I know...
that it's silly to keep putting up posts that say "Go read Piled Higher and Deeper," but, well, Go read Piled Higher and Deeper. This sequence should be mandatory reading for advisors...
Sunday, July 29, 2007
A proviso
This is the G'Nort Proviso to Matthew Yglesais' celebrated Green Lantern theory of geopolitics:
Even if it were the case that sheer American willpower was almost infinitely powerful, the distinction between minimal competence and massive incompetence would be more powerful still. Or in general form: at any given level of power generated by sheer will and determination, the distinction between minimal competence and massive competence in the use of that power is more powerful still.
This is the G'Nort Proviso to Matthew Yglesais' celebrated Green Lantern theory of geopolitics:
Even if it were the case that sheer American willpower was almost infinitely powerful, the distinction between minimal competence and massive incompetence would be more powerful still. Or in general form: at any given level of power generated by sheer will and determination, the distinction between minimal competence and massive competence in the use of that power is more powerful still.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Tomorrow's OU post today!
Because TNR keeps business hours and we don't post directly onto Open University, this won't appear there until morning.
-------------
Rawls continued
A few days ago, Linda Hirshman (I apologize for having misspelled her name a few times below) wrote:
I bow to no one in my admiration for Bill Galston, and I do think that Galston was a real contributor to the intllectual shape of Clinton's first campaign and first term, even if he was not strictly necessary for the election to turn out the way it did. But the fact that there has been only one two-term Democratic presidency since 1971 really is, quite thoroughly, a coincidence, not at all causally related to the publication of A Theory of Justice. in that year. George McGovern's defeat came too soon after publication for the book to have had much impact outside academic philosophy yet, and in any event was by a large enough margin that it seems to have been rather overdetermined. A Democrat won in 1976; he lost in 1980, but he was a hectoring moralistic vocal born-again Christian ; whatever the faults of Rawlsianism, they are not the same as Jimmy Carter's.
After Clinton's presidency, only the election of 2000 could yet have generated a two-term Democratic president. So we're down to the elections of 1984, 1988, and (barely) 2000 lost by Democrats, and those of 1992 and 1996 won by Democrats. This is not the sort of electoral imbalance that calls out for any very extraordinary explanation. This is not a Democratic Party that went through some intellectual implosion like the Federalists or the Whigs did. It's a party that loses some and wins some, with the outcomes substantially predictable by the economy in the year and a half preceding each election.
Moreover, over those thirty-five years, the Democrats have controlled the House of Representatives for twenty-five, and the Senate for twenty. The so-called age of Rawls simply has not been a time of mysterious Democratic impotence and Republican dominance; it's been a time of rough parity.
As to selfishness, while I wasn't around before 1971 to witness it myself, I have it on good authority that it was an attribute of political action and human action even way back in 1970, and that a great many elections in American history had been decided on the basis of something other than tens of millions of voters engaged in a disinterested inquiry about the common good.
Linda also wrote:
This is really extraordinary-- a weird cheap shot playing off the ambiguity of "you'd produce." Rawls never said that the thought experiment of the original position was some kind of substitute for political action. It was a way to organize thinking about justice prior to political action. It was a way to reinvigorate thinking about justice at all, in the face of the technocratic utilitarianism characteristic of the era of the best and the brightest, and the aggregative utilitarianism that had passed as thinking about the "common good" for some time before that.
But more generally: I can't understand the relationship between ideas and political life that Linda seems to be implying. Has any work of political philosophy ever caused the realization of its ideas in the society of its writer's birth, to say nothing of doing so within a generation of publication? About as long after the publication of Leviathan, the government of England broke even more decisively from Hobbes' recommendations than it had already done. Germany remained non-communist a generation after Marx; Victorian England remained Victorian in the decades after On Liberty, and Locke's Second Treatise was only published after the revolution its doctrines seemed to justify. America never became Rawls' "realistic utopia," but neither did it become Hayek's or Nozick's or MacIntyre's or Walzer's vision of a just social order. I can't see the relevance of any of that to our evaluation of the arguments within those works, or to whether the works were important, influential, or powerful.
In short: Theory of Justice, like most works of political philosophy, failed to be self-realizing; and American elections since 1971, like most political activity in most societies, went on their way without perceptible causal influences from works of political theory. This is unexceptional as regards either politics or political theory, and doesn't require any special failings of Theory of Justice.
In saying this I don't contradict Keynes' dictum that
I think this largely holds at the level of the public official, not at the level of the mass election. In the West Wing, Democratic staffers might invoke the difference principle; and for all I know White House staffers have occasionally done so in real life. But they have not done so very much, or in ways that would, or did, cost them elections.
Now: the fact that Rawls and Democratic electoral fortunes merely coincided without causation doesn't mean there's nothing to say about the co-incidence. Rawls was relatively appealing in a non-perfectionist intellectual climate that Aristotleans find objectionable, and that intellectual climate had its effects on the shape of liberal political practice. In the wake of the 1960s, appeals to some unitary set of virtues were going to be hard to sustain as foundations for public life, Rawls or no Rawls; the sexual revolution, women's and gay liberation, and the suspicion of courageous military service as a virtue after Vietnam all helped make virtue-language relatively unattractive for a while. And Warren Court liberalism, in pushing hard against some traditional state practices that had been justified in moralistic, paternalistic, or overtly Christian ways, made "neutrality" a kind of liberal watchword. Rawls' critique of perfectionism and embrace of state neutrality among conceptions of the good at the level of basic justice were a good fit with this intellectual climate. But Rawls didn't cause it. The underlying cultural shifts that made perfectionism unavailable to the left until it was married to pluralism by Galston were underway before 1971, and Rawls did no more than offer some inadvertent post-hoc justification for them.
Those cultural shifts are still with us, though the pendulum has swung a good ways back from the extremes of the 1970s. If Linda wants to revitalize Aristotelean virtue-talk for the left, she's right that Rawls offers a kind of obstacle to the project-- but those shifts offer a bigger one. And if she wants to overcome the Rawlsian obstacle, pointing to the electoral failure of Walter Mondale isn't an intellectually successful way to go about it.
A final note: I feel quite sure that Linda as a philosopher already knows everything I've said here, and so I'm embarrassed to have written in a way that must sound condescending. But the essay itself seemed committed to denying or ignoring all these commonplace objections, and so I've replied as best as I could to the essay itself.
Because TNR keeps business hours and we don't post directly onto Open University, this won't appear there until morning.
-------------
Rawls continued
A few days ago, Linda Hirshman (I apologize for having misspelled her name a few times below) wrote:
Perversely, Rawlsian liberalism also produced a slippery slope into its opposite, complete selfishness. After all, unless you could achieve the degree of selflessness he required, there was no other place to stop. [...] The game that Rawls set in motion, designed to eliminate common preexisting political values, could also produce the result that everybody simply advocated for himself.
It is not a coincidence that the only successful two-term Democratic presidency of the Age of Rawls was engineered in part for Bill Clinton by Bill Galston, a political theorist with a background in classical thought. Although Galston pays due homage to Rawls, his crucial work is ends-driven, not justified on the blindness of the procedure (his foundational political work is tellingly titled Liberal Purposes). Rawls's work--the best effort to take a tradition grounded in the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--and make it relevant to a modern, industrial state simply left the country to the conservatives.
I bow to no one in my admiration for Bill Galston, and I do think that Galston was a real contributor to the intllectual shape of Clinton's first campaign and first term, even if he was not strictly necessary for the election to turn out the way it did. But the fact that there has been only one two-term Democratic presidency since 1971 really is, quite thoroughly, a coincidence, not at all causally related to the publication of A Theory of Justice. in that year. George McGovern's defeat came too soon after publication for the book to have had much impact outside academic philosophy yet, and in any event was by a large enough margin that it seems to have been rather overdetermined. A Democrat won in 1976; he lost in 1980, but he was a hectoring moralistic vocal born-again Christian ; whatever the faults of Rawlsianism, they are not the same as Jimmy Carter's.
After Clinton's presidency, only the election of 2000 could yet have generated a two-term Democratic president. So we're down to the elections of 1984, 1988, and (barely) 2000 lost by Democrats, and those of 1992 and 1996 won by Democrats. This is not the sort of electoral imbalance that calls out for any very extraordinary explanation. This is not a Democratic Party that went through some intellectual implosion like the Federalists or the Whigs did. It's a party that loses some and wins some, with the outcomes substantially predictable by the economy in the year and a half preceding each election.
Moreover, over those thirty-five years, the Democrats have controlled the House of Representatives for twenty-five, and the Senate for twenty. The so-called age of Rawls simply has not been a time of mysterious Democratic impotence and Republican dominance; it's been a time of rough parity.
As to selfishness, while I wasn't around before 1971 to witness it myself, I have it on good authority that it was an attribute of political action and human action even way back in 1970, and that a great many elections in American history had been decided on the basis of something other than tens of millions of voters engaged in a disinterested inquiry about the common good.
Linda also wrote:
Just close your eyes, Rawls said, and think of what kind of political society you would make if you didn't know who you were. Black, white, male, female, smart, dumb--you might be anyone who would then have to live in the society you imagined. Rawls said if you did this, you'd produce unlimited free speech and moderately redistributive capitalism. The wags had it that this white male Harvard professor closed his eyes and produced the government of Cambridge, Massachusetts. No matter. It didn't happen.
This is really extraordinary-- a weird cheap shot playing off the ambiguity of "you'd produce." Rawls never said that the thought experiment of the original position was some kind of substitute for political action. It was a way to organize thinking about justice prior to political action. It was a way to reinvigorate thinking about justice at all, in the face of the technocratic utilitarianism characteristic of the era of the best and the brightest, and the aggregative utilitarianism that had passed as thinking about the "common good" for some time before that.
But more generally: I can't understand the relationship between ideas and political life that Linda seems to be implying. Has any work of political philosophy ever caused the realization of its ideas in the society of its writer's birth, to say nothing of doing so within a generation of publication? About as long after the publication of Leviathan, the government of England broke even more decisively from Hobbes' recommendations than it had already done. Germany remained non-communist a generation after Marx; Victorian England remained Victorian in the decades after On Liberty, and Locke's Second Treatise was only published after the revolution its doctrines seemed to justify. America never became Rawls' "realistic utopia," but neither did it become Hayek's or Nozick's or MacIntyre's or Walzer's vision of a just social order. I can't see the relevance of any of that to our evaluation of the arguments within those works, or to whether the works were important, influential, or powerful.
In short: Theory of Justice, like most works of political philosophy, failed to be self-realizing; and American elections since 1971, like most political activity in most societies, went on their way without perceptible causal influences from works of political theory. This is unexceptional as regards either politics or political theory, and doesn't require any special failings of Theory of Justice.
In saying this I don't contradict Keynes' dictum that
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
I think this largely holds at the level of the public official, not at the level of the mass election. In the West Wing, Democratic staffers might invoke the difference principle; and for all I know White House staffers have occasionally done so in real life. But they have not done so very much, or in ways that would, or did, cost them elections.
Now: the fact that Rawls and Democratic electoral fortunes merely coincided without causation doesn't mean there's nothing to say about the co-incidence. Rawls was relatively appealing in a non-perfectionist intellectual climate that Aristotleans find objectionable, and that intellectual climate had its effects on the shape of liberal political practice. In the wake of the 1960s, appeals to some unitary set of virtues were going to be hard to sustain as foundations for public life, Rawls or no Rawls; the sexual revolution, women's and gay liberation, and the suspicion of courageous military service as a virtue after Vietnam all helped make virtue-language relatively unattractive for a while. And Warren Court liberalism, in pushing hard against some traditional state practices that had been justified in moralistic, paternalistic, or overtly Christian ways, made "neutrality" a kind of liberal watchword. Rawls' critique of perfectionism and embrace of state neutrality among conceptions of the good at the level of basic justice were a good fit with this intellectual climate. But Rawls didn't cause it. The underlying cultural shifts that made perfectionism unavailable to the left until it was married to pluralism by Galston were underway before 1971, and Rawls did no more than offer some inadvertent post-hoc justification for them.
Those cultural shifts are still with us, though the pendulum has swung a good ways back from the extremes of the 1970s. If Linda wants to revitalize Aristotelean virtue-talk for the left, she's right that Rawls offers a kind of obstacle to the project-- but those shifts offer a bigger one. And if she wants to overcome the Rawlsian obstacle, pointing to the electoral failure of Walter Mondale isn't an intellectually successful way to go about it.
A final note: I feel quite sure that Linda as a philosopher already knows everything I've said here, and so I'm embarrassed to have written in a way that must sound condescending. But the essay itself seemed committed to denying or ignoring all these commonplace objections, and so I've replied as best as I could to the essay itself.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Plug away
Via orgtheory, Professor Rojas says:
Via orgtheory, Professor Rojas says:
Interested in social movements and organizations? Need something for your course on race and social change? How about a snazzy account of black power politics in the 1960s? Perhaps I can help you fill out that sociology of education syllabus. Might I humbly suggest my new book on the rise of Black Studies in the university?
That’s right. From Black Power to Black Studies is done, the official publication date is this week, and you can order it from Amazon, which means you’ll get it in about a week or so. Read the blurbs at the Johns Hopkins University website, with instructions for desk copies. Did I mention the spiffy 70s style cover?
Gradual School
As far as I can tell, the data from the new report from the Ph.D. Completion Project shows only four disciplines with 10-year doctoral completion rates below about 45%. One of these, computer science, is undoubtedly depressed by graduate students getting attractive job offers and leaving voluntarily (especially since the data span the mid-to-late 1990s).
The other three are Communications, Sociology,...
and Political Science.
(See Slide 7 in that power point presentation.)
Communications has the lowest rate of completion by year, through year 9. But the gap closes steadily over the years 7-9, and by year 10 Political Science seems to have the lowest rate of completion of the three.
This doesn't tell us what proportion of entering students complete sometime after year 10 (which is worrying in one way) and how many drop out or are failed (both worrying in another way). But notice that the completion rates are consistently lower than in econ, and econ grad students certainly have more attractive job opportunities that become available during their years of study. The completion rates are also lower than in the literary humanities, disciplines whose grad students face notoriously bad job prospects that presumably encourage many of them to drop out.
100% completion rates are implausible and undesirable. But completion rates this low suggest that departments and students are doing a bad job matching expectations at the beginning of programs. The departments can't judge who's likely to succeed in grad school, and students can't tell whether a program is a good one for them. Something seems badly wrong. Some discipline has to come in last in these sorts of measures, but we shouldn't take any solace from that. Either econ or English would have a good reason for a very low completion rate; I can't see that political science has any excuse to be behind both.
Prospective grad students, ask for hard data on time to completion and attrition rates!
See Chronicle coverage here, subscription required. See also Professor Rojas' latest round of advice to grad students-- finally reaching the all-important "The only good dissertation is a complete dissertation."
As far as I can tell, the data from the new report from the Ph.D. Completion Project shows only four disciplines with 10-year doctoral completion rates below about 45%. One of these, computer science, is undoubtedly depressed by graduate students getting attractive job offers and leaving voluntarily (especially since the data span the mid-to-late 1990s).
The other three are Communications, Sociology,...
and Political Science.
(See Slide 7 in that power point presentation.)
Communications has the lowest rate of completion by year, through year 9. But the gap closes steadily over the years 7-9, and by year 10 Political Science seems to have the lowest rate of completion of the three.
This doesn't tell us what proportion of entering students complete sometime after year 10 (which is worrying in one way) and how many drop out or are failed (both worrying in another way). But notice that the completion rates are consistently lower than in econ, and econ grad students certainly have more attractive job opportunities that become available during their years of study. The completion rates are also lower than in the literary humanities, disciplines whose grad students face notoriously bad job prospects that presumably encourage many of them to drop out.
100% completion rates are implausible and undesirable. But completion rates this low suggest that departments and students are doing a bad job matching expectations at the beginning of programs. The departments can't judge who's likely to succeed in grad school, and students can't tell whether a program is a good one for them. Something seems badly wrong. Some discipline has to come in last in these sorts of measures, but we shouldn't take any solace from that. Either econ or English would have a good reason for a very low completion rate; I can't see that political science has any excuse to be behind both.
Prospective grad students, ask for hard data on time to completion and attrition rates!
See Chronicle coverage here, subscription required. See also Professor Rojas' latest round of advice to grad students-- finally reaching the all-important "The only good dissertation is a complete dissertation."
Elsewhere:
Linda Hirshman attributed thirty-five years of American political history to the moral thinness of John Rawls; I began a reply but wandered off into a side issue; Henry Farrell and commentators engaged in a very serious and thoughtful set of arguments about where I wandered to; Matt Yglesias responded to Hirshman more directly. I still intend to do so sometime soon.
Linda Hirshman attributed thirty-five years of American political history to the moral thinness of John Rawls; I began a reply but wandered off into a side issue; Henry Farrell and commentators engaged in a very serious and thoughtful set of arguments about where I wandered to; Matt Yglesias responded to Hirshman more directly. I still intend to do so sometime soon.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Oh, look.
John Gray has written another book.
John Gray has written another book.
Gray, a professor at the LSE who is described on the front cover as "the most important living philosopher", has had a fit of Bush-hatred spectacular even by the standards of important living philosophers. But, rather than getting it out of his system over a macrobiotic soufflé in Hampstead, the silly man has gone and built an entire theory of history around it.[...]
Perhaps aware that he is running short of neocons to man his conspiracy, Gray presses Tony Blair into service. The former Prime Minister was not only a classic neocon, we learn, but one whose mendacity bore the stamp of Soviet disinformation: an American poodle and a red under the bed. Bush, though, is not so much a slippery neocon as an old-style fundamentalist Christian whose policies are designed to hasten global warming (sound of box being ticked) and therefore the end of the world. The CIA, meanwhile, has been taken over by shape-shifting lizards telepathically controlled by the ghost of Milton Friedman.
OK, so perhaps that last sentence misrepresents Gray's argument; but Black Mass could hardly be more bonkers if it really was crawling with lizards. Although Gray is by no stretch of the imagination our most important living philosopher, he does slightly remind me of Bertrand Russell in his dotage - a clever man playing to the gallery.
But it's getting late, professor: the main actors have either left the stage or are heading for the wings, and the only people left in the gallery are a few Independent readers. Go home and sleep it off.
Elsewhere
At Inside Higher Ed, and article about the report of the APSA Working Group on Collaboration," on questions of coauthorship and credit in the discipline. (Apropos ofSix Degrees of Cass Sunstein, kind of.)
Also at APSA, the theme for next year's conference is "Categories and the Politics of Global Inequalities," which sounds to me more like an MLA theme. But there it is; grad students, if you believe in that sort of superstition, start trying to figure out which of your dissertation chapters can accommodate the word "categories" in its title.
(Note to non-political scientists: APSA has a quirky system of adopting a theme for its Annual Meeting-- a theme to which maybe 5% of the conference's panels will be dedicated. The "theme panels" themselves can be quite interesting, and represent the real impact of the theme on the conference. There are some small marginal incentives for both paper-writers and paper-selecting section organizers to put up a pretense of shaping their papers/ sections to fit the theme, but these are generally not worth it and can end up looking kind of silly.)
At Inside Higher Ed, and article about the report of the APSA Working Group on Collaboration," on questions of coauthorship and credit in the discipline. (Apropos ofSix Degrees of Cass Sunstein, kind of.)
Also at APSA, the theme for next year's conference is "Categories and the Politics of Global Inequalities," which sounds to me more like an MLA theme. But there it is; grad students, if you believe in that sort of superstition, start trying to figure out which of your dissertation chapters can accommodate the word "categories" in its title.
(Note to non-political scientists: APSA has a quirky system of adopting a theme for its Annual Meeting-- a theme to which maybe 5% of the conference's panels will be dedicated. The "theme panels" themselves can be quite interesting, and represent the real impact of the theme on the conference. There are some small marginal incentives for both paper-writers and paper-selecting section organizers to put up a pretense of shaping their papers/ sections to fit the theme, but these are generally not worth it and can end up looking kind of silly.)
Monday, July 16, 2007
Big news
From the Montreal Gazette:
This is one of the biggest and longest-standing indigenous rights disputes in the world. The Cree are the largest First Nations group in Canada. I'm not sure why the article uses the language of a "Cree state;" I presume that what's envisioned is an autonomous territory like Nunavut, or conceivably (though this is unlikely) a province. "State" is a word without constitutional meaning in the Canadian federation.
I can't find any online discussion of what territory the "state" might occupy; the question of Cree territory in Quebec, and whether the Cree could be forced to accompany a seceding Quebec out of Canada, is a critical one in Quebec secession debates. Carving a self-determining territory even partly out of Quebec's current landmass would be politically explosive; but it would be very strange for a settlement of the James Bay case to lead to the creation of a territory that didn't include the huge, overwhelmingly Cree, Quebec side of the James Bay watershed.
From the Montreal Gazette:
Land claims agreement worth $1.4 billion
Jeff Heinrich, CanWest News Service
MONTREAL - First they made peace with Quebec, now they're making it with Ottawa - and becoming masters in their own house. Dropping lawsuits totalling $4.5 billion, leaders of the 16,500 Cree of northern Quebec announced a historic $1.4-billion deal with Ottawa on Monday.
If ratified in a referendum in October and approved by Parliament, it will see them take control of all policing, courts and social and economic development in their communities - and perhaps eventually form their own state within Canada.
It's the first time the Cree have reached a significant financial agreement with the federal government since 1983.
t ends three years of intense negotiations aimed at resolving differences over the landmark 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, which compensated the Cree for lands flooded by Hydro-Quebec's mammoth James Bay hydroelectric projects.
A little over five years ago, the Cree signed a similar deal with the Quebec government. Under the so-called Paix des Braves, the Cree got $4.5 billion to settle decades of lawsuits against the province that, like the Ottawa ones, stemmed from the 1975 James Bay treaty.
At a packed news conference Monday, current and former Cree leaders and negotiators joined federal officials, negotiators and politicians to announce what they described as a 50-year deal, covering the 30 years since the original James Bay accord was signed and 20 more years after the new deal is eventually ratified.
"We've come a very long way since 1975," said Matthew Mukash, grand chief of the Grand Council of the Crees.
[...]
Under the agreement, the Crees will take over programs now under Ottawa's jurisdiction: the administration of justice, including rehab centres, workhouses and refuges for women; training and manpower; construction of community centres, sewage systems and firefighting services; and economic development programs.
A second stage of negotiation would then begin on Cree self-government, including eventual status as a fully fledged Cree state within Canada.
This is one of the biggest and longest-standing indigenous rights disputes in the world. The Cree are the largest First Nations group in Canada. I'm not sure why the article uses the language of a "Cree state;" I presume that what's envisioned is an autonomous territory like Nunavut, or conceivably (though this is unlikely) a province. "State" is a word without constitutional meaning in the Canadian federation.
I can't find any online discussion of what territory the "state" might occupy; the question of Cree territory in Quebec, and whether the Cree could be forced to accompany a seceding Quebec out of Canada, is a critical one in Quebec secession debates. Carving a self-determining territory even partly out of Quebec's current landmass would be politically explosive; but it would be very strange for a settlement of the James Bay case to lead to the creation of a territory that didn't include the huge, overwhelmingly Cree, Quebec side of the James Bay watershed.
I don't have one
Via the Chronicle: Six Degrees of Cass Sunstein: Collaboration Networks in Legal Scholarship, by Paul Edelman and Tracey George.
Never having co-authored a publication, I don't have a Sunstein number, though several of my friends are Sunstein 1s.
Via the Chronicle: Six Degrees of Cass Sunstein: Collaboration Networks in Legal Scholarship, by Paul Edelman and Tracey George.
Degrees of separation is a concept that is intuitive and appealing in popular culture as well as academic discourse: It tells us something about the connectedness of a particular field. It also reveals paths of influence and access. Paul Erdős was the Kevin Bacon of his field - math - coauthoring with a large number of scholars from many institutions and across subfields. Moreover, his work was highly cited and important. Mathematicians talk about their Erdős number (i.e., numbers of degrees of separation) as a sign of their connection to the hub of mathematics: An Erdős number of 2 means a scholar did not co-author with Erdős but did collaborate with someone who did (i.e., an Erdős 1). In this study, we examine collaboration networks in law, searching for the Legal Erdős. We crown Sunstein as the Legal Erdős and name a complete (as possible) list of Sunstein 1s and 2s.
Never having co-authored a publication, I don't have a Sunstein number, though several of my friends are Sunstein 1s.
Elsewhere...
Worth reading:
Brad DeLong with an unusually concise and clear ("unusually" in the usual run of things, not "unusually for Brad DeLong") analytic narrative distinguishing political and economic constraints on policy-- in this case-- Chinese economic reform under Deng.
Margaret Soltan on the online amplification effect-- on-campus news can now be worldwide news in a matter of minutes, and college administrators often aren't prepared for it.
That weird story Dan linked to the other day about the Washington burglar invited to join the dinner party for a glass of wine moves from "news of the bizarrre file" to "interesting limit case of social and psychological phenomena" thanks to a sharp post from Julian Sanchez.
Peter Suderman at The American Scene, "Critics and the Masses."
Phoebe Maltz on a discussion of "on the left" as an identity, featuring Charles Taylor and Paul Berman, at a Dissent function.
Worth reading:
Brad DeLong with an unusually concise and clear ("unusually" in the usual run of things, not "unusually for Brad DeLong") analytic narrative distinguishing political and economic constraints on policy-- in this case-- Chinese economic reform under Deng.
Margaret Soltan on the online amplification effect-- on-campus news can now be worldwide news in a matter of minutes, and college administrators often aren't prepared for it.
That weird story Dan linked to the other day about the Washington burglar invited to join the dinner party for a glass of wine moves from "news of the bizarrre file" to "interesting limit case of social and psychological phenomena" thanks to a sharp post from Julian Sanchez.
Peter Suderman at The American Scene, "Critics and the Masses."
Phoebe Maltz on a discussion of "on the left" as an identity, featuring Charles Taylor and Paul Berman, at a Dissent function.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
A relatively good neighbor
NYT:
And yet:
Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
More on New York's particularly bad eminent domain system.
NYT:
Columbia University announced yesterday that it would not ask the state to use eminent domain to evict residents of 132 apartments in the 17-acre area of Harlem that it wants to move into.
The announcement, covering all the remaining residents in the area, suggests that the university, which is seeking the city’s support for a major northward expansion of its Morningside Heights campus, is trying to be conciliatory.
And yet:
In a statement, Columbia said its executive vice president, Robert Kasdin, did not eliminate the possibility that the university might ask the state to invoke eminent domain to acquire the few commercial properties that remain in the proposed expansion area.
Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
More on New York's particularly bad eminent domain system.
True north, high and free
Marijuana use is higher in Canada than in either Jamaica or the Netherlands; indeed than anywhere else in the industrialized world. Quebec leads the way.
Not totally shocking news to anyone who's walked around the Plateau on a Saturday night.
Marijuana use is higher in Canada than in either Jamaica or the Netherlands; indeed than anywhere else in the industrialized world. Quebec leads the way.
Not totally shocking news to anyone who's walked around the Plateau on a Saturday night.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Disturbing search of the day that brought someone to this blog
Lesbian with hijab pics. Not here; sorry.
Lesbian with hijab pics. Not here; sorry.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Science Memories
When I saw Dan a couple weeks ago, we discovered a memory that we shared: Science magazine (always published as Science 'XX where XX was the then-current year-- Science '80, Science '81.
This was the first adultish magazine I subscribed to (renewing the subscription was an annual present from my mom), and I think I subscribed throughout the magazine's six or so years of existence. Dan and I both remembered the article that covered the Robert Axelrod iterated-prisoners'-dilemma tournament, the one that found tit-for-tat to be the most successful overall strategy and formed the basis of Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation. We also remembered first hearing about AIDS through that magazine-- there was an early ominous cover story, with a headline that said something like "a mysterious illness has been killing gays, Haitians, and drug users-- and it may be spreading into the nation's blood supply."
And the third thing I remember-- and really that's about it, from six years of reading-- is the Alan Lightman columns in the front of the magazine. Many of these were later collected in volumes that ran under the titles of two of the most memorable columns: Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe (1984) and A Modern Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court (1986). (The only column I remember as vividly as those two is "A Visit By Mr. Newton.") The memory of those columns means I was one of the first people I know to pick up Einstein's Dreams when it was published-- one of the only times when I was really ahead of the curve on something that subsequently became very popular among people I knew.
A similar story to "I read about the tit-for-tat experiment in my geeky magazine as a kid more than a decade before starting grad school in poli sci"-- in my high school course on Discrete Math (mainly number theory), we briefly studied voting systems and had to prove Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (something I couldn't begin to do now, and I suspect in retrospect that we only proved a selected subset of the overall conclusion-- but I remember cycling and having to demonstrate that cycling would occur). In each case the result vaguely entered my long-term memory, so that when I encountered it in grad school I knew that I already knew that but also knew that I didn't know it at any very sophisticated level and hadn't studied it in college.
When I saw Dan a couple weeks ago, we discovered a memory that we shared: Science magazine (always published as Science 'XX where XX was the then-current year-- Science '80, Science '81.
This was the first adultish magazine I subscribed to (renewing the subscription was an annual present from my mom), and I think I subscribed throughout the magazine's six or so years of existence. Dan and I both remembered the article that covered the Robert Axelrod iterated-prisoners'-dilemma tournament, the one that found tit-for-tat to be the most successful overall strategy and formed the basis of Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation. We also remembered first hearing about AIDS through that magazine-- there was an early ominous cover story, with a headline that said something like "a mysterious illness has been killing gays, Haitians, and drug users-- and it may be spreading into the nation's blood supply."
And the third thing I remember-- and really that's about it, from six years of reading-- is the Alan Lightman columns in the front of the magazine. Many of these were later collected in volumes that ran under the titles of two of the most memorable columns: Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe (1984) and A Modern Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court (1986). (The only column I remember as vividly as those two is "A Visit By Mr. Newton.") The memory of those columns means I was one of the first people I know to pick up Einstein's Dreams when it was published-- one of the only times when I was really ahead of the curve on something that subsequently became very popular among people I knew.
A similar story to "I read about the tit-for-tat experiment in my geeky magazine as a kid more than a decade before starting grad school in poli sci"-- in my high school course on Discrete Math (mainly number theory), we briefly studied voting systems and had to prove Arrow's Impossibility Theorem (something I couldn't begin to do now, and I suspect in retrospect that we only proved a selected subset of the overall conclusion-- but I remember cycling and having to demonstrate that cycling would occur). In each case the result vaguely entered my long-term memory, so that when I encountered it in grad school I knew that I already knew that but also knew that I didn't know it at any very sophisticated level and hadn't studied it in college.
Journals
Via Brayden at orgtheory : the new ISI journal figures are out. Impact factors for selected poli sci, political theory, and political philsoophy journals. As is well-known, coverage is spotty-- particularly so for us, because ISI provides the service for Social Sciences (including "Ethics"), but not for the humanities (so excluding any journals it considers to be "Philosophy" rather than "Ethics."). I searched for and could not find History of Political Thought, Review of Politics, Constellations, Polity, European Journl of Political Theory, most of which are in ISI's Web of Science database. (By contrast, both The New Republic and Dissent are listed.)
3.023 APSR
1.923 Philosophy & Public Affairs
1.390 Ethics
1.083 Critical Review
1.055 JOP
0.762 Journal of Political Philosophy
0.500 Political Studies
0.404 Political Theory
0.231 Social Philosophy & Policy
0.230 Social Research
(I omit the AJPS deliberately, as it published zero articles in political theory last year.)
There's obviously something odd about the Critical Review figure. But it's interesting that Journal of Political Philosophy comes in so much above Political Theory.
I played around with the "cited by which journals" function for a few minutes. PPA and Political Theory, not totally surprisingly, are in different minifields; articles in one don't cite articles in the other. Articles in PPA are cited in PPA, Ethics, SPP. Articles in Political Theory are cited in Political Theory, HPT, APSR, JPP. JPP seems to be the bridge journal: cited in both Ethics and Political Theory, citing PPA as often as Constellations or the APSR. This confirms my hunch; lately it has seemed like JPP is the most catholic of the journals I regularly read.
Via Brayden at orgtheory : the new ISI journal figures are out. Impact factors for selected poli sci, political theory, and political philsoophy journals. As is well-known, coverage is spotty-- particularly so for us, because ISI provides the service for Social Sciences (including "Ethics"), but not for the humanities (so excluding any journals it considers to be "Philosophy" rather than "Ethics."). I searched for and could not find History of Political Thought, Review of Politics, Constellations, Polity, European Journl of Political Theory, most of which are in ISI's Web of Science database. (By contrast, both The New Republic and Dissent are listed.)
3.023 APSR
1.923 Philosophy & Public Affairs
1.390 Ethics
1.083 Critical Review
1.055 JOP
0.762 Journal of Political Philosophy
0.500 Political Studies
0.404 Political Theory
0.231 Social Philosophy & Policy
0.230 Social Research
(I omit the AJPS deliberately, as it published zero articles in political theory last year.)
There's obviously something odd about the Critical Review figure. But it's interesting that Journal of Political Philosophy comes in so much above Political Theory.
I played around with the "cited by which journals" function for a few minutes. PPA and Political Theory, not totally surprisingly, are in different minifields; articles in one don't cite articles in the other. Articles in PPA are cited in PPA, Ethics, SPP. Articles in Political Theory are cited in Political Theory, HPT, APSR, JPP. JPP seems to be the bridge journal: cited in both Ethics and Political Theory, citing PPA as often as Constellations or the APSR. This confirms my hunch; lately it has seemed like JPP is the most catholic of the journals I regularly read.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Apropos...
Of my aside in this post, I thought I'd note the following.
Indeed, there is a new paper out with the provocative finding that choices made in a one-off ultimatum game are correlated with testosterone levels, with high-testosterone men being more willing to reject low offers and more willing to make high offers (i.e. more willing to accept a loss when in the position of power and more willing to reject a possible gain when in the subordinate position.
But compare that post to this one from the indispensable Tyler Cowen, or to this Economist article. Tyler characterizes the result as "we are programmed to be spiteful." I'd say: We have positional preferences-- pride and vainglory as well as compassion-- and high-testosterone men weight their positional preference for dominance relatively heavily compared with their absolute preferences for gain. This, I find to be intuitive rather than counterintuitive, though a clever way of getting at it. Certainly the fact that there are people who will cut off their noses to spite their faces-- accepting absolute losses in order not to lose status-- is not novel. Hobbes knew it; so did Montesquieu; so did Smith.
Hobbes characterizes people like that as among the greatest threats to peaceful human coexistence-- because, unlike the desires for security or for absolute material gain, the desire for status can't be satisfied for everyone simultaneously. Positional competitions are zero-sum.
Hobbes seemingly hoped we could do without that destructive bit of our psychologies. This was much greater optimism than later thinkers showed, though they hoped that the most stupidly destructive aspects of it (e.g. dueling) could be curbed-- and, later, Mill and others hoped that the Romantic shift from Excellence to excellences might diffuse status competitions, letting persons excel in more various arenas. (And compare: Will Wilkinson, and here and here and here.)
By contrast: the genuflection before the manly Mr. Mansfield, the sneering reference to girly-men [Accountants! How wimpy!], the conflation between "excellence" and sheer dominance or pridefulness, and the faux bravura of the manly cuss that the gentleman can't bring himself to utter. So much appallingness in so little space! I'll reiterate the rhetorical question from my aside: Has any good ever come from someone who feels the need to announce he's being manly?
At the risk of seeming to denigrate my own field, I have to wonder whether Peter (a fellow political theorist) would deny that those girly-men economists have rather more status across a number of dimensions than we do, or that their willingness to accept merely absolute goods like big raises doesn't seem to have hurt their comparative positional standing in the social sciences...
Update: Peter responds.
Of my aside in this post, I thought I'd note the following.
Men with high testosterone levels are too proud or magnanimous to make sound business decisions (as, say, Aristotle also noticed). So rational choice theory should appeal, most of all, to testosterone-challenged men--economists and accountants, who prefer, as Mr. Mansfield explains, "rational control" to displaying their excellence. A real man, we might say, has too much b---- to be low-balled, even if accepting the low offer in his interest.
Posted by Peter Lawler
Indeed, there is a new paper out with the provocative finding that choices made in a one-off ultimatum game are correlated with testosterone levels, with high-testosterone men being more willing to reject low offers and more willing to make high offers (i.e. more willing to accept a loss when in the position of power and more willing to reject a possible gain when in the subordinate position.
But compare that post to this one from the indispensable Tyler Cowen, or to this Economist article. Tyler characterizes the result as "we are programmed to be spiteful." I'd say: We have positional preferences-- pride and vainglory as well as compassion-- and high-testosterone men weight their positional preference for dominance relatively heavily compared with their absolute preferences for gain. This, I find to be intuitive rather than counterintuitive, though a clever way of getting at it. Certainly the fact that there are people who will cut off their noses to spite their faces-- accepting absolute losses in order not to lose status-- is not novel. Hobbes knew it; so did Montesquieu; so did Smith.
Hobbes characterizes people like that as among the greatest threats to peaceful human coexistence-- because, unlike the desires for security or for absolute material gain, the desire for status can't be satisfied for everyone simultaneously. Positional competitions are zero-sum.
Hobbes seemingly hoped we could do without that destructive bit of our psychologies. This was much greater optimism than later thinkers showed, though they hoped that the most stupidly destructive aspects of it (e.g. dueling) could be curbed-- and, later, Mill and others hoped that the Romantic shift from Excellence to excellences might diffuse status competitions, letting persons excel in more various arenas. (And compare: Will Wilkinson, and here and here and here.)
By contrast: the genuflection before the manly Mr. Mansfield, the sneering reference to girly-men [Accountants! How wimpy!], the conflation between "excellence" and sheer dominance or pridefulness, and the faux bravura of the manly cuss that the gentleman can't bring himself to utter. So much appallingness in so little space! I'll reiterate the rhetorical question from my aside: Has any good ever come from someone who feels the need to announce he's being manly?
At the risk of seeming to denigrate my own field, I have to wonder whether Peter (a fellow political theorist) would deny that those girly-men economists have rather more status across a number of dimensions than we do, or that their willingness to accept merely absolute goods like big raises doesn't seem to have hurt their comparative positional standing in the social sciences...
Update: Peter responds.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Social sciences and social theory
Over the past couple of days, I've kept coming back to questions of the relationship among the social sciences, and the state of progress in them. My mind may have been primed for this topic by hearing Tyler Cowen (a week ago today) give a terrific talk on the place of economics in social inquiry.
Since then:
I've puzzled over an imaginary syllabus for either an introductory or a capstone course for the Politics, Philosophy, & Economics major some of us are working on developing at McGill.
I've thought about issues of disciplinary borrowing and its absence: how economists stereotypically think that no question has been studied until it's been studied by an economist (no empirical question has been studied until it's been studied by a labor economist using an instrumental variable or an exogenous shock, no theoretical question has been studied until it's been studied by a modeler), and so won't bother to read even the standard works in a field they've decided to dabble in; and legal academics stereotypically know just enough social science to get themselves into trouble, reading the works that someone happens to have cited in law reviews already regardless of its standing in its home discipline; and how political scientists, sociologists, and historians seem to have gone through a generational shift from reading one another constantly to reading one another almost never.
I've reread Elster's Sour Grapes for the first time in years, and marveled at it-- as a piece of prose, as a model of joining formal analysis to humanistic erudition, as a powerful statement about what social inquiry needs to be like that the disciplines still haven't caught up with 24 years later. And I thought: its year of publication, 1983, also saw Imagined Communities, Spheres of Justice, Nations and Nationalism. The next year The Evolution of Cooperation came out; the year after that, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Weapons of the Weak, and Taylor's Philosophical Papers. 1981: Treatise on the Family; Theory of Communicative Action.
I recognize all the sources of rose-colored hindsight bias, and how we're able to see things at a distance that we couldn't see up close. Yet I still thought: Those are books that I think all social scientists and social theorists should have a familiarity with; and I'll bet I'll still think so in ten years. And I wonder how many works published in the last four, or the last ten, that will be true for.
This all put me in the perfect mood for the pointer from Henry Farrell to this paper by Peter Hall about social inquiry and the disciplines.
Over the past couple of days, I've kept coming back to questions of the relationship among the social sciences, and the state of progress in them. My mind may have been primed for this topic by hearing Tyler Cowen (a week ago today) give a terrific talk on the place of economics in social inquiry.
Since then:
I've puzzled over an imaginary syllabus for either an introductory or a capstone course for the Politics, Philosophy, & Economics major some of us are working on developing at McGill.
I've thought about issues of disciplinary borrowing and its absence: how economists stereotypically think that no question has been studied until it's been studied by an economist (no empirical question has been studied until it's been studied by a labor economist using an instrumental variable or an exogenous shock, no theoretical question has been studied until it's been studied by a modeler), and so won't bother to read even the standard works in a field they've decided to dabble in; and legal academics stereotypically know just enough social science to get themselves into trouble, reading the works that someone happens to have cited in law reviews already regardless of its standing in its home discipline; and how political scientists, sociologists, and historians seem to have gone through a generational shift from reading one another constantly to reading one another almost never.
I've reread Elster's Sour Grapes for the first time in years, and marveled at it-- as a piece of prose, as a model of joining formal analysis to humanistic erudition, as a powerful statement about what social inquiry needs to be like that the disciplines still haven't caught up with 24 years later. And I thought: its year of publication, 1983, also saw Imagined Communities, Spheres of Justice, Nations and Nationalism. The next year The Evolution of Cooperation came out; the year after that, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Weapons of the Weak, and Taylor's Philosophical Papers. 1981: Treatise on the Family; Theory of Communicative Action.
I recognize all the sources of rose-colored hindsight bias, and how we're able to see things at a distance that we couldn't see up close. Yet I still thought: Those are books that I think all social scientists and social theorists should have a familiarity with; and I'll bet I'll still think so in ten years. And I wonder how many works published in the last four, or the last ten, that will be true for.
This all put me in the perfect mood for the pointer from Henry Farrell to this paper by Peter Hall about social inquiry and the disciplines.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
New look
I've upgraded the aesthetics around here a bit. Beaucoup beaucoup de whitespace, which I always have trouble appreciating until I see it. (My instinct is to cram as much text as is humanly possible into a given space. My Senior Page in my high school yearbook was... not aesthetically pleasing or very easy to read, though it amused me.) I like the ability to browse post titles in the left-hand sidebar.
The change was in the service of fixing my permalinks. The good news is: one can now click on the permalink button below each post and get a functioning link. The bad news is: this doesn't fix any of the old bad-code links. Sorry about that.
Took the occasion to tweak the blogroll, dropping some things (e.g. the late lamented Crescat Sententia) and adding a handful of new ones.
I've upgraded the aesthetics around here a bit. Beaucoup beaucoup de whitespace, which I always have trouble appreciating until I see it. (My instinct is to cram as much text as is humanly possible into a given space. My Senior Page in my high school yearbook was... not aesthetically pleasing or very easy to read, though it amused me.) I like the ability to browse post titles in the left-hand sidebar.
The change was in the service of fixing my permalinks. The good news is: one can now click on the permalink button below each post and get a functioning link. The bad news is: this doesn't fix any of the old bad-code links. Sorry about that.
Took the occasion to tweak the blogroll, dropping some things (e.g. the late lamented Crescat Sententia) and adding a handful of new ones.
Is it my imagination...
or did the Supreme Court's term end with an awful lot of identical 5-4 splits? It's not just that O'Connor switched sides often enough that you might get some 5-4 liberal decisions and some 5-4 conservative ones. It's that there'd usually be a few significant cases that turned out to have 6-or-more-person majorities. The past couple weeks seems anomalous to me in recent-historical terms. The five conservatives hung solidly together as did the four liberals, with no interesting defections except for Kennedy on the death penalty, across an especially wide range of cases.
Update Stuart Benjamin says something similar. He thinks it's unusual that an antitrust case followed exactly te same 5-4 roght-left cleavage as constitutional cases, and that the majority and minority are now engaged in ideological "shadowboxing" even over cases that aren't directly ideological.
Eugene Volokh reports that Kennedy was in the majority in all 24 5-4 cases this term-- he is now the swing vote, with the other 8 dividing the same way over and over again. Overall Kennedy was in the majority 69 out of 71 times.
But Kennedy did swing back and forth a bit: "Note that the 24 5-4 cases came out with Kennedy joining the four conservatives 13 times, the four liberals 6 times, and no easily identifiable bloc 5 times."
or did the Supreme Court's term end with an awful lot of identical 5-4 splits? It's not just that O'Connor switched sides often enough that you might get some 5-4 liberal decisions and some 5-4 conservative ones. It's that there'd usually be a few significant cases that turned out to have 6-or-more-person majorities. The past couple weeks seems anomalous to me in recent-historical terms. The five conservatives hung solidly together as did the four liberals, with no interesting defections except for Kennedy on the death penalty, across an especially wide range of cases.
Update Stuart Benjamin says something similar. He thinks it's unusual that an antitrust case followed exactly te same 5-4 roght-left cleavage as constitutional cases, and that the majority and minority are now engaged in ideological "shadowboxing" even over cases that aren't directly ideological.
Eugene Volokh reports that Kennedy was in the majority in all 24 5-4 cases this term-- he is now the swing vote, with the other 8 dividing the same way over and over again. Overall Kennedy was in the majority 69 out of 71 times.
But Kennedy did swing back and forth a bit: "Note that the 24 5-4 cases came out with Kennedy joining the four conservatives 13 times, the four liberals 6 times, and no easily identifiable bloc 5 times."
Munroe-Blum condemns proposed UK academic boycott
June 19, 2007
Statement by the Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University, Heather Munroe-Blum, on the potential boycott of Israeli universities by the United Kingdom’s University and College Union
The exchange of knowledge and ideas is essential to the advancement of human development in all its forms: civic, scientific and cultural. Any attempt to constrain the ability of universities to engage freely in scholarship and teaching is an attack on the fundamental value of academic freedom.
The boycott of Israeli universities which is being considered by the United Kingdom’s University and College Union (UCU) should be thoroughly condemned.
We live in a world in which universities and their faculty members should seek to promote scholarly understanding and to remove barriers to academic exchange and expression.
It would be a gross violation of the values which form the foundation, and progressive evolution, of civil society if the UCU endorsed this action. I urge our British university colleagues to reject the boycott proposal.
I join in solidarity with President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University and Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau of the University of California, Berkeley, in support of unfettered interaction with Israeli scholars and institutions and in saying to those members of the UCU who would pursue this deplorable action: if you choose to isolate Israeli universities, you should add McGill to your boycott list. We will stand steadfast against those who seek to undermine academic freedom.
Heather Munroe-Blum
Principal and Vice-Chancellor
McGill University
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Nussbaum on India and democracy
The convocation address given by Martha Nussbaum when she was awarded an honorary degree by McGill last month is now online.
The convocation address given by Martha Nussbaum when she was awarded an honorary degree by McGill last month is now online.
Ethics revisited
So-- as people have been delighted to point out to me-- New York Times Magazine ethics columnist Randy Cohen has been revealed to have donated money to MoveOn.org, in violation of the Times' ethics rules governing political activity by its writers.
Over at NRO, Douglas Kern provides commentary that manages to be almost right and yet totally nuts.
OK, in order:
1) If Randy Cohen actually knew about the Times policy and thought that somehow MoveOn.org (the PAC, not the affiliated 501c4) was relevantly like a nonpartisan charitable contribution and not relevantly like a political contribution, and didn't even wonder about this enough to ask someone, then he's dumb. When you donate to a PAC, and fill out the paperwork that gets the donation into the FEC database, you get lots of verbiage about this not being a tax-deductible charitable contribution. You're contributing directly to the election or defeat of political candidates, even though you're not contributing directly to the candidates. This is the basic distinction of American campaign-donations law. It's not hard. One may not like the rules that put PACs on one side and the Catholic Church on the other of a very bright line, but they're not hard to understand from a donor's perspective. (They may be hard for the organizations themselves to understand, in terms of what's permitted or not to groups on either side of the line.)
I don't think he's that dumb. Therefore I think he's a liar.
2) He's not, strictly speaking, a hypocrite, because-- as I kvetched about all these years ago-- his official position on the relationship of ethics to political morality is that the rules are less important than being on the leftward side. He's living up to his announced code, though of course that differs from the Times' code.
3) I agree with both Cohen and Kern that this is a pretty dumb rule. It's not as dumb as the famous case of the Washington Post editor who doesn't vote lest it prejudice him, but it's dumb. Journalists categorically shouldn't be in the pay of political actors. But how one gets from there to the rule that they should not themselves contribute to such actors is beyond me. Making the contribution doesn't add to the journalist's bias. In order to avoid (yes) the appearance of impropriety or conflicts of interest, I'd say that news (not opinion) reporters who directly cover politics and elections shouldn't contribute-- lest the donation make the reporter feel that he or she now has a psychic stake in the candidate's success. (But note it's only a psychic stake; the conflict of interest is much harder to identify than when a business reporter owns stocks.)
4) But, contra Cohen's general position and Kern's view about this case, I think that following the rules is morally important. This may make me less than manly in Kern's eyes.
[Aside: Has any good ever come from someone who feels the need to announce he's being manly? Among the defining traits of John Wayne types is that they don't talk very much, certainly don't talk about themselves very much, and basically never talk about themselves with the kind of self-reflexivity that says, 'hey, didja see what I just did? Didja see what kind of action that was? When someone tells you he's being manly, call him a poseur-- it's ok, you can use a French word, because you're not pretending to be John Wayne-- and then check to make sure your wallet's still in place.)
Anyway: this may make me less than manly in Kern's eyes. And in Cohen's it means that I'm morally deluded. But the rules are how we live with our moral and political disagreements. The rules are how we avoid case-by-case post-hoc ajudication-- the kind of ajudication that is most likely to be infected by bias. Until the day comes when everyone working on a newspaper has precisely the same political principles, because they've fallen in behind Kern's manly "leadership with the acknowledged authority to interpret and apply those principles," a news organization needs some way to know, and to provide mutual reassurance, that people with strong but divergent beliefs about ultimate political ends are all operating within the same restraints on means.
Kern is kind of right about the difference between ethics and virtue-- but completely wrong about what that means about ethics. Ethical rules tell us: don't stuff the ballot box, even when you think it's really really morally important that your guy win because of your general theory of justice. They tell us: zealously represent your client, even if you think he's scum, or get out of the way and let someone else do so, because you're a professional with expert knowledge and the client-customer has a hard time monitoring whether you;re doing a good job or not. They tell us: don't give a students bad grade because they disagree with you politically, even if you think that their political views reveal that they must be really dumb or very bad people. They tell us-- contra Cohen's advice-- not to authorize ourselves to commit workplace fraud in the service of our overarching vision of how commerce and labor ought to be organized.
That's not to say that ethics is ultimately more important than morality broadly understood. Ethics offers a particular register of morality, not the whole of it. But the ability to live on terms of fair and reciprocal cooperation with those who disagree with us is morally important in its own right. Honoring professional and contractual obligations is morally important. In denigrating ethics as the morality of sociopaths, Kern implicitly calls for the morality of narcissistic megalomaniacs-- those so sure of their own virtue and the rightness of their cause that they can't imagine the need for moral engagement with those who might disagree.
So-- as people have been delighted to point out to me-- New York Times Magazine ethics columnist Randy Cohen has been revealed to have donated money to MoveOn.org, in violation of the Times' ethics rules governing political activity by its writers.
The New York Times, Randy Cohen, ethics columnist, $585 in three donations in August 2004 to MoveOn.org, which conducted get-out-the-vote drives to defeat President Bush. In addition to the syndicated column "The Ethicist" for the Times Magazine, Cohen answers ethics questions for listeners of NPR.
Freelancers like Cohen are covered by the Times policy, which says, "Times readers apply exacting standards to the entire paper. They do not distinguish between staff-written articles and those written by outsiders. Thus as far as possible, freelance contributors to The Times, while not its employees, will be held to the same standards as staff members when they are on Times assignments, including those for the Times Magazine. If they violate these guidelines, they will be denied further assignments."
Cohen said he thought of MoveOn.org as nonpartisan and thought the donation would be allowed even under the strict rule at the Times.
"We admire those colleagues who participate in their communities — help out at the local school, work with Little League, donate to charity," Cohen said in an e-mail. "But no such activity is or can be non-ideological. Few papers would object to a journalist donating to the Boy Scouts or joining the Catholic Church. But the former has an official policy of discriminating against gay children; the latter has views on reproductive rights far more restrictive than those of most Americans. Should reporters be forbidden to support those groups? I’d say not. Unless a group’s activities impinge on a reporter’s beat, the reporter should be free to donate to a wide range of nonprofits. Make a journalist’s charitable giving transparent, and let the readers weigh it as they will.
"Those who do not cover anything, but write a column of opinion should have even more latitude. It is such a writer’s job to make his views explicit. Those donations to nonprofits will no doubt reflect the views he or she is hired to express. In evaluating such civic engagement, it is well to remember that to have an opinion is not to have a bias. To conceal one’s political opinions is not to be without them."
After MSNBC.com checked the names of Times staff and contributors on this list with a spokesperson for the Times, Cohen sent this addendum:
"That said, Times policy does forbid my making such donations, and I will not do so in the future."
Over at NRO, Douglas Kern provides commentary that manages to be almost right and yet totally nuts.
Dear Randy:
Nincompoops talk ethics. Men talk virtues. Stop being a nincompoop.
My highest law-school grade was in Legal Ethics. I achieved a stellar grade because I devised an infallible mechanism for solving any legal ethical dilemma. My mechanism was this: Remember that legal ethics is a system of rules:
1) designed by sociopaths;
2) for sociopaths;
3) to prevent public acknowledgment of their sociopathy;
4) while still allowing said sociopaths to fleece said public.
Once you realize that contemporary ethics is not morality but the clever simulation of morality, you’re halfway to qualifying for an ethics-consulting job.[...]
I’m only kidding a little about the sociopathy. By definition, a sociopath is one who can only emulate the rules and mores of society, as a sociopath never internalizes any sense of right and wrong. In a country where fewer and fewer people agree about how to determine right and wrong, the bogus pseudo-answers of ethics begin to sound more and more appealing. Put another way: As we grow more sociopathic as a society, ethics makes more and more sense.
And that’s where you come in, my fine ethical friend. Your job as a public ethicist is not to teach people how best to apply the rules and obligations of a transcendent authority, as the ethicists of old once did. That would be hard. And intrusive. And divisive. And let’s face it: “transcendent authority” carries the whiff of the red state, with all the unpleasantness (NASCAR, Wal-Mart, redundant children) there attached. Neither is your job to teach philosophy. That, too, would be hard, and unsatisfying as well; when do philosophers ever agree? No, your job is to provide just enough soothing advice to scratch that fleeting itch that your affluent readership feels when confronted with moral questions that vacuous self-serving upper class prejudices can’t immediately resolve. Forget right and wrong; the role of the modern ethicist is to move puzzled smart people from a state of mild dismay to a pleasant coma of satisfied smugness in the shortest time possible. You seek to avoid not sin, but the appearance of impropriety. But a great many virtues can appear quite improper, and a great many sins can appear quite proper indeed.
Consider, for example, the “ethical” rule that precludes journalists (and quasi-journalists like yourself) from donating money to politicians and overt shill machines. You’ve correctly deduced that this rule is asinine. Suppose for a moment that you obeyed it. Would you feel any differently, write any differently, be biased against conservatives any differently if you kept your $585.00 instead of donating it? And would you suddenly evolve into a better, purer, more ethically unstoppable self if you gave that money to The Medusa Fund for Underprivileged Maoists in Malibu, instead of Kucinich for President? No, this rule does nothing to prevent bias. It rewards those sneaky enough to donate anonymously, or through a proxy, even as it penalizes those who make their political biases a matter of public record. Note that my infallible ethics problem-solving mechanism predicts this rule perfectly:
1) It’s easily implemented, so that even a sociopath can enforce it;
2) It’s easy to obey, so that even a sociopath can abide by it;
3) It gives the public the entirely false sense that journalists who abide by this rule are honorable and unbiased; and
4) It doesn’t prevent any journalist with even a lick of cleverness from secretly donating money to politicians and then copping a “fairer than thou” attitude from an unassailable position of serene non-involvement.
[...]
A real system for determining right and wrong requires commonly held first principles and leadership with the acknowledged authority to interpret and apply those principles. That kind of agreement is in short supply these days. In modern societies where people adhering to all sorts of creeds regularly interact in order to make money, principles and dogma will tend to take a backseat to rough ‘n ready codes of conduct – and modern ethics is nothing if not rough ‘n ready. Morality is for heroes; modern ethics is for sophisters, economists, and calculators. We tolerate modern ethics, as we tolerate sophisters, but they should both know their place, and neither should command great love or respect.
So ignore the rules, Randy, and donate away. Of course, your donation will expose you as an appalling hypocrite, and you may lose your job consequently. That’s okay. Your job is stupid. Why not write a column calling men to heroic virtue instead of cocktail-party pleasantries?
OK, in order:
1) If Randy Cohen actually knew about the Times policy and thought that somehow MoveOn.org (the PAC, not the affiliated 501c4) was relevantly like a nonpartisan charitable contribution and not relevantly like a political contribution, and didn't even wonder about this enough to ask someone, then he's dumb. When you donate to a PAC, and fill out the paperwork that gets the donation into the FEC database, you get lots of verbiage about this not being a tax-deductible charitable contribution. You're contributing directly to the election or defeat of political candidates, even though you're not contributing directly to the candidates. This is the basic distinction of American campaign-donations law. It's not hard. One may not like the rules that put PACs on one side and the Catholic Church on the other of a very bright line, but they're not hard to understand from a donor's perspective. (They may be hard for the organizations themselves to understand, in terms of what's permitted or not to groups on either side of the line.)
I don't think he's that dumb. Therefore I think he's a liar.
2) He's not, strictly speaking, a hypocrite, because-- as I kvetched about all these years ago-- his official position on the relationship of ethics to political morality is that the rules are less important than being on the leftward side. He's living up to his announced code, though of course that differs from the Times' code.
3) I agree with both Cohen and Kern that this is a pretty dumb rule. It's not as dumb as the famous case of the Washington Post editor who doesn't vote lest it prejudice him, but it's dumb. Journalists categorically shouldn't be in the pay of political actors. But how one gets from there to the rule that they should not themselves contribute to such actors is beyond me. Making the contribution doesn't add to the journalist's bias. In order to avoid (yes) the appearance of impropriety or conflicts of interest, I'd say that news (not opinion) reporters who directly cover politics and elections shouldn't contribute-- lest the donation make the reporter feel that he or she now has a psychic stake in the candidate's success. (But note it's only a psychic stake; the conflict of interest is much harder to identify than when a business reporter owns stocks.)
4) But, contra Cohen's general position and Kern's view about this case, I think that following the rules is morally important. This may make me less than manly in Kern's eyes.
[Aside: Has any good ever come from someone who feels the need to announce he's being manly? Among the defining traits of John Wayne types is that they don't talk very much, certainly don't talk about themselves very much, and basically never talk about themselves with the kind of self-reflexivity that says, 'hey, didja see what I just did? Didja see what kind of action that was? When someone tells you he's being manly, call him a poseur-- it's ok, you can use a French word, because you're not pretending to be John Wayne-- and then check to make sure your wallet's still in place.)
Anyway: this may make me less than manly in Kern's eyes. And in Cohen's it means that I'm morally deluded. But the rules are how we live with our moral and political disagreements. The rules are how we avoid case-by-case post-hoc ajudication-- the kind of ajudication that is most likely to be infected by bias. Until the day comes when everyone working on a newspaper has precisely the same political principles, because they've fallen in behind Kern's manly "leadership with the acknowledged authority to interpret and apply those principles," a news organization needs some way to know, and to provide mutual reassurance, that people with strong but divergent beliefs about ultimate political ends are all operating within the same restraints on means.
Kern is kind of right about the difference between ethics and virtue-- but completely wrong about what that means about ethics. Ethical rules tell us: don't stuff the ballot box, even when you think it's really really morally important that your guy win because of your general theory of justice. They tell us: zealously represent your client, even if you think he's scum, or get out of the way and let someone else do so, because you're a professional with expert knowledge and the client-customer has a hard time monitoring whether you;re doing a good job or not. They tell us: don't give a students bad grade because they disagree with you politically, even if you think that their political views reveal that they must be really dumb or very bad people. They tell us-- contra Cohen's advice-- not to authorize ourselves to commit workplace fraud in the service of our overarching vision of how commerce and labor ought to be organized.
That's not to say that ethics is ultimately more important than morality broadly understood. Ethics offers a particular register of morality, not the whole of it. But the ability to live on terms of fair and reciprocal cooperation with those who disagree with us is morally important in its own right. Honoring professional and contractual obligations is morally important. In denigrating ethics as the morality of sociopaths, Kern implicitly calls for the morality of narcissistic megalomaniacs-- those so sure of their own virtue and the rightness of their cause that they can't imagine the need for moral engagement with those who might disagree.
Compare and contrast
Two new blog entries on political science research on diversity.
Daniel Larison (at the new, revamped American Scene) on Robert Putnam's "Ethnic Diversity and Social Capital" research (see his Skytte Prize Lecture), showing that increases in local diversity can be "devastating" to social capital in all the affected communities; people hunker down in the face of unfamiliar neighbors, their intracommunal associational life dries up and intracommunal ones don't develop anytime soon.
Henry Farrell on Scott Page's book, The Difference, showing that under various not-too-restrictive conditions diversity in a pool of decisionmakers has benefits. Different perspectives, assuming that they're perspectives on a shared question, problem, or enterprise, can be more valuable than expertise. (Diverse agents with divergent preferences don't getthe same results.)
Note that these conclusions are entirely compatible with one another. A neighborhood isn't an enterprise association. It may be that the epistemic benefits of diversity can only be obtained in fairly artificially structured environments. (Most formal decisionmaking bodies are artificially structured environments.)
Add Putnam and Page to my reading pile; and puzzle over the implications for liberal theory and democratic theory respectively. Or else throw it out into the world and encourage a grad student to do the puzzling...
Two new blog entries on political science research on diversity.
Daniel Larison (at the new, revamped American Scene) on Robert Putnam's "Ethnic Diversity and Social Capital" research (see his Skytte Prize Lecture), showing that increases in local diversity can be "devastating" to social capital in all the affected communities; people hunker down in the face of unfamiliar neighbors, their intracommunal associational life dries up and intracommunal ones don't develop anytime soon.
Henry Farrell on Scott Page's book, The Difference, showing that under various not-too-restrictive conditions diversity in a pool of decisionmakers has benefits. Different perspectives, assuming that they're perspectives on a shared question, problem, or enterprise, can be more valuable than expertise. (Diverse agents with divergent preferences don't getthe same results.)
Note that these conclusions are entirely compatible with one another. A neighborhood isn't an enterprise association. It may be that the epistemic benefits of diversity can only be obtained in fairly artificially structured environments. (Most formal decisionmaking bodies are artificially structured environments.)
Add Putnam and Page to my reading pile; and puzzle over the implications for liberal theory and democratic theory respectively. Or else throw it out into the world and encourage a grad student to do the puzzling...
Monday, June 25, 2007
Poli sci papers
Henry Farrell has set up a new blog with abstracts and links to political science papers, kind of like what Larry Solum does for law, Brian Weatherson does (used to do?) for philosophy, and various econ bloggers do for their discipline.
Henry Farrell has set up a new blog with abstracts and links to political science papers, kind of like what Larry Solum does for law, Brian Weatherson does (used to do?) for philosophy, and various econ bloggers do for their discipline.
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