The term “the taxpayer” is playing an increasing role in British public debate, often introduced, seemingly, as an apparently neutral synonym for “the public” whilst really being no such thing. The term is endlessly repeated by BBC interviewers asking “tough questions” of politicians and civil servants and it seems as if none of them either notices or is willing to question the ideological assumptions and tacit theory of legitimacy that lie behind the term.

Point 1. In a state that at least markets itself as a democracy, the principle ought to be that the state is answerable to the electorate. Pretty much everyone in the electorate pays taxes (VAT at least) but the key idea is not that the state is answerable to them because they pay for it, but rather because it is a non-voluntary entity that claims authority over them and subjects them to its laws. Whether they are “net contributors” to the public purse is neither here nor there. People who pay in more than they receive – such as the mythical “taxpayer” – have no special claim to extra influence.

Point 2. The “taxpayer” idea is being used in very harmful ways to deprive many ordinary people of their basic human rights, including the right to marry and form a family with a partner of their choice. (In the UK, the government asked an advisory committee to calculate the income levels at which families of various sizes would not be net beneficiaries of the tax-and-transfer regime in order to rule that people who failed to meet that income threshold would not have the right to have their foreign spouse live with them in the country.)

Point 3. The “taxpayer” idea claims that only those who pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits make “a contribution”. But that’s nonsense. Many poorly paid people make a contribution through work that they ought to be paid more for. The fact that they are underpaid and exploited shouldn’t be held against the many many people who, for example, keep our public and health services running. Many people who are not “economically active” make a contribution to society as parents, carers or in many other ways. And those unable to make a contribution because of age or disability: they have the same right to a say as anybody else.

The “taxpayer” trope is a pernicious ideological assault on the very idea of equal citizenship. It is elitist and exclusionary and promulgates a false theory of the state according to which government belongs to the propertied. No it doesn’t: it belongs to its citizens, rich and poor, old and young.

A womanless conference at Yale two days ago inspires this little variant on the classic Passover songs Chad Gadya (“One Little Goat”) and Dayenu (“It would have been enough!”)

Had He only convened a conference on the Age of Revolution at Yale—Yale!—it would have been enough. Dayenu!

Had He only convened a conference on the Age of Revolution at Yale—Yale!—at which there were no women panelists, it would have been enough. Dayenu!

Had he only convened a conference on the Age of Revolution at Yale—Yale!—at which there were no women panelists, and called the center that organized the conference “The Center for the Study of Representative Institutions,” it would have been enough. Dayenu!

For no strictly sufficient reason I’m reading Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, by Albert Jay Nock.

I grew up in the conviction that in a truly civilised society the sanctions of taste and manners would have a compelling force at least equal to those of law, religion and morals. By way of corollary I became convinced that expediency is the worst possible guide of life. Bentham’s doctrine of expediency, on which Michel Chevalier a century ago observed that American society was founded, seemed to me thoroughly false, corrupting and despicable; and in my opinion the present state of the society based on it affords the strongest evidence that it is so.

Obviously this stuff starts with Burke, if not earlier: “The age of chivalry is gone. – That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”

And Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, which lays considerable blame on utilitarianism, if I do not misread that author.

On a more contemporary note, I am pleased to see The American Conservative reviewing George Scialabba’s latest: good for them. But then this:

He also displays on occasion a too-generous view of some rather sinister figures. One can defend, for example, a humanitarian agenda on the part of the world’s great powers in favor of aiding poorer nations without relying on the musings of Peter Singer

I get it that it’s the abortion stuff. But do people really, seriously find Singer ‘a rather sinister figure’?

I don’t mind if people say they think utilitarianism has repugnant implications – it’s a major ethical theory, after all. But the demonisation, and the attribution of fundamental social influence seem so consistently disproportionate.

Why do so many people hate utilitarianism so much? No one hates Kant’s ethics this much, but it’s just as weird a theory, isn’t it? And quite influential. When was the last time that someone blamed Kant for damn near everything? (Fair is fair, surely.)

Paul Krugman mentions that Keynesian staple, the “paradox of thrift”:http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/the-harm-germany-does/ in passing on a post on Germany. Which I read as giving me license to quote one of my favorite paragraphs from Albert Hirschman’s work (this from his piece, “How the Keynesian Revoution was Exported from the United States, and Other Comments,” in Peter Hall (ed.) The Political Power of Economic Ideas.

But while rehabilitating common sense, Keynes hardly presented his own theory in commonsensical terms. Rather, his message was delivered in a book whose text was uncommonly difficult. Moreover, he frequently presented his propositions as counterintuitive rather than as confirming common sense: for example, instead of telling his readers that converging individual decisions to cut consumption can set off an economic decline (common sense), he dwelt on the equivalent but counterintuitive proposition that a spurt of individual decisions to save more will fail to increase aggregate savings. In this manner, he managed to present common sense in paradox’s clothing and in fact made his theory doubly attractive: it satisfied at the same time the intellectuals’ craving for populism and their taste for difficulty and paradox.

I’m not sure if it’s entirely fair, but it is surely beautifully put. Unfortunately, this essay doesn’t appear in the new volume of The Essential Hirschman (Powells, Amazon). But there are many other wonderful essays that are there (including my favorite, “Rival Views of Market Society). A wonderful book, and a treat if you haven’t read Hirschman before.

For a while I have been working on a paper on democracy, expert knowledge, and economics as a moral science. [The financial crisis plays a role in the motivation of the paper, but the arguments I’m advancing turn out to be only contingently related to the crisis]. One thing I argue is that, given its direct and indirect influence on policy making and for reasons of democratic accountability, economics should become much more aware of the values it (implicitly or explicitly) endorses. Those values are embedded in some of the basis concepts used but also in some of the assumptions in the theory-building.

The textbook example in the philosophy of economics literature to illustrate the insufficiently acknowledged value-ladenness of economics is the notion of Pareto efficiency, also known as ‘the Pareto criterion’. Yet time and time again (for me most recently two days ago at a seminar in Oxford) I encounter economists (scholars or students) who fail to see why endorsing Pareto efficiency is not value-neutral, or why there are good reasons why one would not endorse the Pareto-criterion. Here’s an example in print of a very influential economist: Gregory Mankiw.
[click to continue…]

Economics students from the University of Manchester have set up the Post-Crash Economics Society. The subtitle of their website summarizes their mission:

The world has changed, the syllabus hasn’t – is it time to do something about it?

I am probably getting old but in any case can’t suppress a déjà-vu feeling.

Paris June 2000.
Cambridge University June 2001.
The Kansas City Proposal August 2001.
Harvard University November 2011.

and there surely were more that I don’t recall.

Yet what’s interesting is that the Post-Crash group get strong support from a surprising corner. Is there someone out here/there who can tell us what an ‘early day motion’ in British Parliament precisely means, politically?

The New York Times tells us today that undergraduate interest in the humanities is fading. The basis for the claim is the reduction in interest at Stanford, where the humanities claim 45 percent of the faculty but only 15 percent of the students, and Harvard, which has seen a 20 percent decline in humanities majors over the last ten years.

But Stanford and Harvard are both special cases, and Stanford is especially special.

And as my co-blogger Ari Kelman points out, the overall numbers for the humanities don’t look like they’re in quite a crisis. As Ari says, “in 1970-1971, 17.1% of students who received BAs in the United States majored in a humanities discipline. Three decades later, in the midst of the crisis in the humanities we hear so much about, that number had plummeted to 17%.”

Ari’s numbers come from the National Center for Education Statistics, which shows something more genuinely resembling a crisis in the social sciences, which over the same period have gone from 23% of bachelor’s degrees to 16.4% of bachelor’s degrees.

But the NYT article is right about one thing – some administrators and faculty sure want there to be a crisis in the humanities, because that means they can cut the humanities.

A graph of the NCES data appears below the fold. Clearly the big growth area is undergraduate business and “other” majors. [click to continue…]

I don’t usually link to the bits and pieces of media that I do – it’s for a different audience than the CT audience. But I’ll be doing the “Warren Olney show”:http://pri.org/programs/point tomorrow, and it promises to be … lively – the other guests are Stewart Baker, Josef Joffe and Joseph Wippl (a former CIA security professor, who I don’t know). Wish me luck.

The Web of Fear: Episode 4, at 1.13, you get the first, known, extant, moving image of Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart. At 8.13, he establishes why he will be with the Doctor for the rest of his life.

What are you doing on November 23rd (assuming you are not in the UK)? I’m considering buying basic cable for a single month. The eldest daughter is pushing hard, and time is ebbing away.

I’m in the middle of grading papers. I started, a while ago, grading the electronic files using Word’s reviewing capacity (track changes and comments). This results in i) it taking much longer, because I make many more comments and ii) my comments and editing being potentially useful because they are actually legible (which they never were before). So, this is potentially very good for the students. But: I have no idea whether they actually read the comments (especially because I make it fairly clear that I am not interested in what their grades are, only in whether they learn a lot, so very rarely get to listen to students who challenge their grades). I just had an idea: I could withhold their grades until they return the paper to me, with a response to every single comment I made. The comment could just be: “ok”. I simply want a mechanism for making them read the comments. Has anyone else done this? Or does anyone have some reliable mechanism for making them read comments?

In 1969, while he was working on Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan, which would have guaranteed an income of $1600 plus $800 in food stamps to every family of four, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was deputized by Nixon to investigate the historical accuracy of one of Karl Polanyi’s claims in The Great Transformation.

Polanyi had famously argued that Britain’s Speenhamland system—like Nixon’s plan, it would have guaranteed an annual income to poor families, regardless of whether they worked or not—had the perverse effect of making the poor poorer. Reiterating claims made by Marx and Engels, Polanyi wrote that Speenhamland allowed, even encouraged, employers to hire workers at below-subsistence wages (the poor were guaranteed an income regardless of whether they worked). Because workers would start losing their income  supports once they earned more than a subsistence wage, and because employers were more than happy to have local parishes supplement or subsidize wages, Speenhamland effectively put a cap on wages. Productivity went down, and with it, poor rates and income supports.  The long-term result, said Polanyi, was increased immiseration among the poor.

Few people have attended to Polanyi’s caveat that had the working poor not been prohibited by the Anti-Combination Laws of 1799-1800 from organizing themselves they might have been able to reverse these effects. (Admittedly, that point only gets a passing mention in Polanyi’s chapters on Speenhamland.) Instead, his argument has been taken as Exhibit A of Albert Hirschman’s perversity thesis: policies designed to achieve positive ends, particularly when those ends relate to the poor, often produce the opposite of their aims. (Hirschman himself made a nod to these linkages.)

When Nixon began mooting his version of Speenhamland in the early part of 1969, talk of perversity (in all senses) was very much in the air. In mid-April, the economist Martin Anderson—then a White House staffer, but previously a devotee of Ayn Rand; Anderson has also been credited with bringing Alan Greenspan, another Randian, into government—prepared a report on the history of poor assistance, which was essentially little more than a series of extracts about Speenhamland from The Great Transformation.

So troubled was Nixon by this history that he had Moynihan personally undertake an assessment of Polanyi’s findings. Moynihan set his staff right to it, resulting in a team of bureaucrats surveying all the most up-to-date historical literature on Speenhamland.

As Fred Block and Margaret Somers—from whose wonderfully informative 2003 article in Politics & Society, “In the Shadow of Speenhamland: Social Policy and the Old Poor Law,” I have cribbed this story—concluded:

The Family Assistance Plan was ultimately defeated in the U.S. Senate but only after Richard Nixon had a conversation about the work of Karl Polanyi.

The Nation “ran a story about academics for hire”:http://www.thenation.com/article/176809/schools-sale a few days ago. Its opening paragraphs:

Professor Todd Zywicki is vying to be the toughest critic of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the new agency set up by the landmark Dodd-Frank financial reform law to monitor predatory lending practices. In research papers and speeches, Zywicki not only routinely slams the CFPB’s attempts to regulate bank overdraft fees and payday lenders; he depicts the agency as a “parochial” bureaucracy that is “guaranteed to run off the rails.” He has also become one of the leading detractors of the CFPB’s primary architect, Elizabeth Warren, questioning her seminal research on medical bankruptcies and slamming her for once claiming Native American heritage to gain “an edge in hiring.” …

What isn’t contained in Zywicki’s university profile, CV, byline or congressional testimony is the law professor’s other job: he is a director of the Global Economics Group, a consulting business that boasts in a brochure that its experts have been hired by industry to influence the CFPB and other regulatory agencies. Nor does Zywicki advertise Global’s client list, which includes some of the biggest names in the financial industry, among them Visa, Bank of America and Citigroup.

Last summer, Zywicki’s firm was retained for $500 an hour on behalf of Morgan Drexen, a debt-relief company accused by the CFPB of deceiving consumers and charging illegal upfront fees. None of these potential conflicts of interest, however, have been disclosed during the course of Zywicki’s anti-CFPB advocacy in the media or in government. … While sponsored research groups are something of a mainstay of Beltway lobbying campaigns, Dodd-Frank has created unique incentives for companies to hire professors to represent their point of view.

Many CT readers will be familiar with Professor Zywicki’s blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy. Which leads to a question that I would be interested to see Professor Zywicki answer (perhaps in the context of a more general response to the Nation article, which I had expected him to have written already – hence my delay in putting up this post). Has Professor Zywicki ever billed any clients of the Global Economics Group, or anyone else with whom he has a financial relationship, for blogposts on the Volokh Conspiracy or for other and/or more general forms of blogging activity?

While it’s hardly dispositive, if one “searches the VC on relevant terms”:http://www.volokh.com/?s=dodd-frank&submit, Zywicki blogs actively and enthusiastically on topics directly connected to the paid advocacy agenda that Fang discusses in his article. Very likely, this is simply because he has strong beliefs about these topics. Yet it would be good to know the one way or the other. As an occasional reader of the Volokh Conspiracy, I’d read his blogging differently if it were being directly underwritten by clients of the expertise-and-advocacy-for-hire group that he works with, and I imagine that other readers would too. If he hasn’t in fact billed anyone in this way, I’ll be happy to publish any statement as an addendum to this post.

As an aside, if one wants to read more on academia-for-hire, Zywicki’s bete-noire, Elizabeth Warren “wrote a very good piece”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=332162 before she went into politics.

Update: At this stage, I think it’s reasonable to surmise that Professor Zywicki, for whatever reason, prefers to leave people draw their own conclusions than to clarify whether he has, or has not, blogged for hire without disclosing it. So it goes.

Recently I read the book The Reason I Jump: One Boy’s Voice from the Silence of Autism. This is a very unusual book, for both its content and its format. The writer, Naoki Higashida, wrote this book when he was 13. It consists of 58 questions and answers that give a picture of autism from the inside – and this time not from one of the few people with autism who are also verbally strong (often people with Asperger’s), but written by a boy who has sever communication problems. He wrote the book using an alphabet grid; a helper can then transcribe what he wants to tell us.

Naoki gives answers to questions such as “Why do you echo questions back at the asker?” or “Why do you take ages to answer questions?” or “Why don’t you make eye contact when you’re talking?” – and the question that gave the book it’s title “What’s the reason you jump?”. The answers are highly interesting and revelatory of the autistic mind – at least, of one autistic mind. It takes ages to answer a question because “by the time it’s our turn to speak, the reply we wanted to make has often upped and vanished from our heads … and all the while, we’re being bombarded by yet more questions. I end up thinking, this is just hopeless. It’s as if I’m drowning in a flood of words.” [his italics]. And the reason he jumps? “When something happens that affects me emotionally, my body seizes up as if struck by lightening. … it means I am not free to move the way I want.” [click to continue…]

California just hit up the Koch brothers for a million bucks. The Koch brothers haven’t admitted hiding behind shell outfits while throwing scads of dollars at initiatives meant to break unions and block tax increases in the Golden State, but the fine is part of a settlement in a case launched to find out if they did so hide and throw.

The California group opposed to public goods wanted big money, so they went to the Kochs on the ground that “nobody in California would want to do this[.]” They appear to have viewed the Kochs as a right-wing money milch cow: “dealing with the Koch network … availability of funds never crossed our mind.”

I love with an unseemly passion the – hastily? purposely? sleepily? – inept redaction that allows the Sacramento Bee to make informed guesses about the other donors to the cause of destroying the state parks and public schools as well as killing labor. These guesses include the family that owns the Gap and “Ventura County businessman Gene Haas, who.… served 16 months in a halfway house in 2008 and 2009 after pleading to conspiracy to commit tax evasion.”

The tax increase that passed is the one that led to the state’s celebrated balanced budget. The million dollar fine might help balance the budget a little, too. Maybe we should hope for some more feckless and shady out of state donations, followed by more fines – then perhaps we could restore California’s public services, including her great universities, to the people who live here instead of eroding them to please ideologues from elsewhere.