bq. the European left has to find a more certain voice. It must argue passionately for a good capitalism that will drive growth, employment and living standards by a redoubled commitment to innovation and investment.
I’m not sure who this “European left” is, but, given the piece is by Hutton, I’m thinking party apparatchiks in soi-disant social democratic and “socialist” parties, often educated at ENA or having read PPE at Oxford. I’m not sure how many battalions that “left” has, or even whether we ought to call it left at all. Anyway, what struck me on reading Hutton’s remarks was that calls for the “left” to do anything of the kind are likely to founder on the fact that the only thing that unites the various lefts is hostility to a neoliberal right, and that many of us don’t want the kind of “good capitalism” that he’s offering. Moreover in policy terms, in power, the current constituted by Hutton’s “European left” don’t act all that differently from the neoliberal right anyway. In short, calls like Hutton’s are hopeless because the differences of policy and principle at the heart of the so-called left are now so deep that an alliance is all but unsustainable. That might look like a bad thing, but I’m not so sure. Assuming that what we care about is to change the way the world is, the elite, quasi-neoliberal “left” has a spectacular record of failure since the mid 1970s. This goes for the US as well, where Democratic adminstrations (featuring people such as Larry Summers in key roles) have done little or nothing for ordinary people. Given the failures of that current, there is less reason than ever for the rest of us to line up loyally behind them for fear of getting something worse. Some speculative musings, below the fold: [click to continue…]
I almost admire Ron Paul for sticking to his propertarian guns, even when he knows it’s going to cost him. All the same, I wish the next person who gets to play the Chris Matthews role could manage to make it cost him a bit more, maybe like so:
“Jim Crow was a legal institution but also a social institution. Both functioned to deprive African-Americans of what all Americans today would consider basic liberties. Your libertarian philosophy commits you to dismantling the legal institution, but also commits you to prohibiting legal dismantlement of the social side of Jim Crow. This means one difference between you, as a libertarian, and the liberals who supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is that you are, in at least one important sense, less committed to guaranteeing individual liberty. You hope everyone will be free, but your libertarianism actually forbids you from fully guaranteeing basic liberties, in the no-Jim-Crow sense all Americans now take for granted. Is that right?”
That’s too many words, but I think it does a better job of pre-empting Paul’s responses: one, protesting he’s no racist; two, just expressing optimism that the market would somehow have caused the social problems to disappear, if there were no legal Jim Crow; three, saying it’s ancient history. Of course, boxing in Ron Paul is not the most vital task of the hour, probably. But it would be good if libertarians – tea party types generally – had more of an uphill slog, due to the fact that the liberty they want to guarantee is not quite the liberty Americans tend to assume should be guaranteed.
For students of agnotology there is no more striking finding than the observation that many people, presented with evidence that undermines a strongly held belief, react as if that belief had been confirmed[1]. This seems to undermine any possibility that evidence will ever settle political disputes. And yet, evidence does seem to seep through in the end. Although belief in Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction persisted long after the absence of evidence had turned into clear evidence of absence, it faded away in the end (not that it has completely disappeared even now).
As a slightly more optimistic take on the experimental evidence, I offer the example of Santa Claus. Young children, presented with the suggestion that Santa isn’t real, blithely ignore it. Slightly older children, though, react in exactly the manner of the experimental subjects, reaffirming their belief in the Santa story and (of course) the associated presents. Later, of course, they accept the truth.
In some social contexts children are likely draw the obvious analogy between Santa and God, while in other contexts, the distinction between the two beliefs is maintained successfully. But regardless of context, there is an obvious risk, for those who would like their children to grow up as theists, in insisting too hard on the reality of Santa.
Similarly, I suspect that the apparent success of Republicans in believing six impossible things before breakfast, and in taking up new delusions as old ones are abandoned, may mask an underlying erosion of faith. Birtherism may morph into torturism without any obvious sign of stress, but at some level people must gradually become aware that their political beliefs are more like the faith that belief in Santa will bring presents and less like the belief that kicking a rock will give you a stubbed toe.
fn1. The general phenonomen of confirmation bias (paying attention to evidence that supports your belief and disregarding contradictory evidence) is well established. The first finding of reinforcement Nyhan and Riefler find that Democrats ignore contradictory evidence, while Republicans respond in the way I described. I can’t find the study that supported this. Nyhan and Riefler cite earlier research by Redlawski that I haven’t been able to find.
Matthew Yglesias points to this Arthur Brooks piece, “Obama says it’s only ‘fair’ to raise taxes on the rich. He’s wrong.” Brooks says he’s shifting from the usual perverse consequences argument – if we tax the rich it will actually cost more money – to a fairness argument. But really it’s just a twistier iteration of the perverse consequences argument.
Usually I half-agree with what Julian Sanchez has to say. But not in this case.
In a recent post, I suggested that claims about “desert” are generally misplaced in arguments about copyright—whether they are deployed on behalf of “deserving” small fry artists or against “undeserving” labels. As some commenters pointed out, there’s no obvious reason this argument should be restricted to the domain of copyright—and quite right. I think most areas of political philosophy and policy—theory of just punishment springs to mind as a possible exception—would be better off if we just scrapped the concept of “desert” entirely, and just spoke about what people are entitled to.
Here’s the difference, very roughly, in case this sounds like semantic hairsplitting. To say someone deserves X is to say that X is in some sense an appropriate or fair reward in light of that person’s morally virtuous qualities or conduct. To say that someone is entitled to X is just to say that the person has a just claim to X, without any implied commitment to some deeper claim about their moral merit.
Here’s his thesis, a paragraph or so further on: “I think political and policy discussions should concentrate on what people are entitled to, rather than on necessarily muddy attempts to determine (and embed in law) what people morally deserve.”
The post goes on at some length. Sanchez is at pains to confess that he is making a rather vague argument, not trying to nail anything down. But it seems to me 1) absolutely, completely hopeless; 2) a standing temptation to libertarians and conservatives; 3) worth shooting down hard. [click to continue…]
One of the weirder aspects of Arthur Ripstein’s recent book on Kant’s Political Philosophy, “Force and Freedom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674035062/junius-20, was the emphasis given to unwanted touching as a rights-violation. Now when a Canadian gives an exposition of a Prussian it isn’t altogether clear whose culturally-bounded norms might be infecting their normative intuitions. But I was immediately reminded of the discussion when I read “Simon Kuper’s column”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/db51a45e-4472-11e0-931d-00144feab49a.html#axzz1Fp4ghsT3 in this weekend’s Financial Times. Kuper’s piece is based around Raymonde Carroll’s account of American and French cultural differences in her “Cultural Misunderstandings”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226094987/junius-20 . Well, “read the whole thing”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/db51a45e-4472-11e0-931d-00144feab49a.html#axzz1Fp4ghsT3 , as they say.
Just listened to an interesting bloggingheads exchange between our Henry and Robert Farley on Egypt and zombie international relations.
Two responses: Robert Farley reads a WSJ piece on Egypt and suggests, in effect, that the effect of internet social networking might not be to allow for more connections between protesters – ‘just connect’, as the slogan might be – but to enable aggregate overwhelming of the security response; which, in the end, couldn’t be quite ‘dexterous’ to be in enough places, with enough force, at once. I have no idea whether this is right or not but, as a thesis, it deserves a name, which will obviously be ‘Denial of Service Attack’, DoS for short. Denial of Security Service, that is.
Then they are on to zombies, and Drezner’s book. Farrell and Farley consider whether there is a history of supernatural approaches to political theory – Marx and vampires and a certain amount of para-zombie theory of the market, so forth. Any good Soviet-era socialist zombie political theory? They miss an important data point which, in fact, all historians of the zombie film, and zombie literature have also missed. The ‘modern’ zombie genre does not start with Romero, in 1968. It starts with one of my pet favorite sf films: the 1936 Menzies/Wells film, Things To Come. And it starts as emblematic political theory allegory. You read that right, kids: the modern zombie film genre was born as an explicit exercise in pedagogically illustrating the strengths and weakness of IR realism. [click to continue…]
Just when you think “he can’t possibly be saying that, there’s an obvious objection” – he anticipates, and replies … great stuff. From some time in the late 1980s.
“Feminist Philosophers“:http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/ has for some years been conducting a “gendered conference campaign”:http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/gendered-conference-campaign/, a campaign against conferences where all speakers are men. I support this campaign. A conference in which all speakers are men is undesirable in terms of its outcomes: it gives a biased representation of the field, the likelihoods are that wo/men cover different topics and/or use different methodologies, we don’t want to put off (female) grad students by giving them the implicit message that the field is not welcoming to them, and we want women scholars to be given an opportunity to present their work. A conference with only male speakers is also likely to be the result of a biased process in which the organisors have given free hand to gendered stereotypes that influence us when thinking about who the ‘interesting speakers’ in the respective fields may be; although the evidence on these kind of implicit bias processes is by now vast, I still regularly come across instances where conference organisors have not given this any thought.
Now it seems like we’ll have to extent this campaign to include Summerschools: to my surprise, I received a call for participation for “a Summerschool”:http://www.summer.ceu.hu/02-courses/course-sites/justice/index-justice.php on ‘Justice: Theory and Applications’ yesterday, which includes six teachers, all male. Theories of justice belong to my own area of specialisation, and I thus can say with some confidence that there are plenty of interesting, excellent contributors out there who are female. In fact, in my Research Master Course ‘Contemporary Theories of Justice’, one student remarked that he had never had a philosophy course with so many female authors on the reading list.
Clearly there may be additional hurdles: for example, it may be the case that female scholars are more likely to refuse an invitation. Or there may be areas where it really is much more difficult, bordering at the level of the impossible, to find female teachers. But that’s definitely not the case for theories of justice.
In the UK we are being treated to “a rich and enjoyable series of programmes on Justice featuring Michael Sandel”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/seasons/justiceseason/ . No doubt there will be quibblers, but I think he’s done a great job so far. Last night’s episode discussed Bentham, Kant and Aristotle and, for my money, both utilitarians (in the shape of Peter Singer) and various German Kant-fans came across as slightly unhinged. The moment that most summed this up, however, was discussion of the German Constitutional Court’s Kant-inspired dismissal of a law that would allow the federal authorities to shoot down a hijacked airliner destined to crash into a city with catastrophic loss of life. “Judgement here”:http://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/rs20060215_1bvr035705en.html . According to these Kantians, even if the passengers are doomed to die in the next few minutes and shooting-down the plane will save many lives on the ground, to attack the airliner would show a lack of respect for their human diginity, purposiveness, endiness etc. and so is forbidden. For me, that looks like a reductio.
These aren’t exact new thoughts, but versions of them have been expressed hereabouts of late, and G. K. Chesterton puts them amusingly and very quotably. So I quote, again, from What’s Wrong With The World? Which I’ve decided is altogether more amusing than Orthodoxy, with longer stretches of complete sanity which, when that grows stale, is punctuated by protests against women’s suffrage and such. [click to continue…]
This was made by some 15 year-old schoolkids in the UK. Having got the link I, mercifully, watched it before sending to my philosophy students. They get the philosophy pretty much right. PARENTAL ADVISORY though, it is very rude (I have not sent it to my students, though I suppose some of them probably read CT).
Windsor and Maidenhead Council (UK) “is planning a reward scheme”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/31/council-plans-big-society-reward (supermarket tokens and the like) for volunteers to help implement David Cameron’s “Big Society”:
bq. it is likely residents would get a loyalty card similar to those available in shops. Points would be added by organisers when cardholders had completed good works such as litter-picking or holding tea parties for isolated pensioners. The council says the idea is based on “nudge theory” – the thought that people don’t automatically do the right thing but will respond if the best option is highlighted. Points would be awarded according to the value given to each activity. Users could then trade in their points for vouchers giving discounts on the internet or high street.
Maybe the Council should have read more widely, since according to another body of literature (Bruno Frey, “Sam Bowles”:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/320/5883/1605 ), they risk sending out a signal that only a mug performs good works for no reward. An interesting natural experiment, to be sure, but not one that I’d wish on the residents of Windsor and Maidenhead.
“Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/new-labour-and-inequality/ and “Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/in-which-matthew-yglesias-observes-that-innumeracy-is-an-awful-thing.html have argued that this graph, from “Lane Kenworthy”:http://lanekenworthy.net/2009/06/01/did-blair-and-brown-fail-on-inequality/, shows that we shouldn’t be too critical of Labour’s performance with respect to inequality over their 12 years of government in Britain.
Both Matt and Brad are pushing back against “Chris’s post below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/09/30/its-about-the-distribution-stupid/, which argued that Labour had done very little about equality. (Although in his remark on my comment on his post, Brad now seems to suggest that his post was a pre-emptive strike against what Chris would go on to write in comments.) There’s a natural rejoinder on behalf of Chris, which has been well made in both Matt and Brad’s comments threads. Namely, if the graph really showed that things had gotten better, equality-wise, the Gini coefficient for the UK would have fallen. But in fact it rose, somewhat significantly, over Labour’s term. Indeed, the “IFS Report”:http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/4524 that the graph is based on shows quite clearly that it rose markedly towards the end of Labour’s term.
So I got to thinking about how good a measure “Gini coefficients”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient are of equality. I think the upshot of what I’ll say below is that Chris’s point is right – if things were really going well, you’d expect Gini coefficients to fall. But it’s messy, particularly because Gini’s are much more sensitive to changes at the top than the bottom.
. Farrell and Farley consider whether there is a history of supernatural approaches to political theory – Marx and vampires and a certain amount of para-zombie theory of the market, so forth. Any good Soviet-era socialist zombie political theory? They miss an important data point which, in fact, all historians of the zombie film, and zombie literature have also missed. The ‘modern’ zombie genre does not start with Romero, in 1968. It starts with one of my pet favorite sf films: the 1936 Menzies/Wells film, Things To Come. And it starts as emblematic political theory allegory. You read that right, kids: the modern zombie film genre was born as an explicit exercise in pedagogically illustrating the strengths and weakness of IR realism. 
“Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/new-labour-and-inequality/ and “Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/in-which-matthew-yglesias-observes-that-innumeracy-is-an-awful-thing.html have argued that this graph, from “Lane Kenworthy”:http://lanekenworthy.net/2009/06/01/did-blair-and-brown-fail-on-inequality/, shows that we shouldn’t be too critical of Labour’s performance with respect to inequality over their 12 years of government in Britain.