Experimentation

I'm one of the last of the oldline blogluddists who thinks that the decline of civility and decency the blogosphere can be traced to two events, one of which I won't tell you but one of which was the creation of comments sections. In particular, I remember thinking that the opening of comments at Kevin Drum's then-site, CalPundit, changed things rather a lot. Almost every high-traffic site I've been reading since before the introduction of comments seems to me to have suffered on net from the development, except for Crooked Timber.

However:
1) This is a very low-traffic site, compared with my former digs chez Volokh or chez TNR. I'ts far below the traffic of sites with comments sections I really enjoy-- i.e. John and Belle, or PTN.

2) I'm going to be hosting a blogevent in the near future that will require comments, and I figured that I ought to start figuring out how to accommodate a comments section before rather than during that event.

So I'll be opening comments around here, at least temporarily. I hereby incorporate by reference Brad DeLong's comments policy, pending the evolution of relevant local norms. I don't intend to moderate in advance a la Leiter.

So, all twenty of my loyal readers: talk away!

Update:

So much for low traffic! Welcome to Kevin Drum's reader's. I invite you to stick around and read a post that's actually about something (e.g.).

And, NB: People generally don't, or shouldn't refer to themselves as luddites about some modern technology without making fun of themselves, and I was certainly trying to do that. It's a silly view that says technology c. 2002-2003 was just right, and that the years since have been a fall from grace. It is true that my experience of blogging and reading blogs came to feel different after comments sections opened, and obviously I've made a deliberate decision to leave comments off until now-- but I'd still ask you not to take my opening paragraph above too seriously. (By the way, saying "one of which I won't tell you" was meant to be more honest than just attributing the whole change to comments sections. I know it looks like I'm trying to be coy or cute but that wasn't the idea.)

Kevin quite reasonably says, "This deserves explication. Does Jacob think that opening a comment section changed my actual blogging? Or did the blogging remain the same but the mere existence of raucous commenters changed things? If the latter, why not just ignore the comments? If the former, how?"

Unfortunately I can't quite disentangle the two. This is a matter of impressionistic memory of events 5-6 years past, and many things change at the same time. With or without comments Kevin's one of the blogosphere's best on a number of dimensions, and I certainly don't mean that he became uncivil-- he continues to stand out for his civility and graciousness. So maybe it's just that I found one of my favorite blogs marred by the raucousness below the posts, that I couldn't quite discipline myself to look away from. And CalPundit probably stands out in my memory partly because the contrast between Kevin's posts and the raucousness below them was so dramatic; if I didn't look away, it meant that my experience of reading the blog changed very suddenly. I think that's mostly where this impression in my memory comes from.

But I also think that comments sections have encouraged intra-blog rather than inter-blog conversations.

As a lecturer, I'm at least somewhat responsive to my audience and their reactions. I do notice when the students' eyes are glazing over, when they seem alert, what makes them ask questions, what puts them to sleep. I don't respond to that in a Pavlovian way-- that way lies the professor-as-standup-comic, and I'm pretty sure that my vocation doesn't lie in that direction even if I wanted to try it. But I do respond, consciously and unconsciously-- speaking to a live audience is interactive in a way that writing an article for future publication is not. I'm sure that makes me a better teacher than if I ignored my audience-- but it also makes my lectures a little bit more homogenous, and a little bit more geared to what I think my students already find interesting or congenial.

Blogging's interactive, too. If nothing else, I suspect that choice of blogging topics gets influenced by the enthusiasm for some topics shown by one's commentators, when comments sections are on. That by itself makes the medium a little bit less idiosyncratically personal; it encourages blogging about hot topics over blogging about one's cat (to take an old CalPundit example)-- whereas as a reader I enjoy the idiosyncratically personal voices.

But there's probably something beyond even that. Comments crowds tend to be more aligned with the blog-author than do other blog-writers. And I think that conversations among blog authors across ideological lines started to fall off after comments sections came into being. Opportunity costs of time kick in-- most blog-authors do read their own comments sections, and that surely changes the overall ideological balance of who they're spending time online reading. The objections one starts to notice to one's own position come from one's loyal readers-- so a center-left blogger will start to encounter primarily objections from the left, and vice-versa. That has an effect of its own. At least for some bloggers, the effect is a predictable echo-chamber one, and the positions become more extreme.

One other thing about all this:

2002-03 of course had more going on in it than blogstuff. I do think that, as the war in Iraq became more likely, and then happened, politics in general became somewhat more polarized and nastier in the US, certainly than it had been for a while after 9/11.

One thing I worry about in my memory is... well, for comparison I think about Andrew Sullivan and Paul Krugman. Sullivan famously called Krugman as a "shrill" critic of Bush, back in the days when Sullivan was broadly supportive of Bush. Now that pretty much everything Krugman said about Bush has proven an understatement, and now that Sullivan is fully on board as a critic, I wonder how he remembers Krugman c. 2000-2003? My guess is that he still remembers them as shrill. Krugman was, from Sullivan's perspective, prematurely anti-Bush-- and like the premature anti-Fascists of 1939 and 1940, those who were prematurely anti-Bush tend not to get much love from the latecomers. (I think that Brad DeLong's long-running "order of the shrill" feature was actually a pretty important device-- it reminded the latecomers that they were coming around to views Krugman had long since put forward, and views that they had once found irritating in him.)

From my perspective as I lived it, some of the left blogosphere was prematurely anti-war. What that means is: they were right and I was wrong. They saw important things before I did. But it's very difficult to change the emotional valence of memory. It's likely that some of my memory is colored by that-- I found off-putting some commentary that was right, but that I didn't agree with then. I don't think that that directly plays very much into my wariness about comments sections, but that's the sort of thing it would be hard to know for sure about oneself. It probably does play into my overall memory of a change in blogspheric tone in that era.

For what it's worth, I don't think that I'm the only one who was struck by Kevin's comments section in the old days; in the post linked to above, Brad DeLong relies on "Kevin Drum's comments section" as a shorthand for something to be avoided: "trolls must be squashed quickly, or the space turns into... Kevin Drum's comment section." I see that Kevin's got moderators these days, and that it makes a difference, but, again, memories are hard to shake.

Multimedia

The "Liberals and Libertarians: Common Ground or Separate Agendas?" panel at Princeton last month is now available in video at the WWS website (scroll down to October 23) or in free audio on iTunes (search for liberals libertarians, or for one or more of the participants-- Paul Starr, John Tomasi, Brink Lindsey, Will Wilkinson, Douglas Massey, Chris Hayes, me.) Yes, I now exist in iTunes-- very exciting, I know.

An introduction to referral logs

Dear students,

If you're going to run a google search on an assigned paper topic, which mentions a bunch of readings from your class, don't be shocked if the search at some point directs you toward the professor who thought up the topic in the first place. But following that link leaves a digital trail that your professor can see. Nothing wrong with following the links, of course; it's good to look for ideas! But I just thought you should know.

JTL

When the right hand doesn't know what the headline-writer is doing

Poorly-phrased NYT article:

President-elect Barack Obama has signaled that he will pursue a far more ambitious plan of spending and tax cuts than anything he outlined on the campaign trail — a plan "big enough to deal with the huge problem we face,” a top adviser said Sunday — setting the tone for a recovery effort that could absorb and define much of his term.

Even-more-badly-phrased headline: "Obama Aides Signal Deeper Cuts in Taxes and Spending."

NB: The article's about the need for a larger stimulus package than anticipated-- that is, more tax cuts and more spending.

"more ambitious plan of spending and tax cuts" misleadingly suggests that spending will be cut; better to write "plan of spending increases and tax cuts" or "plan of tax cuts and spending."

"Deeper Cuts in Taxes and Spending" is even worse; it unambiguously means that spending will be cut, and cut more than had been anticipated, which is the reverse of what's going on.

Sigh.

Update: fixed now.

That's a shame.

I understand perfectly well that the business model no longer makes a lick of sense and that there are probably better uses for the space these days, but I'm still nostalgically sorry to see the end of Harvard Square's Out of Town News. When I was in Cambridge I'd sometimes still buy some newspaper or magazine from some far-distant point, just 'cuz. Undoubtedly I wouldn't been able to find it online, but equally undoubtedly I wouldn't have happened upon it. I liked browsing the headlines of the world.

Montreal's book and magazine retailers seem to operate in an alternate universe in which the internet was never invented. I don't understand how a place like the Renaud-Bray around the corner from me can support what's probably 750 square feet of retail space on the ground floor on the main street of a major commercial district just for magazines-- and how many of the magazines are French reviews of history of the human sciences or philosophy. Little hole-in-the-wall used bookstores abound-- and the one across Mont-Royal from my house has a much larger philosophy section than does the McGill Bookstore. It's a puzzlement, and almost-certainly a temporary anomaly, but I'll enjoy it while I've got it.

Of related interest, I loved this NYT Magazine articleon the challenge to improve Netflix' recommendation software. (Related because of the switch from corner video stores where you might plausibly browse and find new things to an online system with many more choices that will nonetheless be hidden from you unless there's good recommendation software.) I love the list of movies that are proving impossible to predict or correlate: especially Napoleon Dynamite but also “I Heart Huckabees,” “Lost in Translation,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou,” “Kill Bill: Volume 1” and “Sideways.” Two cheers for unpredictability.

Well, yes and no.

According to the Chronicle, "Bob Jones U. Apologizes for Past Racist Policies." The university has issued this statement:

At Bob Jones University, Scripture is our final authority for faith and practice and it is our intent to have it govern all of our policies. It teaches that God created the human race as one race. History, reality and Scripture affirm that in that act of creation was the potential for great diversity, manifested today by the remarkable racial and cultural diversity of humanity. Scripture also teaches that this beautiful, God-caused and sustained diversity is divinely intended to incline mankind to seek the Lord and depend on Him for salvation from sin (Acts 17:24–28).

The true unity of humanity is found only through faith in Christ alone for salvation from sin—in contrast to the superficial unity found in humanistic philosophies or political points of view. For those made new in Christ, all sinful social, cultural and racial barriers are erased (Colossians 3:11), allowing the beauty of redeemed human unity in diversity to be demonstrated through the Church.

The Christian is set free by Christ’s redeeming grace to love God fully and to love his neighbor as himself, regardless of his neighbor’s race or culture. As believers, we demonstrate our love for others first by presenting Christ our Great Savior to every person, irrespective of race, culture, or national origin. This we do in obedience to Christ’s final command to proclaim the Gospel to all men (Matthew 28:19–20). As believers we are also committed to demonstrating the love of Christ daily in our relationships with others, disregarding the economic, cultural and racial divisions invented by sinful humanity (Luke 10:25–37; James 2:1–13).

Bob Jones University has existed since 1927 as a private Christian institution of higher learning for the purpose of helping young men and women cultivate a biblical worldview, represent Christ and His Gospel to others, and glorify God in every dimension of life.

BJU’s history has been chiefly characterized by striving to achieve those goals; but like any human institution, we have failures as well. For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture. Consequently, for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures. We conformed to the culture rather than provide a clear Christian counterpoint to it.

In so doing, we failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves. For these failures we are profoundly sorry. Though no known antagonism toward minorities or expressions of racism on a personal level have ever been tolerated on our campus, we allowed institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful.

On national television in March 2000, Bob Jones III, who was the university’s president until 2005, stated that BJU was wrong in not admitting African-American students before 1971, which sadly was a common practice of both public and private universities in the years prior to that time. On the same program, he announced the lifting of the University’s policy against interracial dating.

Emphasis added.

As statements of repentance go, this is... not the greatest.

Bob Jones University didn't admit blacks until 1971-- seven years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and a generation after Brown v. Board. For several years thereafter it admitted only married black students. Once unmarrarried blacks were admitted, it promulgated a strict ban on interracial dating as well as on the advocacy of interracial dating; these policies endured until 2000, 33 years after Loving v Virginia, which itself, after all, represented a forced incorporation of those southern outlier states that still forbade interracial marriage into a then-already-existing national consensus against such bans. In other words, the ban on interracial dating was put in place only after the surrounding culture had rejected such rules as racist. And the university famously fought all the way to the Supreme Court in the 1980s to preserve its tax exemption in the face of an IRS revocation due to its racist policies. It lost the legal fight, paid a million dollars in back taxes, and kept the policies. Now, 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status for educational institutions in the U.S. is mighty easy to come by. To have it stripped away-- whatever the constitutional merits-- is a pretty clear sign that you're way outside the boundaries of acceptable opinion or behavior in the American political culture.

In short, Bob Jones University did not passively float along on the tide of American racism, and it was not racist only in its "early stages." It was worse on racial questions, longer, than any other university in the country. And it was actively, determinedly, passionately worse. The University did not conform itself to a surrounding ethos. It fought to resist changes to that ethos; it fought hard, at serious institutional cost.

Now, resisting the surrounding culture is something one expects from religiously dissident institutions. Of course a fundamentalist Christian university views itself as being at odds with the surrounding world-- for better and for worse. Passive conformity is no great virtue, and fighting hard for one's beliefs is admirable. But if it turns out that your beliefs were grotesquely, abominably wrong, then it's cowardice to suddenly plead passive conformity. That's a vice of which Bob Jones University has never been guilty-- and the lie that it has been strips its supposed apology of any moral force.

I suspect that someone at BJU really thinks this was a good faith effort to come to terms with the past. It's not. It's a pretend-apology, unworthy of the name, one that deflects all blame to the outside world. Shame on the Chronicle for falling for the pretense.

Settling Moral Accounts: Law, Politics and Morality

Montreal Political Theory Workshop

Settling Moral Accounts: Law, Politics and Morality

0930-1630 hours

Friday 5 December 2008

Room 16, Old Chancellor Day Hall
3644 Peel Street

McGill University

This workshop is funded by the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Philosophie Politique (GRIPP), and co-hosted by the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism.

Panel I: 0930 – 1230 hrs.

Settling Moral Accounts: Conceptual Issues

Chair: Jacob Levy (Political Science, McGill)

Farid Abdel-Nour (Political Science, San Diego State University), “Citizen Responsibility in Democratic States”

Abstract:

Citizens of democratic states are implicated morally when their state’s functionaries bring about bad outcomes on either the domestic or the global political stage. In such states, citizens have at least the right to vote in competitive elections and the right to intervene in public political debates that can potentially alter the available electoral options. At a minimum, elections usually result in the selection of legislators and other decision-making personnel who in turn, through the law or otherwise, are connected to political outcomes. For example, significant aspects of foreign as well as domestic policy are determined by the results of elections. Thus the role that citizens play in elections connects them morally to those political outcomes that are largely determined by the results. Faced with the right to vote, citizens can in most contexts choose whether to vote. And if they do they can choose among limited existing options of how to vote. In this paper I differentiate between three main burdens of political responsibility that citizens bear as a result of this minimal right. There is a burden they bear simply by virtue of participating in elections, no matter how they do so. For by participating, they implicitly agree to own the results, even if with their vote they opposed them. How citizens participate in elections involves another layer of responsibility. For example, those who with their vote further a particular result, bear an additional burden for bad outcomes associated with it. As to those who fail to participate they are not entirely off the hook. Depending on the specificity of the situation, they may end up bearing responsibility for failing to do their part to prevent a bad outcome. Citizenship in democratic societies, even in its most minimal form is a burdensome political role in which ordinary individuals are thrust. It involves a responsibility that they cannot shake off, and serves to make them complicit in the outcomes of state actions on the domestic as well a global political stage.

Gaëlle Fiasse (Philosophy and Religious Studies, McGill), “Should I Merely Excuse the Ignorant but Forgive the Wicked?”

Abstract:

In the debates on forgiveness, contemporary philosophers place too much emphasis on the distinction between forgiving and excusing. Furthermore, they do not make enough effort to explicate the notion of actions done out of ignorance. In this vein, Jankélévitch asserts that “we forgive the wicked but excuse the ignorant”. Derrida goes on to arrive at the paradox that the more an action is intentionally wicked, the more it calls for forgiveness. To counter both claims, I suggest looking at the question of forgiveness, both by 1) revisiting the degrees of evil in moral action within the Aristotelian framework of voluntary and involuntary action, and by 2) making a comparison between love and forgiveness. I show in which sense unintentional actions are not necessarily outside of the field of forgiveness, and why it is false to consider that the worst evil action calls more towards forgiveness than other kinds of wrongdoing. Such a view neglects the distinction between the agent and his action in the process of forgiveness, the role of regret, and the fact that ignorance of what is morally wrong can actually constitute an extreme form of wrongdoing. I thus revisit the “intellectualist” claim that puts too much emphasis on knowledge versus ignorance, while neglecting the role of passions, and, more importantly, the fact that reason itself can have a corrupt goal. Insisting on excusing the ignorant could lead to neglecting the responsibility of wrongdoers who ignore the fact that what they do is bad. Limiting forgiveness to intentional wrongdoing underestimates the many other actions and feelings that might call for forgiveness.

Catherine Lu (Political Science, McGill), “Accounting for Political Catastrophe”

Abstract:

What is involved in accounting for political catastrophes, including genocide, interstate and civil war, and oppression? One way to think about this question is to focus on the task of settling moral accounts through tribunals, truth commissions or other state-sponsored institutional mechanisms. Such moral accountings focus on the judgement of individual, institutional and social responsibility for political catastrophe. Yet, in contexts of political conflict that have culminated in catastrophe, the authority to judge and settle moral accounts is highly controversial. Typically, the question of authority to settle moral accounts is tied to the question of authority to punish. Judgements about responsibility and punishment, however, do not exhaust the task of accounting for political catastrophe. Recognizing a more pluralistic notion of moral accounting for political catastrophes, including other forms of public narrative and self-reflection, opens room for a pluralistic view of the agents who can engage in the task of accounting for political catastrophes. One implication of a pluralistic view of moral accountants and accountings is that contestations about authority to settle moral accounts are mitigated by an acknowledgement that any accounting for political catastrophe – including judicial judgements – are incomplete, subject to contestation and revision, and will likely remain unsettled. The quest to settle moral accounts once and for all may in fact turn out to be excessively authoritarian and ahistorical, undemocratic or inequitable, and morally as well as politically counterproductive.

Discussant:

Christiane Wilke (Law, Carleton)

Lunch Break 1230-1415 hrs.

Panel II: 1415 – 1630 hrs.

Responsibility for Crimes Against Humanity and International Law

Chair: Catherine Lu (Political Science, McGill)

Kirsten J. Fisher (Political Science, McGill), ‘Individual Responsibility in Collectively Committed Atrocity’

Abstract:
In its aim to answer the question, ‘for what can individual contributors to collectively committed atrocity be held criminally accountable?’, this paper suggests new categories of international charges. It briefly examines what individual responsibility for collective wrongs can mean. Then, in defining necessary distinctions between acts of international criminal behaviour, it recommends the need for new categories of charges. This paper argues that while leaders (planners, instigators, commanders) possess the greatest amount of criminal responsibility, the criminal actions of other perpetrators are both aggravated and mitigated by the fact that they contribute to the greater atrocity. Any reasonable conception of international crime must reflect that contributing actions (murder, rape, etc) of “lesser” offenders require their own distinct category of crime which signifies the mitigating and aggravating circumstances surrounding them. This paper also argues that although leaders must be held responsible for the actions they plan, set in motion and command, the generally accepted policy of command responsibility, by which leaders can be held legally responsible for genocide or crimes against humanity for the actions of their subordinates, risks unfair labeling.

Christiane Wilke (Law, Carleton University), ‘Between Civilization and Humanity:

Visions of Law and Community in the Nuremberg Trial of the Judges’

Abstract:

The 1947 Nuremberg Trial of Nazi Judges is one of the rare occasions in which judges sat in judgment on other (former) judges. Nazi judges and judicial administrators were accused and ultimately convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Yet how did the Nuremberg Court arrive at its judgment? This paper analyzes the function of two overlapping markers in the judgment: “civilization” and “humanity”. The Nuremberg judgments, I argue, are based on the 19th century framework that conceived of international law as tied to a Eurocentric “standard of civilization”. The Nuremberg Court addresses the Nazi judges not simply as human beings but as member of the judiciary of a formerly “civilized” country that committed “barbarous” atrocities. In this imaginary, “law” and “civilization” are seen as mutually constitutive. The paper inquires into the consequences of this mode of thinking. For example, how does the Nuremberg Court construct the difference between its own mode of judgment and the practices of the accused Nazi judges? How does the Court justify the use of novel legal concepts such as “crimes against humanity”? And what is gained and lost in the Court’s insistence on describing Nazi state violence as “lawless” as opposed to organized through law and bureaucracy? These questions have implications for contemporary transitional justice scholarship that too often identifies the task of moving away from state repression with the “return” of the rule of law.

Discussant:

René Provost (Law, McGill)

Book launch: For Kin or Country: Xenophobia, Nationalism and War

Wednesday, November 19, 5-7 pm, McGill Bookstore: Book launch for Stephen Saideman and R. William Ayres, For Kin or Country: Xenophobia, Nationalism and War, Columbia University Press, 2008.

Machiavelli and Machiavellism

MACHIAVELLI AND MACHIAVELLISM: AN ONGOING AFFAIR:
POLITICAL REALISM VERSUS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Dr Cesare Cuttica
Luigi Einaudi Foundation, Turin

Thursday, November 13 2008
2:30 p.m.
Arts Building, room 160

Dr.Cesare Cuttica obtained his first degree in Philosophy at the University of Pavia (Italy) and his MA and PhD in History at the European University Institute (Florence) in 2007. He has since been an Associate Tutor at the University of Sussex in Great Britain and Research Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC.

Dr. Cuttica is now doing postdoctoral work at the University of Pittsburgh in the History Department and at the European Union Centre of Excellence with a grant provided by the Luigi Einaudi Foundation (Turin).

The lectures in this series have also been made possible through the generosity of the Italian Cultural Institute and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rome.

Charles Taylor inaugure un nouveau forum interuniversitaire

I missed this when it came out, but the news office at U de Montreal did a nice write-up of the inaugural GRIPP lecture given by Charles Taylor in September.

International Political Economy opening, McGill University

International Relations

The Department of Political Science invites applications for a tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level in the area of International Relations, with a specialization in international political economy, broadly understood. The Department seeks applicants whose research is theoretically and empirically informed, who possess strong training in qualitative and/or quantitative and/or formal methods, and who can teach effectively at the undergraduate and graduate levels. An applicant’s record of performance must provide evidence of outstanding research potential. Candidates should have already completed the PhD or be very near completion. Applications should include a curriculum vitae, graduate transcript, three letters of reference, a sample of written work and materials pertinent to teaching skills. The position start date is August 1, 2009. Review of applications will begin in January 2009 and will continue until the position is filled. For more information about the Department and University, visit our web site at www.mcgill.ca/politicalscience/.

PLEASE FORWARD SUPPORTING MATERIALS TO:

Professor Richard Schultz
James McGill Professor and Chair
Department of Political Science
McGill University
855 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2T7

All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply; however, in accordance with Canadian immigration requirements, priority will be given to Canadian citizens and permanent residents of Canada. McGill University is committed to equity in employment and diversity. It welcomes applications from indigenous peoples, visible minorities, ethnic minorities, persons with disabilities, women, persons of minority sexual orientations and gender identities and others who may contribute to further diversification.

Private Law Models for Public Law Concepts

How did I miss this over the summer? An excellent article on a number of intersecting important topics.

Daniel Lee, "Private Law Models for Public Law Concepts: The Roman Law Theory of Dominium in the Monarchomach Doctrine of Popular Sovereignty," The Review of Politics (2008), 70:370-399

The essay traces the juridical origins of the modern doctrine of popular sovereignty as developed by the monarchomach jurists of the late sixteenth century. Particularly, the use of doctrines from the Roman law of property explains the sovereign right of the people to resist and reconstitute the commonwealth. Reviving the civilian concept of dominium during the French Wars of Religion and dynastic royal politics, these radical jurists articulated the claim that the people, not kings, have property rights over the commonwealth. By conceptualizing the people corporately as property-owners in this way, they were able to draw on legal arguments from Roman law to justify popular resistance as an assertion of a corporate property right. In doing so, the monarchomachs expressed an elaborate theory of state and sovereignty within the grammar of the Roman private law.

Public Intellectual 2.0

A new essay by Dan Drezner at the Chronicle on social scientists, bloggers, and declinist narratives about public intellectuals.

Hither and yon, warm weather edition: two talks at UCLA

Thursday, November 13, 7 pm, public lecture in 2232 School of Public Affairs: "Freedom and Federalism." More information here.

Friday, November 14, noon, workshop in School of Public Affairs Building room 5391 (Faculty Lounge): "Contra politanism: against the moral teleology of political forms." (Please e-mail in advance for a copy of the paper.)

Senior fellowship at CREUM

Thursday, 6 November 2008 in Fellowships, Notices by Martin Blanchard | No comments

The University of Montreal’s Centre de recherche en éthique (CREUM) is proud to announce its senior fellowship grant. We are inviting applications of professor-researchers for residential fellowships which can vary in length according to individual circumstances. Fellowships up to 40,000 $ will be awarded for the academic year 2009-2010.

CREUM’s mission is to contribute to interdisciplinary research and graduate training in the areas of fundamental and applied ethics.

We encourage applications from researchers working in the principal research domains of CRÉUM : fundamental ethics, ethics and politics, ethics and health, ethics and economy, ethics and the environment. We also accept applications from different domains, inasmuch as their research has a direct link with ethics.

The University of Montreal is a francophone institution. Applicants are expected to have at least a working knowledge of French.

The CREUM will offer to its senior fellow :

- A research grant up to 40 000 $ ;
- An individual office ;
- Access to the services of the University of Montreal (libraries, sports center, etc.) ;
- Assistance for material organisation of the stay.

In return, the fellow will be expected :

- To pursue the research project submitted in their application ;
- To participate in the Center’s activities (conferences, seminars, lectures) ;
- To present their work in progress in the context of Center’s seminars and workshops.

Applications will be judged according :

- To the significance of their proposed research and its relevance to CREUM’s mission ;
- To the quality of candidates’ previous research and their ability to benefit from the activities of the Center.
Applicants must submit all of the following to the CREUM by December 31, 2008 :

- A curriculum vitae ;
- One scholarly paper or publication written in the course of the last three years ;
- A statement (1 500 words or less) describing the proposed research project ;
- Two letters of reference (sent directly to the Center before the deadline) ;

Postmark deadline is December 31, 2008. Send applications to :

Daniel M. Weinstock, director
Centre de recherche en éthique (CREUM)
University of Montreal
C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-Ville
Montreal (Quebec)
Canada H3C 3J7

Quote of the day, special 1L edition

"Oh, I don't believe in hypothetical situations, Mr Donaghy. That's like lying to your brain." Kenneth, 30 Rock, November 6 2008.

Remember, remember...

when, a year ago, Ron Paul raised a whole lotta money on Guy Fawkes Day? It's forever ago in political time, and hard to remember that it seemed particularly interesting interesting. But my post about Ron Paul, Guy Fawkes, and V for Vendetta was one of the most-read things I've ever written, oddly enough. And I still think that the migration from the defense of the British state through Alan Moore's anti-Thatcherism to Ron Paul, the fact that a traditional British celebration of the defeat of the enemies of the state could end up animating an agenda of radical anti-statism, is one of the stranger things I've ever seen in political symbolism. So, for this year's Guy Fawkes Day, a link to look backward at.

Do Libertarians Fit in a Liberal World?

Todd Seavey has written an article for Reason about the liberalism and libertarianism conference at Princeton a coupleof weeks ago.

The challenge is structuring inter-faith dialogue: Indonesia in comparative perspective

Today at McGill: The challenge is structuring inter-faith dialogue: Indonesia in comparative perspective

Thursday, 6 November 2008
9:00 am ― 2:00 pm
Thomson House
Ballroom
3650 McTavish Street

Co-sponsored by the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia; Department of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia, Ministry of Religious Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia; McGill University’s IAIN Indonesia Social Equity Project and the Centre for Developing-Area Studies.

9:00 am. – Introduction: Professor Phil Buckley (McGill University, IISEP);

-Welcome from McGill University: Prof. Christopher Manfredi, Dean, Faculty of Arts
-Opening comments: His Excellency Djoko Hardono, the Ambassador of the Republic of Indonesia to Canada

-Opening comments: Bpk Andri Hadi, Director-General for Information and Public Diplomacy, Department of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Indonesia

9:30: Framing the question of Inter-faith dialogue
Prof Patrice Brodeur, Canada Research Chair on Islam, Pluralism, and Globalization at the Faculty of Theology and the Science of Religions, University of Montreal
Professor Phil Oxhorn (CDAS, McGill University)

10:20-12:00 Panel 1 (Moderator: Professor Jamil Ragep, McGill University)

1. Prof. Franz Magnis Suseno: Pluralism and Relations Between Religions: The Focus on Indonesia (25 minutes)

2. Prof Wayan Wita : Some Concepts of Local Genius and Culture for Universal Interfaith, Hinduism Perspectives (25 minutes)

Responses: Professor Davesh Soneji; Professor Jacob Levy

12:20-2:00: Panel II (Moderator: Professor Erik Kuhonta, McGill University)
1. Prof. Dr. Bahtiar Effendy: “Interfaith Dialogue: The Indonesian Perspective.”
2. Dr. Arif Zamhari Rohman PhD

Respondents: Professor Ellen Aitken; Mr. Jaime F. Opazo Sáez

2:00pm: Closing remarks

Now online

The special issue of Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy devoted to a symposium on David Miller's National Responsibility and Global Justice, including my National and statist responsibility,among many other pieces. (Institutional subscriptions likely necessary.)

Readings for the day after

Fabio Rojas, "why i admire the obama i know and fear for the obama that is to come"

Franklin Foer, "Hail to the chief, any chief"

Todd Seavey, "Time for Obama Honeymoon to End" (NB: in parliamentary procedure, the time to reconsider something that's just happened isn't until a member of the previous majority says so!)

David Bernstein, "The end of white supremacy"

Mike Potemra at the Corner, "The View From Harlem, worth quoting:

Why was I, a John McCain voter, there [at the Obama celebration in Harlem]? A bit of personal history. I was born in 1964, and on the day I was born the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Prince Edward County in Virginia had to reopen its public schools. The county had closed the schools because they decided it was better to have no public schools at all than to have to admit black kids into them. Here we are, just 44 years later, with an African-American president, a president elected with the electoral votes of that very same Commonwealth of Virginia.

I voted for John McCain because I admire him immensely as a person, and agree with him on many more issues than I do with Senator Obama. And I ask a rhetorical question: Can we McCain voters, without embarrassment, shed a tear of patriotic joy about the historic significance of what just happened? And I offer a short, rhetorical answer.

Yes, we can.

[Update:] Will Wilkinson, "One night of romance"

Scattered thoughts on the day after:

I keep seeing the phrase "record turnout" thrown around. It's not true. I don't think turnout is an end in itself, and don't think that lower turnout signals an unhealthier democracy. But those who disagree shouldn't then take it on faith that an inspirational candidate automatically translated into higher turnout. It appears that turnout will be lower both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the electorate than in 2004. McCain got about 7 million fewer votes than Bush; Obama got about 3 million more than Kerry. The disspiritedness and disillusionment of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents mattered, a lot. A Republican base, faced with the catastrophic failure of a presidency they had rooted for and the nomination of a candidate they'd always disliked, stayed home-- not in droves but not in trickles either. [Update: This Politico story is claiming turnout of 130 million, but I don't see how to square that with any other reported numbers.]

Ted Stevens is winning? That's repulsive. And it's a very bad omen for the rebuilding of a sane, honest, principled Republican Party that a smart decent guy like John Sununu got thumped while Ted Stevens got reelected. More broadly, the extinction of New England Republicanism seems to me a bad thing-- the GOP that is the regional party of the resentful South is a particularly unattractive opposition party. On the other hand, it's a wonderful thing that (apparently) three states of the Confederacy voted for Obama.

Yay for the marijuana referenda, boo for the marriage referenda-- and I really hope that California Prop 8 isn't construed retroactively so as to annul existing marriages.

The Bob Barr campaign was a mess, and by any reasonable measure the enterprise of trying to advance libertarian ideas with third-party presidential candidates seems overdue for retirement. (The teenage LP activist who still lives in my memory is very angry at me for writing that sentence.) But I can't help it-- I'm pleased to see Barr's vote exceed the two-party gap in an important state that then tilted Democratic, North Carolina. (And southern Libertarians are traditionally more likely to be Republican voters otherwise, so it's very plausible that Barr tipped the state.) That does at least send a tiny little but audible signal to the Republicans that the big-spending, trade-undermining, civil-liberties-attacking path of the Bush years cost them some small-government voters who they can't take for granted.

Twenty years ago I hadn't heard of Barack Obama, so I don't have twenty years worth of belief that he could never be president to overcome. Twenty years ago I very much had heard of Joe Biden, and watching the scene in Grant Park on TV my brain kept skipping a beat at seeing him up there. I have twenty years worth of accumulated belief that he was never rising above his Senate seat, and changing that belief is taking some work.

While I think Obama will be more purely his own man and less the product of competing pressure groups on his staff than any president since, well, let's say LBJ, I'm still very happy to hear of the Rahm Emanuel invitation. It's good news for the fight to save NAFTA from Obama's Ohio primary rhetoric, since Emanuel was one of the champions of NAFTA ratification in 1993.

I hear a lot of commentary about Obama seeming subdued last night, all of it at least mildly negative but noting that it's understandable less than 24 hours after the death of his grandmother. I have to say that I liked it; I like it when he's serious and sober and professorial, which is a lot of the time. (I didn't understand "professorial" being used as a term of abuse after the third debate.) Though it's hard to rank Obama and Bill Clinton as political orators, I enjoy listening to Obama more, in large part because of his calm seriousness. When Clinton feels someone's pain, he increases mine. His smile and warmth can occasionally be infectious but often strike me as flippant or self-satisfied. I loved Clinton's 2004 convention address, but always hated watching his State of the Union talks and eventually just quit doing so; and in presidential debates he always left me feeling like I was being lied to even when I wasn't. (All of this is totally compatible with the praise I sometimes heap on the Clinton presidency, the Clinton years, and the Clinton brand of New Democratic politics, by the way.) The happiness of the sneaky kid who's getting away with something never seemed far from him-- except when he exploded in anger at not getting away with something. The contrast between Clinton's heat and Obama's cool is already a commonplace, but it's true, and I'm much more at ease with Obama's style.

Moreover, to be sober about the duties and responsibilities that are now his seems entirely in order.

Tarr, "Subnationalism and Constitutional Space," Friday November 7 at McGill

Friday, November 7, 12-2 pm, G. Alan Tarr will present a paper, "Federalism and Subnational Constitutional Space" in the Gold Room at McGill's Faculty Club. Responses will be provided by Professor Filippo Sabetti and by Erin Crandall, both of McGill Political Science, prior to a general discussion.

Alan Tarr is the foremost scholar of constitutionalism in American states. He is the Director of the Center for State Constitutional Studies, and Chair of the Department of Political Science, Rutgers University, Camden. He is the author of Understanding State Constitutions (Princeton) and the editor of numerous volumes on state constitutions and constitutional politics. This year he is Fulbright Visiting Chair in Public Policy, Governance and Public Administration
at the University of Ottawa, where he is studying subfederal constitutionalism in comparative perspective.

If you are interested in attending, please e-mail me at jtlevy-at-gmail.com for the paper.

I hope that I'm the first...

to offer the claim that the new Starbucks offer merges the theory of instrumentally rational voting and the theory of expressovist voting.

Elsewhere on election day

My friend Todd Seavey has decided to devote his blog this week to denunciations, in his inimitable style, of quisling Obamatarians and liberaltarians like, well, me.

And another college friend (and my onetime newsroom boss) Naomi Camilleri wrote up a thoughtful post on "Why don't we vote?" In the comments thread there I speak up for the nonvoter.

I am not an economist...

and Greg Mankiw is.

And yet, I'm pretty sure about this bit.

Mankiw writes:

On a regular basis, I am offered opportunities to make some extra money. It could be giving a talk, writing an article, editing a journal, and so on. What incentive is there to put forward that extra work effort?

To a large extent, the beneficiaries of that extra effort are my kids. My lifestyle is, as a first approximation, invariant to my income. But if I make an extra few dollars today, I will leave more to my kids when I move on. I won't leave them enough so they can lead lives of leisure, but perhaps I will leave them enough so they won't have to struggle too much to afford a downpayment on their houses or to send their own kids to college.[...]

Let's suppose Greg Mankiw takes on an incremental job today and earns a dollar. How much, as a result, will he leave his kids in T years?

The answer depends on four tax rates. First, I pay the combined income and payroll tax on the dollar earned. Second, I pay the corporate tax rate while the money is invested in a firm. Third, I pay the dividend and capital gains rate as I receive that return. And fourth, I pay the estate tax when I leave what has accumulated to my kids.

Let t1 be the combined income and payroll tax rate, t2 be the corporate tax rate, t3 be the dividend and capital gains tax rate, and t4 be the estate tax rate. And let r be the before-tax rate of return on corporate capital. Then one dollar I earn today will yield my kids:

(1-t1){[1+r(1-t2)(1-t3)]^T}(1-t4).

Mankiw goes on to analyze the different long-term returns ostensibly generated by the tax plans of Obama and McCain.

Let's look at something again:

"On a regular basis, I am offered opportunities to make some extra money. It could be giving a talk, writing an article, editing a journal, and so on. [...] Let t1 be the combined income and payroll tax rate[...]"

Obama is proposing a significant hike in the payroll tax on people who earn more than $250,000, and it's fair to note that this would elevate top marginal tax rates considerably above the Clinton-era rates that people often refer to Obama as reinstating. It's also fair to note that it makes Social Security much more redistributive (it's always been somewhat redistributive) and much less like the insurance or pension plan the average voter perceives it to be. Indeed it makes Social Security so much more redistributive that we may see a test of a longstanding article of faith among left-leaning opponents of means-testing: that Social Security that taxed some in order to give to others would be politically vulnerable, and that keeping the program universal with payouts tied fairly closely to "contributions" was a necessary part of the political strategy of keeping the program untouchable and immortal.

But nothing in Obama's plan involves changing the fact that the payroll tax is a payroll tax, that is, a tax on wages and salaries. The honorarium Mankiw receives for giving a talk or writing a commissioned article, the royalties he receives for writing a book-- these things aren't subject to the payroll tax. The payroll tax is paid on the check he receives every month from Harvard, and not on those other bits and pieces.

Now I understand that he's trying to model the general case of "incentives to do a little more work for a little more compensation." But most people can't fine-tune their work-income tradeoffs the way a famous academic with lots of discretionary paid speaking engagements and writing assignments can. A regular salaried white-collar worker can work hard in the pursuit of whatever merit raises are on offer next year, without knowing precisely what they'll be. A working-class worker is going to be far below the threshold that's needed to make Mankiw's model work (top income tax brackets as well as maxed out on current consumption, so the marginal dollar is entirely invested and subject to compounded taxes on investment as well as inheritance taxes later). So the choice of these little lumps of extra work-for-income was important for the simulation to proceed. And it proceeds on a false basis: that extra lump of work is not taxed at the (payroll+ top income tax) rate, but only at the top income tax rate.

It also seems to me that one has to be pursuing a pretty odd investment strategy if one is paying capital gains taxes on the dollar investment every year. It may be worth noting the distorting effect created by the incentive not to realize your gains every year-- but given the existence of the tax, behavior adjusts accordingly, and people don't realize their gains every year and subject themselves to the tax. Maybe that means they forgo the chance to maximize each year's return by switching around-- but you only maximize that way if you're an omniscient forecaster. Mortals maximize expected value by buying and holding index funds. The omniscient forecaster who would otherwise be capable of getting a 10% return won't continue to chase it at the price of paying capital gains taxes every year, unless he's awfully dumb for an omniscient guy; he'll do what us mortals do and live with the market-tracking return that isn't taxed every year.

The capital gains oddity might be a tolerable approximation; the misrepresentation of marginal lumps of income and the payroll tax seems to me entirely out of bounds.