I’m at a workshop, unable to blog properly, and saving my eurozone energies for revisions to a piece for _The Nation_ (the ending of which has changed dramatically twice, and which is likely to change dramatically again before its Friday deadline). But this “piece in the FT”:http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/000cb4ae-0abc-11e1-b9f6-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1dEBeOEIu is not very far from what I would be writing if I had the time.

bq. Apparently, the answer to the huge problems of the eurozone is the replacement of elected premiers with economic experts – approved officials dropped from European institutions. In Greece, Lucas Papademos, a former vice-president of the European Central Bank, has been pushed hard for the job; in Italy, Mario Monti, another economist and a former EU Commissioner, is much mentioned. They may lack a democratic mandate but they’re fantastically well regarded in Frankfurt. It remains to be seen if either will clinch the role. But what exactly is the great attraction of technocrats?

bq. If ever modern Europe needed brave, charismatic leaders to carry their nation through turbulent times, it would seem to be now. Instead, it is as if the crew of the Starship Enterprise had concluded that Captain Jean-Luc Picard is no longer the man for the job and that it is time to send for the Borg. Efficient, calculating machines driving through unpopular measures across the eurozone with the battle cry “resistance is futile” are apparently the order of the day. Faced with a deep crisis, once-proud European nations are essentially preparing to hand over power to Ernst & Young.

Cosma Shalizi and I have an article on “Thaler/Sunstein and democratic politics”:http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228376.500-nudge-policies-are-another-name-for-coercion.html in the current issue of _New Scientist._ The title is a bit misleading (our problem with nudging isn’t that it’s coercive; it’s that it doesn’t have much in the way of feedback), but we’ll stick by the main text.

bq. “Nudging” is appealing because it provides many of the benefits of top-down regulation while avoiding many of the drawbacks. Bureaucrats and leaders of organisations can guide choices without dictating them. Thaler and Sunstein call the approach “libertarian paternalism”: it lets people “decide” what they want to do, while guiding them in the “right” direction.

bq. …This points to the key problem with “nudge” style paternalism: presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct, the technocrats’ prescriptions. This leaves the technocrats with no systematic way of detecting their own errors, correcting them, or learning from them. And technocracy is bound to blunder, especially when it is not democratically accountable.

bq. … democratic arrangements, which foster diversity, are better at solving problems than technocratic ones. Libertarian paternalism is seductive because democratic politics is a cumbersome and messy business. Even so, democracy is far better than even the best-intentioned technocracy at discovering people’s real interests and how to advance them. It is also, obviously, better at defending those interests when bureaucrats do not mean well.

Soon after reading this (via Chris’ post) I read this (bia BoingBoing). I would pay good money – albeit probably only a small amount – for a videogame designed by Horkheimer and Adorno.

“”We realized that if we incentivized things that were inherently boring,” Butterfield told me, “people would do them again and again—it showed up in the logs—but that they would secretly hate us.”

“This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.”

Just wanted to give our Ohio readers a chance to tell us how inordinately pleased they are with themselves. And to tell anyone who doesn’t yet know that, in an exceptionally high turnout, Ohio voters defeated their state government’s union busting legislation by a large majority. Well done everybody. And, from your friends in Wisconsin, thanks. Fantastic.

Chris’s “post below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/11/08/a-new-communist-manifesto/ reminds me that I’ve been meaning to disagree with this “claim”:http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/10/utopia_is_creep.php by Nick Carr.

bq. Works of science fiction, particularly good ones, are almost always dystopian. It’s easy to understand why: There’s a lot of drama in Hell, but Heaven is, by definition, conflict-free. Happiness is nice to experience, but seen from the outside it’s pretty dull.

bq. But there’s another reason why portrayals of utopia don’t work. We’ve all experienced the “uncanny valley” that makes it difficult to watch robotic or avatarial replicas of human beings without feeling creeped out. The uncanny valley also exists, I think, when it comes to viewing artistic renderings of a future paradise. Utopia is creepy – or at least it looks creepy. That’s probably because utopia requires its residents to behave like robots, never displaying or even feeling fear or anger or jealousy or bitterness or any of those other messy emotions that plague our fallen world.

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At The Utopian there are details of a project by Adorno and Horkheimer for a new Communist Manifesto:

bq. Horkheimer: Thesis: nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings. In this situation it is mankind’s dream that we should do away with both work and war. The only drawback is that the Americans will say that if we do so, we shall arm our enemies. And in fact, there is a kind of dominant stratum in the East compared to which John Foster Dulles is an amiable innocent.

bq. Adorno: We ought to include a section on the objection: what will people do with all their free time?

bq. Horkheimer: In actual fact their free time does them no good because the way they have to do their work does not involve engaging with objects. This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.

h/t Brian Leiter.

We went to see Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem on Saturday, with Mark Rylance playing the role of “Rooster” Byron. It was one of the most overwhelming experiences I’ve had at the theatre. The production was superb, and Rylance extraordinary, inhabiting the character of drunk, drug-dealing outsider Byron with love and energy throughout. Englishness is the theme, but hardly the house-trained Englishness of which the Daily Mail would approve, since the action is set on Byron’s last day before eviction from his illegal encampment by Kennet and Avon council, and Byron is a “gippo” and a “pikey” (Americans might call him “trailer trash”). The inhabitants of the little box houses on the “new estate”, many of whom have hung around Rooster’s caravan as adolescents themselves, want him out. If I were being pretentious I might use terms like Dionysian (ok I just did). The play problematizes peace, “progress”, order and prosperity and projects a view of what matters that won’t appeal to Steven Pinker or the average economist. Well too bad for them. I hear the play was well-received on Broadway. I wonder how well the Wiltshire underlass travelled to New York? No spoilers here, but I have listened to Sandy Denny singing “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” about 100 times in the past couple of days, often with tears running down my face.

Singapore is evidently a great place for shopping, as this photo from a friend shows:

But it is surely a sign of deep recession that gives us bargains like this in Dublin:

On the one hand, I’m glad DC is bringing out volume 1 of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane [amazon]. I’m glad, too, that they aren’t bringing it out until after X-Mas. That way, I can’t give it to Belle as a present, which would be unwise. On the other hand, I can’t help thinking that an even better book might collect just the covers of all 137 issues, cataloguing all the ways in which – due to being too fat, or a ghost, or due to Pat Boone, or a lead cube on her head, or being a giant, or very small, or too highly evolved, or having over-educated green ape feet – Superman’s girlfriend [UPDATE: girl friend!] serially failed ever to become his wife, or even his girlfriend, I think. Fortunately, the internet provides. I don’t think I’ve ever actually read an issue of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane, but I can’t believe it could be as much fun as the covers promise. [click to continue…]

<a href=”http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/130821/”>From Open Pajamas Media</a>:

<blockquote>A JOURNOLIST REMINDER: There was this email group, called <a href=”http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/20/documents-show-media-plotting-to-kill-stories-about-rev-jeremiah-wright/”>Journolist</a>, where journalists got together and talked about how to bury stories that hurt Democrats and push stories that hurt Republicans. <a href=”http://thevailspot.blogspot.com/2011/01/journolist-membership.html”>Here’s a list of the members.</a></blockquote>

No, that was not the purpose of Journolist.  It was an ordinary liberal listserv that included pundits and professors.  Once in 2008, one of its members, angered by the American media’s harping on the Jeremiah Wright nonsense, suggested an aggressive pushback against conservative pundits.  No one took him up on the suggestion.  People complained for a while (on list and off, in public even) that Sean Hannity had fed a stupid debate question to George Stephanopoulos, and then they went back to arguing about social policy and the Red Sox.  The end.

Reynolds’ second update to his disingenuous/delusional post acknowledges that there might in fact be something to the Herman Cain sexual harassment story after all.  Do tell!  Now all Professor Reynolds needs to do is to take down and apologize for his little piece of slander about a liberal listserv that (a) did not actually do anything wrong in the first place and (b) clearly had nothing to do with the Cain story, having disbanded in 2010 when the right-wing press proved by geometric logic that it was unseemly for liberals to use the Internet to converse with each other.

Full disclosure: yes, I myself was a member of Journolist for about two years.  I was invited to join because I signed <a href=”http://gawker.com/5591801/scandal-liberal-journalists-colluded-to-write-open-letter”>the open letter about that ABC News debate of April 2008</a> — indeed, the very letter that is repeatedly cited in the wingnutosphere as proof that Journolist was colluding on an open letter!!  How did the writers of the open letter get in touch with me if I was not already a member of Journolist, you ask?  The amazing but true answer is below the fold:
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It seems that there has been a bit of a kerfuffle at Harvard over Greg Mankiw’s introductory economics course, culminating in a walkout by a number of the students. The “Harvard Crimson”:http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/11/3/ec-walkout-occupy/ gravely pronounces that “Protesting a class’s ideology damages free academic discourse.”

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Anyone who blogs regularly gets annoyed by commenters. We do our best to screen out the worst here at Crooked Timber, but inevitably some get through, and, just as inevitably, they can sometimes upset us. But though I’ve had my intelligence, good judgement and moral character questioned many times, I’ve never had to cope with the kind of abuse female bloggers sometimes get. And the women at CT have had that too, from behind the protective shield of anonymity (though I did work out who on one occasion and warned a fairly prominent academic about what would happen if he came back). Now Helen Lewis Hasteley at the New Statesman has an article on this, complete with reports from some of the women who have been on the receiving end. Read the whole thing.