Cross-posted from the New Statesman Culture blog (original)
It is hard to escape the worry that the arts, humanities and, almost certainly, many of the social sciences face a bleaker future in British higher education if Lord Browne’s report – “Securing a sustainable future for higher education in England” – is implemented. Browne isn’t explicit about this, but on page 25 of the report we find a chilling sentence: “In our proposals, there will be scope for Government to withdraw public investment through HEFCE from many courses to contribute to wider reductions in public spending; there will remain a vital role for public investment to support priority courses and the wider benefits they create.” The priority courses are listed as medicine, science and engineering. The arts, humanities and social sciences are on their own, and will have to support themselves from student fee income, from research grants and from so-called “QR funding” – allocated by government on the basis of past research performance. [click to continue…]
Charles Ferguson has “a nice piece”:http://chronicle.com/article/Larry-Summersthe/124790/ in the _Chronicle of Higher Education_ about Larry Summers, the economics profession and their position in American public life. Definitely worth a read.
I took a fair bit of flak from Yglesias and DeLong last week for welcoming Ed Miliband’s break with New Labour on inequality. But I think I was right in my view that New Labour (or, at least elements of it) had abandoned, in their normative commitments, a concern with distribution. In support of that view, I was interested to read this piece in today’s Observer by Tim Allan, written from a Blairite perspective and worrying about what Ed Miliband has had to say about pay at the top:
bq. … to my mind the most critical and damaging line in your speech was when you said that it is wrong, conference, that a banker [or presumably anybody else] can earn more in a day than a care worker can earn in a year. It is hard to exaggerate the political importance of this position as a break from New Labour. New Labour’s key insight was to recognise that helping the poorest in society could be done without setting limits on people’s aspirations. So it is a line with huge political and practical implications. If it ever moved from conference rhetoric to actual policies, it would raise some difficult practical questions: will a maximum wage really be set at 250 times the wage of a care worker? Why not 25 times, or 2.5 times and what is the rational basis for such distinctions? Would the maximum wage apply also to entrepreneurs earning money from successful companies they have created? Would they have to stop trying to build their business and create new jobs when they reach the threshold? You need quickly to counteract the dangerous perception that you are against success, against wealth creation, and want to dictate economic outcomes for the wealthiest rather than provide economic opportunities for all.
There’s an excellent reply to this from Sunder Katwala over at Next Left.
UPDATE: The original version of this post contained some speculation about the motives of DeLong and Yglesias, and Robert Waldmann commented critically on this. Since I think it is better to take any hint of personal invective out of this, I’ve edited the post to remove this speculation.
_The workers’ flag is palest pink, since Gaitskell dropped it in the sink, now Harold’s done the same as Hugh, the workers’ flag is brightest blue …._
My hopes for Ed Miliband’s leadership of the Labour Party are limitedly optimistic. One of the first things I did after the result was to lift my copy of _The State in Capitalist Society_ off the shelf, where his father wisely writes (p. 244):
bq. “social democratic leaders in government illustrate particularly clearly the limits of reform. For while they raise great hopes among their followers and many others while in opposition, the constrictions under which they labour when in government, allied to the ideological dispositions which lead… them to submit to these constrictions, leave them with little room to implement their policies.”
Indeed. Still, Ed Miliband represents a great improvement on New Labour in one crucial respect. Blair, Mandelson, Milburn and the rest of the gang not only failed to achieve Labour’s goals concerning inequality and social justice, they abandoned them, an abandonment summed up in Mandelson’s notorious statement that he was “intensely relaxed” about people at the top becoming “fithy rich”. New Labour, taking their cue from the Clinton Democrats, abandoned the distributive objectives of the left on the basis that the rising prosperity engendered by growth, markets and globalisation would benefit everyone. Well it hasn’t. Personally I think it was never going to, for “spirit-level” type reasons, among others. But anyway, that model ran into the wall of the banking crisis and we’ll shortly see the absolute standard of living of the poorest falling as the deficit gets clawed back at their expense. The aspirational middle classes, who Blair and Mandelson wooed will also be having a tough time of it: so I’m far from convinced that a renewed emphasis on distribution will cost Labour the centre ground. A continuation of New Labour would, though, certainly doom the party with its core constituency, many of whom would lapse (further) into apathy or would be tempted by the several varieties of right-wing populism (BNP, EDL) on offer.
I’ve just completed Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom, his rather excellent book on Kant’s political philosophy. When I say excellent, I mean that Ripstein is clear, precise and does his best to present Kant in an appealing light. I doubt that a better account of Kant’s views will be published in English. Clarity of exposition, however, has two sides to it. And in me it induced both the belief that this was what Kant believed and a revulsion at the implications of such a system. I detected rather more affection in Ripstein’s own response, in fact, I rather get the impression that he believes that something close to Kant’s views are true.[fn1] I, by contrast, have had my respect for Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Mill and Nietzsche enhanced, especially insofar as they are all prepared to pay at least _some_ attention to welfare, anthropology, and psychology – all of which Kant (officially) disdains in favour of the sparse metaphysics of freedom-as-non-domination. [click to continue…]
I’ll be participating in a live Q&A session for the Guardian on this topic next Thursday (23rd) 1-4pm (UK time). Philosophers, philosophy graduates (and anyone else) with good ideas for what to say are welcome to email me with suggestions or advice at C-dot-Bertram-at- bristol-dot-ac-dot-uk . And if you’re interested, perhaps a current philosophy student or an intending one, then please tune in.
I recently had the pleasure of attending the “European Society for Philosophy and Psychology conference in Bochum, Germany”:http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/philosophy/espp2010/index.html . The highlight for me was attending a talk by “Michael Tomasello”:http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/ of the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig on pre-linguistic communication. Getting home, I ordered a copy of Tomasello’s “Why We Cooperate”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262013592/junius-20 in which he argues, on the basis of detailed empirical work with young children and other primates, that humans are hard-wired with certain pro-social dispositions to inform, help, share etc and to engage in norm-guided behaviour of various kinds. Many of the details of Tomasello’s work are controversial (the book is essentially his Tanner Lectures and contains replies by Silk, Dweck, Skyrms and Spelke) and I lack the competence to begin to adjudicate some of the disputes. But this much is, I think, clear: that work in empirical psychology and evolutionary anthropolgy (and related fields) doesn’t – quelle surprise! – support anything like the Hobbesian picture of human nature that lurks at the foundations of microeconomics, rational choice theory and, indeed, in much contemporary and historical political philosophy. [click to continue…]
Highly recommended – Ajami, a film largely set in a part of Jaffa in Israel. Ajami is from the Tarrantino/Crash/Amores Perros school of multiple overlapping narratives shot from different points of view. It is basically unscripted and uses non-professional actors and improvisation. The movie concerns an Arab family in the Ajami neighbourhood who are engaged in a feud with a Bedouin clan. Drug dealing, a disappeared Israeli soldier and his relative in the police, romantic entanglements across the Jewish/Arab and Muslim/Christian divides are the other elements in the mix. I think that’s about all I can say about content without spoiling the plot. Politics are there, inevitably, but largely by implication – the film isn’t shouting a message at you. Get to see it if you possibly can.
The second part of Stuart White’s excellent interview with Edward Lewis over at The New Left Project is now out, covering basic income, republicanism, equality and liberty. Check it out.
Ok, now I’ve got that in your heads for the rest of the day, let me do a bit of blegging/moaning. I’m off to a conference in the Ruhrgebiet later this month and, feeling vaguely guilty about my carbon footprint, decided to go by train. It wasn’t all that easy to get a good deal online. The best way of planning a route and buying a ticket is from the “Deutsche Bahn”:http://www.bahn.com/i/view/GBR/en/index.shtml website, but instead of getting a price and a ticket you have to purchase blind (having supplied your credit card details and agreed to pay!), only later getting a “er, here’s what it will cost, is that ok with you – phone us” email. DB have now mailed me a set of tickets (starting in Bristol) which I anticipate causing “interesting” conversations with the conductor between Temple Meads and Paddington. I now have to work out and pay for a route from Leuven to rural station in Normandy on a Sunday: SNCF, SNCB and DB all give me totally different accounts of which trains are running and when. So one national company might sell me a ticket for a service in another country which the domestic operator claims doens’t exist. So why, oh why ….
Why oh why isn’t there an integrated, user-friendly pan-European booking service for continental rail travel, selling tickets at prices that compete with the airlines? Until someone makes this happen, we’ll all be burning a lot more carbon than we need to.
A “recent piece of research”:http://ideas.repec.org/p/lec/leecon/09-23.html by British economist James Rockey into people’s misperception of their place on the political spectrum got a certain amount of “gleeful mileage”:http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100047245/why-middle-class-lefties-believe-stupid-things-because-their-friends-do/ in the right-wing press, and for predictable reasons. The research claimed that many people mislocate themselves – identifying with the “left” even though they hold opinions that are fairly right-wing. Having worried this over for a few weeks now, my considered view is that whilst the research is flawed at a quite fundamental level, the conclusion might contain some truth. Let’s see if I can express that thinking without contradicting myself! [click to continue…]
Part one of a superb interview of Stuart White by Edward Lewis over at the Next Left Project. Meritocracy, luck egalitarianism, status inequality, negative liberty and republican liberty all get some discussion. I particularly liked Stuart’s observation that contemporary politics is keen on the “choice” side of luck egalitarian argument but tends to little or nothing about the correction of brute luck.
Chicago economist Raghuram Rajan offers the following explanation for the long-term stagnant real incomes of Americans at the 50th percentile of the income distribution (compared to their compatriots at the 90th):
bq. A number of factors are responsible for the growth in the 90/50 differential. Perhaps the most important is that technological progress in the US requires the labor force to have ever greater skills. A high school diploma was sufficient for office workers 40 years ago, whereas an undergraduate degree is barely sufficient today. But the education system has been unable to provide enough of the labor force with the necessary education. The reasons range from indifferent nutrition, socialization, and early-childhood learning to dysfunctional primary and secondary schools that leave too many Americans unprepared for college.
I really find this difficult to believe. My guess is that, in terms of the real skills objectively needed to do the job, a high school diploma is more than adequate for most office work. Of course, it may be that, because of competition for those jobs, you need a higher level of qualification to get one. But that’s a different story.