Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan (who I know a little and like) are blogging about their recent book on organization management, _The Org_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/biblio/9780446571593?p_ti, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446571598/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0446571598&linkCode=as2&tag=henryfarrell-20) over at “OrgTheory.net”:http://www.orgtheory.net at the moment. It’s both a very good book and an excellent introduction to a particular style of thinking about organizations. The book starts with Ronald Coase’s insights about the relative benefits of contract and hierarchy, and goes from there. Much of the book is devoted to showing how these insights travel across a wide variety of different contexts – Baltimore policing (building on “Peter Moskos’ sociology”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/07/21/discretion-and-arrest-power/), Christian preaching and the like. Much of the book is also devoted to explaining why apparently frustrating aspects of organizations have a rationale, and may even be the best way of accomplishing something or somethings, given the complex and multiple needs, internal incentive problems and so on. More succinctly, the book sets out to show how the world that Dilbert inhabits may not be the best of all possible worlds, but is better than we realize at first glance, and actually less dysfunctional than the obvious alternatives. It provides a lot of detail and case study to back up this basic claim. And it is in an entirely different league of intelligent argument from other books aimed at business readers.

All this said, I tend to view organizations from a different perspective than the authors, one which didn’t really get any sustained attention in the book. Fisman and Sullivan build on two major traditions in organization and management – one stemming from Frederick Taylor, and the other from Chester Barnard. Taylor emphasized the value of overt incentives, monitoring and information in achieving organizational efficiencies. Barnard emphasized the benefits of fuzzier notions of corporate culture, in creating a more diffuse, but likely valuable set of benefits in interactions between workers and management. Fisman and Sullivan start off with a Coaseian version of Taylor’s arguments, but weave in some Barnardian arguments about the benefits of corporate culture as the book progresses. A good organization is one with clear, well designed incentives, _and_ with a culture of trust.

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A very wide range of issues have been raised in the many interesting postings and comments during the Crooked Timber seminar about my book Envisioning Real Utopias which ran from March 18-28. In what follows I will give at least a brief response to the core themes of each of the eight contributions to the seminar. I will organize my reflections in the order of the contributions in the symposium.

“[PDF version here]”:https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Erik-Olin-Wright-Reflections-on-Real-Utopias-Crooked-Timber-symposium.pdf
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“Story at the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/03/iain-banks-gall-bladder-cancer?INTCMP=SRCH, thanks to people in comments below. This is very sad news. He has been a wonderful and prolific writer, whose intelligence and considerable grasp of politics were often concealed by the lightness of his touch. I would have loved it had he written more in the experimental vein of some of his earlier fiction – _Walking on Glass_ is just a lovely book – but am grateful for what he has written. He never got the reception in the US that he deserved – some CT readers may not know his work. Readers interested in his literary side should perhaps start with _Walking on Glass_ or _The Wasp Factory_ (“It is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparalleled depravity. There is no denying the bizarre fertility of the author’s imagination: his brilliant dialogue, his cruel humour, his repellent inventiveness. The majority of the literate public, however, will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it.” – _The Irish Times_), and those more interested in sf should begin with _Consider Phlebas_ or perhaps _The Use of Weapons._ They’re all wonderful novels, in very different ways.

Matthew Hutson’s interesting article in yesterday’s Times has, in the print edition, the unfortunate tag “How much does psychology determine moral principles?: a lot”, which led me to think it was going to be about whether ought implies can. In fact it is about research showing what anyone who teaches moral philosophy already knows, which is that people get confused the first time they encounter trolley-type problems:

For a recent paper to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, subjects were made to think either abstractly or concretely — say, by writing about the distant or near future. Those who were primed to think abstractly were more accepting of a hypothetical surgery that would kill a man so that one of his glands could be used to save thousands of others from a deadly disease. In other words, a very simple manipulation of mind-set that did not change the specifics of the case led to very different responses…..

Other recent research shows similar results: stressing subjects, rushing them or reminding them of their mortality all reduce utilitarian responses, most likely by preventing them from controlling their emotions.

Even the way a scenario is worded can influence our judgments, as lawyers and politicians well know. In one study, subjects read a number of variations of the classic trolley dilemma: should you turn a runaway trolley away from five people and onto a track with only one? When flipping the switch was described as saving the people on the first track, subjects tended to support it. When it was described as killing someone on the second, they did not. Same situation, different answers.

I haven’t read the papers he refers to, but I’d be impressed if it established either of the claims he asserts toward the end of the article:

Objective moral truth doesn’t exist, and these studies show that even if it did, our grasp of it would be tenuous.

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It’s the annual World Autism Awareness Day. Last year, Twitter provided an excellent source of links and information through #WAAD – so check out Twitter later today if you are interested. I’d like to use the occasion to put in a plug for an old book, a classic indeed, that I only read last Summer, but that should be on anyone’s reading list who wants to enter the world of people with autism:
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So the Hugo nominees are “here”:http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2013-hugo-awards/. Outside of the novels, the only nominated work I’ve read is Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn’s _Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature_ which I am entirely happy to recommend you go vote for, or, better still, buy. As for the novels, they’re:

* 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
* Blackout, Mira Grant (Orbit)
* Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
* Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, John Scalzi (Tor)
* Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (DAW)

I’ve read five of the six (and I got halfway through the first book in the series which Mira Grant’s _Blackout_ ends), and I’ve got a serious case of the mehs. _2312_ is the only one that I would recommend as doing something interesting. The other five seem to me solid, but not wildly exciting. Ahmed’s _Throne of the Crescent Moon_ is a lot of fun – good sword and sorcery from a non-Christian Europe-centric perspective. _Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance_ is perfectly fine, but while it isn’t the worst of Bujold’s books, it’s not close to being the best either. John Scalzi’s _Redshirts_ didn’t grab me, perhaps because I never particularly liked _Star Trek_, and so was underwhelmed by the pathos.

But in the end, the Hugo nominees are no more and no less than a prestigious crowdsourced recommendation list. Which means that if your taste doesn’t gel with that of the Hugos crowd, you shouldn’t get bent out of shape about it, but also you shouldn’t take it as gospel. CT readers are a different crowd than Worldcon attendees/supporters, and I imagine would generate a different list. If people want to namecheck the books they liked in comments, I’ll undertake to write a follow up post next week that tries to pull these recommendations together in a more useful form. I’ve already listed “some of my favorites here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2013/02/27/hugo-nominations-2/ but take that as a conversation starter, not ender.

I think they really buried the main story at Boing Boing, linking to this LA Times article about Dapper Day at Disneyland.

The two white guys are obviously enormous secret service agents – easily 7 feet tall – and the two white women (just wait until the right wing blogs find out about this!) are pretty big, too.

There is much to admire in Erik Olin Wright’s _Envisioning Real Utopias._ It’s an intelligent and thoughtful exploration of our current situation (capitalism, and the injustices thereof), the aporias of old-style radicalism (standard issue Marxism-Leninism – maybe not so useful in explaining the early 21st century), and various small-bore examples of what a better world might be that could perhaps be expanded into something bigger. The examples of little quasi-utopias that Wright discusses are familiar ones – but in the case of popular budgeting in Porto Allegre, Wright can hardly be blamed, since his work with Archon Fung did a lot to highlight this case for English-speakers such as myself. And, of course, I’m biased. I start from a position that is in strong sympathy with Wright – I’ve been influenced both by his work, and the work of people who he’s engaged with in both friendly and argumentative ways over the last couple of decades (the various tendencies within the _Politics and Society_ crowd). If I aspire to a political tradition, it’s Wright’s tradition of an interest in radical change, combined with a strong respect for empirically guided analysis. [click to continue…]

Not that we need another one. The old ones still work fine. But it seems to me there is one that hasn’t been offered, and isn’t half bad.

Defenders of ‘traditional marriage’ insist 1) that their position is, well … traditional; wisdom of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the history of Western Civilization, etc. etc.; 2) they are not bigots. They are tolerant of homosexuality, and the rights of homosexuals, etc. etc. Maybe they watch the occasional episode of “Will and Grace”, in syndication (even if they didn’t watch it back when it started.) They are careful to distance themselves from those Westboro Baptist Church lunatics, for example.

It’s gotten to the point where one of the main, mainstream arguments against same-sex marriage is that legalizing it would amount to implying that those opposing it are bigots. Since they are not just bigots (see above), anything that would make them seem like bigots must be wrong. Ergo, approving same-sex marriage would be a mistake. Certainly striking down opposition to it as ‘lacking a rational basis’ would be a gross moral insult to non-bigoted opponents of same-same marriage.

This ‘anything that implies we are bigots must be wrong’ argument has problems. But that’s old news. Here’s the new argument. Grant, for argument’s sake, that contemporary arguments against same-sex marriage have been scrubbed free of bigotry. Doesn’t it follow that these arguments must not be traditional but, somehow, quite new? [click to continue…]

Tomorrow, as a belated contribution to the Real Utopias seminar, I’ll be posting a piece which talks about manipulation of the Wikipedia process. As soon as I’d finished writing, I turned to Twitter, to read this “interesting story”:http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/the-institute-for-cultural-diplomacy-and-wikipedia by Benjamin Mako Hill about his experiences with the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (an organization that I only know of because they relentlessly spam me with unsolicited emails about tedious-sounding events – apparently it is “effectively impossible”:http://laboratorium.net/archive/2012/05/13/spam_alert_the_institute_for_cultural_diplomacy to get off their mailing list). In any event, it appears that some mysterious individual called icd_berlin created a Wikipedia page on the Berlin based Institute, which was then built up by a series of anonymous contributors with Berlin IP addresses. Critical comments about their intern policy were removed (again by an individual with a Berlin IP address). And then things get worse …

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The final post in our seminar on Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias is by Marc Fleurbaey, with the collaboration of his seminar students Inka Busack, Joaquin Garcia, Jacob Girard, Kathryn Long, Anthony Sibley, Jiemin Wei.

There are many details of the book which could be commented upon and praised or criticized, but this short text will focus on three questions which appear central in the Real Utopias project.

* Why focus on capitalism versus socialism?
* What role for market transactions?
* What is the status of utopian research?

A final version of the response is now available here

One of the examples of real utopia put forward by Wright is the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). In its simplest, and arguably most utopian form, the idea is that every member of the community would receive a payment sufficient to sustain a decent standard of living. Implementing a UBI in this fashion would pose a huge, arguably insuperable, financing challenge in the context of a market economy. The same isn’t obviously true of a closely related idea, a guaranteed minimum income (GMI)
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Ken Loach, Kate Hudson and Gilbert Achcar are calling for a new party to the left of Labour in the UK.

Labour is not alone in its shift rightwards and its embrace of neoliberal economic policies. Its sister parties across Europe have taken the same path over the past two decades. Yet elsewhere in Europe, new parties and coalitions – such as Syriza in Greece or Die Linke in Germany – have begun to fill the left space, offering an alternative political, social and economic vision. The anomaly which leaves Britain without a left political alternative – one defending the welfare state, investing for jobs, homes and education, transforming our economy – has to end.

Well there’s lots to agree with in their statement: we need to resist austerity, and Labour isn’t going to do that effectively. The Labour leadership’s current strategy seems to be a combination of keeping quiet, appearing “responsible” by not seriously challenging the austerity narrative, and pandering to the right on immigration. Last week’s shameful abstention on workfare was the latest manifestation of Miliband’s pusillanimity.

But there’s a lot missing too. Loach et al focus on domestic bread-and-butter issues and don’t seem to have anything to say about Europe, let alone the wider world. And there’s nothing at all on climate and the environment, a silence that is all too common on the left, as Bill Barnes’s contribution to the Real Utopias symposium underlines.

There’s also the key fact about British politics which means that talk of a British left “anomaly” compared to Syriza and Die Linke misses the mark. The UK just had a referendum on the alternative vote, and that referendum was lost. With first-past-the-post and no prospect of electoral reform, voters will reliably back the party that promises to end the ConDem coalition. That party is Labour, however hopeless it has been in the past and however useless it will be in the future. I can’t see a way round this, and that leaves me deeply pessimistic. I wish Loach et al success, but I can’t see it happening.

In September 2005, on the fourth anniversary of 9/11, The Nation ran a long piece I did on liberal support for the Iraq War and for US imperialism more generally.  By way of Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, Christopher Hitchens, and Peter Beinart—as well as Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty—it addressed what I thought and still think are some of the deeper political and intellectual roots of the liberals’ support for the Iraq War. On the tenth anniversary of the War, I thought I might reprint that essay here. Some things I got wrong (Beinart, for example, went onto have something of a turnabout on these issues; it wasn’t Oscar Wilde but Jonathan Swift who made that jibe). Other issues I over-emphasized or neglected. But still, it’s got some useful stuff there. Without further ado…

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It’s the fourth anniversary of September 11, and Americans are getting restless about the war in Iraq. Republicans are challenging the President, activists and bloggers are pressing the Democrats and liberal hawks are reconsidering their support for the war. Everyone, it seems, is asking questions.

Two questions, however, have not been asked, perhaps because they might actually help us move beyond where we are and where we’ve been. First, how is it that few liberals and no leftists in 1968 believed that Lyndon Johnson, arguably the most progressive President in American history, would or could airlift democracy to Vietnam, while many liberals and not a few leftists in 2003 believed that the most reactionary President since William McKinley could and would export democracy to Iraq? [click to continue…]