profound digression, someone who is challenging enough, doesn’t the reader lose twice over?
In response to my previous post on the imminent threat to Dutch universities to have their budgets cut with up to 1 billion euros a year, I received a few emails from (mainly younger) staff to ask how they could contribute to the protests.
I will respond specifically for the current Dutch case, but I think we could learn from international experience here. So if you have additional thoughts on what university staff could do to make sure the material conditions in which they need to do their work are adequate (and for public universities this means not having their public budgets cut in a way that creates inadequate funding), then please do share your suggestions.
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Plain People of Crooked Timber: can’t see why you’re drafting us in here so often after leaving us out in the cold for five years or whatever, we are busy people with our own lives and so on.
Me: but I love you and you’re the best!
Plain People of Crooked Timber: well if you’re going to resort to flattery, I suppose it’s alright but you should probably give it a rest for a bit after this.
Me: OK, is it immoral to convince people they hold immoral beliefs, despite knowing they may commit immoral actions as a result? Should I troll people into being bad people?
Plain People of Crooked Timber: those are daft questions and the answers are obviously yes and then no.
Me: OK, but hear me out. Anti-abortion believers’ stated views are that fertilised embryos are people (with souls) even when they haven’t implanted into the uterine wall. Blastocysts too. This entails regarding IVF as a grotesque parade of murder. Multiple embryos are produced, several implanted due to the staggering cost of a single round, and then the number often brought down via selective abortion since who wants to have triplets sweet Christ not to speak of quadruplets, and one is usually not thriving as much, so it’s easier to make a decision. Well, easy; I have never been in this position and many people probably find it far from easy, and perhaps even agonising, who am I to say, and I am deeply sorry for people in this difficult situation, which may be the worst of their lives. I retract the whole easy concept I am being ignorant and even unkind. BUT all of this is completely moral at every stage and every level and I am cheering on everyone who does this, best of luck, I hope this works for you and you have all the children you wish for. I love mine and everyone who wants children should be able to have them, just as people who don’t want children should be able to not have them.
The remainder lie forever in stasis like the astronauts of some commercial venture the Weyland-Yutani Corp has deemed unprofitable, or are destroyed, with fewer than five percent adopted by some other couple. I hope that changes if people want it to, I hope they all get used and people get to pay less for what is an unreasonably exorbitant procedure. Carry on! Also, if they were not used, kept in stasis, or discarded, that would also be moral and right and not murder under any conceivable definition of murder.
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On Monday, the first day of our academic year, I went to a demonstration. The reason for the demonstration are the announced budget cuts for higher education, which our new right/extreme-right government wants to implement. The figures aren’t set in stone yet, but the financial appendix that was presented when the new government took office suggests that there will be a direct cut to the budget of higher eduction of 150 million euros in 2025, and increasing up to almost 1 billion a few years later (I read somewhere that this is equivalent to the size of one Dutch public university). The cuts would come in different ways – some are reversals to budget-increases that were made by the previous Minister (the renowned scholar Robbert Dijkgraaf who left his prestigious job in Princeton to serve as our minister of education); there are also indirect cuts because the government plans to reduce the number of international students (which will lower revenues for universities); and general cuts to HE. The government will also lower the payment universities gets for a student that takes too long to finish their undergraduate degree, and then expects the students to pay much higher fees. Importantly, the previous government made a Bestuursakkoord (a sort of ten-year contract) with the public universities, which this new government now modifies significantly, without agreement from the universities.
There was a real sense of defeat among the participants at the demonstration that I talked to, which I also sense very strongly. Why? [click to continue…]