This week at CT we’re delighted to have Michèle Lamont as our guest. Michèle is Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies at Harvard. She is also a former teacher of mine, though for some reason her faculty web page does not mention this. A main theme in her extensive body of scholarship has been the comparative study of the relationship between moralized concepts of worth and social hierarchies — her main work here are her first two books, Money, Manners and Morals: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class and The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. Her new book, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, examines how quality and excellence are defined in the humanities and social sciences, by way of a study of the deliberation and negotiation of panel members as they award prestigious fellowships and awards.

Michèle’s work is always provocative and insightful, and I’m delighted that she’s agreed to join us for a while here.

That our group blog is named “Crooked Timber” is sometimes taken to suggest that we are all devotees of Isaiah Berlin, who popularized the phrase about the ‘crooked timber of humanity’ that our title riffs on. As it happens, we are no more all fans of Isaiah Berlin than we are fans of “Therapy?”:http://www.amazon.com/Crooked-Timber-Therapy/dp/B001PS0EZ2/henryfarrell-20 (I haven’t listened to them since Teethgrinder meself), but it probably behoves us to acknowledge that today is Berlin’s “hundredth birthday”:http://www.economist.com/theworldin/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12494599 (or rather would be, if he were still alive). Princeton University Press has The Crooked Timber of Humanity and various other titles “for sale here”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6265.html for thems that are interested.

This “FT article”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f4d18748-5232-11de-b986-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1 is the best piece I’ve seen on the intra-Europe battles over ECB policy, but it could go deeper still.

When Angela Merkel ended a long and otherwise unremarkable speech about economic policy this week with a vitriolic attack on the world’s three mightiest central banks, the German chancellor was writing a minor chapter of her country’s political history. No previous chancellor had dared attack their, and others’, central banks so frontally – saying the US Federal Reserve, Bank of England and European Central Bank should all row back on their unconventional recent ways of propping up economies. …

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Well someone had to use that headline first, so it might as well be me. Does anything demonstrate the desperation and vacuouseness of the Brown adminstration more than the “appointment”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/gordon-brown/5450671/Sir-Alan-Sugar-backs-resolute-Gordon-Brown.html of a former entrepreneur, turned property developer, turned reality-show compere as “enterprise Czar”? Actually, don’t answer that question, because lots of other things do. Despite a lifetime of voting Labour, I couldn’t bring myself to back them in the Euros (went for the Greens in the end, faute de mieux, since you ask). Maybe nothing can save Labour, but Alan “tm” Johnson might be their only chance. Brown needs to jump though.

At IHE, Scott Jaschik has a piece about a site that sells corrupted files to students as a way to get a few extra hours or days to finish an assignment. The idea is that the student submits a corrupted file, it takes the instructor a while to figure this out, in the meantime the student finishes the assignment.

Although I’ve never had students send me corrupted files, I’ve certainly had them supposedly send me attachments that weren’t there in reality. Of course, most people have, at one time or another, forgotten to attach a file to an email so it’s hard to assume it’s always intentional, but one wonders.

The piece made me reflect on what other excuses are emerging in the new digital environment that weren’t in vogue earlier. I’ve had students claim to have lost their Internet connection at home making it difficult to meet a deadline. While on the one hand, I tend to be skeptical of this, ISPs are sufficiently bad that it’s not completely implausible. What’s your favorite digital-era bogus excuse?

As a tribute to old excuses that presumably some still use, here’s a link to the “The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall Of American Society” [or pdf] by Mike Adams in case there are people who haven’t seen it yet.

…Simon Singh is appealing the finding that he libeled the British Chiropractor Association by denying that chiropracticionariness is evidence-based medicine. (More details here). (Beware, Daniel — you’ll have the scientists suing you if you’re not careful). Fortunately, he has the greatest living Englishman on his side, so there is some hope that justice will be done.

The news that NICE has put acupuncture and chiropractic on the list of approved therapies for non-specific lower back pain has led to about the reactions you’d expect – back-slapping and high-fiving from the crystals and “life force” crowd, agonised complaining from the professional skeptics. But it’s actually a sign of something that ought to make us worry, not much but at least a little bit, about the way in which we’re doing medical science in this country.
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The economic crisis has, as we’ve been discussing, raised a lot of interest in Keynesian economics, but so far it’s been based more on the obvious bankruptcy of alternatives than on successful examples of Keynesian fiscal stimulus. Although there were some big financial bailouts late last year, few countries engaged in large-scale fiscal stimulus before the first few months of this year (Obama’s package was passed in February, and is only now being implemented, so we can’t expect to see evidence of impacts on GDP until late this year).

Australia went early and hard with a substantial cash handout to households in December 2008, followed by another round of cash stimulus delivered a month or two ago, and then a large-scale infrastructure program. The national accounts for the March quarter (which should include the effects of the first round of stimulus) have just come out, and show growth of 0.4 per cent, compared to a 0.6 per cent contraction in the December 2008 quarter[1]

On the face of it, this is a big success for Keynesian fiscal policy. And, there’s pretty general agreement that, despite some qualifications and plenty of concerns about the future, the prima facie interpretation is the correct one.

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I just wanted to post a quick note about one of our upcoming guest bloggers so readers who’re not familiar with her work can read up on it. Michèle Lamont is most recently author of How Professors Think, a book that’s already inspired discussions here at CT. Other books of hers you may have come across (or if not then should check out) include The Dignity of Working Men and Money, Morals and Manners. Also, her co-edited volume (with Marcel Fournier) on Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality is standard text on Sociology of Culture syllabi. And then there are her many articles. This is just a heads up.

Via Laura, I see this kitchen table math post on Richard Elmore’s paper on “high performing” schools. Elmore observes that so-called high performing schools in affluent communities that he works in often seem very similar to low-performing schools in low-income communities, and very unlike successful schools in low-income communities. Here’s Elmore on successful high-performing schools:

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It’s no secret that I’m a Klarion the Witch Boy fan. Which is why I was so amazed to see this on Flickr today. Kirby’s Klarion dates from 1973. But here is a pilgrim “witch boy” as early as 1965! “Thrills of mystery, Unknown worlds, strange powers – beyond” indeed! This could change everything! I feel like those scientists who dug up the Ida fossil. (Because I’m much less ambitious, obviously.)

“Matthew Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/06/prestige-cross-pollination.php does Martin Feldstein a serious injustice.

Feldstein’s characterization of the bill isn’t really correct and some of his economic analysis is debatable. But beyond that, the key point on which Feldstein’s argument turns actually has nothing whatsoever to do with economics. … Feldstein’s hypothesis … is clearly a proposition about _international relations_ … Presumably the reason the Post is interested in Feldstein is his expertise in economics. So there’s no reason for them to be running an op-ed whose key contention has nothing to do with economics.

Matt is clearly unaware of Feldstein’s distinguished record as a theorist of international relations (this may not be as distinguished as his research record on “the relationship between Social Security and savings”:http://www.monthlyreview.org/nftae02.htm, but you can only do what you can do). Feldstein is particularly famous (well, famous is one way of putting it), for his suggestion in a 1997 “Foreign Affairs article”:http://www.nber.org/feldstein/fa1197.html that the introduction of the euro might lead to a civil war that would tear Europe apart.

War within Europe itself would be abhorrent but not impossible. The conflicts over economic policies and interference with national sovereignty could reinforce long-standing animosities based on history, nationality, and religion. Germany’s assertion that it needs to be contained in a larger European political entity is itself a warning. Would such a structure contain Germany, or tempt it to exercise hegemonic leadership?

A critical feature of the EU in general and EMU in particular is that there is no legitimate way for a member to withdraw. This is a marriage made in heaven that must last forever. But if countries discover that the shift to a single currency is hurting their economies and that the new political arrangements also are not to their liking, some of them will want to leave. The majority may not look kindly on secession, either out of economic self-interest or a more general concern about the stability of the entire union. The American experience with the secession of the South may contain some lessons about the danger of a treaty or constitution that has no exits.

The carpers and the hurlers on the ditch might complain that Jean-Yves Reb hasn’t reached for his rifle in the intervening ten years, and doesn’t look like he’s going to anytime in the foreseeable future. But that would be to miss the point that Feldstein’s contribution spurred “much”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc0041/federalideals.pdf “spirited”:https://segue.middlebury.edu/repository/viewfile/polyphony-repository___repository_id/edu.middlebury.segue.sites_repository/polyphony-repository___asset_id/2089508/polyphony-repository___record_id/2089509/polyphony-repository___file_name/Amy_Verdun.pdf “discussion”:http://mq.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/12/4/33.pdf among international relations scholars, and specialists on the European Union (most of it not very complimentary to Professor Feldstein, but again, you can only do what you can do).

One could debate and dispute whether implementing a Basic Income Grant would be a good idea in affluent post-industrial societies, as we did (“here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/28/redesigning-distribution/ and “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/10/should-feminists-support-basic-income/ and “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/02/02/feminism-and-basic-income-revisited/) at CT before. Yet for developing societies with serious problems of persistent poverty, it seems to me like a very good idea indeed. One could add as a (desirable) condition that such a society should be able to internally generate the money to fund such a BIG (that is, there must be a big enough section of rich or middle class people whose consumption or income can be taxed). The idea may work wonderfully in countries like South Africa for example. If you give poor South Africans a relatively tiny BIG, they are not given welfare payouts that enable them to sit back and rest (as the critics may have it), but rather people are given some very basic means to take their lives in their own hands: money for food, for basic health care, for school fees, for a roof above their head, and perhaps to set up a small business. No more begging for food needed. The amounts can be tiny and may seem like pocketmoney to people in the global North, but as we know from the relative success of microcredits, poor people can change their lives (and those of their children) when they have small amounts of money.

There is now empirical evidence supporting this line of reasoning, coming from Namibia, where in 2004 “a coalition”:http://www.bignam.org/ of churches, trade unions, NGOs and AIDS organisations decided to run a pilot project to figure out what a small BIG would do to the lives of the extreme poor.

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Yes, it is true! Visit the official book site. You can view the whole thing via Issuu.com, which has a very nice Flash-based reader: minimal and elegant but full-featured. And/or download the PDF for offline reading.

Want to see a neat trick? I can embed the book, like so.

Then you just click to turn the page (illegible at this size) or click to open and read in full-screen mode. It’s a very nice viewer they’ve got. Or I could make the embed open on a particular page, so when I’m blogging about a passage while teaching, I can just point the kids to the page in question. Or open the book itself onscreen in class and zoom so it’s readable. Neat, I call it.

The full book title (some would say: over-full): Reason and Persuasion, Three Dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Meno and Republic book I, with commentary and illustrations by John Holbo and translations by Belle Waring. It will be out in print by mid-August. The version that is up right now is actually the final draft – so far as I can tell. But I still have a week-and-a-bit to catch any last typos or mistakes. (I have a terrible suspicion that the Stephanus pages may have shifted a bit during the last edit. Gotta check that. How tedious, but oh-so-necessary.) I hope there aren’t any major problems with the book still, at this point. But if there are – well, I will do my best to make needed changes. So if you would like to volunteer your services as proofreader/last minute reviewer/critic, you are most welcome.

Not pre-publication peer-review. Not old-fashioned post-publication review. Perinatal peer-review. (Socrates always said he was a midwife. So I assume he would approve.)

The book is published by Pearson Asia (that’s a story in itself) and will be available in paperback by mid-August. They’ve been bringing out nice, inexpensive draft versions for my students in Singapore (that’s why I have an Asian publisher.) For this first general release I insisted on extending the deal I had insisted on for my own classroom use: I reserve the e-rights and so have a free hand to try manner of cool free e-stuff. I’m hoping one reward for my virtuous ways will be that some folks will want to adopt the book for classroom use. (Free e-availability is a big pedagogic bonus, I think.) And will then see to it that copies of the book are in school bookstores, so Pearson (and I) get paid a little. That seems fair.

OK, that’s all for now. If you want to talk Plato, please come on over to the book site. (And link! Please link! And help me edit the book, last minute, if you wouldn’t mind.) But it might be fun to chat about e-publishing in academia in this thread. If you are inclined. Doesn’t this sort of thing make a lot of sense. whatever you think of my particular book? I say it does.