Academia

by Rutger Claassen and Ingrid Robeyns

Let’s establish an upper limit on the personal wealth any individual can possess. This is the core principle behind ‘limitarianism’. Limitarianism represents one of the more radical proposals in the debate on wealth inequality. Over the past few years, one of us has developed the philosophy of limitarianism (first in the academic realm, and then more recently also in the public sphere, as regular readers of this blog know). The proposal has since been endorsed, and in some cases further developed, by other scholars and writers, including Thomas Piketty and the Dutch journalist Sander Heijne.

Of course, not everyone likes the idea. One of the most important critiques on limitarianism is that it is unclear whether company owners can continue to hold on to their flourishing businesses in a limitarian world. Or no longer being able to receive exceptionally high pay for running these companies. Think, for example of the $46 billion compensation package Elon Musk received for serving as Tesla’s CEO.

Annemarie van Gaal, described as one of the most well-known businesswomen in the Netherlands and columnist for the influential Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, claims that with a wealth cap, there will no longer be any business activity:

“But anyone who is willing to take significant risks, endure immense stress, and sacrifice sleepless nights to apply their talent and perseverance in order to reach the top, should be given free reign. These people are the ones who create jobs and ensure that our country remains among the wealthiest in the world. (…). Would top entrepreneurs still be willing to sacrifice years of their lives, take countless risks, and endure hardship if they knew in advance that there’s a limit to their success? No. We will never become a happy society if we allow this.”

But is this correct? Can business owners remain owners of their business under limitarianism? And can their businesses thrive? This is an important question. Because even if there are strong moral arguments for limitarianism, they are not worth much if limitarianism destroys the economy. [click to continue…]

A few weeks ago, I drew up a flowchart to estimate the probability that Trump would establish a dictatorship in the US, which looked, at the time, like an even money bet.

We don’t need to speculate any more. Trump has announced the dictatorship, and there is no sign of effective resistance. The key elements so far include

• Extremists announced for all major positions, with a demand that they be recess appointments, not subject to Senate scrutiny
• A state of emergency from Day 1, with the use of the military against domestic opponents
• Mass deportations, initially of non-citizens and then of “denaturalised” legal immigrants
• A third term (bizarrely, the nervous laughter that greeted this led to it being reported as a joke).
• A comprehensive purge of the army, FBI and civil service

It’s clear that Trump will face no resistance from the Republican party. There’s an outside chance that the Supreme Court will constrain some measures, such as outright suppression of opposition media, but that won’t make much difference.

It’s possible that Trump will overreach in some way, such as carrying out his threat to execute political opponents before the ground is fully prepared. Or, his economic policies may prove so disastrous that even rigged elections can’t be won. But there is no good reason to expect this.

I can’t give any hopeful advice to Americans. The idea of defeating Trump at the next election is an illusion. Although elections may be conducted for some time, the outcome will be predetermined. Street protest might be tolerated, as long as it is harmless, but will be suppressed brutally if it threatens the regime. Legal action will go nowhere, given that the Supreme Court has already authorised any criminal action Trump might take as president.

The models to learn from are those of dissidents in places like China and the Soviet Union. They involve cautious cultivation of an alternative, ready for the opportunity when and if it comes.

The remaining islands of democracy will have some difficult choices to make. I’ll offer some thoughts on Australia, and others may have something to say about their own countries.

For Australia, the easy, and wrong, course of action will be to pretend that nothing has happened. But in reality, we are on our own. Trump is often described as “transactional”, but this carries the implication that having made a deal, he sticks to it. In reality, Trump reneges whenever it suits him, and sometimes just on a whim. If it suits Trump to drag us into a war with China, he will do it. Equally, if he can benefit from leaving us in the lurch, he will do that

Our correct course is to disengage slowly and focus on protecting ourselves. That means a return to the policy of balancing China and the US, now with the recognition that there is nothing to choose between the two in terms of democracy. We need to back out of AUKUS and focus on defending ourselves, with what Sam Roggeveen has called an “echidna” strategy – lots of anti-ship missiles, and the best air defences we can buy, from anyone willing to supply them.

I’ll be happy to be proved wrong on all this.

Note: I’d prefer not to have any post-mortems on what the Democrats did wrong. Any possible lessons won’t be relevant to the future. And a country where only a third of the population is willing to turn up and vote against dictatorship is headed for disaster sooner or later.

Kitchy and quasi-totalitarian ghastliness, USA (from 2008)

After Trump’s second election victory, lots of Americans are talking about emigrating, most commonly to Canada. This happens with every rightwing election win[1], but nothing ever comes of it. With the real prospect of indefinite Trumpist rule, the issues are more serious, but it seems unlikely that much will happen. But why not?

It’s fairly well known that Americans rarely emigrate. There are, for example, only about a million US citizens living in Canada at the moment. Conversely, there are around a million Canadians living in the US. These are surprisingly low numbers for contiguous countries with a common language (except for Quebec) and relatively straightforward[2] paths to migration.

A detailed illustration of a U.S. passport with the text ‘US Paort’ on the cover, lying on top of a Canadian flag background. The Canadian flag’s red and white colors with the maple leaf design are vibrant and easily recognizable behind the passport. The setting is simple, with the passport angled slightly to showcase the modified cover design, creating a contrast between the blue of the passport and the red and white of the flag.
As usual ChatGPT didn’t quite get the text right

More generally, it’s a common rightwing talking point that the USA is the country most commonly named as a desired place to migrate to. What’s less remarked is that Donald Trump’s expressed desire for more migrants from “places like Denmark” reflects underlying reality. Migration from other rich countries to the US is very limited. In 2022, about 300 000 people (excluding tourists) from Europe arrived in the US, and the majority of these were students, most of whom would probably return. And Europe includes a lot of poor countries.

There’s a lot more migration between other rich countries, including between other Anglospheric countries. For example, although Canada has about a 10th of the population of the US, there are about half as many Canadians in Australia (50 000) as Americans (100 000).

The conclusion I draw is that the US is very different from other, superficially similar countries, I’ve visited the US on lots of occasions and had a couple of extended stays totalling two years. But it still seems a very foreign place to me, much more so than New Zealand or the UK, where I’ve been less frequently. And I imagine the same is true, in reverse, for Americans abroad.

Looking at the recent election results, they are in part a reflection of global trends (anti-incumbent, anti-migrant etc). But the vote for Trump was substantially higher than for most of the far-right policies in other countries. I think (hope) that this reflects some specifically American factors.

The option of moving to Canada is, for most Americans, an illusion. They will have to sort out their problems at home, as best they can.

fn1. In the event of a Democratic victory, there aren’t a lot of options for rightwingers, even ignoring practical difficulties. Lots of them have nice things to say about Hungary, but I think only Rod Dreher has moved there. Same in spades for Russia.

fn2. Migration is never easy. But, excluding moves within the EU, Canada-US migration seems to be about as straightforward as anywhere. CUSMA (formerly NAFTA) makes it relatively easy to get work permits, and thereby make the contacts needed for employer sponsorship.

Together with many other academics in the Netherlands, I have been very busy in organizing a nation-wide demonstration next Thursday against the 1 billion budget cuts to higher education that our very-right-wing government has announced. (For background explanation, see this earlier post).

Today, I have a long opinion piece in the daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad analyzing the crisis in higher eduction. For our non-dutch speaking colleagues, and anyone with an interest in this matter, my colleague from the law department Bald de Vries edited an AI-based translation (to which I made a few further tweaks) – you can find it below the fold. [click to continue…]

One of my favorite metasciences lines is: “Does anyone look around and say…things are going great, I just think we need MORE PAPERS?”

Obviously, we all want more scientific progress, better evidence, broader scope — but I don’t think that this is best accomplished by churning out more of these fancy peer-reviewed pdfs. Indeed, our systems of peer review and knowledge evaluation are breaking down under the strain. Everyone is under pressure to produce more and more papers earlier and earlier in their careers.

The situation is accelerating with LLMs. The cost of producing these pdfs continues to decline, and as long as the demand for the pdfs stays strong, we should expect the supply to increase. Everyone agrees that this is a problem.

Well, almost everyone.

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Obviously people are shocked, and particularly shocked at the rejection of normal sensible politics by the rubes who have elected an oaf, a criminal and a rapist to the White House, again. But the trouble is that this kind of thing keeps happening, or nearly happening, and not just in the United States. And it turns out that the policies pursued by the MAGA extremists, by Le Pen, Meloni or Farage, aren’t really all that different from the ones followed by the normal sensible people, albeit that the rhetoric from the sensibles is less crude and laced with sweeteners about “compassion”.

The underlying problem is nationalism and the organization of the world into nation states, a form of organization that fosters and promotes nationalist sentiment and attachment and downplays transnational concern and solidarity, which is “all very well” but shouldn’t come “at our expense”. This has been the problem since well before 1914, but was particularly in evidence then as the greatest movement of international solidarity that had ever been built largely collapsed in favour of supporting “our boys” against theirs. It was there in the 1930s, not only in the rise of particularly agressive nationalisms but in the failure of normal sensible states to come to the assistance of those threatened by it, such as Jews fleeing across borders. All very well, but not at our expense. And it is, rather obviously, in evidence now as countries struggle with people moving and with climate change. All very well, but not at our expense.
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In the spring, I’ll be teaching the second semester of our philosophy grad program’s first-year seminar. This is the seminar all PhD students in the philosophy department take together as a cohort during their first year in the program. The fall semester of the seminar typically leans towards the metaphysics and epistemology side of philosophy, while the spring semester leans toward the ethics and political side. (We recognize that this isn’t really a defensible way to think about joints within the discipline, but the content delivery aspect of the seminar isn’t a priority, and we think of the categories as flexible depending on who’s teaching it. So, it’s a serviceable organizing principle for our purposes.) There’s a separate year-long workshop on pedagogy, so the first-year seminar doesn’t need to include that content, though of course it can.

I took a class like this as a PhD student, and I know that many other philosophy grad programs have them. This must be true outside of philosophy, too. I’m interested in hearing from people about how they’ve experienced courses like this, whether from the student side or from the teacher side or both. It seems to me that there are so many valuable things that a class like this might aim to accomplish, and a wide range of ways it might be put together to realize combinations of aims.

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“We live in an age which silence is not only criminal but suicidal”, wrote James Baldwin in his “Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis”. The year was 1970. I wonder if there has ever been a time when silence was neither criminal nor suicidal. I would like to live there and then, for sure.

In his poem “A leaf, treeless, for Bertolt Brecht” [“Ein Blatt, baumlos, für Berlolt Brecht”] (published posthumously en 1971 in the book Schneepart [Snowpart]), Paul Celan contended that crime lay in any conversation, not only in conversations about trees, as Brecht suggested in his famous “An die Nachgeborenen“. Without trees, every conversation merely repeats what has already been said. (I have a verse from this poem and the tittle of Celan’s answer to it tattooed in my left forearm). [click to continue…]

Until last Friday, I subscribed to two newspapers: the Washington Post and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. As of Friday, I only subscribe to NZZ. I shared my cancellation on Facebook and was surprised by how many people in my network commented that they had done the same. This included people who almost never comment or even react to any of my posts. Clearly I was not the only one who needed to act on the Post’s eleventh hour decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in the US elections.

But I wondered: is this just my bubble? I was super curious to know how widespread this action had been. It turns out, quite widespread. Of WaPo’s approximately 2.5 million paying subscribers, over 200,000 cancelled their subscriptions by today, Monday.

As of an hour ago, Jeff Bezos posted an editorial on WaPo talking about how Americans don’t trust the media. Okay, but the 200,000+ people who cancelled their subscription on Friday presumably trusted WaPo enough to pay for it until last Friday. As noted by David Folkenflik at NPR, if a paper wants to stop endorsing political candidates, fine, but making that announcement less than two weeks before a presidential election is not a convincingly neutral stance. Do it a year or two out and few will raise major concerns. Do it at this point in time and lose a big chunk of your subscriber base, not because we didn’t trust you to provide good news coverage, but because what you did here was spineless.

Do head over to WaPo to read Alexandra Petri’s editorial on the matter. I’m sorry that by unsubscribing from the Post, I have cut my support of her work as well. If there is another way to support here, I’m happy to do it.

Oh, and please minimize or abandon altogether your use of Amazon. Let’s not feed this beast.

The idea of the gold rush is deeply rooted in the American psyche. “There’s gold in them thar hills.” Anyone can abandon his family and community to gamble big on themselves. Thanks to this rugged individualism and the natural bounty of our territory, there’s a chance that you can strike it rich.

More than American, perhaps, the gold rush is specifically Californian. The Californian Dream in fact came to dominate the older American dream, according to historian HW Brands (quoted in Wikipedia):

The old American Dream … was the dream of the Puritans, of Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard”… of men and women content to accumulate their modest fortunes a little at a time, year by year by year. The new dream was the dream of instant wealth, won in a twinkling by audacity and good luck. [This] golden dream … became a prominent part of the American psyche only after Sutter’s Mill.

Maybe this is why I hate California.

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