Ingrid

Today is a special day for me: it’s the first day of my maternity leave (read: finally time to slow down and take a daily nap) and from now on I can legitimately call myself a philosopher. Yes, I’ve done something that is unusual for someone in my situation: I just completed an MA in Philosophy, which I studied on a part-time basis with the “British Open University”:http://www.open.ac.uk/ since January 2005.

Until now only a handful of people knew, since I thought it was a little weird for someone in my situation to take a taught degree in philosophy. After all, even though I’m not in a philosophy department, there is nothing that prevents me from reading any philosophical book or article, or doing (some sort of) philosophical research myself — as I have in fact been doing for some years now, as those who know my work can testify. Yet I have wanted to properly study philosophy since around 1995, but the flow of life prevented me from doing so until 2004, when I decided that if I wasn’t going to do it then, it may not happen before I would retire. There were some areas of philosophy that I had read a lot about for my PhD work, but I was curious to know more about other areas too, such as philosophy of mind or metaphysics. [click to continue…]

So, for anyone who wants to know, “the Belgian crisis”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/19/the-ingredients-of-the-belgian-cocktail/ has arrived at a new absolute low. The coalition negotiations have been broken off. The negotiating Flemish and Francophone parties could not agree on the core issue – whether or not to openly debate in the next years the shift of certain governmental responsibilities from the federal to the regional levels. And I really don’t know what solutions are still available now. Almost all parties seem to impose non-negotiable demands or taboos that together make any coalition impossible. New elections? Not sure whether they would be constitutional – recall that the constitutional court has ruled that the electoral district Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde is currently holding unconstitutional elections, and that problem has not been solved either. To be continued.

Here’s some information for fans of “the capability approach”:http://www.capabilityapproach.com/Briefings.php: the “Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency”:http://www.mnp.nl/en/index.html released “a report”:http://www.mnp.nl/en/publications/2007/Sustainablequalityoflife.html that I co-wrote on how to conceptualise the quality of life for national policy purposes in affluent countries – we argue for a capability metric and are rather critical of the happiness metrics. I should add, though, that the proof is in the eating of the pudding, and we don’t have any funding to collect the necessary data that a capabilities-based index of the quality of life would require; our work remains at the conceptual level only. It may well turn out that we would need a very long questionnaire in order to collect all data, which in turn might jeopardize the viability of a capability-index of quality of life (since the non-response-rate would be higher). And there are more problems to solve before we would arrive at a capability index, certainly one as (relatively) easy to measure as either GDP per capita or happiness indicators. Anyway, if anyone has more money and more time and thinks this is a fun project to pursue, let me know what comes out of it.

Today is 150 days after the Belgian elections, and there is still no government. The crisis is as deep as it was when I last “wrote about it”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/19/the-ingredients-of-the-belgian-cocktail/. There have been partial agreements between the negotiating parties over the last weeks, but for none of the crucial issues there is an agreement yet – the situation of the Francophone population in the Flemish border communes around Brussels, a solution to the crisis in the election district Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde, some aspects of the welfare state reform, and the government budget.

And it is a crucial day: the Commission Internal Affairs of the National Parliament (where the Flemish make up the majority) has a meeting today, and the Flemish parties have threatened that if there is no (for them acceptable) compromise (or at least the beginning of a compromise) on Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde in the coalition negotiations, they will use their majority position to vote for the splitting of this election district. Such a Flemish-Francophone majority-minority decision would be unheard off for Belgian political norms, since it would basically imply that the Flemish majority imposes its will on the Francophone minority. All political commentators argue that this would only deepen the political crisis.

I haven’t been following each and every detail of Belgian politics in the last two months – even for a Belgian it is rather complicated, and the constant political incidents and provocations (from both sides), which have continued even after the negotiations have been resumed, are making me tired and slightly depressed. Readers who had more time and energy to follow the debate are very welcome to expand below. In the meantime we’ll be waiting to see what happens on this crucial day – the Commission Internal Affairs meets in 4 hours and 55 minutes, and so far there is no sight on any solution for Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde in the coalition negotiations.

It’s Saturday noon and my toddler is taking a nap; I am not in the mood for doing academic work and by now too heavily pregnant to do any serious amount of housework. So here are two musing about books.

The first is a real book, with a wonderful 1970s smell. I finally could get hold of a copy of Amartya Sen’s Collective Choice and Social Welfare. I made photocopies of that book when I studied welfare economics in the mid-1990s, and subsequent attempts to buy the book always failed. It hasn’t been reprinted for yeeeeeeears, and the only second hand version that I once found was a few hundred dollars – too much for my budget. But purely by accident, I had another look earlier this week on the Amazon second hand market, and found one, for 50 dollars. A first edition, with the errata-page included. It arrived from California today – less than 5 days after I ordered it. It’s a first edition, previously owned by someone called David Owen Butcher. Thank you David, you made my day.

The other book is Facebook. It seems that the virus finally caught me. Last week a friend showed me the ‘inside’ of facebook, and tried to lure my into joining. I saw the phantom of the timesink in the close distance, so resisted the temptation. Yet “Chris’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/11/reforming-inheritance-tax/ suddenly made me think that perhaps facebook can also be useful, and hey, the economist in me woke up, and earlier this week I joined. I even joined the Crooked Timber group (not sure what that implies, though). So, did those of you who joined Facebook in July after “Henry set up the group”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/11/trying-not-to-lose-face/, ever went back to work on your social facebookrelations there?

Last weekend, I had a friend visiting who is a Washington-based journalist. She told me that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the interesting new woman in town, who receives lots of attention for her outspoken views. I responded that I didn’t have the impression that the Dutch were sad that she left. Perhaps in the Netherlands people were a bit tired of hearing her views which never covered any shade of gray but were always rather black-white, provocative, and, at least in the opinion of some, unnecessarily insulting and divisive.

So what a surprise when the news came that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has returned to the Netherlands. Apparently the Dutch state is no longer willing to pay for her security in the US, which it has been doing since she moved to Washington. According to the “Dutch newspapers”:http://www.nrc.nl/anp/binnenland/article780539.ece/Hirsi_Ali_bereid_beveiliging_zelf_te_betalen, she is willing and planning to raise funds for her security in the US, but was not allowed to do this before she had a Green Card. That Green card she received a week ago, but this implied she only had one week’s time to raise the funds, before the Dutch funding of her security in the US ended. Now that she’s back on Dutch territory, the Dutch State is again protecting her, and as soon as she has raised enough funds, she wants to go back to the US.

According to the Dutch radio, she is not entitled to private protection by the US government when she is on US territory – with or without Green Card. So I was wondering…. since Hirsi Ali is a “Resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute”:http://www.aei.org/scholars/scholarID.117,filter.all/scholar.asp, can’t they pay for her security as part of her secondary employment conditions?

Finally, here is the promised post on Belgium – delayed not only by personal circumstances, but even more by the time it took me to talk to a dozen of people more knowledge on the Belgian situation. Writing this post made it very clear that one should never trust one single source when he or she is talking about Belgium – chances are very high that only a partial (and thereby biased) analysis is offered. So I talked to people from both sides of the language border, spent hours on websites from both Flemish and French Belgian newspapers and other media, and tested my draft ideas on Belgians from all persuasions.

Below the fold my list of the main ingredients of the Belgian cocktail (warning: very long post!). [click to continue…]

Yesterday evening, at the editorial meeting of the Dutch philosophy journal Filosofie en Praktijk (Philosophy and practice), we had a discussion about what methods are used in political philosophy. One editor mentioned that he is doing quite a bit of refereeing for the National Science Foundation, and that many political philosophy research proposals are quite vague on the methods that they’ll use. There is often some reference to ‘reflective equilibrium’, he said, but is that really all we do? Similarly, I noted that the “ECPR’s”:http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/ Summer school on Methods and Techniques this year had no “courses on offer”:http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/events/summerschools/ljubljana/courses.aspx on methods in political theory. And I know of several political science departments where the traditional ‘methodologies’ course includes all sorts of fancy quantitative and qualitative methods, but no political theory methods.

So do political theorists and philosophers have no methods? Of course not. But perhaps we are not so explicit about them than the empirical sciences or the theoretical disciplines that use methods such as game theory or formal modeling. I don’t doubt that we do use methods, but perhaps they are more implicit in our work. I have to confess that I’ve found it harder than I liked to answer colleagues who asked me what precisely our methods are (in fact – it’s not just colleagues – Last year when I had a 45 minutes interview with the Dutch National Science Foundation for the VIDI-grant competition, the only question I got was about the methods I would use in my political theory research).

So I’d like to ask two questions: What are the methods of political theorists and philosophers? And is there a good book or set of articles on “methods and techniques in political theory and philosophy” ? Or should we simply apply what is written in a good textbook on analytical philosophy?

I’ve been meaning to write a post on the political chaos in Belgium – but my absence on CT in the last weeks already revealed that I haven’t had a decent chunk of time yet. For those of you in countries where there hasn’t been any reporting – it’s day 82 after the federal elections, and the Flemish and Walloon parties are so bitterly opposed to each other’s demands, that commentators are talking aloud of “the end of Belgium” (which is not going to happen soon, since neither of them wants to give up Brussels – but there are signs that the crisis between the Dutch/Flemish-speaking and Francophone regions is deeper than it has been in decades).

And the more I thought about what I should write, the more it became clear that it’s a complicated issue to write about. One problem is that the interpretations of the political events differ dramatically between the Dutch-language and the Francophone Belgian press – truly as if they are from two different planets – so any (foreign) journalist/reader who masters only one of those two languages will almost inevitably get a distorted or one-sided pictured. Then there is the question whether, as a Flemish person, I can write sufficiently neutral about this. One of the many dimensions of the Belgian drama is the historical disrespect of Francophone Belgians for the Flemish, especially their language; and part of the interpretational differences is whether this is still the case today, and whether one should bother. I’ll keep my own views for another time, but one thing that I noted in international conversations is that it seems hard for most non-Flemish to appreciate why language can be such a big deal (“this francophone Belgian philosopher”:http://www.uclouvain.be/en-11688.html is the Great Exception, and he’s writing a book on linguistic justice). I don’t know what would work as good international comparisons, but in any case there are plenty of other national political sensitivities that are not always easy to understand for outsiders, and where one does need to have some minimal historical knowledge to appreciate present-day sensitivities.

So I will try to write a piece next week trying to explain, as neutrally as I can, the facts and background info; and, if I have some time left, I’ll give my views in another post. But now I first have to mark the essays of my Walloon students.

Judith Warner wrote a “column”:http://select.nytimes.com/gst/tsc.html?URI=http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/24/opinion/24warner.html&OQ=_rQ3D1Q26thQ26emcQ3Dth&OP=5051bb3fQ2FdTYrdQ3F1affQ3FdkwwDdwDdkAdfQ7E.Q7D.fQ7DdkAT5aQ7DYa_Q3CQ3FQ5BP in yesterday’s NYT (unfortunately behind the pay-wall) on the need to make part-time work genuinely available for all American workers. She argues that study after study shows that up to 80% of mothers, both those holding jobs or caring at home, want to work part-time, but that currently only 24% do so because “part-time work doesn’t pay”:

Women on a reduced schedule earn almost 18 percent less than their full-time female peers with equivalent jobs and education levels, according to research by Janet Gornick, a professor of sociology and political science at City University of New York, and the labor economist Elena Bardasi. Part-time jobs rarely come with benefits. They tend to be clustered in low-paying fields like the retail and service industries. And in better-paid professions, a reduced work schedule very often can mean cutting down from 50-plus hours a week to 40-odd — hardly a “privilege” worth paying for with a big pay cut.

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A little while ago, when “Harry discussed the latest addition to the Real Utopias Project on basic income and stakeholding”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/28/redesigning-distribution/, some commentators raised the issue of the gender effects. I promised at that time that I would write a post about it. Well, finallly the time has come — thanks to a workshop on this topic that the “Heinrich Boell Foundation”:http://www.boell.de/ organised last Thursday in Berlin. They are the think-thank of the Green German Party, which is currently seriously debating whether they should advocate a basic income as (part of) a welfare state reform strategy. The workshop addressed the question whether a basic income would have different implications for women and men, and whether, all things considered, it would be a policy reform that feminists may want to support. [click to continue…]

“Henry’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/30/hip-orthodoxy/ reminds me of a time in my recent past that the struggles of heterodox economics were taking up a good deal of my energy. In 2001, I was one of the three Cambridge University PhD students who wrote a little piece called “Opening up economics”:http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Cambridge27.htm, which was originally signed by 27 economic, business economics and development economics PhD students to call for an ‘opening up’ of the economics discipline. In fact, originally we were four writing the proposal, but one dropped out since she became too worried that writing this piece might jeopardize her chances of getting her degree. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that many of us were scared, and some fellow PhD students didn’t want to sign because they worried about how their supervisors would react. So far for the notion of a free market of ideas.
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Today I received an e-mail from an undergraduate student (whom I don’t know) who asked if he could pose a few questions on Amartya Sen’s work: [click to continue…]

When my husband turned 40, his sister and I joined forces in giving him a present that we knew he would really like: a photography-trip to a city of choice, with childcare included. Read: his sister would take care of our son at home, and I would buy him a ticket for two to a city where he would like to take pictures, and he could spend all day making pictures without me moaning that I want to move on. He chose New York City (which implied that since I think it is crazy to fly across the Atlantic for 3 days, the citytrip turned into a one-week holiday).

We are not quite new to NYC, since we lived there for six months in 2004… nevertheless, given that we worked too much then, I am sure there is still loads for us to see. What do you think we should not miss? And what are the hidden gems of NYC that we are unlikely to find in a travel guide, or the places of special interest for photographers? With doubled thanks!