In response to my previous post on the imminent threat to Dutch universities to have their budgets cut with up to 1 billion euros a year, I received a few emails from (mainly younger) staff to ask how they could contribute to the protests.

I will respond specifically for the current Dutch case, but I think we could learn from international experience here. So if you have additional thoughts on what university staff could do to make sure the material conditions in which they need to do their work are adequate (and for public universities this means not having their public budgets cut in a way that creates inadequate funding), then please do share your suggestions.
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Plain People of Crooked Timber: can’t see why you’re drafting us in here so often after leaving us out in the cold for five years or whatever, we are busy people with our own lives and so on.

Me: but I love you and you’re the best!

Plain People of Crooked Timber: well if you’re going to resort to flattery, I suppose it’s alright but you should probably give it a rest for a bit after this.

Me: OK, is it immoral to convince people they hold immoral beliefs, despite knowing they may commit immoral actions as a result? Should I troll people into being bad people?

Plain People of Crooked Timber: those are daft questions and the answers are obviously yes and then no.

Me: OK, but hear me out. Anti-abortion believers’ stated views are that fertilised embryos are people (with souls) even when they haven’t implanted into the uterine wall. Blastocysts too. This entails regarding IVF as a grotesque parade of murder. Multiple embryos are produced, several implanted due to the staggering cost of a single round, and then the number often brought down via selective abortion since who wants to have triplets sweet Christ not to speak of quadruplets, and one is usually not thriving as much, so it’s easier to make a decision. Well, easy; I have never been in this position and many people probably find it far from easy, and perhaps even agonising, who am I to say, and I am deeply sorry for people in this difficult situation, which may be the worst of their lives. I retract the whole easy concept I am being ignorant and even unkind. BUT all of this is completely moral at every stage and every level and I am cheering on everyone who does this, best of luck, I hope this works for you and you have all the children you wish for. I love mine and everyone who wants children should be able to have them, just as people who don’t want children should be able to not have them.

The remainder lie forever in stasis like the astronauts of some commercial venture the Weyland-Yutani Corp has deemed unprofitable, or are destroyed, with fewer than five percent adopted by some other couple. I hope that changes if people want it to, I hope they all get used and people get to pay less for what is an unreasonably exorbitant procedure. Carry on! Also, if they were not used, kept in stasis, or discarded, that would also be moral and right and not murder under any conceivable definition of murder.
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On Monday, the first day of our academic year, I went to a demonstration. The reason for the demonstration are the announced budget cuts for higher education, which our new right/extreme-right government wants to implement. The figures aren’t set in stone yet, but the financial appendix that was presented when the new government took office suggests that there will be a direct cut to the budget of higher eduction of 150 million euros in 2025, and increasing up to almost 1 billion a few years later (I read somewhere that this is equivalent to the size of one Dutch public university). The cuts would come in different ways – some are reversals to budget-increases that were made by the previous Minister (the renowned scholar Robbert Dijkgraaf who left his prestigious job in Princeton to serve as our minister of education); there are also indirect cuts because the government plans to reduce the number of international students (which will lower revenues for universities); and general cuts to HE. The government will also lower the payment universities gets for a student that takes too long to finish their undergraduate degree, and then expects the students to pay much higher fees. Importantly, the previous government made a Bestuursakkoord (a sort of ten-year contract) with the public universities, which this new government now modifies significantly, without agreement from the universities.

There was a real sense of defeat among the participants at the demonstration that I talked to, which I also sense very strongly. Why? [click to continue…]

This study showing that US academic faculty members are 25 times more likely than Americans in general to have a parent with a PhD or Masters degree has attracted a lot of attention, and comments suggesting that this is unusual and unsatisfactory. But is it? For various reasons, I’ve interacted quite a bit with farmers, and most of them come from farm families. And historically it was very much the norm for men to follow their fathers’ trade and for women to follow their mothers in working at home.

So, I decided to look for some statistical evidence. I used Kagi’s AI Search, which, unlike lots of AI products is very useful, producing a report with links to (usually reliable) sources. That took me to a report by the Richmond Federal Reserve which had a table from a paper about political dynasties.

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So is Trump going to be able to pivot to pro-choice in the run-up to the election? I mean: he’s trying. But will it work? And will his pro-life base accept it, because he’s Trump?

I hope no pro-choice voters are fooled. I hope they hold him responsible for overturning Roe. It’s beyond obvious they can’t trust Trump to veto a federal ban, if he’s re-elected, and R’s pass one in Congress. Which they will (almost certainly?) try to do, if they can.

Here’s why I’m even bothering to ask (you knew that stuff I just said.) I think there’s one reason why the pro-life base might go along with it, besides maybe them being boxed in and nowhere else to go. And I haven’t seen anyone really think through the psychology of the shift. Permit me to speculate.

[UPDATE: comments have shown the above paragraph is misleading. Read it so: here’s on reason why the pro-life base, and politicians, might go along if he really goes pro-choice and makes a serious effort to drag others in the party with him. One can’t really trust him, but he might try to make the pivot credible. He doesn’t want to go to prison if he loses, after all. And yes I know there’s nothing he could do to render himself truly trustworthy, still there are things he could do to try to make the R party more pro-choice in an attempt to win voters.]

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I read reddit. Yeah, I know.
Plain People of Crooked Timber: “why would you go and do a thing like that when you could sit on the kitchen floor and watch your packet of English muffins slowly pass its sell-by date and develop that unpleasant sour flavour you usually don’t notice until it’s too late and the thing is dripping with butter, and you experience one of life’s trivially grand disappointments. Because that would be a more profitable use of your time.”
Me: “But see, I’m arguing with misogynists and annoying ‘just asking questions about white culture’ people till they rage-quit!”
Plain People of Crooked Timber: shake heads with eyes closed and lips pressed into a single line. “Honestly.”
Me: “There are actually good subreddits too, like about how to write query letters.”
Plain People of Crooked Timber: “You are spending 90% of your time on Am I The Asshole why do you try and lie to us like this?”
Me: “OK, but listen, I’ve decided to read twitter instead!”
Plain People of Crooked Timber: “Oh, you’ve picked a fine time for it, haven’t you?”
Me: “Right, now now I’m arguing with all these RETVRN white marble statue pfp dickwads about Latin, it’s way better!”
Plain People of Crooked Timber: glare loftily.
Me: “No, for real, the best thing happened to me the other day. One of these guys who sucks you in by seeming just to want everyone to learn Latin, which I also want–”
Plain People of Crooked Timber: “Why in God’s name do you want that?”
Me: “Well, there’s lots of fun stuff to read, but not, like, the Aeneid because its a thing of crystalline beauty and also super-boring. But learning Latin would be morally improving or something.”
Plain People of Crooked Timber:”So you agree with him!”
Me: “No, no, it’s different. Anyway. They suck you in by seeming merely to want everyone to learn Latin, and then one second later its DEVS VULT, like, damn, son, I want some transition time where you hate North Africans or something under the guise of the Punic Wars. Wait. Maybe I guess, just skip to the crusades, actually, scratch that. So he’s exhorting his followers to, I don’t know, reclaim the Holy Land or whatever (but in the singular) and he calls out, invokes as it were, them–as a singular friend–whom he calls amicus. Yeah that’s right, the nominative. But as he’s calling to them, it should be the vocative, this happens rarely, and then it’s a second declension noun it’s literally the only time you ever have a form for vocative that’s different from the nominative. I just responded *amice and BOOM I got blocked by nine people, some big accounts. It was great.”

So, I just want you all to know I’m keeping busy, useful person and so on. Actually I write for hours every day and if I produce 2,500 words I can dork around on the loserweb as I please, save that it is injurious to the spirt. If I want to spend time slowly becoming confused and faintly judgmental about people who have a fiancé and two kids…like what’s holding you up? People should do as they please but you need important legal protections in case he leaves you or you die, just go to the courthouse. How is he ‘not ready’? You have a two and a four year old, he’s ready for producing whole-ass human beings who will suffer existential crises in the ink night of the soul, children who will be rejected by friends in the seventh grade and experience pain no adult can bear to remember, that they erase from life for self-protection, people who will someday get so drunk they puke and, having had soup before, get a pea stuck in their nose, and there’s no way to get it out? Even the following bile that they vomit up, futile, burning from emptiness, won’t wash it away? This, all this, but he’s not ready to get married? Who is this joker? Many places offer marriage-like benefits to unmarried parents, that’s sensible, but these people live in America. I wonder if learning Latin would help him learn manly virtue and get it together. Maybe I should get into an argument with the OP about how her “‘”fianc锑” (and I use the term very loosely) needs to get a copy of Wheelock for his first-date anniversary.

I am very pleased that our very own Chris Bertram has responded to Joseph Heath’s very entertaining and polemical “John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism,” a widely shared Substack post [HT: Dailynous]. Chris has made some important corrections to the public record, and the comments on his post are extending that.

As it happens, I just did a three-part series on Heath’s excellent book, The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State (OUP, 2020). [The first one is here; the second here; here.] And I may do a fourth in which I compare his take on cost-benefit analysis with Dave Schmidtz’s. Do read the first few paragraphs of my first post in the series, so you get a sense of my view of the significance of Heath (Toronto), whom I have never met in real life.

Before I get to my criticism of Heath — and I don’t need to remind regular readers I am no Marxist – Heath’s essay is a rare case of auto-biographical history of philosophy in which Heath gets something important right despite the polemical and boundary-policing efforts — note his repeated use of ‘bullshit.’ Usually, such retrospective first-person narratives are only instructive as polemics and boundary-policing (and a window into the anguished grievances of the author).

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There has been much attention online to a piece by Joseph Heath arguing that analytical Marxism disappeared because the analytical Marxists all turned into Rawlsian liberals. At a certain level of resolution (blurred, zoomed out) the argument has something going for it. But at that level, all it amounts to is the claim that this group of thinkers shifted their attention over time from critical investigation of the normative and positive claims made by Karl Marx to concerns about justice, and, particularly, distributive justice. Heath’s piece also contains some startling inaccuracies:

1. Heath claims that Cohen abandoned the Marxist view, summed up, according to Heath in the belief “that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labour, and so if they receive something less than this, they are being treated unjustly” and Heath associates this view with a commitment to the labour theory of value. But, as any scholar of Marx knows, Marx himself rejected the view that workers are entitled to the full fruits of their labour in the Critique of the Gotha Programme because of the need to make deductions, among others, for those unable to work. Moreover, Cohen rejected the labour theory of value and declared its relationship to the charge of exploitation to be one of irrelevance in his essay “The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation” (available in his History, Labour and Freedom).

2. Heath claims that Cohen, worried about the way that Marx’s theory of exploitation rests on similar premises to Nozick’s views (as he was), spent “spent the better part of a decade agonizing, and wrote two entire books trying to work out a response to Nozick, none of it particularly persuasive.” Well, by my count, Cohen wrote exactly one book responding to Nozick, namely Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality. Of course it is up to Heath what he finds persuasive, but, personally, I think the great achievement of that book is its focus on the principle of self-ownership and its rejection of that principle.

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OK guys, here’s the deal. Last night I had a decently long dream in which Vishnu appeared to me personally, blue but golden with godly light and so on, to explain to me that he was real, and that I should worship him but not necessarily his avatars, more just him, (though I objected that Rama and Krishna are more approachable). And further that he was indeed the Mahavishnu, i.e. supreme deity, like, the Trimurti is a heresy and he and Brahma and Shiva are not coequal in a tripartite god relationship. Also, I should brush up on my Sanskrit so I could read devotional texts. I vaguely agreed, I mean, he’s an incomprehensible being of supreme power. So far so good. But then I woke up.

And I went to tell my mom, ‘you will not believe the dream I had last night, this is so crazy, my dreams are wilding out, should I start worshipping Vishnu? Because this is crazy.’ And in the gauzy spiderweb in the bitter-smelling boxwood outside the window I saw the outline of a bird, as if one had flown darting onto it and then vanished, and that’s when I remembered my mother has been dead for years now. At that point I turned to her, because I always love to see her like this, and hugged her once until she fell through my arms, and then I woke up, in the smallest bedroom of my house, where I have been staying with my sister. There is a big tree out the window beside the bed here, and a loud window A/C unit there partially blocking the view, but you can see it, the blue of the morning sky almost just the same as the blue paint in the room, which is tiled with paintings and photographs. Bishop Johnathan Mayhew Wainwright is a little forbidding there at the bottom of the bed.
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(Originally drafted for a conference at Frankfurt in 2018 to mark the 40^th anniversary of Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. I’ve done a bit of editing of my conference script and added a few footnotes etc, but it isn’t necessarily produced to the scholarly standards one might require of a journal article.)

In Karl Marx’s Theory of History, G.A. Cohen attributed many of the ills of capitalism to the market mechanism. Later in his career he came to see the market as practically ineliminable. Insofar as he was right about the market in his earlier work, it may turn out that the alternatives to capitalism he championed at the end of his life will also generate the pathology he deplored: the systematic bias in favour of output over leisure and free time. The following explores some of these tensions.

Introduction

In the second half of his career, G.A. Cohen concentrated his discussion of capitalism on its wrongs and injustices. According to his diagnosis, the primary injustice in capitalism arose from the combination of private property and self-ownership, which enables capitalists – who own the means of production – to contract with workers – who own only themselves and their labour power, on terms massively to the capitalists’ advantage. The workers, who produce nearly all of the commodities that possess value in a capitalist society, see the things that they have produced appropriated and turned against them as tools of exploitation and domination by the capitalists. But the wrongness and injustice of capitalism, the theft of what rightfully belongs to workers, is only one part of what is to be deplored about capitalism. In chapter 11 of Karl Marx’s Theory of History, a chapter where he went beyond the expository and reconstructive work he undertook earlier in the book, Cohen articulated a different critique, this time focused not on injustice but on the ills to which capitalism gives rise. In that chapter he attacks capitalism for stunting human potential through a bias towards the maximization of output, a bias which condemns human beings to lives dominated by drudgery and toil. Relatedly, he attacks capitalism both for stimulating demand for consumption that adds little of real value to people’s lives and because for damaging of the natural environment through pollution. In developing this critique, Cohen also notes that the bias towards output he identifies is celebrated by Max Weber as exemplifying rationality itself, a celebration which Cohen thought ideological and mistaken.¹

Though both the wrongness and the badness of capitalism arise from the conjunction of private property and the market, it seems natural to emphasize the role of private property more in the production of injustice and to stress market relations more in the genesis of its badness. It is the fact of what the capitalists own that gives them decisive leverage over workers in the labour market, making exploitation within the workplace consequently possible; it is the market that compels everyone, capitalists and workers both on pain of extinction, to act in ways that end up being so destructive for human and planetary well-being.

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Harris’ nomination locks in another Boomer presidency. This single generation — those born in the nineteen years between 1946 and 1964 — is guaranteed another presidency. 36 consecutive years, not counting the Biden Interregnum (he’s technically too old).

Despite being a Boomer, you may have noticed that she’s the young, exciting candidate.

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According to The New York Times (23 August), The Justice Department “filed an antitrust lawsuit on Friday against the real estate software company RealPage, alleging its software enabled landlords to collude to raise rents across the United States.” I am not an expert in law or anti-trust, but there is another (systemic risk management) angle to this story that the NYT missed, and worth spelling out.

Here’s how the Times summarizes the case:

RealPage’s software, YieldStar, gathers confidential real estate information and is at the heart of the government’s concerns. Landlords, who pay to use the software, share information about rents and occupancy rates that is otherwise confidential. Based on that data, an algorithm generates suggestions for what landlords should charge renters, and those figures are often higher than they would be in a competitive market, according to allegations in the legal complaint. By Danielle Kaye, Lauren Hirsch and David McCabe

There’s more detail in a piece (here) the Times did earlier in the year (July 19, 2024) written by Danielle Kaye. And for a lot more background see this piece in Propublica (here, October 15, 2022). One wonders why the Times waited so long until there was government prosecution to report on this topic.

Before I get to my interest in this story, the coverage highlights two important political angles: (i) this may be a contributing cause to rent inflation because the software allows landlords, which are fairly large companies that use the software, to collude; (ii) there is an interesting issue how this case fits under existing anti-trust law because the collision is kind of indirect mediated, in part, tacitly through a third party. The company itself brags they have “purposely built” their platform “to be legally compliant.” I leave the first issue to economists and the second to lawyers.

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