Ingrid

Amartya Sen turns 75 later this year (on November 3rd, to be precise), and we are going to celebrate this. In academic style, of course. “Kaushik Basu”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/kb40/ and “Ravi Kanbur”:http://people.cornell.edu/pages/sk145/ have edited a 2-volume Festschrift, aptly called “Arguments for a Better World“:http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199239993. I am not sure when Sen is going to read those 1400 pages, but that detail shouldn’t spoil the party. And Basu and Kanbur are also organising, together with the Institute for Human Development “a conference”:http://amartyasenconference.net/ to celebrate his birthday. That event will take place in New Delhi on the 19th and 20th of December. “The Call for Papers”:http://amartyasenconference.net/call-4-paper.asp, which so far I haven’t seen circulating, is only open to young economists and social scientists, with ‘young’ being defined as those under 40. It’s a pity, though, that political philosophers are not invited to submit papers, given Sen’s important contributions to that field.

“Nancy Folbre”:http://people.umass.edu/folbre/folbre/, who is widely considered to be one of the most knowledgeable economists on issues of care work, has recently started a new blog, called “Care Talk”:http://blogs.umass.edu/folbre/. It’s a research blog that “aims”:http://blogs.umass.edu/folbre/welcome-to-care-talk/ to bring together interdisciplinary insights on issues of care — child care, care issues related to primary education, elder care, care for disabled, and health care. Care is a neglected issue in several disciplines and subdisciplines, including economics and political philosophy, and I can only applaud this initiative. I hope that this will become a genuine international blog — much can be learnt from looking at how care work is organised and divided in other countries.

Folbre published earlier this year her new book “Valuing Children”:http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/FOLOUR.html which I have here on my desk. I promise our readers a review of that book sometime in June.

This week I received my copy of “The Capability Approach“:http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521862875, a fat book that contains a large number of essays on… yes, good guess. It’s primarily written by social scientists or interdisciplinary oriented scholars — hence not so much the more philosophical side of that literature. Sometimes I feel very happy and satisfied, perhaps even a little proud, when I see a book to which I’ve contributed a chapter. For instance, that was the case last September when Jude Browne’s splendidly edited “The Future of Gender“:http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521697255 came out. That volume contains many excellent essays on issues of gender and sexual difference by interesting thinkers, and I felt my own chapter was decent enough. Sadly, I do not have such feelings about my chapter in The Capability Approach. The simple reason is that that chapter was written in 2001, and analyses certain limitations of the capability approach for the analysis of gender issues. Yet in the 6 years and 8 months between sending that chapter to the editors and its ultimate publication, I think very little of what I wrote in that article is still original or not by now broadly appreciated. The literature on the capability approach has developed at an incredibly fast pace, and the arguments in that chapter are… well, a little old. Academic publishing is a slow business – often too slow. Anybody a worse experience than those 6 years and 8 months?

Part-time work is often argued to be one possible solution for working parents, so as to make the balance between work and caring easier. This post is not about the question whether this is indeed (part of) the solution in general – that is, for all types of paid work. Rather, I’d like to raise some doubts about the idea that part-time work is a good thing for academics who are doing research (in addition to whatever else they do – teaching or management). In this country, plenty of academics work part-time, and often standard lecturer positions are only offered on a part-time basis (often 80%). [click to continue…]

I’m working on a co-authored paper on the notion of agency in Amartya Sen’s work. Agency as related to empowerment and autonomy, and not as an institution such as a real estate agent. Suddenly I recalled that when I was teaching on Sen in Louvain-la-Neuve two years ago, I was told that there is no word in French for ‘agency’. So now I am wondering: is this true? And if so, are there more languages that do not have a word for ‘agency’? (in fact, I even have a hard time to come up with an appropriate translation in Dutch). I checked it with “an internet translator”:http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr, which only translates it (for Dutch and French) as an institution, not as a property of human beings. Weird.

… at least, that was what Bart De Wever, the leader of the small Flemish nationalist party, said in “an interview in La Libre Belgique”:http://www.lalibre.be/actu/belgique/article/408221/bart-de-wever-ce-pays-n-existe-plus.html. He doesn’t deny that when Belgium was founded, in 1830, it corresponded to what the francophone elite wanted. But these days, he argues, the media are divided, the culture is divided, public opinion is divided. There is no longer a unified society.

Whether or not that is true, the latest news is that Yves Leterme managed to reach an agreement on a new government yesterday. But what a government, and what an agreement! The coalition includes the three major parties (liberals, social democrats, and Christian democrats) and is asymmetrical, since the francophone social democrats are taking part, whereas the Flemish social democrats are not. This is highly notable, since until now federal governments have, to the best of my knowledge, never been asymmetrical in this way. But more worrisome, the agreement they reached is regarded by commentators from across the spectrum as extremely vague and weak. There are no details on the budget, yet there is an agreement on taxcuts (a demand from the liberals) and on an increase of the social benefits (a demand from the social-democrats), in addition to a commitment not to create a budget deficit. Perhaps they do believe in manna from heaven after all. Nothing is said about the Flemish demands to regionalise the social security system, employment policies and other responsibilities they wanted to transfer from the national to the regional levels. Nothing is said about how they will solve the problem with Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde, without which future elections will be unconstitutional.

So no surprise that most media commentators ask: how long will this government last? De Standaard “summarizes”:http://www.standaard.be/Artikel/Detail.aspx?artikelId=DMF18032008_117 the situation aptly: “No team, no programme, no budget, no leader.” And even if this government lasts longer than when the first real decision needs to be taken, what will it contribute to solving “the profound problems that are haunting this country?”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/19/the-ingredients-of-the-belgian-cocktail/

I’ve been reading with great interest “Henry’s”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/03/12/free-public-choice/ “posts”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/03/12/free-everything/#comments on Open Access publishing in academia, and want to add a thought by considering this issue from the perspective of what I will call ‘the South’ — basically most (but not all) universities in developing countries. When debating the costs and benefits (not just economic, but broader) of commercial versus open access journals, there does seem to be a benefit that I find particularly important, namely that open access could, at least in the long run, contribute to closing the global inequalities in access to education. And it can also help to improve the quality of the papers being produced by scholars living and working in the South, which in turn increases their chance of being published in what we consider quality journals, which would be good not just for their carreers, but also for global dialogues.

This is not just a theoretical thought. If the information I get from (associate) editors of journals who explicitly encourage submission of papers from the South is representative, then the problem can be sketched like this: Scholars living and working in the South are submitting papers that contain interesting empirical information about the areas they live in, or interesting interpretations and analyses of issues that are different from the analysis one would hear from a typical ‘Northerner’. Yet these papers are not up to date with recent theoretical developments or other relevant published literature, and are also not written in the ‘style’ of mainstream academic articles. So almost all these papers get rejected. (Of course there are, in absolute numbers, enough exceptions; but if we’d look at percentages, I’d think this is a fair sketch of the problem).

Clearly this is not a fair game: these authors have to meet our quality standards but they are working under much harder conditions (like power cuts), and with only a fraction of the resources we are having at our disposal (not just money, but also books and journals, and the quality of the education they enjoyed themselves). In short, the access barriers to academic journals are one significant factor contributing to global academic inequalities. One more reason to support open access.

It’s the international women’s day today – but with “a 6-weeks old baby”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/30/born-under-a-full-moon/, a 2-year-old toddler, and a close family member in hospital (nothing to panic about), I didn’t have the time or energy to go to any activity or debate. Luckily I have a long list of feminist and women’s issues that I want to blog about in the near future (but with the little one, I think I shouldn’t make too many promises about timing). So in the meantime let me turn this into an open thread. If you celebrated women’s day, what did you do? Any other thoughts or stories on international women’s day? And what should be the priorities of the women’s/feminist movement for the years to come — locally, regionally, internationally?

As many readers of this blog, I frequently receive requests from academic journals to referee papers. Sometimes refereeing a paper creates benefits for the referee (like reading an interesting argument or getting inspiration for a new project), but on balance I find referee work a burden. Still, I do a lot of it (I think), since I consider it a duty of any scholar who is sending manuscripts to journals.

How much should we referee? If I were to accept all referee requests that I get, I would hardly be able to do any research myself. So I want to find out how many papers I should referee before I have fulfilled my professional duty. In the last months, I talked to some (international) colleagues about how much they referee and how they decide whether to accept or reject a referee request, and I’ve discovered that some of them don’t find it difficult at all to refuse to referee virtually all the requests they get. Not me: I feel bad every time I turn down an editor (but I’m getting better at it!). Surely there is some sort of collective action problem here, since the system can only be sustained if enough people do referee; so I feel anyone who wants to be part of this system (that is, who submits papers to refereed journals), should feel a professional duty to referee. I think one should referee at least the same number of papers as the number of reports one receives; so if in the last 12 months you’ve received 10 reports, you should referee at least 10 papers in the same period (if asked and if you feel competent to referee them, of course). I’ve been told that this rule was once suggested at a meeting of editors at the APSA meetings – and it makes perfect sense to me. Perhaps we should add 10% or 20% as a margin, since there will be people who submit papers but are not yet being asked to referee, as they are not known by journal editors as potential referees.

Since we have several journal editors among our readers, I’d like to ask: how difficult is it these days to find (good) referees? And if you’ve been in the business for some time: is it getting easier or harder to find good referees? And to anyone who feels like commenting: what do you think of the above rule to decide when we’ve done our fair share of refereeing — any better proposals?

A kind reader alerted me to “an article”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/03/health.nhs1 in last Sunday’s Guardian, on the proposal by the Conservative Party to introduce the Dutch system of Kraamzorg in the UK. As I briefly mentioned in “an earlier post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/03/2-weeks-of-birthleave-for-fathers/, under this system a qualified maternity nurse cares for mother and the newborn child at home in the first week after the birth.

The article gives a fair account of what these nurses do, and of the advantages of this system. Yet I’m surprised by the claim that the system would be too expensive to be introduced. Of course the question is ‘expensive in comparison with what’. In the Netherlands, one reason why mothers who give birth leave the hospital so quickly after the delivery (if they go to the hospital at all, that is), is the cost; a maternity nurse at home is much cheaper than the cost of keeping mother and child in hospital (as is the case in Belgium, for example). I don’t know what the kind of care is that is currently provided to newborns and their mothers in the UK – yet it is self-evident that if the comparison is made with no care for the newborn and mother at all, then the system is relatively expensive. But how under a system of no care at all the mothers can take the rest that they need is a mystery to me. The days that this could be provided by family members are, for most of us, long gone. Hence not a bad plan from the Tories, if you ask me.

There was a full moon last Wednesday, when Ischa was born. A month earlier, I was at a Christmas party in Belgium, and was warned to return home on time ‘because babies tend to be born when there’s a full moon.’ Why that would be so, no-one has yet told me. But it is a fact that last Wednesday, the delivery ward in the hospital was full, and two women had to be referred to another hospital. The nurse who served breakfast confidently told me she knew it would be busy when she came to work the night before – she had noticed that the moon was full.

I’ve also been told that children born under a full moon would somehow be special. Ischa is absolutely adorable (I know, I know, all parents suffer from this kind of prejudice); he’s been rather kind to his parents (so far!) by sleeping relatively well at night; he’s a big supporter of the nappies industry; and he makes an interesting case study for international private law scholars, since, “just as his older brother”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/21/whats-in-a-name/, he has two different official surnames thanks to the unwillingness of the Belgian state to recognise the surname that his parents have chosen for him. Yet whether any of that can be traced back to his being born under a full moon — I doubt it.

In “the interview with G.A. Cohen”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/02/ga-cohen-interview/ that Jon linked to last week, Cohen closes by saying that in the long run political philosophy has an enormous impact on society. He gives as an example Mill’s liberty principle, which he sees as having been implemented a hundred years later; he concludes that ideas of contemporary political philosophers, such as Rawls and Nozick, have “enormous social effect”. We should just not want to see results within a few years, but rather look at a longer time scale.

I am sceptical about this optimism. At the very least, the “enormous” should be replaced with “some” social effect. Surely some political philosophy has some social effect; but in my judgement, it is especially the work of those philosophers who either are also well-informed about empirical matters and those who are willing and able to translate their insights for a broader public of citizens and policy makers, and who are effectively going into debate with citizens, are having most chance of having any effect. So I think the impact of scholars like Amartya Sen and Philippe Van Parijs will be much bigger, both in the short and the long run, then the Cohen-school of political philosophy. The higher the level of abstraction, the more ‘technical’ and (let’s face it) unaccessible the writing style, the more ideal-theoretical the work, the more based on hypothetical models and simplifying-assumptions-based reasoning, and the less informed by at least some empirical knowledge, the less the impact of a particular piece of political philosophy. Moreover, even the most socially relevant of political philosophy has probably only a modest effect in comparison with the impact of charismatic intellectuals, social activists or politicians. In short, I think Cohen & Co are way too optimistic about the societal and political relevance of their work, though of course I’m happy to be proven wrong.

Interesting interview on Dutch television yesterday – with “Andre Krouwel”:http://english.fsw.vu.nl/Organization/index.cfm/home_file.cfm/fileid/8734A856-DA20-27A6-825C47E17FFFDDE0/subsectionid/8734A0E5-F625-E3F6-7A547D82FF33EC56, a professor in political science from the Free University in Amsterdam who has designed “an electoral compass for the USA presidential elections”:http://www.electoralcompass.com/. The Electoral compass has been very popular for recent Dutch elections: by answering questions about the substance of the electoral debate, the programme compares your views with those of the candidates. Questions concern a range of issues, such as health care, pension reform, environmental policies, and so forth – and, unique to the US compass, questions on gun control, the death penalty and Iraq. In 2007 Krouwel and his colleagues designed an electoral compass for the Belgian Federal elections; and now they have designed one for the US elections. According to “their website”:http://www5.kieskompas.nl/, they are now also designing an electoral compass for the 2008 Spanish elections.

If you answer the 36 questions, your answers are compared with those of the candidates, and the compass tells you which politician has the closest views to yours (or rather, vice versa). It was interesting to note that the democratic candidates are all closely situated to each other on the compass, whereas there is much more internal diversity within the republican camp. I filled out the questions, and the compass revealed that my views are closest to those of Edwards. Yet it may well be that if I would have had the right to vote, I wouldn’t want to lose the historical chance to vote for a female or black American president, even if on substance, my views apparently are slightly closer to the views of Edwards (but then, Clinton and Edwards seem to be very close to each other on the compass). I’m curious to read whether you felt the outcome of the test was what you expected, and also whether the questions cover the most important issues that are being discussed (or should be discussed) in the US electoral debate.

When last September “Ronald Plasterk”:http://www.minocw.nl/ministerplasterk/index.html, the Dutch minister of Education, Culture and Science, who also holds emancipation in his portfolio, “released his Policy Paper on Emancipation”:http://www.minocw.nl/ministerplasterk/nieuws/35434/Meer-kansen-voor-vrouwen.html, he was criticized for not mentioning men at all. Basically his view is that women should be encouraged to perform more paid work so that they can be ‘financially independent’, and the government should provide the conditions for making this possible, for example by expanding the supply of formal child care facilities. I agree with the critics that what is missing is a vision of what fathers need to be offered, both as a matter of justice for fathers, but also as a precondition for women’s emancipation. So I would like to suggest to Mr. Plasterk, as a first and minimal step towards the inclusion of men in his emancipation policies, that he introduces the right for fathers of a minimum of 2 weeks of fully paid birthleave (and, of course, also for co-mothers in the case of lesbian parents).
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