Academia

Here’s an extract from my contingent* book-in-progress, Economic Consequences of the Pandemic commissioned by Yale University Press. Comments and compliments appreciated, as always.

The Covid-19 pandemic has taught us several things about inequality, or rather, it has dramatically reinforced lessons we, as a society, have failed to learn. The first is the importance of luck in determining unequal outcomes.

Some of us will get Covid-19 and die or suffer lifelong health consequences. Others will lose their jobs and businesses. Many, however, will be unaffected or will even find themselves better off. Some of these differences may be traced to individual choices that are sensible or otherwise, such as deciding whether to wear a mask in public places. But mostly they are a matter of being in the wrong (or right) place at the wrong (or right time).
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That might seem a silly question, but I’m finding myself genuinely wondering. I’m going to use this post to write through my confusion, building toward a second, deeper question, which arises if we’re willing to take that first question seriously: Should single-issue anti-abortion voters prefer a course of action that leads to fewer abortions, or should they prefer a course of action that leads to more abortions but that makes the laws better reflect their convictions about the ethics of abortion? This, I’ll suggest, is the actual choice situation they face.

I’m not a single-issue anti-abortion voter myself, so I might well misstep at various points. And, because most of the single-issue anti-abortion voters I know personally are Catholic, I’m still likelier to misstep with respect to the non-Catholic moral underpinnings of abortion opposition. Still, I don’t think anything I say in setting out the considerations as I see them needs to contradict the ethical or spiritual commitments that underpin these voters’ political stance. Indeed, I am trying to reason from those ethical commitments as I understand them to the political question at hand. Let’s grant for the sake of argument that Amy Coney Barrett would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Why might a single-issue anti-abortion voter nonetheless oppose her appointment? As I see it, there are two types of reasons for opposition.

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(For those who don’t have the French. “Tousse ensemble/crève générale” (cough together, general death) is a play on “Tous ensemble/grève générale” (all together, general strike.)

A piece I wrote elsewhere in March is doing the rounds again. ‘The Prodigal Tech Bro’ is about the privileged place in professional interactions and public discourse given to men who used to work in senior positions for tech platforms and are now surprised and disturbed by what those companies do. It points out how the ex-tech executives’ “I’m was lost, now I’m found; please come to my TED talk” redemption arc misses out a key part of the narrative groove they use to slide back into our good graces. It’s the bit in the Biblical parable of the Prodigal Son where he hits rock bottom in a pigsty and decides to go home and beg to be taken on as one of his father’s servants. Ultimately, he’s forgiven, much to the chagrin of the brother who stayed home and did the work, but the original Prodigal Son understands where he went wrong, and more importantly who he has wronged, and believes all the long walk home that he will never regain his former status and comfort.

A new documentary on Netflix, The Social Dilemma, is about the harms of social media. It centres the wide-eyed gradualism of a former tech executive named in my piece, amongst others whose careers have followed a similar trajectory from poacher to … someone who thinks we should maybe sometime think about hiring some more gamekeepers, if that’s ok, though obviously not the radical gamekeepers, and definitely not gamekeepers who think their job is something more than game-keeping the herd so ‘we’ can conveniently shoot or farm it.

The film repeats the same failing of the former tech execs – it assumes that the privileged people who made the mess we’re all in should be at the centre of the conversation on how to clean their shit up, crowding out once again those who have suffered because of their shit, or who’ve wrecked their careers by speaking loudly about the existence of this shit, and – crucially – limiting our thinking about what we do now to the homeopathic solutionism of the slurry-drenched insider who is already defined by his insistence that what looks, smells and acts like shit is not, in fact, shit. [click to continue…]

Last Monday was the opening of the academic year at Dutch Universities. Over the last three years, it has become a tradition for the activist group WOinActie to organise some sort of protest. This year, there was the challenge of how to organise a protest given COVID, but a solution was found.

WOinActie organised together with the labour union protest bicycle tours between various Dutch universities. The idea was to symbolise the lives of temporary part-time teaching staff, who teach a few years (often on a contract that doesn’t allow for research) at one university, and then have to move on to another university, since they are not offered permanent contracts (they universities don’t want to offer those because they claim they can’t take the financial risks). But those temporary instructors teach courses that are part of the regular curriculum, and the claim of WOinActie is that work that is permanent should be done by tenured teachers; instead, the Netherlands has in international comparison one of the highest percentages of temporary teaching staff. Of course, the protest was used to talk again to the press, and also to have a brief, open-air and corona-proof, conversation with the minister of HE before the cyclists took off at the University of Nijmegen to cycle to the University of Wageningen.

The students from Utrecht University supporting WOinActie painted 10.000 red squares in Utrecht, from the historic Academy Building in the city center all the way out of town to the University Headquarters (Bestuursgebouw) at Utrecht Science Park.
Each of the red squares symbolises one hour of unpaid work that is done by staff at Utrecht University each day; the students estimated that this amounts to 10.000 hours on a daily (workday) basis, and protest that their education should not depend on the unpaid overwork of their teachers. That estimation is probably an overestimation, but the point stands. It was pretty impressive to see those red squares through town, as you can see in this clip that my son Ischa made: #10.000 In Groningen, students also staged a protest around the 10.000 hours. [click to continue…]

This is a guest post by Kenan Malik replying to two posts by Chris Bertram last week

Chris Bertram published two posts on Crooked Timber last week, the first¹ challenging critiques of the concept of “white privilege”, the second² arguing that certain claims about race and class are irrational. As one of the targets of these articles (Chris linked to one of my posts as exemplifying the problem, and we had previously debated the issue on Twitter), this is a response. Chris’ two posts are not directly linked, but they clearly deal with linked issues, and it is worth looking at them in tandem.

In the first post, Chris argues that “the ‘white privilege’ claim sits best with a certain sort of metaphysics of the person, such that individuals have a range of characteristics, some of which are more natural and others more social, that confer a competitive advantage or disadvantage in a given environment, where that environment is constituted by a range of elements, including demographics, institutions, cultural practices, individual attitudes, and so forth.”

But he also acknowledges that “I’m not establishing that, as a matter of fact, “white privilege” in the form I describe is a real thing, although I believe that it is”. It is difficult to see, though, how one can have a debate about whether “white privilege” is a meaningful category without have first established whether it is “a real thing”. It is possible to have an abstract debate about whether such a phenomenon could exist, but not to critique those who challenge the concept as inchoate in reality. Chris, in common with many proponents of the “white privilege” thesis, takes as given that which has to be demonstrated.

Underlying the “white privilege” thesis are two basic claims. First, that being “white” is a useful category in which to put everyone from the CEOs of multinational corporations to the cleaners in an Amazon warehouse. And, second, that being in such a category imbues people with privileges denied to those not in that category. Are either of these claims true?

The idea of whiteness as a “certain sort of metaphysics of the person” derives, of course, from racial thinking. In recent years it has found an important expression in the notion of “white identity” – the idea that all those deemed white have a common identity and set of interests which may conflict with those of non-whites. Most anti-racists (and, I assume, Chris, too) reject such a claim. We recognize that all whites do not have a common identity, that the interests of white factory workers or shelf-stackers are not the same as those of white bankers or business owners, but are far more similar to those of black factory workers or Asian shelf-stackers.

Why, then, do we ignore this when it comes to the question of “white privilege”? Because, proponents of the white privilege thesis argue, white people do not suffer the kinds of discrimination suffered by non-whites by virtue of their skin colour. At one level this is true. “Racism” refers to the practice of discrimination against, and bigotry towards, certain social groups; there may be many reasons for such discrimination and bigotry, but one is clearly that those who are non-white are often treated unequally. Viewing the issue in terms of “white privilege” is, however, deeply flawed for a number of reasons.

First, it is not a “privilege” not to have to face discrimination or bigotry; it should be the norm. I doubt if Chris, or, indeed, most proponents of the white privilege thesis, would disagree. Framing the absence of oppression or discrimination or bigotry as a “privilege” is to turn the struggle for justice on its head.

Second, the concept of white privilege fails to distinguish between “not being discriminated against or facing bigotry because of one’s skin colour” and “having immunity from discrimination or bigotry because one is white”. The distinction is important. Many whites, because of privileges afforded by wealth and class, do have immunity against discrimination. But many others, who are poor or working class, do not. Their experiences of state authority or of policing is often similar to that of non-whites.³

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Most people interested in thinking about inequality, will have come across the dry and sarcastic saying from Anatole France that “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” France shows us how the reality of class, economic inequality, makes a mockery of equality before the law because of the different real-life effects of the same law.

Now why is sleeping under bridges bad? Well, presumably, it is bad because it makes you more vulnerable to certain harms: exposure to the cold, or being beaten up by gangs of strangers. We can imagine a kind of objection to Anatole France, albeit a very obviously silly one. It would go like this: the thing we should really be concerned about is the harms that people are exposed to. And when we investigate we find no difference in those harms between rich people who sleep under bridges and poor people who sleep under bridges. (We can assume that a few rich people, inebriated after a night at their club, end up under bridges too). According to the silly objection, what we should concentrate on is the group of people who sleep under bridges: there’s a perfect match between membership of this group and those who suffer the harms, whereas it turns out that lots of poor people, because they never sleep under bridges, are not at risk of such harms.

It is a silly objection, and obviously so. And yet we come across something very similar in form in many arguments about race and class. There are harms reliably associated with low socio-economic status and those harms fall on people regardless of their race. Kerching! – it is claimed – race doesn’t matter in the explanation of those harms! But obviously, if being black increases your relative propensity of being sorted into a poor working-class group that is exposed to such harms, and if being white reduces your relative propensity of being so sorted, then race is actually a big part of the picture. Showing that, of those who are in a category that is strongly pre-selected for by race, harms were not associated with race, does not lead to the valid conclusion that those harms are not associated with race.

With everything going on, we at CT haven’t managed any posts for a few days, so I’m opening a thread for comments on any topic. I’ll try to get comments out of moderation reasonably promptly, but bear in mind that I’m in Australia, near the opposite time of day to most readers.

I received an email earlier today announcing a new book series, focussing on Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE). There has been a notable rise in the success of PPE – as can be seen from the multiplying numbers of PPE undergraduate and graduate programs and PPE scholarly activities in recent years. This series is a logical next step in the development of the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary study of topics that are relevant to economics, politics and philosophy.

The new series, which will be published by Oxford University Press, has a website, five editors (Ryan Muldoon, Carmen Pavel, Geoff Sayre-McCord, Eric Schliesser and Itai Sher), and a long list of editorial advisors (and I’m honoured to be included there).

I’m not sure how long it will take them to publish the first book – given how slow academic publishing is, it might take a while – but in the meantime the editors welcome book proposals by scholars working in this area.