I wrote this for Public Ethics, addressing one of the theses from Feminism for the 99%, which claims that “liberal feminism is bankrupt.” That thesis reduces liberal feminism to corporate feminism or lean-in feminism. Against that reduction, I suggest that: “Properly understood, liberal feminism is radically egalitarian feminism—both as feminism and as liberalism. Properly situated, the values it espouses demand structural reform to redress economic disadvantage. That’s why, as a liberal feminist, I agree with the manifesto’s criticism of lean-in feminism.”

I then consider why, if liberal feminism properly understood is radically egalitarian, so many liberal feminist seem to be more focused on the women “breaking the glass ceiling” than on the women left to “clean up the shards.” One part of the answer:

“Liberalism offers a strong evaluative grounding for demands of justice on behalf of women across the social hierarchy—and indeed for demands that that hierarchy be demolished. The social subordination to which we subject the women sweeping up the shards is unjust on grounds of the freedom and equality that liberalism celebrates. Precisely because I think liberal feminism furnishes compelling diagnoses of these injustices and illuminating prescriptions for rectification, it strikes me as important to address the hard cases that it faces. These are cases wherein apparent choice seemingly shields inequity from censure—the cases that have long been regarded…as poison for liberal feminists. Redeeming liberalism’s promise as a radical evaluative framework requires addressing the cases wherein deference to choice appears to be justice-undermining. For liberal feminists, this notably includes cases of apparently voluntary compliance with gender norms, including gender norms about caregiving.”

I conclude that “liberalism can be a tool for building the movement this catastrophic moment demands—and it’s a tool the movement should be slower to cast aside.”

As prommised, here’s the first of the regular open threads, where you can comment on any topic. Moderation and standard rules still apply. Lengthy side discussions on other posts will be diverted here. Enjoy!

Elizabeth Saunders and I have a piece in the Washington Post. Behind a paywall, but the nub of the argument below the fold. [click to continue…]

A brief note stating my view of the decision of the British government to award leading “gender-critical feminist” and philosopher Kathleen Stock the Order of the British Empire for “services to higher education”. Nobody thinks that Stock has been awarded this honour for her work in aesthetics, nor that she has made contributions to higher education in the UK that exceed those of thousands of other university employees. Rather, Stock’s award has to be seen as just another example of Boris Johnson’s government using its powers of patronage to prosecute an “anti-woke” culture war. Other examples of this were the appointments of David Goodhart and Jess Butcher to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission and the granting of a peerage to a leading member of the Spiked! (ex-Revolutionary Communist Party) network, Claire Fox. Many of these decisions appear to have been taken at the behest of Trade (but also Equalities) minister Liz Truss, who recently made a bizarre speech name-checking Foucault and suggesting that local councils, somehow influenced by Foucault, had put race and gender equality ahead of teaching children to read and write. Truss has also made a point of referencing the conflicts around trans rights in articles for the Daily Mail. Goodhart, the new EHRC commissioner, has been a vocal supporter of the “hostile environment” policy that led to the UK’s Windrush scandal; Butcher is on record as saying that women who are subject to workplace discrimination should find ways round the problem rather than bringing formal complaints. Nobody reflecting on the values and agenda that led to Butcher’s appointment can believe that the government which gave Stock an OBE has a serious commitment to the interests of women. In a parallel case in which the Trump administration had used its powers of patronage to honour “gender-critical feminists”, I have no doubt that American philosophers who have applauded Stock’s award would see it for what it is: the instrumentalization of discretionary power to fight the culture war. I’ve deliberately avoided going into Stock’s views in this post, although I am not a fan. Rather, I’ve confined myself to things that everyone on this side of the Atlantic who is reasonably well-informed about the facts, including, I suspect, Stock herself, knows to be true. (Comments turned off on this post.)

That’s the headline for a piece that ran in the Canberra Times on New Years’ Eve, looking at the way borders separate families for serious reasons (like controlling the pandemic) and for frivolous ones (for example, because of spurious claims about the effect of migration on wages, or because people are uncomfortable about a changing population).

I’m going to end this little series of positive notes I started ten days ago with sharing several excellent nonfiction books I read in 2020. Last year, my goal was to read 52 books. A year ago I had set as my goal for 2020 60 books, not because I knew we’d all be experiencing a lockdown, but because I was supposed to be on sabbatical in the fall and figured I’d be able to make more time for it. (I was indeed on sabbatical this past fall, but I did not “go” on sabbatical in that I just stayed in Zurich rather than my original plan of spending it at my alma mater Smith College in a special visiting position. Fortunately, we were able to reschedule that for fall ’23.) It turns out, during lockdown March-May I didn’t read any books at all. I can’t explain it, but it’s not how I coped. Fortunately, during the rest of the year I caught up. I already posted separately my resulting fiction recommendations, now for the rest.

I started 2020 with a tough, but very important and well-written book: Know My Name by Chanel Miller. This is the story of the woman who had been sexually assaulted by Brock Turner on Stanford’s campus. She goes through so much of what happened in the aftermath including lots of discussion of the crazy legal system that lets people like Turner move on with their lives while the lives they assault are forever changed. I believe this should be required reading on university campuses. It would be very hard for 18-year-olds to process (it’s hard to process at any age), but valuable.

 

While we are on the topic of sexual assault, [click to continue…]

A new regular feature on CT! Once a week, we’ll be posting an open thread, where you can post on any topic you like, subject to the usual moderation rules.

The other purpose of this regular post will be to deal with thread derailment. An example is a recent thread on Brexit which deviated into a lengthy analysis of labelling rules for marmalade and chocolate. Disputes of this kind will be directed to the open thread, where the participants can argue to their hearts’ content.

The first suggested topic for discussion: what should we call this feature? The current title is not very imaginative, so feel free to suggest something better. Is Marmalade and Chocolate too obscure?

I decided to dedicate two separate posts to books, this one is for fiction. I usually don’t read much fiction so last year I wouldn’t have had enough to write about for such a post (and what I did read I didn’t like so wouldn’t have wanted to write about it). I still don’t have that much, the hope is that you’ll add your own. Like last year, this is not about books that were published in 2020, I am just sharing what I read in 2020 and recommend.

My big reading innovation this year, by the way, was listening to audiobooks. It helped me read more since I can still follow along comfortably at 1.5x speed, often even 1.75x or 2x speed, which is definitely faster than I read. Importantly, it lets me multitask so I can make progress on a book while cooking or working on a jigsaw puzzle (one of my pandemic sanity preoccupations although some of you may recall that this wasn’t a pandemic novelty for me).

This book is definitely not new, it’s even been made into a movie already (I haven’t seen it), but I only came across it this year: Still Alice by Lisa Genova (2007). It’s a tough topic, early onset Alzheimer’s in an academic. It’s beautifully written and the best fictional depiction of academia I have seen (but again, to be fair, I don’t see that much fiction). It did make me rather paranoid, but following up on the book I also read about things one can do to help delay onset (FWIW, solving crossword puzzles is not one of them).

[click to continue…]

Another extract from my book-in-progress, Economic Consequences of the Pandemic

Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, governments around the world have issued huge amounts of public debt, much of which has been purchased by central banks. In the US, for example, Federal public debt increased by $3 trillion over the course of 2020 (this is about 15 per cent of US national income)

while the monetary base (money created directly by the Federal Reserve) increased by around $1.6 trillion. This money was used to buy government bonds along with corporate securities in open market operations (what is now called Quantitative Easing)

These policies represent a complete repudiation of assumptions which were considered unquestionable by the political class until relatively recently: that budgets should be balanced, and that public debt is always undesirable.

Even the most widely-accepted modifications of these assumptions are now problematic. A standard view is that budget balances should be stable over the course of the economic cycle. If measured appropriately, this entails a stable ratio of public debt to national income.

But where should this ratio be set?

Is there anyone who hasn’t spent more time in the kitchen this year than usual? Perhaps healthcare workers. I don’t eat bread so I skipped all the sourdough discussions, but I did end up trying all sorts of new recipes. I’ll just share one savory and one sweet, and am otherwise hoping folks will contribute their own favorites.

A Late Show with Stephen Colbert was my go-to daily entertainment watching the previous night’s episode around lunch time. I was so impressed by how he and his team pivoted to the lockdown. In one episode, he cooked a dish based on shallots with Alison Roman that sounded very intriguing since I like shallots, but few recipes ever call for more than a bit of it (or I don’t tend to know them, please educate me). I made the dish the next day and have made it a bunch of times since, it’s excellent. I substituted sardines for the anchovies, because I already had those at home and since it worked well for me, I’ve stuck with that variation.

For sweets, I tried a sweet potato casserole for the first time this Thanksgiving and was so impressed that I’ve made it twice since (and will definitely be making it again). It seems to be presented as a side dish, but in my book it’s definitely a dessert. I do recommend two modifications to that recipe though that I picked up on from reading the comments on the site: (1) half the white sugar (1/4 instead of 1/2 cup); (2) double the topping except for the butter. Commenters noted that it was too sweet otherwise and they were right. I forgot these modifications the last time I made it and it was indeed too sweet. It’s a straight-forward recipe and doesn’t even really require a food processor (I haven’t used one for it). Try it out!

Your turn, please share your finds (or oldies, but goodies if you prefer).

It’s time to share your most helpful tech finds for the year, this time more on the software than the hardware side. My big find was a task management tool that is the mother of all task management tools. It’s called Amazing Marvin and amazing is indeed the word I use when I describe it to friends and colleagues. If there is one downside, it’s that its versatility makes it a bit hard to navigate at first, but the investment is worth it.

Let me take a step back and explain the problem I was trying to solve when I searched for a tool back in the Spring. The search was not necessarily prompted by the pandemic, but launching into a huge data-collection project a week into lockdowns certainly gave a nudge. I had never had a good system for keeping track of tasks, ranging from very specific small to-do items to components of large multi-year projects. I had tried several programs over the years, but none had met my needs, whatever those might have been. (Sometimes you don’t realize what works well until you try to get a program to do what you need and then it hits you that that missing feature is a must-have.) I was using a mix of approaches from putting some things on my Google Calendar to keeping emails unread until I had tended to them, etc. It was a sad patchwork of solutions that, frankly, left me wondering how I wasn’t dropping balls left and right.

Enter Amazing Marvin. [click to continue…]

(Are there hobbies that don’t bring joy?)

In this sixth installment of end-of-2020 positive notes, let’s talk about hobbies that have helped us get through this crazy year. I started the following a bit before the pandemic, but it proved to be the perfect distraction (except for those beginning months of global postal confusion).

A little less than a year ago, I signed up for two postcard exchange Web sites: Postcrossing and Postcard United. “Exchange” is not entirely the right word for it since you are sending postcards to people different from the ones sending you postcards so it’s exchange in a global sense, but not concerning the specific items. (In reality, on occasion such an exchange does happen, but it’s rare.) You might think the model wouldn’t work. After all, there is no direct incentive to sending out something nice since the person you are sending to is not the one sending you a card. Do people put any care into sending thoughtful cards then given that there is no obvious incentive to doing so? It turns out many do. On the user profile, it’s possible to signal what is of interest and many of the cards I’ve received (over 200 at this point) have addressed my stated likes such as cards (and stamps!) of turtles and modern and/or local art. Similarly, I try my best to send something the person has requested and have amassed quite a postcard collection to assist me in this.

With all the distancing that 2020 has involved, it’s been genuinely lovely to connect with people from across the globe. There are a great number of participants in East Asia, I’ve sent numerous cards to and received many cards from China, as well as Malaysia and Indonesia. The hobby seems to be very big in Germany and Russia as well. Some of this is just a numbers game (countries with large populations), but it doesn’t seem to be entirely about that. Of course, the activity comes with its set of costs not least of which is the postage and so this will pose constraints on who can participate. There are accounts in places like Germany with more than 10,000 cards sent and received, in such instances we’re talking some major financial investment in the hobby. Not that many other hobbies don’t come with costs, but I do find that interesting.

The sites put limits on how many cards you can have traveling at any one time, which can be a bit frustrating if you’re ready to jump in full speed, but is also realistic from the site’s perspective to establish that a new member is serious and will continue sending out cards. This is why one would end up joining more than one site, by the way, that way you can have more cards traveling at the same time (and thus also be receiving more).

Through this hobby, I’ve learned some interesting tidbits about philately around the globe. I was not aware, for example, of so-called maxicards (examples here through an image search). These are special issue stamps with corresponding cards with the stamp on the front side of the matching postcard. They tend to look wonderful and I’ve enjoyed getting a few from various corners of the globe. (If you have one to spare, I’m interested! As far as I can tell, neither the US nor Switzerland issues them these days so I haven’t been able to buy them for trade. Please correct me if I am wrong.)

From social media I gather that lots of people picked up bread baking as a hobby this year. I skipped that as I don’t eat bread. Has anyone started new hobbies this year that have worked out well? (I realize some of the previous posts have covered some related topics and I will have a post dedicated specifically to book reading as well as art making, but feel free to post about those types of hobbies here as well.)