If you’ve studied game theory, you’ve probably come across the mixed-motive coordination game, a simple one-shot game in which two representative actors have to figure out how to coordinate so as to find a mutually beneficial equilibrium – but have different interests over which equilibrium they choose. And if you studied it a couple of decades ago, you very likely have heard it referred to as “the battle of the sexes,” a term that has fallen out of common usage, for obvious reasons. But when I read Tyler Cowen’s short piece on the actual historical struggle between women and men for recognition, I was immediately was reminded of Jack Knight’s argument, based on mixed-motive coordination games, for why power is more important to the emergence of social rules than most economists think. [click to continue…]

My paper with Kailey Mullane on what’s wrong with free public college has been published in Educational Theory, open access so anybody who wants to can read it. Obsessive readers of CT (are there any?) will know that I’ve had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the issue for quite a while, and the arguments we’ve had here helped me and Kailey refine our views and develop the paper. What we did in the end was look at and analyze a hybrid of the Warren and Sanders proposals from the 2020 primary, evaluating it against two relatively simple normative criteria – equity (which we explain) and whether it would raise the average level of educational outcomes across the population. (Later in the paper we consider other values that might also be relevant).

Free public college might sound great if you ignore the cost and compare it with what we have now. But given the way public higher education is actually funded currently, and given the persistent patterns of enrollment (and even on very optimistic assumptions about how those patterns would change if public college were free), for various structural reasons almost none of the new spending would be on students from the bottom 50% of the income distribution and most of it on students in the top 25% of the income distribution. Some people (here) have defended this by saying that under these plans the funds would all come from taxes on the super rich. Even if you believe that, mightn’t there better feasible alternative ways of spending those funds in education? We compare the proposal with i) spending those funds in k-12 (which, unlike higher education, is a universal program) and ii) spending the funds on expanding the Pell Grant program (a very popular and successful program for supporting lower income students). Either of those will be much more equitable (in any reasonable sense) ways of spending the money, and will probably (there’s a caveat to this that you can see in the paper) in raising the average level of educational outcomes.

I can’t speak for Kailey, but I was (naively) a bit shocked when reading the Warren and Sanders proposals how thin and lacking in detail they were, and how clear it was that they had not consulted anyone who knew anything about higher education funding as it currently works. For example, they seem not to understand within each state public colleges and universities are unequally funded, with much more government funding per student going to institutions attended by more affluent students, and much less to those attended by less affluent students; they also seemed not to understand that low income students usually pay very low rates of tuition at the institutions they attend: for those students the financial barrier to college is not, usually, tuition, but living expenses, which eliminating tuition does nothing about at all. Sanders’s requirement that states participating in the free public college not spend any more money on administrators, if it is serious as opposed to crowd-pleasing, reveals that he doesn’t know what administrators do (or what “administrators” means). As things stand the US government (all sources) spend about 30-40% more per student/year in higher education than in k-12, and both candidates (considering their overall education policy offer) were proposing to increase that differential considerably. When I pointed this out to my dad, who was a veteran observer of ill-considered political decisions, he said “That’s not really what they care about. It’s just that nobody in their campaigns has bothered to do the calculation that you have done”.

Because discussions here at CT have had such an influence on my own thinking, I thought some of you might be interested in reading the whole thing so here’s the paper. Please share it with your friends, and feel free to comment!

One source of the Global Academic Gap is that many universities and academic resources in the Global South are underresourced (sometimes massively so). If there is no money to pay for a generator to deal with electricity blackouts, or in case there is no money to hire scholars, then it’s hard to even start doing research. And if we want to strengthen entire fields in a resource-poor country, we will also need resources for people to build the academic networks that we take so much for granted in (most) of the Global North (even when acknowledging that within the Global North there are also significant inequalities in budgets).

About 9 or 10 years ago, my institute hosted a visiting researcher – Thierry Ngosso. Thierry is from Cameroon, but did his PhD in Louvain-la-Neuve and held post-doc positions in Harvard and Sankt Gallen. For years, he tiredlessly prepared the launch of the EthicsLab in Yaoundé, now 5 years ago. Many political philosophers and ethicists from the global North and Africa met there, and discussed ethical and philosophical questions for several days. And of course, over tea-breaks and meals, we also discussed the many challanges that building an EthicsLab in Cameroon entailed.

Thierry and his friends are putting together another conference, to mark the fifth aniversary of the EthicsLab, and to strenghten the activities and networks of the EthicsLab. But they need financial support – for the conference, and for the EthicsLab more generally. It would be very ironic that they would end up with a scenario whereby there would be many more well-funded scholars from the US and Europe than from neighbouring African countries at this conference, only because of the global maldistribution of money. That’s why Thierry and his friends have started a fundraiser for the EthicsLab.

I just donated, and feel it’s a privilege to be able to make a small contribution to this fantastic initiative. Please join me in making a donation, if you are so inclined. Thank you!

RIPLEY: How do we kill it, Ash? There’s gotta be a way of killing it – how, how do we do it?

ASH: You can’t.

PARKER: That’s bullshit!

ASH: You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? A perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.

LAMBERT: You admire it…

ASH: I admire its purity. A survivor. Unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

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Okay, this one is short.  In an interview, an evolutionary biologist explains why cats are, in an evolutionary sense, perfect.  There are big cats and little cats, but otherwise they vary surprisingly little in shape, diet and behavior.  They’re all doing one thing and they’re all doing it superbly well.
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When I first published on what I call ‘synthetic philosophy’ back in 2019, I presented the two key components of the view in such a way that it caused confusion about the position I was trying to describe as a sociological phenomenon within philosophy of science. I developed the idea of ‘synthetic philosophy’ in order to give philosophers of science a better conception of what they actually do and how this might fit in the modern university (and their grant agencies). I introduced the idea with the following characterization:

‘synthetic philosophy’ [is] a style of philosophy that brings together insights, knowledge, and arguments from the special sciences with the aim to offer a coherent account of complex systems and connect these to a wider culture or other philosophical projects (or both).

It is quite natural that my readers thought that synthetic philosophy just is a kind of integrative project. In contemporary philosophy, Philip Kitcher is (recall) the spokesperson for a view like pretty much this (including the use of ‘synthetic philosophy’) in which it is part and parcel of contemporary pragmatism. My friend, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, also advocates for a version of this view (see, for example, here at DailyNous). In Bad Beliefs, Neil Levy emphasized and developed a slightly different version of this view, too. This approach is also nicely defended by Adam Smith in the context of describing philosophy’s role in the division of labor at the start of Wealth of Nations.

My unease about this program is due to the fact that what does the integration, the integrative glue, as it were, is too unconstrained or (to use one of Timothy Williamson’s favorite words) undisciplined. I also worry that it opens the door to the image of the philosopher as creative genius who has mystical powers at understanding the totality of things. I reject the anthropological (and moral) assumption on which such a heroic figure is based. In addition — and I was myself not as clear about this back in 2019 —, hyper-specialization makes the kind of integrative project Kitcher wishes to defend a glorious, fool’s errand. (To be sure Kitcher himself is quite explicit that he rejects the anti-egalitarian commitments that are inscribed in the creative genius image.)

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As I say in my TED Talk about Vilem Flusser, the most pressing cultural question is: “why are things so weird?” Or as Anna Shechtman describes it:

“that feeling—floating somewhere between mania and motion sickness—that everything has changed.”

It seems like everyone really fucking wants the answer to be “The Algorithm.”

The New Yorker internet and culture columnist Kyle Chayka gives them that answer in his new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.

I’ve spent years articulating why this a bad answer. “The Algorithm” is the answer that Susan Wojcicki and Mark Zuckerberg desperately want us to give. It feels like critique but it in fact reifies the premises and business models of the tech platforms: it implies that the platforms are in some computer-genius fashion holding the reins of culture and brainwashing their users. Advertisers, famously, would love to hold the reins of culture and brainwash potential customers.

And Senator, Facebook sells ads.

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No, I’m not kidding.  The US football season is wrapping up with its usual bang: two playoff games this weekend, then the Super Bowl two weeks later.  So if you’ve never checked it out, this might be a time.

So, in the spirit of philosophical discussion, let’s start with some reasons you might not want to watch American football.

— “I don’t consume media about team sports.  The exploitation and commodification of the players, the hysteria of the fans, the endless advertisements, the disgusting late-capitalist excess generally, all appall me.”

Okay so 1) this is a perfectly defensible and legitimate philosophical position, and 2) you can stop reading now.  I’m trying to explain to a bunch of white meat fans why beef is actually pretty great, and you’re a vegetarian.  Nothing wrong with being a vegetarian, it’s great, but this post isn’t for you.
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Part 4 and (for now) last of this series. Earlier installments can be found here.

So, by early 1999 various attempts to resolve the Kosovo situation had failed. In autumn 1998 the Americans had sent Richard Holbrooke as a special envoy to Belgrade. Holbrooke negotiated a deal that looked good on paper, with a ceasefire, partial Serb withdrawal, international observers, and negotiations leading to eventual elections. However, in practice the KLA ignored the deal – they hadn’t been consulted, after all – and the Serbs quickly began to foot-drag and renege. So, by January 1999, armed intervention was under serious discussion.

One theory of the conflict deserves mention here. This is the idea that US President Bill Clinton provoked the bombing campaign in order to distract public attention away from the Monica Lewinsky scandal and his subsequent impeachment. This idea was widely discussed at the time, usually referencing the 1997 movie Wag the Dog, in which a US Presidential administration concocts a war in Albania to distract from the President’s sexual misconduct.
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I’ve been reading Maylis de Kerangal’s Réparer les vivants (oddly available in two different English translations as Heart (US) and Mending the Living (UK)), which I highly recommend. De Kerangal’s speciality is writing about people at work and this is the saga of a heart transplant over 24h, from the beginning of the donor’s day (a trip to go surfing) to the moment his heart re-starts in the recipient’s body. She gives compelling portraits of the people who work in intensive care medicine, and one of them is a nurse with a specialism in overseen the transplant and liaising with the family, who also happens to be a singer with an interest in song, including birdsong. So, there’s a passage in the book where there’s discussion of the Algerian trade in goldfinches (chardonnet in French), which, apparently, get sold for vast sums for their singing prowess. There must be something special about the Algerian ones, because the goldfinch is not an endangered species: there are lots of them out there. So, I’ve been reading about goldfinches and listening to clips of their song, and I’ve just bought a new camera lens with a reach of 800mm (full-frame equivalent) and I see birds in the distance from my living room window. I can’t really see what they are, so I pick up the lens and I see a treeful of goldfinches. And I press, through window glass. Not the greatest image, but serendipitous.

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Continuing my discussion of the recent upsurge in pro-natalism, I want to talk about the idea that, unless birth rates rise, society will face a big problem caring for old people. In this post, I’m going to focus on aged care in the narrow sense, rather than issues like retirement income, which depend crucially on social policy.

Looking at Australian data on location of death, I found that around 30 per cent of people die in aged care, and that the mean time spent in aged care is around three years, implying an average of one year per person. Staffing requirements in Australia amount to aroundone full-time staff member per residents. So the “average” Australian requires about one full-time working year of aged care in their lifetime, or about 2.5 per cent of a working life. This is, as it happens, about the proportion of the Australian workforce currently engaged in aged care.

But what if each generation were only half the size of the preceding one? In that case, the share of the labour force required for aged care would double, to around 5 per cent.

If you find this scary, you might want to consider that children aged 0-5 require more care than old people, and for a much longer time. Because this care is provided within the family, and without any monetary return, it doesn’t appear in national accounts. But a pro-natalist policy requires that people have more children than they choose to at present. To the extent that this is achieved by subsidising the associated labour costs (for example, through publicly funded childcare), it will rapidly offset the eventual benefit in having more workers available to provide aged care.

And that’s only preschool children. There’s a significant childcare element in school education, as we saw when schools closed at the beginning of the pandemic. And school-age children still require plenty of parental care. (I’ll talk about education more generally in a later post, I hope).

Repeating myself, none of this is a problem when people choose to have children, more or less aware of the work this will involve (though, as everyone who has been through it knows, new parents are in for a big shock). But it’s clear by now that voluntary choices will produce a below-replacement birth rate. Policies aimed at changing those choices will have costs that exceed their benefits.