Ingrid

Via several blogs where it was mentioned (I saw it on NewApps and Feminist Philosophers), a link to a new blog, called Occupy Philosophy. I’m no longer sure what the word ‘Occupy’ is supposed to mean when we are not only using it in connection with seats of capitalist power (as in ‘Occupy Wall Street’) but also in connection with seats of systematic/critical reflection (‘Occupy Philosophy’). But let’s not spend our energy on that quibble, but rather applaud efforts to involve professional philosophers (and other academics) in contributing to the discussion of the issues that the Occupyers are trying to put on the political agenda.

Two related things perhaps worth mentioning.
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I haven’t been reporting or commenting for a while on the ongoing political crisis in Belgium, which most recently started with the elections 15 months ago and the inability to form a government afterwards, but in fact genuinely started after the elections in June 2007 and the inability of the subsequent government to tackle some major socio-economic and political problems. In essence, the country has been politically unstable or incapable of effective governance for the last 4 years (In case you lost the story, here are my earlier posts on Belgian politics (starting with the oldest): “one”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/19/the-ingredients-of-the-belgian-cocktail/ “two”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/07/one-hundred-and-fifty-days-after/ “three”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/02/175-days-and-still-counting/ “four”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/19/belgium-time-out-of-the-political-crisis/ “five”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/03/19/belgium-no-longer-exists/ “six”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/09/22/15-months-of-belgian-political-mess/ “seven”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/12/22/a-dramatic-turn-in-the-belgian-political-crisis/ “eight”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/07/30/if-language-trumps-reasonableness-we-must-be-in-belgium/ “nine”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/11/19/whether-or-not-it-is-good-for-europe-it-is-very-bad-for-belgium/ “ten”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/06/13/belgian-elections-strong-victory-for-nva/ “eleven”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/02/18/thanks-to-250-days-nogov-surrealism-flourishes-in-belgium/).

The last months were filled with one attempt after the other to find a coalition, all in a climate of the absence of trust between the two main linguistic groups, and also in what I’d call the ‘bad-divorce-atmosphere’. With that latter I mean that if one listens to the interpretation or explanation of a certain event by either the Flemish or the Francophones, it is just like listening to two spouses in the middle of a very ugly divorce: it is as if they live in two completely different realities. This, in fact, is probably the factor that makes me most pessimistic regarding the odds that the two linguistic groups will stay in the same country in the long run: just like a bad marriage, they no longer have enough valuable things in common, and their common past may no longer be enough to keep them together.

So now, in this mess, another event was just announced that may cause Belgium to sink even deeper: Yves Leterme, the Christian-Democratic former Prime-Minister, who has been been running the daily affairs for the last 15 months waiting to be succeeded by the new PM, has announced that he is moving to the office of the OECD.
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Last April, Martha Nussbaum’s book Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach came out. Too late for being included in my entry on the capability approach at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but I’m immediately making up for that omission since I’m working on a book review for the Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews. My verdict? It’s a useful introduction for undergrads and policy makers, but given its length it doesn’t (and cannot) have much depth. (for me, that’s not a criticism: it’s by definition almost impossible for introductory books that cover such a broad range of disciplines to have much, if any, depth). Yet I think it is somewhat more problematic that something is missing that many undergraduates and most policy makers reading this book will want to know, since it doesn’t cover the empirical work being done. Hence the book also ignores all the questions related to measurement, which is, in my experience, the #1 question asked by economists who want to understand this framework, and by policy makers looking for an answer to the question whether the approach has any bite.

One could be inclined to believe that this is merely a teaching book, and it is with that assumption that I read it; yet there is also something in there for scholars of the approach. They will also discover some new claims and statements – some of which I endorse, and some of which I contest.
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We exist. That’s the subtitle of a new blog, Disabled Philosophers, a blog which wants to make disabled philosophers more visible. I think this is a great thing to do. Do have a look, and if you feel you fit the description of a disabled philosopher, or a philosopher who cares for/shares their live with a disabled person, do consider submitting your description. I think bringing this out in the open will do a great service to all those who are struggling with these issues, or those who want to know more. In fact, I think a blog like this makes academia (and, by extension, the world) a little bit more humane, since it shows people as they are, not as we imagine them to be.

Since my older son was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at age 3, I read many books on autism. From those books I learnt that the chance that a sibling would also have/develop an ASD was about 5%, compared with the 1% chance for anyone in the population (that is, about 1% of children are officially diagnosed with autism, but I think one can seriously doubt whether that figure is not an underestimation due to under-diagnosis).

I always thought that this 5% figure was odd, since it didn’t correspond at all to my observation at the special-needs-daycare/school of my son or in online parent support groups or in accounts of families affected by ASDs that I read, where many parents report to have several children with an ASD. I noticed just way too many children who also had siblings with an ASD to make that figure of 5% correspond to reality. And now, there’s a study just published in Pediatrics, confirming my observation: if a parent has a child with autism, the chance of a sibling also developing an ASD is almost 20%. That’s what the authors found in a large American sample, and I don’t see any reason why it would be different for other parts of the world.

Not sure how that will change the way we look at autism (if it will make any difference at all), but I find it a striking (but not surprising) figure.

Since England was on fire (perhaps still is, in a certain sense) and the financial markets are in trouble, we may be forgetting that a human disaster is taking place in Eastern Africa, where millions of people are suffering from famines. A photo series in the New York Times makes visual how horrendous the situation is. These pictures are from Somalia, which is for a range of reasons probably the worst situation of all countries in the Horn of Africa where people are suffering from hunger, but that’s little consolation. I recall famines in Ethiopia and neighboring countries ever since my childhood, and it is depressing to see them returning again and again, leaving one to feel rather powerless about what, if anything, one can contribute to providing a sustainable solution to this.

Famines are horrible, and are made worse by war, lawlessness, bad or nonexisting governance, and population growth (there is some accessible background material at the BBC Africa sites). These aspects make it harder to think of solutions to prevent this from happening yet again in the future, but that is not the worry of people currently starving. They need food, water and medical care, and they need it now. But once these horrible pictures get off our screens again, and the people who are now starving are either buried or are trying to rebuild their lives, we should not forget returning to searching for a sustainable solution to global poverty reduction/elimination. Let’s invest more in that discussion here on CT (to be continued).

The American Economic Association has announced that from July 1st, “double-blind reviewing” will be dropped for the American Economic Review (being the flagship journal in the economics profession), and the 4 other journals which the AEA publishes. Here’s the full statement on their website:

Upon a joint recommendation of the editors of the American Economic Review and the four American Economic Journals, the Executive Committee has voted to drop the “double-blind” refereeing process for all journals of the American Economic Association. The change to “single-blind” refereeing will become effective on July 1, 2011. Easy access to search engines increasingly limits the effectiveness of the double-blind process in maintaining anonymity. Further, it increases the administrative cost of the journals and makes it harder for referees to identify an author’s potential conflicts of interest arising, for example, from consulting.

So, how good are these arguments?

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The academic journal Theoria published recently a roundtable on philosophy publishing. For those of us who have been active as paper submitters, referees, and (associate or guest) editors, it doesn’t contain spectacular new insights – though I found it nevertheless interesting. Yet importantly, this kind of ‘behind the scene’ information is essential for graduate students who aspire an academic job, or postdocs who want and need to strengthen their position: it gives information on how academic journals really work, what counts and what is relevant etc. For many graduate students and junior scholars it is hard to get this information if one isn’t lucky to be mentored by a senior scholar who has the relevant experiences and knowledge, and is willing to share them.

All the editors who took part in the roundtable observe that it is increasingly difficult to find referees. This confirms my experience as an Associate Editor of Feminist Economics, and also reflects the crazy number of requests I get to review papers from all sorts of journals, and also on papers where I strongly doubt I have special expertise. So I’ve been wondering for a long time: is this system sustainable? Is there a way to reward referees, or another way to create positive incentives for refereeing (whether material or immaterial)? Or is there no need to ‘fix the system’?

Back in June 2009, I wrote a post on the basic income experiment in Otjivero, Namibia. Recall that this was a two year experiment in which the (about) 1,000 residents of a very poor community were unconditionally given N$100 (about 10 Euro) on a monthly basis for two years (from January 2008 till December 2009). The mid-term effects (on income generating activities, health, school enrollment, reduction of the number of underweight children, …) were very positive.

On Sunday, I’m flying to Cape Town to teach a course on the capability approach, and afterwards I will head to Otjivero to try to better understand the effects and desirability of the basic income grant (BIG), and to gain a better grasp of the overall nature of the project. My South-African colleague Ina Conradie, who is a senior development scholar with many years of experience in development work in South Africa, is joining me; in part we are also interested in finding out to what extent this could be a desirable poverty-reducing policy for South-Africa.
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Feminist Philosophers gives us the answer. Read it and share it among your networks. For comments, questions, objections, endorsements: go there.

So after an attempt to close down Philosophy at Middlesex and cut Philosophy at King’s College London, now the Philosophy Department in Keele is threatened with closure, together with Keele’s Centre for Professional Ethics. You can read all about it here. I really can’t help but wonder: “Who’s next?” We earlier reported here on plans to cut funding for the humanities and the social sciences at the EU-research spending level.

I think the tendencies are clear. If you are teaching/doing research in a field/discipline that can not easily show (quantitatively, please!) to policy makers & bureaucrats that you will make a significant positive contribute to economic growth, your very existence is at stake. Never mind that you’re opening up minds, teaching logic or the arts, passing on history to the next generations. Either someone on the market should be willing to pay for what you’re doing, or else you are at mercy of the benevolence of your government. The University as a public good? That’s an old fashioned idea from premodern times, obviously.

If you think I’m exaggerating, read the EU agenda on the modernization of the Universities, published by EU bureaucrats in 2006. I think what we’re witnessing now, is that this agenda has touched the lowests levels of execution, and that the financial crisis is seen as a great opportunity to push it through. A tiny bit of this ‘modernization agenda’, like the stress on international mobility of students and teachers, could be explained by the goals of creating multi-national understanding and hence contributing to peace. But the rest of that agenda regards the university primarily (perhaps solely?) as an instrument for the economy. We had better become more worried, and we had better started to create a counter-discourse to this narrow economistic paradigm then. What I see around me, and what I see developing that hasn’t been fully worked out yet, worries me a lot.

I wrote here two years ago that it was, perhaps, the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, but repeated the same claim last year. Yet all the newspapers and website are full with claiming that the anniversary is today. Never mind. I probably didn’t have the patience in 2009 and 2010 to wait until 2011. Here we are.

There’s quite a lot of attention to IWD here in the Netherlands today. The question why we still need it has luckily not been so prominent this year. This is a nice surprise, since I remember having seen asked this question on the 8th of March for the last… euh.. ten years or so (that is, as long as my memory serves me). I had an interview with a radio journalist early this morning and had prepared for that question, but she asked different ones. My answer would have been: we still need women’s day as long as women are not treated as equals to men, and both are treated with respect and dignity – but that also implies that, at least in some parts of the world but possibly in most parts of the world, we may need International Men’s Day too, since men who do not embrace dominant masculinities have a hard time in some areas too (child custody in some countries; birth leave in several EU countries, for example). If International Men’s Day were to contribute to thoughtful reflections on masculinities, it may well be a contributing to the liberation of some men, and definitely be welcomed by feminist/egalitarian women too. And it may also be a good thing for gay people, if the widespread account that homophobia is in (large) part driven by anxieties over masculinities is true.

I’m always curious to hear what people did on IWD (and recall from last year that some of you buy roses for your wife/girlfriend, which is definitely not the kind of political activities associated with IWD here in Western Europe). I ‘worked hard’ this year: on Sunday I was in a debate on the combination of care and paid work (and what policies are needed) in Amsterdam, and today I joined 6 other students and professors to stage the docu-play Seven, which recounts the true stories of seven amazing women leaders from across the world, who have been strong and inspirational against the odds (since most of them suffered a lot of abuse and violence). As a genuine actress-for-one-day I came home with a bunch of pink flowers, to the great delight of my five year old, who has pink as his favorite color. Happy International Women’s Day!

Congratulations to Belgium, which holds since midnight the world record cabinet formation after the elections now exactly 250 days ago. Being the founders of surrealism, the Belgian people decided to celebrate this with people’s parties in open air, especially a big one Gent. The poster says ‘steun onze helden’, that is, ‘support our hero’s’, but this should be interpreted as ironically as possible. The people organising and attending these parties are fed up with the Belgian politicians who are unable (or unwilling?) to form a coalition and govern the country. If you want to see another piece of Belgian surrealism, watch the Flemish comedian Geert Hoste giving an interview to CNN in which he comments on the situation and the festivities.
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For years I have been wanting to write an overview book on the capability approach and it looks like I may find some time to do that in the next 18 months (possibly quicker if I can buy myself out of some teaching). There are a few publishers interested, and one (a major commercial press of academic books) is actually quite persistent in reminding me that they are interested in this project.

But why publish with a publisher? Why not simply put the book open access on the web? I wonder whether an open access book would be (a) feasible, and (b) all things considered a good thing to do.
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