Andrew Sullivan links to a Ross Douthat-Julian Sanchez exchange (that started as a Douthat-Saletan exchange, and concerning which Karl Smith and Noah Millman get words in edgewise, if you care to follow up the links.) Douthat suggests that secular liberalism has philosophical-metaphysical problems: [click to continue…]

A few months ago, I posted a draft article on Politics and the Internet that was forthcoming in the _Annual Review of Political Science._ The final version is now out, and available (via a paywall passthrough: let me know if this doesn’t work for you) here – with acknowledgment to Crooked Timber readers for the helpful suggestions that you all gave me. Again, thanks.

bq. Political scientists are only now beginning to come to terms with the importance of the Internet to politics. The most promising way to study the Internet is to look at the role that causal mechanisms such as the lowering of transaction costs, homophilous sorting, and preference falsification play in intermediating between specific aspects of the Internet and political outcomes. This will allow scholars to disentangle the relevant causal relationships and contribute to important present debates over whether the Internet exacerbates polarization in the United States, and whether social media helped pave the way toward the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. Over time, ever fewer political scientists are likely to study the Internet as such, as it becomes more and more a part of everyday political life. However, integrating the Internet’s effects with present debates over politics, and taking proper advantage of the extraordinary data that it can provide, requires good causal arguments and attention to their underlying mechanisms.

Over the last couple of years, Cosma Shalizi and I have been working together on various things, including, _inter alia_, the relationship between complex systems, democracy and the Internet. These are big unwieldy topics, and trying to think about them systematically is hard. Even so, we’ve gotten to the point where we at least feel ready to start throwing stuff at a wider audience, to get feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Here’s a paper we’re working on, which argues that we should (for some purposes at least), think of markets, hierarchy and democracy in terms of their capacity to solve complex collective problems, makes the case that democracy will on average do the job _a lot better_ than the other two ways, and then looks at different forms of collective information processing on the Internet as experiments that democracies can learn from. A html version is under the fold; the PDF version is here. Your feedback would very much be appreciated – we would like to build other structures on top of this foundation, and hence, really, _really_ want criticisms and argument from diverse points of view (especially because such argument is exactly what we see as the strength of democratic arrangements).

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In case you are bored with libertarianism …

I see that Invasion – The Complete Series is marked down 90% to only $7 [amazon]. Do you think that means I should buy it? Let me give you some context: 5 years ago it was marked down 60% and in the end I didn’t buy it. Ha-ha! My frugality pays off! Now I can get a better deal! Or can I? What if it’s bad? Help me to think this through as a rational actor.

Henry’s reading seems quite straightforward and I’m really not seeing why Vallier isn’t seeing it. Let’s take it slow and straighten the curves as we go. [click to continue…]

In lieu, I presume, of a reply to my previous posts disagreeing with him on Hayek and Judt, Tyler Cowen links to “this post”:http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/05/hayek-on-serfdom-and-welfare-states/#more-2954 by Kevin Vallier on _Bleeding Heart Libertarians_ which frames the debate thusly:

bq. Every once in a while folks in the political corner of the blogosphere start talking about Hayek’s argument in The Road to Serfdom. As Matt Yglesias said Monday, lots of people, conservatives and liberals alike, say that Hayek believed that any welfare state inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Then some people who have actually _read_ Hayek reply that he always supported social insurance, safety nets, public goods provision and many forms of regulation. Then confusion ensues.

bq. … Obviously Farrell and Judt’s claims are over the top due to their use of various “of any sort” “unequivocally” “at all” and “Hitler” modifiers … instead of beating up on them, let’s use our collective annoyed-by-someone-on-the-internet energy in a constructive fashion: to see what we can learn about Hayek’s real arguments against socialism and the welfare state. … Caldwell concludes, rightly, that Hayek was right about this. But he points out that Hayek’s criticism of the welfare state is subtler and involves two claims. The first problem with the welfare state is that it is a philosophically slippery target. … when Farrell reads this, he concludes that Hayek basically made the same claims about the welfare state and socialism, namely that both institutions will lead, eventually, to totalitarianism, even if the socialism gets us there sooner than the welfare state. … In my last post, I pointed out that _even the later Hayek_ defended a universal basic income … Thus, Hayek supported what we typically call a welfare state throughout his career. … In my view, then, Hayek’s target is not “the welfare state” as such, that is, not a social insurance or safety net state, but rather a _state based on a robust conception of distributive justice applied to its economic components_ … Hayek’s critique of the welfare state simply falls out of his broader conception of the legal order of a free people. … So let’s distinguish between two kinds of welfare states: the welfare state of law and the welfare state of administration. Hayek’s preferred welfare state is limited by his insistence that the law be regulated by clear, public, general principles rather than administrative bodies.

bq. Hayek opposes the welfare state of administration. … But the second problem with the welfare state of administration is that it contains an internal dynamic that pushes in a socialist direction. … Of course, this is not totalitarianism by any means. For one thing, if citizens affirm even modest economic freedoms (as most members of liberal democracies do), then they will resist this accretion effect before things get too bad. And that’s the pattern we see: even in Scandinavian countries, people resist regulation due to their concerns about efficiency and, yes, concerns about property rights (sometimes more effectively than we supposedly libertarian Americans). …

bq. Hayek overplayed his hand by arguing that the tinkerer’s welfare state will inevitably lead to totalitarianism, but not by much. The most free and economically successful liberal democracies hybridize welfare states of law and welfare states of administration. They’re hybrids largely due to the fact that most citizens of liberal democracies endorse elements of both liberalism and socialism. But if citizens of liberal democracies gave up liberalism entirely and stopped minding regulation so much, then I think the dynamic of the administrator’s welfare state would lead to significant authoritarianism that, while not totalitarian, would be uncomfortably close.

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My books-for-kids threads have been good conversation starters so let’s keep it up. Zoe (age 10) and I have been listening to Madeleine L’Engle on audiobook. Listening to an audiobook while drawing is an excellent use of a Saturday afternoon. I remember reading The Time Quintet [amazon], I think when I was in 7th grade or so, and getting moderately tripped out. Then I got into Stephen King. Rereading – re-listening, whatever – I’m amazed by how weird they really are, as kid fare. How much weird religious-scientific exposition there is. Cherubim and mitochondria, making a sort of Episcopalian-psychedelic (Episcodelic? Psychopalian?) mélange. It’s like a cross between Harry Potter and Dante’s Purgatorio (no infernos, please, we’re universal salvationists.) Gifted kids of absent/highly-abstracted parents start out bewildered but get enlightened/spiritually-uplifted by weird alien/angels on the way to saving the world/universe.

We’re part way through A Wind In The Door, having finished A Wrinkle In Time last Saturday. Then last Sunday we went to see The Avengers – which was great! (did you hear?) – and Zoe was very excited that the plot was sort of similar. US government meddling with tesseract opens doorway to creepy alien forces beyond our comprehension across the universe, etc. Film was a bit more action-packed than the book.

Anyway, any Madeleine L’Engle thoughts? Religious sf (like C.S. Lewis.) Kid lit that bucks genre conventions, but that kids really like, proving that the conventions can be broken?

From Curtis White’s article on philanthropy in the current issue of Jacobin:

bq. In the United States, everyone may enjoy freedom of speech so long as it doesn’t matter. For those who would like what they say to matter, freedom of speech is very expensive.

It goes on:

bq. It is for this reason that organizations with a strong sense of public mission but not much money are dependent on the “blonde child of capitalism,” private philanthropy. This dependence is true for both conservative and progressive causes, but there is an important difference in the philanthropic culture that they appeal to. The conservative foundations happily fund “big picture” work. … On the other hand, progressive foundations may understand that the organizations they fund have visions, but it’s not the vision that they will give money to. … If there is need for a vision, the foundation itself will provide this. Unfortunately, according to one source, the foundation’s vision too often amounts to this: “If we had enough money, and access to enough markets, and enough technological expertise, we could solve all the problems.”

Have I mentioned recently how happily superannuated “Jacobin magazine”:http://jacobinmag.com/ makes me feel? You should all be subscribing.

Gizmodo has a piece “proclaiming the death of Flickr”:http://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet at the hands of the hateful and incompetent Yahoo. In many ways, Flickr has been the most important site on the internet to “me”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisbertram/ (after CT of course) for the past five years. There isn’t another site that allows people who are serious about photography (including film) to display and talk about their work with others who feel the same way, that also includes a social media component. True, there are other sites that are good display vehicles (zenfolio or smugmug) but that’s like opening your shop down a dusty side-street: random traffic. And there are other sites that do the social media thing and carry photos (Facebook, Google+) but where you are showing your stuff not to _photographers_ but to your “friends” who may or may not care. No one else does the combination. The other thing about Flickr is the crossover from online social groups to real-world friendships. In Bristol we have monthly pub meets and various other events; through other Flickr projects I’ve met and hung out with photographers in other places, notably San Francisco. I’d never have met those people on Facebook. But Flickr does look tired and Yahoo has starved it of support. It is not dead yet, but it will be a tragedy if it goes, since nothing else does the same job.

Pretender, in the non-pejorative sense (and à propos of nothing in particular). Wikpedia’s definition will do: “A pretender is one who claims entitlement to an unavailable position of honour or rank. Most often it refers to a former monarch, or descendant thereof, whose throne is occupied or claimed by a rival, or has been abolished.” So, for example, Plato was pretender to the Philosopher King’s throne in a perfectly respectable sense. He wasn’t an imposter. It was his proper title. This seems to me a concept deserving of wider application and all-around democritization. When you write up your resume or CV, why list only the position you’ve got? That’s an extremely random sort of fact about yourself, on average. If we must be defined by our jobs or stations, most of us are much better defined by the offices or stations we should have – but that someone else is squatting on, through no merit of their own; or that, through no fault of our own, just don’t happen to exist. I’d be perfect for a lot of way cool jobs that don’t happen to exist. And if being perfect for the job isn’t some sort of entitlement, I don’t know how anyone can be entitled to any job. (Not that I don’t have a good job now. I do. And I’m lucky to have it.) Pretending, in this sense, is the highest form of ethical authenticity. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.” That is, you ought to put ‘pretender to freedom’ on your business card. If you put ‘accounts executive’ or ‘associate professor’ you are selling yourself short. Think about that kid in “The Squid and the Whale” who pretends he wrote “Hey You”. He’s not trying to fool anyone. He just thinks he should have written it. It was only a sort of accident that Roger Waters got there first. Makes a certain amount of sense.

What should your business card say?

Take it away, Platters!

A tech question for the CT commentariat. I’m a mac user, still using Snow Leopard but being pressured by Apple to upgrade to Lion – because I use MobileMe, which has become iCloud, which is no longer compatible with Snow Leopard after next month. (Except, apparently, they are relenting a bit about that. See below.)

The question: should I upgrade to Lion? [click to continue…]

Two references worth reading in light of the last post.
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