From the category archives:
Academia
Last week I was in the Public Records of Victoria (PROV) looking at records of the Melbourne mint. My substack about the Sydney mint by rights should come first, but I’m fresh-ish off the plane so I’m doing this one first.
It was a bit extravagant building two mints in Australia. As I flicked through the massive file of equipment to order and repair I wondered why they built another one. I’d assumed it was just that Melbourne was much closer to where most of the gold turned out to be.
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Colleagues Cyril Hédoin and Pablo Paniagua are running a symposium on “PPE” (philosophy, politics, and economics) over there. They follow James Buchanan’s classic question, from 1964, of “What should economists do?” Given that Crooked Timber is, arguably, situated at least in part in this field, I thought I’d repost my response to their introductory essay here, with their permission.
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From the Fall of the Berlin Wall until about a decade ago my animating intellectual question was pretty much, ‘how did a small number of natural sciences become qualitatively more impressive than the social sciences?’ Because I met the late George Smith relatively early in my thinking about this (as an undergraduate), I often formulated this question in terms of evidence; he liked his version of my question as ‘how to turn data into high-quality evidence?’ And his striking answer was (to simplify) that deviations from theoretically significant expectations through theory-mediated measurement were made informative in an iterative process over time in the sciences that succeeded in achieving lift-off. While I was much more interested in the social organization of the sciences than George, I never did much better than he did in answering my own question. But I did make sure his version was published in the best possible form and with full detail (see his ‘Closing the Loop.’)
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(This is an updated version of something I posted 20 years ago, on the 20th anniversary, and 10 years ago, on the 30th anniversary, of my friend’s death)
About 43 years and 3 weeks ago the soon-to-be late lamented You and Yours had one of those “off to University” shows, helping parents and about-to-be new undergraduates to understand what the first few weeks of University was going to be like.[1] Although fitting the latter category, I only listened because at the time You and Yours was among my regular listening. One comment struck me, and has stayed with me ever since. A woman in her thirties, commenting on Freshers’ Weeks, said that “in that first week of college you meet people who will be your friends for the rest of your life”.
I was skeptical. And it hasn’t been true for me. I’ve kept in much closer touch with several friends from secondary school than anyone from college (I did meet CB sometime in 1984, but only for a few minutes, and not again till Sept 12, 2001, so he doesn’t count; I’ve recently reconnected with someone else I was close to, but we hardly saw each other for 35 years). My first day at Bedford College was spent almost entirely with a girl called Alison who decided the next day to leave (not, I hope, because she spent the first day with me, but because she was trying to escape her home town of Egham, to which my college suddenly announced it was moving).
But it was also that week that I met Adrian.
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When I posted a piece on the latest failure of the US Navy a while back, I predicted that I wouldn’t be changing any minds. That was one of my safer predictions, confirmed almost immediately by Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money. Farley declined to respond, saying “whatever his other virtues, Dr. Quiggin is not a serious voice on naval questions”.
I wasn’t surprised by this. Farley is the epitome of the navalist view that serious expertise on the technology of naval warfare is a crucial requirement for commentary, whereas being right is irrelevant.
Given this respect for credentialed expertise, however, I was a bit surprised to see Farley endorse a piece by Bret Devereaux making the claim that “the United States Navy is a load-bearing component of the global economy”. You might think that the relevant expertise here included at least some knowledge of both transport economics and the global economy. Devereaux, who is an “ancient and military historian”, has neither. Still, I’m not going to pull academic rank here. Let’s see what Devereaux has to say and how well it stacks up as a piece of economic analysis.
Having alighted from the bus in an industrial area I’d never been before, I found the right building and descended the stairs. As instructed by email, I rang the doorbell. I was immediately met by the two cutest dachshunds you’ve ever seen. My first words to the Westpac archivist:
“This is already the best archive ever!”
We have been granted ethical approval by review committees at our institutions.
(A piece I ran in The Guardian)
The recent panic about a breach of Medicare computer security by an “AI agent” contrasts sharply with other recent cases such as the Telstra and Optus outages that left many Australians unable to reach Triple Zero. In those cases, no one blamed the computers involved. The mistakes were clearly sheeted home to the corporations that operated them.
This wasn’t always the case. When the term “artificial intelligence” was coined some 70 years ago, the first mainframe computers (absurdly primitive by modern standards) were viewed with the same awe and concern as the AI agents of the present day. There were even “algorithms” (though the term wasn’t used in that way at the time) that were supposed to pick ideal dating matches.
Failures were inevitable, and blame-shifting became routine. “The computer made a mistake” was the 1960s equivalent of “your email must have gone to junk”. Gradually, however, we realised that the problem was not with the computer but with incorrect information fed into it or badly written programs invoked as a result.
These days, methodological nationalism is finally sparking a heated debate in philosophy. A flurry of new papers has recently been published in open access: Baycan, 2026; Beaton, 2026; Milioni, 2024; Sager, 2021; Ujlaki, 2026. Naturally, some of them question the relevance of the critique of methodological nationalism to political philosophy. As I myself argued that nationalism is a cognitive bias (that is, a factor that systematically distorts judgements), let me explain why I believe it is a cognitive bias that heavily affects the ethics of migration.
There is a simple method to detect and weigh bias in philosophical debates about justice (Dumitru, 2023). It has three steps: [click to continue…]
Books that complain about the state of universities, written by university members, are probably as old as the institution itself. And if there is one institution that needs – and should be able to provide – self-reflection, it is universities. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to comment on a new addition to this genre, Long Live the Ivory Tower, by historian Klaas van Berkel (currently only available in Dutch). It made me think, once more, about a question that I’ve long been chewing on: how to preserve the right balance between functional differentiation and coupling of institutions in modern societies?
Responding the gloominess of recent posts, I thought I’d try a piece that’s more optimistic about Europe, if not about the US. It’s a mashup of a couple of recent Substack newsletters.
The New York Times has a thumb-sucker about the rise of the European far right, which would greatly mislead anyone not up with the facts. The picture is one of inexorable advance, citing parties such as “the Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the Sweden Democrats and the Reform U.K. party of Nigel Farage.”
The New York Times doesn’t mention that:
- The right-wing coalition of which Wilders was part collapsed when he withdrew support and lost the subsequent election. Wilders’ party split and is competing with two other far-right parties, also in opposition.
- The right-wing Swedish coalition, which had promised the Sweden Democrats a role, was defeated at the recent election, with the SD vote declining.
- Farage’s Reform party has also split, and Farage himself is now massively unpopular.
There have been more consequential losses than this. The most successful far-right government in Europe, that of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, was crushed in elections earlier this year, and the party is now splitting. Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) lost office in 2023 and has now also split.1
Other successes have turned sour for the far right. Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, a successor to various neo-fascist parties, won elections in 2022 and has held together since then. But the government hasn’t delivered much of the far-right agenda, beyond stunts like a recently announced ban on burqas in schools. The Finns Party’s participation in a right-wing government (in Finland, obviously) has seen a big loss of popularity.
Europe isn’t out of the woods yet. A victory for the National Rally in the French election next year would pose some significant problems. But compared to the defeats listed above, the fact that the German AfD might form the government of a small German state is not a big problem.