Ingrid

I was at the University of Wisconsin at Madison this week, and was very lucky that Jane Waldfogel was giving “the A. Kahn Memorial lecture”:http://www.irp.wisc.edu/newsevents/seminars/series/2009/KahnLect2009.htm on Thursday. She gave a fascinating talk on developments in comparative social policy studies, and also discussed her forthcoming book on Britain’s war on child poverty. I’m sure that when that book is out, somewhere in April 2010, someone more knowledgeable on the UK and the lessons that can be drawn for the US will post a piece here.

I don’t think we’ve discussed her work here on CT before, which is a shame, really, since her book What Children Need is an excellent book on the topic of its title. The book focuses especially on the question what children from working parents need. How can we make sure that the care that children get when their parents have to work is good enough?
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So the news is spreading that the Belgian PM, Herman Van Rompuy, would be the first president of the EU. I am not going to comment on what that means for the EU now. It’s after nine in the evening here, and I’m preparing my teaching for tomorrow morning (and for reasons I need not disclose in this post, I need my time to prepare).

But despite time shortage, one thing I am happy to throw in cyberspace is a prediction that this will not be good for Belgium. Not a very hard-to-make prediction indeed. In the last years I’ve blogged here, once in a while, on the political instability of Belgian politics, indeed perhaps even the instability of the very future of Belgium; and Van Rompuy seemed to have been the only one able to bring calm back, and at least lead a more-or-less functioning government. His professional skills and talents in making compromises in extremely difficult situations will certainly be very useful in Babylonian Europe; but who will rescue Belgium? How long will it take for the Belgian government to have a new PM, and is there anyone to be found with the same authority that Van Rompuy has been able to command? Tonight Belgium will celebrate that this little country has been able to achieve something powerful, but tomorrow it will wake up with headackes…

Mercedes Sosa “died today at age 74”:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/10/04/arts/AP-LT-Argentina-Obit-Mercedes-Sosa.html?_r=2&hp. An amazing voice, wonderful songs, and an important symbol of resistance against the Argentinean dictatorship. She will be missed, not just by Latin-Americans.

In August, the Erasmus University Rotterdam fired Professor Tariq Ramadan. Well, strictly speaking, they didn’t fire him, but rater withdrew the invitation to be a guest professor. Since December 2006 Ramadan had a contract with the City Council of Rotterdam to advise the City Council on civic integration & multicultural policies (about half of the population in Rotterdam is not from Dutch origin and the city has enormous socio-economic-cultural problems). At the same time he was invited as a guestprofessor at the Erasmus University for the same period (allegedly he had asked for this affiliation himself when he was asked to work for the City Council). So legally speaking in August the City Council fired him, and at the very same moment the University withdrew its invitation to be affiliated as a guest professor. Yet for what follows, I don’t think this legal quibble is very relevant. From an ethical-political point of view it remains a dismissal. The question is: was this dismissal justified?
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Sometimes you make a picture that you feel like sharing. Quiet Sundays are a good time to do so. Here’s one. It’s a wall painting, taken in a small street in Utrecht, with a row of bicycles in front of the wall painting. I love wall paintings – I prefer poetry on walls and windows rather than in libraries, and art outside in public spaces rather than in musea (the metal flowers carved in the pavement around St. John’s College in Cambridge are another example that makes me happy). Enjoy.

Belgium has one of the highest per capita public debts in the EU, and a pension system whereby the workers pay for the pensions. So there is a serious challenge of keeping the public pension system viable and sustainable in the near future when the population will be aging.

According to the Dutch-language Belgian newspaper “De Standaard”:http://www.standaard.be/Artikel/Detail.aspx?artikelId=BE2D2NEF, Belgian politicians have decided that the best qualified candidate for the position to lead the Belgian National Office for Pensions will not be appointed. The reason? He is Dutch-speaking, and it was decided that appointing him would bring the balance of francophone versus Dutch speaking high office public servants in danger. [click to continue…]

Rather than being about dead ideas in economics, this post is about the future of economics: its relation to ethics. More specifically, about teaching ethics and economics.
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I haven’t blogged much in the last months — I had too much on my plate and blogging is an easy thing to drop if there’s much more work than can be squeezed into 24 hours a day. A few times something came on my path that I felt I had to blog about, and now, in this academic-off-season with more time (or rather: fewer urgent deadlines) the challenge will be to remember all those things that I felt were worthwhile throwing into the Blogosphere.

Here’s one. A few weeks back I joined “the Friends of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”:https://leibniz.stanford.edu/friends/ (SEP). For philosophers, but also for other academics or thinkers/writers/readers who sometimes want to check out a philosophical theory, term, subfield or canonical thinker, this is a true gift. I use it in my teaching and have so far only had positive remarks from students. The SEP contains high quality refereed entries, generally well-written and enlightening, and always freely available to anybody on Earth with access to the internet. Anybody supporting the Open Access movement, or anybody seriously concerned about educational equality of opportunity on a global level, should therefore support the SEP if they can (the membership fees are $5 for students and $10 or 25 for professionals – much less than the fees of most academic associations). So now there is an easy way to support the SEP, and you’ll get something in return for your membership – nicely formatted PDFs of the entries. I hope many thousands worldwide will join, and that the people working hard at creating and maintaining the SEP will take it as a big ‘thank you’ for their work.

One could debate and dispute whether implementing a Basic Income Grant would be a good idea in affluent post-industrial societies, as we did (“here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/28/redesigning-distribution/ and “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/10/should-feminists-support-basic-income/ and “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/02/02/feminism-and-basic-income-revisited/) at CT before. Yet for developing societies with serious problems of persistent poverty, it seems to me like a very good idea indeed. One could add as a (desirable) condition that such a society should be able to internally generate the money to fund such a BIG (that is, there must be a big enough section of rich or middle class people whose consumption or income can be taxed). The idea may work wonderfully in countries like South Africa for example. If you give poor South Africans a relatively tiny BIG, they are not given welfare payouts that enable them to sit back and rest (as the critics may have it), but rather people are given some very basic means to take their lives in their own hands: money for food, for basic health care, for school fees, for a roof above their head, and perhaps to set up a small business. No more begging for food needed. The amounts can be tiny and may seem like pocketmoney to people in the global North, but as we know from the relative success of microcredits, poor people can change their lives (and those of their children) when they have small amounts of money.

There is now empirical evidence supporting this line of reasoning, coming from Namibia, where in 2004 “a coalition”:http://www.bignam.org/ of churches, trade unions, NGOs and AIDS organisations decided to run a pilot project to figure out what a small BIG would do to the lives of the extreme poor.

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From occasional conversations with international colleagues, I’ve come to believe that teaching loads of university lecturers may differ quite substantially between countries. I am curious finding out whether my belief is false or not. So I propose to do a little survey. If you are teaching at a University, could you tell us what a regular teaching load in your faculty/university is, and any factors that you think influence this (e.g. whether you are in a research-oriented university, the country in which you are based etc.)

Here’s an example. In the Netherlands there is no distinction between research-intense and other universities. With a few exceptions, every university lecturer is also supposed to be an active researcher (we do not make the distinction between those who do research, and those who teach, except for people who are hired as postdocs for projects). Where I am based (faculty of philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam), a standard teaching load for someone with a full time appointment is 4 courses a year. Most courses are 10 weeks, 2 hours a week; graduate courses are 15 weeks. All teaching staff supervise a few (roughly 3-5) BA and one or two MA dissertations annually, and mark an equal number of dissertations supervised by others. Class size varies between 10 students (MA courses) and about 100 students (some first year courses). We tend not to have teaching assistants, hence all the marking of essays/exams, course preparation, etc. is done by the teachers (there are rare exceptions to this rule). PhD ‘students’ are not regarded as students but as staff, and in any case most lecturers supervise one or two of them, with a few professors supervising half a dozen. I’d be curious finding out where this load is situated on an international and interdisciplinary comparison. My suspicion is that it’s an average load, but I may well be wrong.

According to “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Women’s_Day, yesterday was the 100th International Women’s Day (I started writing this post yesterday, but spent most of that day at a feminist meeting and having a women’s night out. Sorry. But here it is – better late than never). “Last year, here at CT”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/03/08/international-womens-day/, we discovered that in some countries this is not celebrated as a social or political event (as it is in Europe) but rather as a day to give your wife or girlfriend chocolates or flowers. So I felt it’d be good to post an old-fashioned political poster, stolen from the very same wikipedia site. Isn’t it awesome? [click to continue…]

So we’ve finally arrived at Chapter 3 in Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality. In Chapter 3, ‘The Basic Structure Objection’, he aims to show that principles of distributive justice apply to people’s legally unconstrained choices. Rawls, whose theory of justice is his main target in this book, has famously argued that the primary subject of justice is what he calls ‘the basic structure of society’, being “the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation” (TJ Rev Ed p. 6). Cohen’s critique on Rawls is that the principles of justice should also apply to choices which are left open by the rules of those institutions.

As with other chapters in this book, this chapter is also more or less a reprint, from his 1997 article ‘Where the Action is: on the site of distributive justice’. So the claims Cohen makes here are not new, and have already been debated. So let me just pick up a few points (hopefully not too idiosyncratic) that either struck me or particularly interested me. [click to continue…]

We’ve been discussing here at CT many, many times issues related to justice, care and the family, so I thought some of you may want to know that I’m organising a conference on that theme with some truly world-class scholars in this area. Information below the fold. There is a strictly limited number of seats, so if you’re interested, then immediate registration is highly recommended.
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“Harry’s post last week”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/01/27/should-you-delay-parenthood-till-tenure/, and Kieran and Magistra’s comments on that post, reminded me of another problem with the academic labour market. In many professions, you have to be a certified, skilled and experienced person, but there is an upper-ceiling on what will be demanded and expected from you for hiring purposes. You have to be good and good enough, but you don’t have to be better than all the others. In fact, there may be no way to say who is better than the others if we compare candidates who are all above a certain threshold of competences and experience. In academia, it seems that the sky is the limit. So it is not good enough to have a PhD degree, some teaching experience, some experience in administration, some experience abroad and a handful of high-quality publications; no, you need more of this compared with your competitors on the job market. You don’t need to be just good; you need to be better than the others. So if there is someone competing for the same job, who has been able and willing to work significantly more hours than you over the last years, than all other things equal that person will have a more impressing CV and will be hired (except if this person is a really horrible character, or known to be a person who always causes trouble).
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