Harry

Following up on my “ethicist” posts, a correspendent points me to this, rather unnerving, article from the Washington Post. A couple of quotes:

The woman and two others interviewed by The Washington Post learned from friends that they were the subject of derogatory chats on a widely read message board on AutoAdmit, run by a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania and a 23-year-old insurance agent….It contains many useful insights on schools and firms. But there are also hundreds of chats posted by anonymous users that feature derisive statements about women, gays, blacks, Asians and Jews. In scores of messages, the users disparage individuals by name or other personally identifying information. Some of the messages included false claims about sexual activity and diseases. To the targets’ dismay, the comments bubble up through the Internet into the public domain via Google’s powerful search engine.

The stories prompted the deans of Yale and Penn Law School to issue statements condemning these sorts of attacks.

In case that doesn’t worry you:

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When the baby arrived, a friend lent us the entire first season of Bewitched on DVD. Now several seasons are on sale in amazon’s fantastic Classic TV Sale. Browsing through the sale brings back many memories. I’ve watched American classic TV in three stages. First, as a kid in the 70s, I saw whatever got imported to the UK at the time (including oldies like Bewitched). Then, in LA in the mid-eighties I watched the true classics — Dick Van Dyke (DVD on DVD — get it!), The Flying Nun, and The Addams Family – in reruns. The new-to-me-at-that-time show I found it hardest to watch was I Dream of Jeannie, not because it is amazingly sexist (which it is) but because by the mid-80s it was impossible to watch Larry Hagman playing a comic role. Finally, now that the DVD revolution has made everything, however bizarre, readily available, I’m watching whatever I can get my hands on with my kids. Still, guidance would be appreciated. You know what I’m like: recommendations welcome. And hurry so that I can get a good deal.

As promised last week, an opportunity to discuss the 3rd part of Erik Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias. Part III explores the difficult problem of a theory of transformation.

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Right now it’s incredibly hard to read about Suez without thinking about Iraq, and it’s a mark of Peter Hennessy’s confidence that Iraq will long be remembered as a disaster of epic scale that he repeatedly draws comparisons between the two events in his marvelous new book, Having it So Good (UK), (US). The book is a history of Britain in the 1950’s, and I’ll impose a brief review on you later. Suez doesn’t dominate the book, but it is the pivotal moment of the decade if not, in fact, the whole postwar period in terms of Britain’s relationship with the world. And the parallels are striking. In both cases, it is clear that a small handful of policymakers were determined to undermine the targeted dictator, and were not about to be deflected by stupid facts. In both cases democratic scrutiny simply didn’t operate; neither Blair/Bush nor Eden were subject to the kind of hard questioning by their cabinet colleagues that should have stopped them, or at least forced them to act less precipitously. And in each case, as we know only too well in the case of Iraq, neither politicians nor military had any kind of long term plan.

But surely, surely, Suez was nowhere near as disastrous in terms of human carnage? Surely, because the Americans acted so, well, correctly, forcing the Brits to back off, the day was saved, if not for Eden, for the world? Surely my title question is ludicrous? That’s what I’d have thought. (Eszter, at least, might want to read on.)

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Randy Cohen has caught up with CT, and is looking at the issue of whether it is ok to use online information to make judgments about applicants to college (not grad school, as we did). He says it is not. Not to be mean, but his judgement includes an extraordinarily bad analogy:

You would not read someone’s old-fashioned pen-and-paper diary without consent; you should regard a blog similarly.

Here I am, writing on a blog, using my own name, hoping that somebody might be stimulated or entertained, or best of all influenced, by what I write, and Randy Cohen thinks that nobody should be reading. The analogy is, in fact, with a diary that I publish and give away for free. I can see there might be a problem with selective reading of blogs (trying to find dirt on someone one wants to reject anyway) and certainly admissions officials should have some sort of protocol for this, but people who make embarrassing comments on their own blog under their own name in public should expect that other people might read and be influenced by them. Writing a diary which one keeps under lock and key seems sufficiently different that anyone who gave a moment’s thought would get it.

Erik Olin Wright’s manuscript-in-progress, Envisioning Real Utopias is on the web. Erik has been working on the Real Utopias Project for about 15 years, cajoling and encouraging left-ish social scientists to think daringly but rigorously about reform ideas that may not be practicable in the short term, but, if enacted, would forward an egalitarian agenda, and would be internally workable. (I’ve been mentioning it a lot recently, in case you hadn’t noticed). I asked Erik to provide a brief intro for your edification, which is below the fold. He’s keen to get (useful) comments at this stage, so please either email him. Or, if your comments concern chapters one, two, or three, comment here (I’ll put up another post for discussion of subsequent chapters next week). If you have the patience to wait till publication to read the whole thing, this paper nicely motivates, and summarises some of, the project.

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Two sensible pieces, one by the BBC’s peerless Mike Baker (can we have an education journalist like him in the US, please?) and another by Fiona Millar on school places lottery flap. A very peculiar piece at the BBC site reporting on research that, as far as I can tell from the report, has nothing to do with the lotteries. The researcher is quoted as saying that:

Our research suggests that lotteries of over-subscribed school places would produce the worst of both worlds – greater educational polarisation and longer, more environmentally damaging car journeys to distant schools by middle-class parents. She said it was interesting that Labour-controlled Brighton was proposing it on the grounds of fairness and equality of opportunity, when this research suggested it might have exactly the opposite result.

I gather that this claim has gotten some play in the debate, so it’s worth refuting it. (As a bonus for my New Labour friends I include a criticism of David Willetts below the fold).

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The newest book in the Real Utopias Project series is Redesigning Distribution (UK). The books are all based on conferences held at Madison, and each one focuses on a particular “real utopian” proposal – an institutional proposal which is supposed to embody or further some egalitarian ideal but is supposed to be in principle implementable in the real world and, more importantly, to be self-sustaining in some hard-to-specify way. This volume compares Basic Income Grants with Stakeholder Grants. Philippe Van Parijs makes the case for a BIG, a universal grant that all citizens would receive on a regular basis from the age of majority, funded most likely out of general taxation; Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott argue by contrast for a Stakeholder Grant, a one-off payment of (in the US at current rates) $80k paid to all high school graduates at the age of majority, funded by an inheritance tax (and returnable, with growth, to the Treasury at death).

I’ll assume some familiarity with the proposals (for the details of BIG see here and for the details of the Stakeholder Grant see Ackerman and Alstott’s book). I’ll also say at the outset that although I’ve been familiar with both proposals for a long time, and find both very appealing, I haven’t got a stake in the debate really. But I was surprised how much new and interesting stuff was in the book, so I thoroughly recommend it whether you are a newcomer to the debate or an old hand.

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Kenneth Horne was born 100 years ago today. My earliest memory is battling with my parents to be allowed to get to bed in time to hear Round The Horne. I even remember when it went off the air because of his untimely death (though in my memory it was replaced by These You Have Loved with Cliff Morgan, which can’t be right). In latter years my daughters have shared the joy of Horne with me courtesy of BBC7. Julian and Sandy, Rambling Sid Rumpo (and here), Charles and Fiona, and, bemused in the middle, the calm tones of Horne himself. BBC7 is celebrating with an episode of Much Binding in the Marsh, a feature-length musical dramatisation of Three Men on A Boat (with Leslie Phillips as a bonus!) and a fun-packed 3-hour history of Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne.

I’ve been at several of the Real Utopias Conferences that have been organised out of the Havens Center. The latestI attended part time, and, I must admit, not without a certain amount of bad conscience. The topic was Rethinking Gender Egalitarianism, and I was leaving my wife at home much of the weekend with a 4-week-old baby and the girls. So, I missed some of the best bits. It was also odd because I rarely attend a conference where I know almost no-one; and although Johanna Brenner is a very old friend, I knew none of the other out-of-towners except through their work, some of them being people whose work I started reading 2 decades ago. Rosemary Crompton, I’m pretty certain, mistook me for my dad. He should be flattered.

Nevertheless it was, in some ways, the best conference yet. Everyone was nicely on task, and although debate got quite excitable it was always good-natured. The lead document, by Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers, authors of Families that Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employmenr, argues for a mix of improved daycare provision, labour market regulation and parental leave at generous replacement rates; and the argument is that this will improve the quality of family life and increase gender equality. The proposal is less utopian and more real than some of the real utopian proposals (perhaps less utopian than I would have preferred) but I think that may have been an unavoidable feature of the subject matter; get too far away from what is feasible in the short-to-medium term and it is hard to say much that is supportable.

The papers are all here.

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Russell has a long, and typically thoughtful, piece explaining his attitude both to abortion and to regulation of abortion. A teaser:

I’ve probably called myself “pro-life” in the past, maybe way back when I was in high school or an undergraduate. But I have no specific memory of doing so, and I wouldn’t today. Part of this is, simply, because I’m not the hardline, simplistic, killing-a-fetus-is-murder opponent of abortion that I was raised to be. (Reading The Cider House Rules will do that to a person.) Do I still want to deter abortion, including–but not limited to–limiting abortion rights where I think best? Yes, definitely; the revulsion I feel towards the concept is still there. When I first learned about what an “abortion” was as a child, the mental image in my (ten-year-old, perhaps?) mind was of that of doctor wielding a butcher knife, stabbing a baby within a mother’s womb…and frankly, the straightforward medical facts of what an abortion involves don’t lead me to feel that that disturbing image is in any principled way flawed.

But while I would insist that is both impossible and irresponsible to pretend that such sentiments and feelings either could or should be excluded from political discussions, I also acknowledge that you have to be able to at least provide some reasoned account of the roots and parameters of one’s revulsions for political purposes; standing alone, they provide few details and fewer answers.

Go read it, and comment there.

From Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence, perhaps the best first paragraph of an academic book:

Affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines well-being. This is the core of my argument. For detail and evidence, go directly to the chapters; for implications, to the conclusion, which also has chapter summaries.

I’ve been longing to read this book since I first heard about it (several years ago) but, on reading the first paragraph, felt obliged to lend it to someone else for several weeks. I’ll tell you all about it when I’m finished with it. Be patient.

Other great academic first paragraphs?

I was posed this problem by someone in a very highly ranked research department in one of the social sciences (not Philosophy, not Madison), and post with permission.

Graduate Admissions Committee for the department in question is deciding whom to admit. For said discipline, as for several others, there is a website on which potential students gossip share information about the departments to which they are applying, and many do so anonymously. However, many such students say enough about themselves that if you are in possession of their file (as graduate admissions committee is) you can identify them with near, and in some cases absolute, certainty. One applicant to said department behaves on the website (under the supposed cloak of anonymity) like… well, very badly, saying malicious things about departments he has visited, raising doubts about whether he is honest and the kind of person it would be reasonable to want other students to deal with, and generally revealing himself to be utterly unpleasant.

Question: is it wrong for the GAC to take this information about the applicant into account when making a decision? Secondary question: does it make a difference to your answer that the department is in a private, not a public, university?

The first ever episode, available for a week. Here. Never say we don’t look after you.