More striking was the simultaneous departure of Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson. Lindsey has been the leading proponent of a rapprochement between libertarians and (US-style) liberals, under the unfortunate portmanteau of “liberaltarianism”, and Wilkinson was similarly seen as being on the left of Cato.
These departures presumably spell the end of any possibility that Cato will leave the Republican tent (or even maintain its tenuous claims to being non-partisan). And Cato was by far the best of the self-described libertarian organizations – the others range from shmibertarian fronts for big business to neo-Confederate loonies.
On the other hand, breaks of this kind often lead to interesting intellectual evolution. There is, I think, room for a version of liberalism/social democracy that is appreciative of the virtues of markets (and market-based policy instruments like emissions trading schemes) as social contrivances, and sceptical of top-down planning and regulation, without accepting normative claims about the income distribution generated by markets. Former libertarians like Jim Henley have had some interesting things to say along these lines, and it would be good to have some similar perspectives
The NYT ran yet another round in the long-running EU vs US series a week or so ago. Although it’s not covered explicitly in the NYT, there is actually some news to report here, in addition to rehearsal of the same old themes.
For quite some time, the US and the leading EU countries have been fairly comparable in terms of output per hour worked. The US has had higher output per person for two reasons: a relatively high employment/population ratio and very high average hours worked per person. The first of these is important because it raises the possibility that EU countries performing well on productivity measures are benefiting from the “Thatcher effect” . If low-skilled workers are excluded from employment, for example by restrictive macro policy, as in Thatcher’s case, or by labor market sclerosis, as claimed by critics of European institutions, then productivity measures are artificially boosted.
This issue is now moot. As a result of the crisis, the US employment/population ratio has dropped sharply, to the point where the US is now little different from the EU. The difference in GDP per person between the US and leading European countries is driven primarily by differences in average hours worked by employed people. [click to continue…]
There is a small symposium in the New York Times today about the recent trend in analytic philosophy towards “experimental philosophy”:http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/8/19/x-phis-new-take-on-old-problems/unconvincing-results.
As some of the contributors note, it’s easy to overstate the trend that’s going on here. It’s not that for the 20th Century, philosophers used only armchair methods, and with the dawning of the 21st century they are going back to engaging with the sciences. When I was in grad school in the 90s, it was completely common to rely on psychological studies of all of uses, especially studies on dissociability, on developmental patterns, and on what was distinctive about people with autism or with “Capgras Syndrome”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_delusion. And the influence of Peter Singer on work in ethics meant that purely armchair work in ethics was out of the question, whatever one thought of Singer’s conclusions.
This was hardly a distinctive feature of philosophy in south-eastern Australia. Indeed, we were probably more armchair-focussed than contemporary American philosophers. As Ernie Sosa notes in the entry linked above, 20th century metaphysics is shot through with arguments from results in 20th century physics. The importance of objective chance to contemporary nomological theories is obviously related to the role of chance in different branches of physics and biology, and “modern theories of it”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chance-randomness/ involve a lot of attention to various sciences. And I’ve lost count of the number of debates I’ve been in in philosophy of language where appeal has been made at one stage or other to cross-linguistic data, which is presumably not armchair evidence unless we assume that the person in the armchair knows every human language. It’s not that I think philosophers do as good a job as they should at drawing on evidence from sources outside traditional philosophy – I’ve even tried to “encourage philosophers”:http://tar.weatherson.org/2010/04/05/extra-curricular-activities/ to do more of this – but they tend to see appeal to other areas of inquiry as a generally acceptable, and often important, kind of move.
So it’s a bit of a stretch to say, as Joshua Knobe does, that in that time “people began to feel that philosophy should be understood as a highly specialized technical field that could be separated off from the rest of the intellectual world.” I’m really not sure which of the great philosophers of the 20th century could be characterised this way. Perhaps if you included mathematics in philosophy and not the “rest of the intellectual world” you can get a couple of great 20th century philosophers in. But I doubt it would get much beyond that.
That’s not to say there’s nothing new or interesting that’s been happening in the last fifteen years or so. In fact I think there are three trends here that are worth noting. [click to continue…]
Here comes my long overdue update on the Dutch government formation (I owe you one on Belgium too, but there isn’t much to report, except the lack of progress, and whatever that could be taken to imply). We had “elections in the Netherlands”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/06/09/dutch-elections-first-results-and-open-thread/ early June, and the right-liberals, VVD, emerged as the biggest party. They first tried to form a coalition with the Christian-Democrats (CDA) and PVV, the party of Geert Wilders (in fact, it is not a party, but a ‘movement’: Geert Wilders is the only member and the other people do not have any formal power, and from what we can gather in the media also not much real power.) But CDA refused to enter any talks/negotiations if VVD and PVV did not first come to some rough agreement between the two of them. So that turned into nothing. [click to continue…]
Conservative leaders issued a series of statements today to try to resolve the growing tensions over the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” planned for lower Manhattan.
“We’re being cast as opponents of religious freedom,” said blogger <a href=”http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/08/16/ground_zero_mosque_origins”>Pamela Geller</a>, “and that’s not fair. We’re just saying that this is a highly sensitive matter and a very important place for us. We’re all about freedom. And to prove it, we propose that the location of the Ground Zero mosque should be dedicated, instead, to a Museum of Danish Mohammed Cartoons. We were very pro-freedom when those cartoons were published, and we think it would be appropriate if the site were to serve as a memorial to that watershed moment in the history of freedom.”
Forum Futures 2010 just went online. It contains summaries/write ups of the presentations made at last year’s meeting of the Forum on the Future of Higher Education. My own contribution, on ethical leadership in higher education, which will contain no surprises for people who have been reading what I’ve been saying about higher ed issues over the past year or two, is here. More interesting are this contribution on a remarkable technology for improving learning outcomes in math science and stats classes, and this piece by Sandy Baum on fairness in college admissions (which is a partner to my own contribution).
Highly recommended – Ajami, a film largely set in a part of Jaffa in Israel. Ajami is from the Tarrantino/Crash/Amores Perros school of multiple overlapping narratives shot from different points of view. It is basically unscripted and uses non-professional actors and improvisation. The movie concerns an Arab family in the Ajami neighbourhood who are engaged in a feud with a Bedouin clan. Drug dealing, a disappeared Israeli soldier and his relative in the police, romantic entanglements across the Jewish/Arab and Muslim/Christian divides are the other elements in the mix. I think that’s about all I can say about content without spoiling the plot. Politics are there, inevitably, but largely by implication – the film isn’t shouting a message at you. Get to see it if you possibly can.
Australia will elect a new government (more precisely, will probably re-elect the current Labor government) on Saturday. Although I promised I would say something about this, the whole business has been too depressing for words. The government has offered nothing but weaselly spin doctoring, and the Opposition has been even worse, playing to anti-refugee xenophobia, and offering nothing but slogans and bribes. In the forty years in which I’ve had some political awareness, I can’t remember anything as bad. [1]
A year ago, I would have thought it impossible that we would be reduced to this. [click to continue…]
As I was reminded in comments last time, snarking about libertarians is not a very productive substitute for writing well-argued posts about The Way Forward for Social Democracy, or writing my nearly-due examiners report for that PhD thesis, or revising my article on climate change on discounting, or getting the yard under control. But if I was capable of responding to that kind of reasoning, I wouldn’t be a blogger would I. So, in lieu of something useful, here’s a thought that occurred to me.
Among the more plausible candidates for an Actually Existing Libertopia, the US in C19 (with asterisks) is pretty prominent. Also, on the basis of fairly thin historical evidence, the Iceland of the sagas. It seems to me that these examples have one crucial point in common that hasn’t received much attention [click to continue…]
The second part of Stuart White’s excellent interview with Edward Lewis over at The New Left Project is now out, covering basic income, republicanism, equality and liberty. Check it out.
Henry’s post linking to Charlie Stross reminded me of one I was planning to do on the question – why has there never been a serious attempt at a real libertarian utopia? Most other utopian ideologies have inspired at least someone to attempt a practical implementation. On the face of it, libertarianism seems ideally suited to the belief in a fresh start, with no messy pre-existing claims. All sorts of ideas have been floated – island buyouts, sea-steading, co-ordinated moves to New Hampshire and so on, but none has gone anywhere. The only explanation I’ve seen, that libertarians are too independent and ornery to organise a utopia doesn’t convince me.
Thinking about the discussion we had though, it strikes me that there is a simple explanation: Actually Existing Libertarianism (see below) offers a better economic deal for nearly all libertarians than any feasible version of Galt’s Gulch. Once you do the math on going Galt, it’s not hard to see why no self-respecting libertarian would actually do it.
From Vincent Scully’s introduction to Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture: “This is not an easy book. It requires professional commitment and close visual attention, and is not for those architects who, lest they offend them, pluck out their eyes.” Two pronouns clash in too slight a clause, like two travelers crashing in too tight a doorway, who, lest they perchance have been switched by them, check whose piece of luggage is whose. Ahem. The Fascist octopus, lest it … aw, this is too hard.
What a world. You go and write a too-long post in which you raise the obviously impossible possibility that someone might argue that gay marriage is like cigarettes – i.e. you can get cancer second-hand – while apologizing for the sheer, silly disanalogousness of the analogy. And then Jonah Goldberg comes up with the brilliant idea that if you support gay marriage on libertarian grounds [as Glenn Greenwald does] … why then how can you support anti-smoking legislation? Riddle me that! [click to continue…]
Ok, now I’ve got that in your heads for the rest of the day, let me do a bit of blegging/moaning. I’m off to a conference in the Ruhrgebiet later this month and, feeling vaguely guilty about my carbon footprint, decided to go by train. It wasn’t all that easy to get a good deal online. The best way of planning a route and buying a ticket is from the “Deutsche Bahn”:http://www.bahn.com/i/view/GBR/en/index.shtml website, but instead of getting a price and a ticket you have to purchase blind (having supplied your credit card details and agreed to pay!), only later getting a “er, here’s what it will cost, is that ok with you – phone us” email. DB have now mailed me a set of tickets (starting in Bristol) which I anticipate causing “interesting” conversations with the conductor between Temple Meads and Paddington. I now have to work out and pay for a route from Leuven to rural station in Normandy on a Sunday: SNCF, SNCB and DB all give me totally different accounts of which trains are running and when. So one national company might sell me a ticket for a service in another country which the domestic operator claims doens’t exist. So why, oh why ….
Why oh why isn’t there an integrated, user-friendly pan-European booking service for continental rail travel, selling tickets at prices that compete with the airlines? Until someone makes this happen, we’ll all be burning a lot more carbon than we need to.
Newt Gingrich, distinguished professor of history and reigning intellectual heavyweight of the Republican Party, explains how <a href=http://gotmedieval.blogspot.com/2010/08/professor-newts-distorted-history.html>crafty Muslims are trying to exploit the ignorance of liberal American elites</a>:
<blockquote>The proposed “Cordoba House” overlooking the World Trade Center site — where a group of jihadists killed over 3000 Americans and destroyed one of our most famous landmarks — is a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites. For example, most of them don’t understand that “Cordoba House” is a deliberately insulting term. It refers to the <a href=http://www.tocmp.com/pix/images/1976ChryslerCordobaSportCoupe.jpg>Chrysler Cordoba</a>, a car made famous by a foreign kind of Mexican man who touted its un-American “soft Corinthian leather.” […I]n fact, every Islamist in the world recognizes Cordoba as a symbol of soft Corinthian leather. It is a sign of their contempt for Americans and their confidence in our historic ignorance that they would deliberately insult us this way.</blockquote>
Well, at first I thought Newt had to be kidding, but then I did some historical research, and guess what? He’s completely right! Check out the Islamomexicanian accent and music that was used to sell “this small Chrysler” to an unsuspecting American market:
somebody who remembers that each and every one of these ai guys firmly believes your average black person has an iq of 48 on Not so Deep Thoughts about Deep AI