As rediscovered by Salvor Hardin, in Foundation by Isaac Asimov:

“A horse having a wolf as a powerful and dangerous enemy lived in constant fear of his life. Being driven to desperation, it occurred to him to seek a strong ally. Whereupon he approached a man, and offered an alliance, pointing out that the wolf was likewise an enemy of the man. The man accepted the partnership at once and offered to kill the wolf immediately, if his new partner would only co-operate by placing his greater speed at the man’s disposal. The horse was willing, and allowed the man to place bridle and saddle upon him. The man mounted, hunted down the wolf, and killed him.

“The horse, joyful and relieved, thanked the man, and said: ‘Now that our enemy is dead, remove your bridle and saddle and restore my freedom.’

“Whereupon the man laughed loudly and replied, ‘The hell you say. Giddy-ap, Dobbin,’ and applied the spurs with a will.”

Further reading from the ACLU (via Glenn Greenwald).

I’ve just returned to teaching after a year’s fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. It’s a great place for anyone who wants to write a book (although you usually are expected to have completed one book already before applying), with good conversation (fellows are usually historians, social scientists or journalists) good offices, and a lot of intellectual activity. The Fellowship application page is here. If you think that it sounds interesting, and are able to transplant to DC for a year, I really recommend it (and am happy to provide advice in comments as needs be).

As I’ve mentioned a few times, I got a lot out of Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias, and am still hoping our long-promised book event comes to fruition. The general idea of the book was in line with my thinking that technocratic rationality, of the kind offered by, say Obama or Blair, is not a sufficient answer to the irrationalist tribalism of the right – the left needs a transformative vision to offer hope of a better life, both for the increasing proportion of the population in rich countries who are losing ground as a result of growing inequality and for the great majority of the world’s population who are still poor by OECD standards[2]. So, Utopia matters.

But it’s just as important that utopia be feasible. Utopia as a dream may be comforting, but is unlikely to inspire effective political action. And attempts to implement a utopia that isn’t feasible are bound to end in failure, quite possibly disastrous failure, as the experience of communism showed us.

So, my idea was to think about what kind of transformative vision might be both feasible, and capable of inspiring effective action. I had a first go at this here and here, in relation to education.

Turning to health care, we could start with a utopian ideal where everyone got all the health care that could benefit them. But that would be utopian in the pejorative sense – the scope for expanding health services is effectively infinite, and the resources available to society are not.

Thinking about feasible utopia, on the other hand, it seems to me that the system of socialised health care in modern social democracies is not a bad model. That is, if all of society worked like the health care system at its best, we could regard the political project of social democracy as a success.
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“Matt Yglesias”:http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/08/31/308874/justice-department-moves-to-block-attt-mobile-merger/, after complaining about the “endless Internet circle jerk over “neoliberalism,”” tries to be a little more conciliatory.

I think when I tried to raise this issue as it pertained to craft beer, I wound up coming across as unduly accusatory and prompted a lot of unproductive responses. So to put the issue as clearly as possible, I wonder if adherents to an anti-neoliberal theory of progressive politics believe the right thing for President Obama to do is to consider the pro-labor benefits of the merger to be an _independent argument_ in favor of the merger that deserves weight alongside other issues. The CWA has an argument on the merits about this that I think isn’t crazy, but the question that I think is philosophically interesting is whether the labor angle deserves consideration apart from the “official” argument about anti-trust economics.

I think the answer to this question is a no-brainer: yes. If you believe, as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Paul Krugman etc believe, that the decline of the US labor movement is an important explanatory factor for the rise of inequality in the US, and if you believe that inequality is a problem, then of course you want to think about the consequences of anti-trust policy for union strength. Weakening unions can plausibly further increase inequality, by weakening actors who used to serve as an important counterweight to e.g. financial interests. But I am not at all sure that Matt himself has any deeply rooted philosophical objections to this way of thinking. In a “more recent post”:http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/08/31/309483/patents-and-inequality/ he quotes a Dean Baker argument that patents and intellectual property contribute to inequality, and concludes:

The general idea is that we shouldn’t accept the view that a world of parasitic finance, asymmetrical globalization, government-sponsored intellectual property monopolies, and Fed engineered wage-suppression constitutes a “free market” outcome relative to which the left wants redistribution.

This seems absolutely right to me – but also to call for an emphatically non-neoliberal approach to politics. As Matt is saying in this post, profound political inequalities are baked into the cake of our current market economy. But if this is right, then it is implausible that we can let markets do their thing, and then worry about the distributional issues later, since inequalities, the power of financial interests, etc not only are part of the system as it is, but also make it very unlikely that we will ever get to the stage of doing substantial redistribution. While Dean Baker (whom Matt is relying on in this post) depicts his reform agenda as a set of pro-market measures, they are not by virtue of this, neo-liberal measures (which would suggest that we should let the market organize itself, and then worry about distribution later). Instead, Dean wants to restructure markets from the get-go so as e.g. to rein in the political power of finance by taxing certain transactions, getting rid of the ‘too big to fail’ problem etc. This political program (like all political programs) emphasizes some problems and de-emphasizes others. But it is, emphatically, a political program, with a theory of what is wrong with the US political economy, and how to fix it.

To put it another way: I think that Matt sometimes adopts neo-liberal language, and is surely friendlier to neo-liberal ideas than, for example, someone like me. But I also think that his agenda – if he were really to draw out its implicit politics – is rather more radical than he is usually prepared to let on. If he is uncertain about whether Chicago-style anti-trust thinking should sometimes be trumped by political considerations, then he should look again at the arguments around the Microsoft trial, which connect directly to the intellectual property questions that he worries about (as a lot of post-Chicago people argued, monopolies tend to stifle innovation in a variety of ways). It isn’t only pro-labor people who would like to see other arguments than George Stigler-style reasoning play a role in anti-trust decisions. If he believes (as he seems to) that inequality is a bad thing, and that current IP policy helps to foster inequality, then he should draw political conclusions from these causal connections.

For what it’s worth, I think that the open information agenda, and the political inequality agenda have a lot more in common than most people think (I have been planning for some time to do more writing on this over the next year). I think it would be a lot more useful to frame the argument as one between different ways of restructuring markets so as to tackle problems of inequality at their source than as one between neo-liberalism and its critics. For one thing, even while different ways of thinking about markets and inequality might point in different directions in specific instances, it would be easier to figure out the trade-offs, especially as they are trying to reach the same end-goal. For another, it would be easier to identify the possible political actors and coalitions that might support the one, or the other, set of reforms, and possible points of agreement or disagreement between them. Both of these would conduct towards better debate.

The _American Prospect_ has published a “review essay”:http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=bubble_trouble I wrote on Eli Pariser’s “The Filter Bubble”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594203008/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=1594203008 (I’m not quite sure when this went up on the WWW; I’ve been travelling). It’s an interesting book, which takes some of the empirical developments that Tyler Cowen enthused about in _The Age of the Infovore_ and comes to diametrically opposite conclusions about their normative implications.

bq. What Cowen sees as enhancing individual autonomy, Pariser sees as restricting personal development. Instead of constructing personal micro-economies that allow us to make sense of complexity, we are turning media into a mirror that reflects our own prejudices back at us. Even worse, services like Google and Facebook distort the mirror so that it exaggerates our grosser characteristics. Without our knowing, they reshape our information worlds according to their interpretation of our interests … We are beginning to live in what Pariser calls “filter bubbles,” personalized micro-universes of information that overemphasize what we want to hear and filter out what we don’t. … Cowen’s ideal world—where the private vice of self-centered information leads to the public virtue of a lively interactive culture—is unlikely to be self-sustaining. It’s also difficult to see how regulation could pop information bubbles. … As Harvard political theorist Nancy Rosenblum has argued, partisanship creates its own checks and balances. As long as partisans are contending for a majority of public support, they have to temper their own beliefs in ways that will allow them to appeal to the public and to respond to potentially persuasive arguments from their opponents. Democratic competition is not a complete solution. It does not protect individuals from a narrowing of their horizons. … Even so, democracies are far more robust against information bubbles than Pariser believes.

So, I finally stumbled across Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Chapter 1 of which ‘The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West’ ends as follows

a liberal sermon which recommends machinery designed to prevent people from doing each other too much harm, giving each human group sufficient room to realise its own idiosyncratic, unique, particular ends without too much interference with the ends of others, is not a passionate battle-cry to inspire men to sacrifice and martyrdom and heroic feats. Yet if it were adopted,it might yet prevent mutual destruction, and, in the end, preserve the world. Immanuel Kant[1], a man very remote from irrationalism, once observed that ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.’ And for that reason, no perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.

Broadly speaking, I’m sympathetic to what Berlin is saying here. Revolutionary utopianism has been a disaster, particularly for the left. But, we still need a feasible version of utopia to oppose to the appeal of irrationalist tribalism and the naked self-interest of the top 1 per cent. And, whatever Berlin may have intended by it, “prevent people from doing each other too much harm” should not mean leaving the rich to enjoy the fruits of a system constructed in their own interests, and letting the devil take the hindmost.

A social democratic and feasible utopia should giving all human beings (individually and as a member of various groups) sufficient room and resources to pursue their own idiosyncratic, unique, particular ends with a reasonably equal capability of achieving ends that are feasible given the resources available to society as a whole.

It’s hard to spell out what that means, but I think easy enough to see that developed societies were moving in that direction, broadly speaking, until the 1970s, and are mostly moving away from it today (with some exceptions in areas like gay rights). The failure of the market liberal model to deliver on its promises, evident in the global financial crisis, along with the current struggle over austerity provides an opportunity to recover some of the ground lost in the last thirty years while, hopefully preserving the gains.

fn1. As in many such cases, our blog’s name and tagline owe at least as much to Berlin’s translation as to Kant’s original.

[Now updated for clarity and symbolic reasons!]

I can see from the comments on <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2011/09/02/romney-and-obama/”>John’s post below</a> that there is some confusion out there about the way the American political system works.  Specifically, there seems to be some serious misunderstanding of the dynamics of national elections in the US.  So let me try to clear this up once and for all.

You are welcome.

Basically, post-Watergate America works like this.  It’s what you might call a “twelve-step” program.
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Brief thoughts about that Bill Keller op-ed on candidates’ religions, and the kerfuffle that kicked up. But only by way of kicking off in the direction of what’s really going on here. The religion stuff needs a more general frame.

Keller is just being reasonable. If candidates say ‘my faith is a private matter and all that need concern the voters is how I will conduct myself in office,’ fine. But if candidates play up faith, for political advantage; if they announce that their religious views and values inform their political views and policy proposals, then obviously that makes religion fair game. Because in politics, your politics has to be fair game. Keller’s critics suggest that arriving at any such conclusion is tantamount to proposing something like a religious test for public office. Or worse! It’s an attempt to ban Christians from public life! But no. He’s only ruling out one or another of a couple possible norms that are so absurd that no one would ever advocate them explicitly. That you can’t fault politicians for concealing their policy objectives, so long as the politicians favor the policy on religious grounds. Or that you can’t fault politicians’ policy proposals, period, so long as they advocate the policy on religious grounds. Something like that. That’s nuts, so Keller is just being reasonable.

But, like I said, I don’t think this is the right way to think about this issue. For one thing, it misses that the religious case is just a special case of a more general phenomenon. Let me switch over to a question Kevin Drum asked last week: why do Republicans get a free pass? He’s absolutely right that they do. [click to continue…]

I was thinking about the possibility of an Obama v Romney matchup in next year’s election and it struck me that, in a lot of ways, Romney looks like Obama’s role model. That’s true in terms of their signature policy achievements (very similar health care policies), their general lack of (and even disparagement of) commitment to particular policies or principles, and their acceptance of the centrist view of the world in which the correct position is always midway between extremes, however those extremes may have been determined, and whatever their substantive content. Romney’s success in winning office in Massachusetts was a model for Obama’s success in what is (at least in Obama’s view and that of his advisors) an essentially rightwing country. Romney even gets some diversity points for being a successful member of a minority group.

As a temporary alien and permanent foreigner, I don’t have to worry about voting. But, of course, like everyone else on the planet, I will be significantly affected by the outcome. Still, as long as the Congress remains divided, it’s hard to see a choice between Obama and Romney making a big difference (of course, I thought that about Bush v Gore, so there you go).

I liked Season 1 of Fringe ok, and I liked Season 2 … somewhat less well. In fact, I almost gave up. The fact that the main characters are sort of one-note was getting more obtrusive. There seemed to be more stinker stand-alone episodes. But the overall story arc still seemed promising. Things really picked up in Season 3, so I’m glad I stuck it out. Sort of the same thing happened as in Season 3 of Lost, and for similar reasons: the ‘Others’ got more interesting. I think the characters in Fringe have less character, charisma, chemistry, something, than the assembled Lost crew. But that’s measuring by a pretty high standard. And Fringe has managed to be the X-Files all over again, without being about aliens, without just retreading Scully and Mulder. And Fringe doesn’t seem doomed to be dramatically unresolvable, as Lost for sure was. (I was so sure there was no way to end that series that I didn’t mind the ending. I’d already priced that in, as the finance guys always lie.) I think that the basic material is in now in place for original sf story-telling; for fun, Lostworthy twists and turns. With characters switching sides, changing in fundamental ways and landing very far from where they started. That would redeem the one-note weakness to date. Of course, what do I know? I haven’t even watched the season 3 finale yet, so I’m probably not even going to read the comments you write until after the weekend. (Sorry, man.)

Last April, Martha Nussbaum’s book Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach came out. Too late for being included in my entry on the capability approach at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but I’m immediately making up for that omission since I’m working on a book review for the Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews. My verdict? It’s a useful introduction for undergrads and policy makers, but given its length it doesn’t (and cannot) have much depth. (for me, that’s not a criticism: it’s by definition almost impossible for introductory books that cover such a broad range of disciplines to have much, if any, depth). Yet I think it is somewhat more problematic that something is missing that many undergraduates and most policy makers reading this book will want to know, since it doesn’t cover the empirical work being done. Hence the book also ignores all the questions related to measurement, which is, in my experience, the #1 question asked by economists who want to understand this framework, and by policy makers looking for an answer to the question whether the approach has any bite.

One could be inclined to believe that this is merely a teaching book, and it is with that assumption that I read it; yet there is also something in there for scholars of the approach. They will also discover some new claims and statements – some of which I endorse, and some of which I contest.
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John Kay has a “piece”:http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/faba8834-cf09-11e0-86c5-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1W9LvZiR2 about the travails of modern economic theory in the Financial Times today. This analogy struck me as a bit unfair.

bq. The only descriptions that fully meet the requirements of consistency and rigour are completely artificial worlds, such as the “plug-and-play” environments of DSGE – or the Grand Theft Auto computer game. … Economists – in government agencies as well as universities – were obsessively playing Grand Theft Auto while the world around them was falling apart.

After all, as best as I am informed, _Grand Theft Auto_ has an entire simulated world, with multiple interactions between quasi-autonomous, if scripted personalities. Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models – not so much. But this spurred me to think – how would _Grand Theft Auto_ work if it looked a little bit more like a DSGE model? All interactions taking place with a single modal gangsta, whose preferences were taken as representative of all gangstas across the entire economy? Frictionless exchanges, in which gunfire never occurs because all actors anticipate what other actors are likely to do, and hence avoid welfare-lowering actions? My imagination is limited, both (a) because I’ve never actually played Grand Theft Auto, and (b) because my exposure to the relevant economic arguments primarily consists of dim memories of snotty comments about Robert Lucas in lectures by neo-Keynesian Peter Neary (who taught advanced macro to my undergraduate class and was keen on the Malinvaud tripod). But I’m sure that other members of the CT community don’t labour under these twin disadvantages, and can do better. Also, I recognize that the title of this post is quite unfair, since Kocherlakota, whatever his other faults, is “not especially keen”:http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=4428 on DSGE arguments, but if the belabored wordplay fits, then wear it …

Deepinaharta, Texas — Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said today that if he should win the White House in 2012, his administration would seek to introduce legislation barring corporations from having abortions.

“Corporations are people too,” Romney said to a dwindling group of supporters who seemed to be distracted by a picture of Texas governor Rick Perry <a href=”http://www.rumproast.com/index.php/site/comments/chimpy_w._mcflightsuit_ii/”>in a flight suit</a>, “and they should be denied the same basic reproductive rights that I once supported and now oppose for people.”  Romney went on to say that people-corporations should enjoy the same tax and regulatory relief as corporation-corporations, “giving job seekers and job creators alike the freedom to innovate and to invest their money as they see fit.”

Romney did not respond to a question as to whether his administration would permit corporations to merge with other corporations of the same sex.

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I’ve been fixing the footnotes to a new translation of Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland (fn1) and whilst doing so happened upon a really fascinating bit of Danish history. Rousseau has a cryptic remark:

bq. You have seen Denmark, you see England, and you will soon see Sweden. Profit by these examples to learn once and for all that, however many precautions you may amass, heredity in the throne and liberty in the nation will forever be incompatible things.

What would they have seen in Denmark?
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