Evergreen philosophy topic! Sure to inspire much friendly discussion!

I don’t usually lecture about the stuff myself, but this semester I decided to, so I cartooned up some images for the PPT slides. So the first thing I have to say is that if anyone has a use for ’em, I’ve released ’em under a CC license. [click to continue…]

I’ve been living with the text of Zombie Economics for a long time and the cover art came out a while back. But now I finally have my hands on a physical copy of the book, and it’s surprising what a difference the real object makes. My immediate reaction was to open it with dread, sure that some terrible error would jump out at me, but that didn’t happen (no doubt the reviewers will find them, but that’s their job).

With that out of the road, I’ve been filled with irrational confidence. “Surely”, I think, “even the most jaded traveller, passing this book on the airport bookstall, will feel impelled to buy it”. No doubt, this optimistic glow won’t survive the arrival of actual sales figures, but I’m enjoying it while it lasts.

The application you’ve been looking for:

While some so-called environments that are less free of distraction may display one, three, or even more lines of text—all at the same time—we understand that if you could only achieve the theoretical removal of all theoretical distractions, you would finally be able to write something. And we want ū— to help you almost do that.

I think what makes Merlin Mann compelling is that he knows he has something important to get across about work and creativity, but what he has to convey is a kind of non-demonstrative non-formula, and trying to say it more than once puts him in the same business niche as a legion of people he rightfully despises. He is quite aware of this, so you see him constantly tuning his anti-pitch and sharpening his anti-advice to make sure he doesn’t find himself, late one night, naked on a bed in a motel in Omaha watching himself deliver an infomercial. It’s the problem of trying to teach something that needs to be shown, or of trying to theorize a craft — the way that critics of postwar critical theory used to say that the trouble with those guys was that they had succeeded in unifying theory and practice, in theory. His advice is excellent, but the act of delivering and listening to it subverts the point of the message, or is an example of the problem that needs solving.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to tweak my citation format. I’ve nearly gotten it just right.

I’ve been mulling over Jonathan Rauch’s “essay on the Tea Party movement”:http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/cs_20100911_8855.php for the last few days. It is a really fascinating piece of sociological journalism. And this “post by Brad Plumer”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/77840/can-the-tea-party-be-controlled brought some of the inchoate thoughts swirling around my head into focus.

bq. Jonathan Bernstein touches on an interesting question below: Who, exactly, speaks for the Tea Party movement? Many Tea Partiers would say that no one does. It’s a grassroots movement, decentralized, self-organizing, bottom-up—all that jazz. Apart from Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, it doesn’t really have any leaders. And yet, there are plenty of groups that would love to channel the Tea Parties’ energy (and rage, let’s not forget rage) for their own purposes. On top of that, the Tea Party movement may need a bit of centralization and coordination to survive and prosper in the future. But all those competing priorities can create an awful lot of tension.
[click to continue…]

I’ve just completed Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom, his rather excellent book on Kant’s political philosophy. When I say excellent, I mean that Ripstein is clear, precise and does his best to present Kant in an appealing light. I doubt that a better account of Kant’s views will be published in English. Clarity of exposition, however, has two sides to it. And in me it induced both the belief that this was what Kant believed and a revulsion at the implications of such a system. I detected rather more affection in Ripstein’s own response, in fact, I rather get the impression that he believes that something close to Kant’s views are true.[fn1] I, by contrast, have had my respect for Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Mill and Nietzsche enhanced, especially insofar as they are all prepared to pay at least _some_ attention to welfare, anthropology, and psychology – all of which Kant (officially) disdains in favour of the sparse metaphysics of freedom-as-non-domination.
[click to continue…]

Following up on various things I’d seen around the tubes, I was surprised (as US readers may well not be) to discover that most of the Ivy League universities only have around 5000 undergraduate students (altogether, they total around 50 000), and, more strikingly, that this number doesn’t seem to have changed in decades (I found this tablegoing back to the mid-1980s but from what I can tell, the numbers were much the same back in the 1950s). In fact, you could throw in Stanford, Chicago and all the top-ranking liberal arts colleges without reaching 100 000 overall.

A few thoughts about this over the fold

[click to continue…]

Looking at the Sarkozy government’s attempt at ethnic cleansing of the Roma, The Economist’s Charlemagne had the following observation about

the vociferous protest from the European Parliament. On September 9th it passed a strongly worded resolution denouncing discrimination against the Roma, and singled out the commission for its “late and limited response”. The row thus brings out the contradictions of European democracy: an elected national government finds that its resort to populism is confronted by the European Commission, an appointed body, and by the European Parliament, a distant chamber elected by a minority of voters.

It struck me that you could replace “national” with ” Southern state”, “European Commission” with “US Supreme Court” and “European Parliament” with “US Federal government”, and the analogy with Brown vs Board of Education would be just about perfect (except that it’s the Parliament driving the Commission and not vice versa). Then I noticed that Chris had proposed an almost identical substitution in relation to economic policy here.

This is the first time I can recall the European Parliament playing a key role in a conflict between the central institutions of the EU, such as the Commission and a member state. If the Parliament and Commission prevail, as they should, it seems to me that this will change the effective political structure of the EU, in the direction of a federal democracy. I’d be interested in the thoughts of those closer to the action.

Myself and some frequent CT commentators are about to leave our homes for Amman, to attend “the 2010 conference of the Human Development and Capability Association”:http://www1.ju.edu.jo/conferences1/oirsite/Home.aspx. It’s a packed program and I’m rushing in and out, so will have very little time for any sightseeing, and no time to travel outside Amman at all. Yet I hope to see at least something else than the University Buildings and my hotel – perhaps visit the most interesting Mosque or historical site of Amman? Any tips?

Another episode in “What David Moles said”:http://chrononaut.org/2010/09/16/many-writers-have-all-the-virtues-of-civilized-persons/

Art Goldhammer on “the Sarkozy meltdown”:http://artgoldhammer.blogspot.com/2010/09/astonishing-rebuke.html

bq. The problem is that this statement was a lie, according to Merkel. … astonishing public rebuke, Merkel’s spokesperson …The idea that Sarkozy would simply have invented an exchange with Merkel and that he would have invoked her “total and entire” support without having cleared it with her beggars belief. A president who behaves in this way permanently discredits himself. Plummeting in polls, attacked for human rights violations, chastised by the Pope, sued by Le Monde, and now slapped in the face by Merkel, Sarkozy seems to be coming unhinged, prepared to say anything and do anything to retain his increasingly tenuous hold on power. How long before an open revolt breaks out in his own party?

“Matthew Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/harvardperetz-controversy-illustrates-folly-of-charitable-donations-to-wealthy-u-s-universities/ on Martin Peretz and the university donation business.

bq. It’s really too bad that Harvard has chosen to take this tack. Obviously the only person in this conversation who’s questioned anybody’s right to “free speech” or exhibited a weak “commitment to the most basic freedoms” is Peretz himself. Equally obviously, Peretz’s right to be a bigot does not create a right to be honored by prestigious universities. My alma mater is doing a disservice to their brand and to public understanding of the issues by deliberately obscuring things in this manner. It would be more honest to say that Harvard is a business run for the benefit of its faculty and administrators. The business model of this business is the exchange of prestige in exchange for money. Peretz has friends who have money that they are willing to exchange for some prestige, and Harvard intends to take the money.

Of course we should fight for social justice. Justice is good. And it’s social. Broadly speaking. So I’m asking about the term, not the thing. I ask because I see that Senator Gregg has come out against justice. Near as I can figure.

Normally I would say it is a bad idea to drop a term just because someone like Glenn Beck gets everyone wound up about it. But I tend to think ‘social justice’ just means justice. Of course people have different ideas about what justice is, but ‘social justice’ doesn’t really express those differences. It’s vaguely associated with 1960’s-style stuff and socialism, but not in a way that sheds any light. Not in a way that really says anything.

Example. I’ve finally gotten around to reading Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, on Harry’s recommendation. I’m not that far yet, but near the start there’s a section on ‘social justice’ then a section on ‘political justice’. Honestly, I can’t tell the difference. [click to continue…]

I’ve an “article”:http://democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6773 on the horrible mess that is EU economic politics in the new _Democracy._ The bit I’d most like people to take away:

bq. austerity measures will not lead to economic stability. They will never be applied to strong member states, and will fail to address the problems of weaker ones, which are more likely to face problems of overheating in the private sector than over-reliance on public borrowing. They are also extremely crude, and would provide little flexibility for states faced with asymmetric shocks. Most importantly, the emphasis of austerity hawks on fiscal rectitude and nothing but is not politically sustainable. They would reproduce the problems of the early twentieth-century “gold standard” system, in which economies responded to crises with chopped wages and swingeing increases in unemployment. As Barry Eichengreen has emphasized, democracies cannot credibly maintain such a system over the long run. European citizens are suspicious of the EU because they do not understand it. If they come to see it as a set of shackles chaining them in economic squalor and misery, their suspicion will be transformed into positive detestation. EMU cannot survive widespread public loathing. Yet such loathing would be the ineluctable result of enforced austerity programs.

But also (following on from yesterday’s review), you should really read “Jacob Hacker’s piece”:http://democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6772 in the same issue on the politics of healthcare reform going forward.

bq. Reformers may have won the war in 2010, but they lost the battle for public opinion: Americans were convinced reform was needed, but not that the federal government should have the authority to make sure it was done right. Reformers cannot afford to lose the second battle for public opinion. Winning it will require organization and narrative. It will also require that progressives coalesce around a broad vision, as they did in the years after the passage of the Social Security Act. That vision should have two sides: the case against insurers and the case for government. … They can begin by resisting insurers’ self-serving entreaties to be freed from the requirement that they spend at least 80 percent of their bloated premiums on the actual delivery of care. … But making a case against insurers is not enough to justify the stronger federal role that is essential. Reformers … should not be afraid … to point out where the law needs to be strengthened, especially when that also means pointing out where private insurers continue to fall short. And nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the public option.

I’ll be participating in a live Q&A session for the Guardian on this topic next Thursday (23rd) 1-4pm (UK time). Philosophers, philosophy graduates (and anyone else) with good ideas for what to say are welcome to email me with suggestions or advice at C-dot-Bertram-at- bristol-dot-ac-dot-uk . And if you’re interested, perhaps a current philosophy student or an intending one, then please tune in.

Available from “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416588698?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1416588698 “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/biblio/9781416588696 .

This is a transformative book. It’s the best book on American politics that I’ve read since _Before the Storm._ Not all of it is original (the authors seek to synthesize others’ work as well as present their own, but provide due credit where credit is due). Not all of its arguments are fully supported (the authors provide a strong circumstantial case to support their argument, but don’t have smoking gun evidence on many of the relevant causal relations). But it should transform the ways in which we think about and debate the political economy of the US.

[click to continue…]

For your postmodern entertainment, a few stories about the social construction of reality on the political right
[click to continue…]