Yer doin' it wrong

Inside Higher Ed reports:

A plan to eliminate 15 faculty positions regardless of tenure status might hit some speed bumps if Albion College’s faculty handbook were followed, but the college’s trustees have decided to ignore that minor inconvenience.

When Albion faculty said the dismissals might violate the handbook, the board promptly passed a resolution washing their hands of the guidelines. Indeed, the board didn’t even bother to say which parts of the book they would change; the trustees simply declared that anything standing in their way was "amended effective immediately."

And the resolution does indeed say, simply,

RESOLVED that exercising the authority of the Board of Trustees under the Charter of 1857, the Faculty Handbook is amended effective immediately in all ways necessary to
permit the reduction of 15 full time equivalent (FTE) existing faculty positions, which may include tenured faculty positions, by the beginning of the 2010-2011
academic year.

Some of the faculty have advanced various interpretations of the Faculty Handbook which are incompatible with the trustees’ fiduciary obligation to govern the College.
The Board of Trustees reaffirms its fundamental commitment to academic freedom, which tenure protects.

This amendment is made effective immediately because the Board considers it an emergency that the Board’s authority in this area be clarified.

Now, final resolution of the relationship between faculty governance and trustee authority is hard to come by, and one usually wants to avoid pushing things to the point where a resolution is needed. But let's say that the trustees are right that they have the responsibility and authority to act unilaterally if they need to. Suppose that they have the authority to unilaterally amend the Faculty hHandbook-- which is likely to be legally correct.

They still haven't acted.

"the Faculty Handbook is amended effective immediately in all ways necessary to
permit the reduction of 15 full time equivalent (FTE) existing faculty positions, which may include tenured faculty positions, by the beginning of the 2010-2011
academic year."

has no actual amendments contained within its language. The thing about written legal documents is that they contain actual words-- and amending them requires substituting other actual words, or else specifying which original words are being deleted. You can't simply declare a policy goal.

If the Faculty Handbook posed an ex ante obstacle to the firings, then I can't see that that obstacle has been removed.

Update: Paul Gowder thinks I'm wrong about this. As you'll see in the comments over there, I think he's wrong in thinking me wrong.

Problems in ethnofederalism and quasi-federalism

There are a few possible outcomes for today's election in Britain that would be of especially great interest for students of ethnofederalism and quasifederalism.

1) If the Tories gain a plurality but not a majority-- and could get over the top with the help of a Celtic party. It's improbable that they would get such help-- except for the UUP, whose candidates are standing as part of the Tory caucus this year, the gulf between the Tories and the non-English parties is substantial.

But this would also mean that Lib-Lab plus one or two Celtic parties would add up to a majority.

Imagine a hung Parliament in which the Tories have two more seats than Lib-Lab-- but Tories + SNP would be a majority, or Lib-Lab + SNP + Plaid Cyrmu would be a majority.

SNP and PC, like the Bloc Quebecois, are generally committed to not being in the business of deciding who runs the whole state. But at that point (like in the aftermath of the last Canadian election) the pressure on them to pick a side could be ratcheted up. So could the inducements offered to them to do so.

If you're David Cameron under these circumstances, do you open negotiations with the SNP? Or do you rely on the pious hope that they can be left out of the calculations, because Lib-Lab won't do a deal with them either?

Now imagine if Tory seats = Lib-Lab seats precisely. If you're the SNP, can you really resist the chance to play kingmaker, to start a bidding war, to name your price?

2) If the Tories gain a plurality, but Lib-Lab together gains a very slim majority, a different set of problems arise that has nothing to do with the Celtic partiesand everything to do with the West Lothian question. This outcome would mean that the Tories had won a majority of seats in England, given party distributions elsewhere. But the government would be Lib-Lab.

Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland-- but not England-- have and regional self-government of varying degrees. England is still ruled directly from Westminster. There has been contention over whether Scottish MPs should be able to vote on individual pieces of legislation that affects England (or England and Wales) but not Scotland. But I think this election result would put the problem in a new, sharper, light. A government that has authority over English-- but not Scottish-- domestic policy would have been decisively chosen by Scottish votes, in the face of an English majority in the other direction.

I could imagine that result being inflammatory; it might finally succeed in igniting widespread English interest in the West Lothian question. That would, I think, pose more dangers for the Tories than it would offer advantages-- as a generation of conflict over Europe showed, identity questions can fracture the Conservative Party, and its leadership has little skill in finessing them. But this outcome would offer a very powerful incentive to the Tories to start playing the Little England card.

See also Chris Lawrence.

Update

We're right in the thick of condition (1)-- and it's amazing how invisible the SNP and PC are. The Bloc Quebecois doesn't enter into governments in Canada-- but it's willing to negotiate its price for tacitly supporting minority governments.

In Britain, the only choices are:

Tory-LibDem coalition, or at least arrangement to keep LibDem from voting down a Queen's Speech;

Tory-Labour grand coalition, which is never going to happen;

a minority government that could be brought down with a sneeze or a stiff breeze, whether Conservative or Labour or Lib-Lab;

or that somebody talks to the SNP and Plaid Cymru and gets their agreement not to vote down a minority government (the SNP, at least, will not take part in government.)

Thisarticle says that the SNP has begun talks with Labour. But that fact isn't being reported anywhere else, and it has the potential to be decisive.

Boring facts

Matt Yglesias chases Brad DeLong chasing David Brooks chasing his own tail as usual, on culture and policy as explanations of social outcomes.

Brooks says

If you combine the influence of ethnicity and region, you get astounding lifestyle gaps. The average Asian-American in New Jersey lives an amazing 26 years longer and is 11 times more likely to have a graduate degree than the average American Indian in South Dakota.

and follows up with

Therefore, the first rule of policy-making should be, don’t promulgate a policy that will destroy social bonds. If you take tribes of people, exile them from their homelands and ship them to strange, arid lands, you’re going to produce bad outcomes for generations.

Now, "first do no harm" to functioning social worlds is a valuable rule for policymakers to follow. And Matt's right to see the second passage as completing the meaning of the first.

But, well, here's the thing. South Dakota, arid though it might be, is not Oklahoma. South Dakota's Indians are mostly Sioux-- the members of the Lakota/ Nakota/ Dakota nations from which the state takes its name. They have been progressively crowded onto smaller and smaller portions of their ancestors' homelands as a result of gold rushes, wars, thefts, and allotments and partitions. But they have not been "exiled" from their homeland, and strange, arid South Dakota is not strange to them.

There's been plenty of bad policy directed at Indians-- but it's not the same bad policy everywhere.

Superseding reparations

This slightly mad Henry Louis Gates op-ed (apparent thesis: the history of slavery has responsibility that's widely distributed and hard to disentangle across North America, Europe, and west Africa, so thank goodness we now have a President whose half-east African, half-white ancestry gives him magical historical-responsibility-apportioning powers) made me, possibly, realize something.

Gates hints that, if reparations are owed to the descendants of slaves, they might be owed in part by [some] west Africans whose ancestors were involved in the slave trade.

I think this is finally a case that lets my moral intuition click into the patterns set by Jeremy Waldron's famously controversial article Superseding Historic Injustice. Waldron argues that forward-looking demands of distributive justice and the welfare of the poor trump backward-looking rectification. There's much more to it, but that's one of the key moral ideas. As applied to the indigenous land rights cases that he talks about, I've never found this even slightly compelling. But: I can't imagine the fact pattern or historical evidence that would make me think taxing west Africans in 2010 to make payments to African-Americans in 2010, when the latter have a standard of living between 20 and 50 times higher than the former. Liberia has a per-capita income of just over a dollar a day. Extracting even millions, to say nothing of tens or hundreds of millions, of dollars (and in dollars, that is, exhausting-and-then-some the foreign exchange reserve capacity of west African states) from people many of whom are among the poorest in the world just can't be what justice demands.

I could just fall back on the following, which is part of how I think about reparation cases anyways: the United States government and the government of the several states within it are historically and institutionally continuous with those that perpetrated slavery. There's been no repudiation of the national debt in the US since that time. So those governments are corporate actors that could still be liable for "their" misdeeds of a century and a half ago (and more recent misdeeds as well, since I think much of the case for reparations rests on the Jim Crow era). No west African state and probably no west African collectivity or corporation has that same demonstrable intergenerational continuity. The relevant actors have ceased to exist. So there's no one who could be held responsible today in west Africa, although there is in the US.

That seems plausible to me. But it also seems unnecessary to reach the conclusion. Forward-looking distributive and welfarist considerations alone would, it seems to me, trump any backward-looking evidence of continuity one could find. That's not a comfortable view for me, and maybe my intuition is still entangled with other facts about the case. But at least I can now see Waldron's point on a basic level that I've never managed before, even though I can follow the argument just fine.

(Hat tip Melissa Harris-Lacewell on twitter.)

Guy Fawkes revisited

Steve Benen and Josh Marshall are surprised that the Republican Governor's Association has decided to issue a call to Remember November in a way that seems to evoke remembering the Fifth of November. I have to say it's not obviously true that there's any Guy Fawkes reference in the video. It could be exclusively a reference to Election Day falling in November. And Benen calls back to a Michelle Bachman rally on Capitol Hill that took place last November 5-- but as far as I can tell Benen was the only one linking that to Guy Fawkes Day. The basic presumption has to be that Americans don't know the date, don't know the rhyme, and don't know the significance of either.

But here, my guess is that the Ron Paul influence on the Tea Parties has meant that rallies have signs and chants to remember November in a way that is directly descended from the Paul campaign's inadvertent association with Guy Fawkes Day.

And-- tell me if I'm imagining this-- in the "Remember November logo, the V is stylized to look both like the checkmark on a ballot and like the V from "V for Vendetta."

SO I think Benen, Marshall, and Scherer are right to see a Guy Fawkes influence here-- but it certainly doesn't amount to a wholesale appropriation of the imagery. This is a lot more tenuous than, say, the usual Republican appropriation of and code language about the American Confederacy.

In case the connection is real, I'll take the occasion to refer you to my post three years ago about the strange twists and turns and misunderstandings that ended with Guy Fawkes being a symbol to the American anti-statist right.

"Worthwhile Canadian initiative"

FIscal restraint through spending cuts, says Tyler Cowen in his NYT column.

(I'm curious: do my Canadian readers recognize the "initiative" joke?)

Lithwick on Liberal Law

Dahlia Lithwick is sometimes one of the best legal writers around... and sometimes just really weird. Today's Slate piece has the thesis "unlike Richard Epstein, poor Harold Koh is viewed as too extreme for the Supreme Court and that makes liberal law students sad."

my concern here is with the next generation of liberal law students, who continue to hear the message that their heroes are presumptively ineligible for a seat at the high court, whereas the brightest lights of the Federalist Society—Judge Brett Kavanaugh, professor Richard Epstein, Clarence Thomas, Theodore Olsen, Ken Starr, and Michael McConnell—are either already on the bench or will be seen as legitimate candidates the next time a Republican is in the White House. Look at the speakers list of the last national Federalist Society conference and tell me the word filibuster would have been raised if John McCain had tapped most of them. "

Olson is 70 and was passed over as too controversial already. Richard Epstein, I feel confident in saying, will never make it to a shortlist. Kenneth Starr, even though he's already been a judge, will never make it to a shortlist, and there are plenty of Democrats who would filibuster him even if it meant staying awake all night reading aloud from the phone book on the Senate floor. And from the linked Federalist Society speaker's list things look no better. Many are on the list for balance (Jed Rubenfeld: not a rising star of the right!), and many aren't lawyers. But of the rest: yes, I believe Epstein or Randy Barnett or Miguel Estrada would be filibustered. Estrada was filibustered for elevation to the circuit court; that's why he's not there now.

In the world we actually inhabit: Robert Bork was defeated; Clarence Thomas scraped by after hearings that were ugly and brutal even before the Anita Hill story broke, and had enough Democratic opposition to sustain a filibuster; Alito was opposed by enough Democrats to sustain the filibuster that was attempted, though enough his Democratic opponents voted for cloture that the vote was held; and Rehnquist's elevation to Chief Justice was opposed by a majority of Senate Democrats (though not quite 40).

By contrast, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who should probably count as precedent for the "liberal hero" model, was confirmed 96-3. I believe that Sotomayor was the first modern Democratic nominee to be opposed by a majority among Senate Republicans.

Republican Presidents have responded to this reality in just the way Lithwick says only Democrats have had to: by trimming their sails and appointing or trying to appoint people with thin paper records (David Souter, John Roberts, Harriet Meyers). The popular impression is that this is part of why Michael McConnell stepped down from the federal bench; though he's a very highly-regarded jurist, he was probably never going to be elevated to the Supreme Court by risk-averse Republican presidents. Likewise, no one ever mentioned Richard Posner on Supreme Court shortlists during the Bush administration, even though he has a claim to being the most influential living American judge; everyone knew that Bush would never appoint someone with that thick and controversial a record, no matter how "bright a light" everyone agrees that he is. See also: Alex Kozinski.

I don't get what Lithwick was thinking. "Richard Epstein would plausibly be appointed, would sail through confirmation hearings, and would not be filibustered" as a baseline for comparison about the fate of liberal law professors doesn't pass the laugh test, and she knows enough to know that.

Goldberg on Ginsburg on Indian Law

"Finding the Way to Indian Country: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Decisions in Indian Law Cases," Ohio State Law Journal.

we have dozens of institutions trying to be identical miniature, for instance, McGills.

A very interesting and challenging article on tuition, incentives, and teaching. It includes this crucial bit of wisdom that echoes something that's come up in this space before:

Now, if you think of universities not as revenue-maximizing institutions but as prestige-maximizing institutions, it all starts to fall into place.

Now, I don't share Usher's attitude to the pursuit of star researchers as a university-building strategy. But the point about tuition, incentives, and institutional convergence is clearly right.

LaCroix on federalism

I've already ordered my copy of Chicago law professor Alison LaCroix's new book The Ideological Origins of American Federalism and made plans to write about it online at some point. But now I notice that she's been blogging the book's themes chez Balkin:

The New Old Federalism

Commandeering Federalism

Recommended reading, and I hope to start writing some responses later this week.

Robert Paul Wolff's memoirs

Via Brian Leiter, the political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff is blogging his memoirs, and it's amazingly entertaining stuff. Three excerpts (but read the whole thing):
first installment:

It was also Arno [Mayer] who unintentionally taught me a pedagogical lesson that has stood me in good stead for forty-five years. His first lecture dealt with the waves of invasions by Germanic tribes that brought the Roman Empire to its knees. Arno had the brilliant idea of relating these invasions to the major battles that had been fought by Germany and the Allies in World War II. The terrain was of course the same, and inasmuch as the rivers and valleys had not moved in the intervening fifteen hundred years, the two made a lovely fit. The five of us sat in the last row of the lecture hall and marveled at the brilliance of Arno's presentation. But when we next met our individual classes, we discovered to our dismay that the students had been massively underwhelmed. The problem was simple. It was nineteen fifty-eight, and our students were eighteen years old, which meant that they had been four when most of those battles were fought. The Second World War was ancient history to them, something their parents did. They had never heard of the Battle of the Bulge.
Sad to say, this experience has been repeated endlessly over the decades. The Freshmen I now encounter were born during the Clinton Administration and probably came to some degree of awareness of the larger world during George W. Bush's second term. Anything before that might as well be ancient Rome. For many years, I compensated for this absence of historical memory by extracting my philosophical examples from Star Trek, but even that draws blank stares now, and as I do not get HBO, I cannot substitute The Sopranos. There is nothing that makes you feel older faster than teaching undergraduates.

second installment:

The next summer, my advisee invited me to dinner at his apartment, where he had taken up light housekeeping with a lovely Radcliffe girl. Saul [Kripke] was there as well. Saul's father was a Conservative Rabbi, and Saul had had a serious Jewish upbringing. As he talked, he davaned, which is to say he rocked back and forth vigorously. As he talked and davaned he ate, gesturing spastically, and as he talked and davaned and ate and gestured, his food scattered all over the table, as if to illustrate the law of entropy. With gentle understanding, the young Radcliffe student patiently swept the peas up from the table top and put them back on Saul's plate, where they stayed for a bit before being restrewn.
I have often wondered whether Saul, brilliant though he undoubtedly was, ever understood how much slack everyone was cutting him, from Quine on down. Somehow, I think not.

Followed immediately by:

For the most part, I went my own way in the department. Harvard professors don't really advance much beyond what is called in child development books "parallel play." No one attends anyone else's lectures, of course, and there is precious little socializing. When they encounter one another on campus, they resemble the dukes and counts at the medieval court of Burgundy, glorious and richly appointed and very formal. Each full professor proceeds in stately fashion, preceded like Cyrano's nose by his vita, and trailing in his wake several Assistant Professors who exhibit the appropriate submissive body language.

This story is the crowning achievement of the memoirs so far, but it demands to be read not excerpted-- go have a look.

Update: The posts are still coming, one a day. See here for the birth of Social Studies and for life with "Barry" (!) Moore and "Herbie" (!!!) Marcuse.

The myth of the golden age

One recurring topic around here is the problematic libertarian historical memory of an America in which once, before the Fall, there was Freedom-- whether the Fall was the New Deal or the 1937 switch in time or the 16th Amendment or the Federal Reserve Act or whatever. And I have a special interest in that subset of soi-disant libertarians who I term confederatistas for whom the Fall was apparently 1865. It's a topic of interest for me outside the blog, too: "Federalism and the Old and New Liberalisms" is substantially about the same thing.

Indeed, the second-most trafficked post in this blog's history was about related problems, though I won't link back to it because it names the odd law professor blogger whose wrath it incurred and who seems eager to resume internet fights whenever possible.

Anyways: I wish to recommend a new piece on the problem by David Boaz, VP of Cato: Up from slavery.

Is...?

This entertaining Gawker post (via Jonathan Chait) about frequent google searches for celebrities-- and the constant recurrence of one in particular-- prompted a few minutes of fooling around to come up with the following about prominent academics.

First of all, I think it's noteworthy what google gives you when you just type in the word "is" . Try it and see.

But on with the show. Google's suggested questions:

Is Cass Sunstein
Jewish

Is Cornel West
married
wife white
married to a white woman
a Christian

Is Larry Summers
Jewish

Is Milton Friedman
still alive

Is Henry Louis Gates
married
married to a white woman

Is Paul Krugman
a liberal
Jewish
a democrat
married

Is Rawls
a utilitarian

Is Tyler Cowen
autistic

Is Weber
a functionalist
a jewish name

Is Michael Ignatieff
Jewish

Is Michael Sandel
Jewish

and, best of all:

Is John Mearsheimer
Jewish

Books in political theory

Good news: Cambridge is bringing Judith Shklar's Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind back into print. It's been hard to find for a long time.

Other books of interest, either newly released, about to be released, or newly learned about by me:

Fonna Forman Barilai, Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory, from the Cambridge "Ideas in Context" series;

my colleague Christina Tarnopolsky's Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants: Plato's Gorgias and the Politics of Shame, Princeton;

Melvin Rogers, The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy, Columbia;

(The above three books will all be discussed at author-meets-critics roundtables at the CPSA meeting in June)

and Ryan Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue, out last year from Cambridge but for some reason I only learned about it last weekend.

I've been known to complain...

I've been known to complain about Phi Beta Cons, the uninteresting National Review blog about higher education. I can easily imagine a place for a website filled with smart and well-informed conservative commentary on the academy, and I think it'd be a useful thing. But it would have to not consist of endless complaints about all forms of affirmative action save for alumni preferences and football admits; whines that Very Serious Studies by National Review freelancers aren't making it onto college curricula; jokes about political correctness that were the state of the comedic are in 1990 or so; and griping that the kids these days are having the sex.

There's lots of talk about the student-loan reform at PBC right now, little of it enlightening in the slightest. But at least it's not PBC, but rather The Corner, that came up with this gem. Republican Senator Lamar Alexander issues a bunch of dull talking points about the reform, and how it turns everything over to the government. He predicts that it will lead to something

more like a Soviet-style, European, and even Asian higher-education model where the government manages everything. In most of those countries, they’ve been falling over themselves to reject their state-controlled authoritarian universities, which are much worse than ours, and move toward the American model which emphasizes choice, competition, and peer-reviewed research. In that sense, we’re now stepping back from our choice-competition culture, which has given us not just some of the best universities in the world, but almost all of them.

So: "Soviet-style" is clearly in there for polemical value. But The Corner headlines the post "Alexander: Obama's 'Soviet-Style' Takeover of Student Loans." Alexander's comparing the predicted system of higher education to the Soviet system. But the headline makes "Soviet-style" into a description of the "takeover"-- i.e. a violent nationalization without compensation.

Notice that banks would be free to continue to make student loans. And they're not having their existing assets taken. All they're losing is the ability to make publicly subsidized student loans in the future. A comparison with Soviet nationalization is just nuts. And it's not even what Alexander said.

Anyway, the headline-post gap wasn't what first struck me about this. Neither was the surrender of National Review to being the microphone handed to current Republican office-holders. Rather, it was this:

Back in the days of the Savings and Loan crisis, and again in the days of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, we saw lots of commentary from the right that the problems couldn't be blamed on the free market. After all, in both cases massive moral hazard had been created by federal guarantees underwriting the debts, eliminating market discipline. Pains were taken to piously distinguish the free market from corporatism and corporate welfare (a distinction I take very seriously, I might add).

In the last two weeks, I haven't seen any Republican official or Republican-leaning intellectual make the slightest reference to the problems with a system in which private lenders make risk-free profits by lending on the back of a federal guarantee. The indictment of corporate welfare has been nowhere to be found. The view that there's something distinctively unproblematic about private lenders with public guarantees has been completely lost. And the (misleading) headline, the reference to a Soviet-style takeover, crystallized this for me. Since there's been no crisis in student lending, no collapse of the system, the status quo ante has been naturalized; there are people on the right who think that the subsidized revenue streams to which lenders had become accustomed were a kind of property that has now been seized. The ex post commentaries on FSLIC and Franny and Freddie have been forgotten.

Update I missed this post from the estimable and independent-minded Reihan Salam.

I'm going to live forever, etc.

I may be a very unreliable blogger these days, but at the very least, I always link to this kind of good news.

Lost thoughts

Spoilers, naturally.

It was deliberately conspicuous that MIB gave Ricardo instructions on how to kill Jacob that mirrored Dogen's instructions to Sayid on how to kill MIB.

But nota bene that Ben did not get the same instructions before actually killing Jacob. Specifically, Ben heard Jacob talk, and killed him anyways, whereas both Sayid and Ricardo are told that if they let their target speak, it'll be too late.

I think this supports seeing Ben as exceptionally free-willed, outside the direct control of either side. He may well have a Gollum-like role to play in the final denouement. He's the only character we've seen who was ever under MIB's sway and then came back to the other side-- this could set up a Gollum-like re-fall from grace (with unpredictable consequences). But my guess is rather that Ben's real proof of the ability to go on choosing.

Ben chose darkness a long time ago, in arranging for the Purge. He lied to the Others for years, claiming to speak for Jacob but never actually meeting the guy. He visited the cabin in the woods that was probably holding MIB prisoner, but on his own telling he never saw anyone in it, so he never spoke with MIB either. (We don't yet know whether Richard knew Ben was lying and let him get away with it, or for some reason was kept in the dark.)

Ben's spent decades nursing nasty grudges-- killing dozens to get even with his father, overthrowing Widmore and starting a bitter long-term war on that front. He resented Locke for being chosen leader and for getting to talk with Jacob. And he killed Locke out of petty envy-- then was easily manipulated by Flocke into killing Jacob with petty resentments. We'll find out that much of the Survivors-Others conflict of the first few seasons was just what it first appeared to be: Ben's own nastiness, with Jacob just serving as a religious pretext.

But after all that, even Ben could repent-- on his own, with neither Jacob nor any of Jacob's representatives leading him there.

A health-care reform thought

The rightward shift in crime policy and welfare policy of the mid-1990s-- basically, welfare reform plus all the Giuliani-era policing improvements-- ultimately benefited Democrats. They stopped the fearful exodus of whites from the party by undermining the two great pathologizing narratives about blacks.

I wonder whether something similar could happen with health care reform. One important source of working-class and middle-class resistance to creative destruction and freer markers over the past couple of decades has been the terror of losing health insurance along with a job, especially but not only for those whose families include someone with a preexisting condition. If a period of unemployment or self-employment lasted longer than COBRA benefits, it became very frightening regardless of savings in the bank or the profitability of the new self-employment; and any job turnover at all was very problematic for those with pre-existing conditions.

I wonder whether health care reform will take some of that fear away, and so make the prospect of turnover seem less like a potentially-mortal threat. No one's going to welcome losing their jobs! But the intensity of opposition to, say, free trade agreements might diminish.

Notice this is not a story about Republicans benefiting because of a backlash against the bill; rather, it assumes that the bill, like all entitlements, will be untouchable and will therefore fade into the background.

Update: Another, ;largely-unrelated, thought, about the relationship between the new law and the insurance industry's self-interest.

This turns the US health insurance industry into something a lot like the water, gas, phone, and electricity utilities in the US between the Progressive era and 1980. They're private and more or less guaranteed a rate of return to capital, but the terms on which they provide service is much more tightly regulated, and will approximate being universal. This is a somewhat unappealing model for lots of reasons; it manages to be pro-business and pro-capital while also being anti-innovation and anti-entrepreneurship. The moves of the late 70s and early 80s away from this model were largely desirable. But the utility model has its (so to speak) utility; it provides private capital for the industry, provides widespread coverage for consumers, and provides at least a little competition and innovation. Indeed the health insurance version will have somewhat more competition than the post-Progressive Era version, since it will lack the enforced protection of allegedly-"natural" monopolies. Insurance industries will still be in competition with each other, albeit in a more constrained way.

Ten most influential books

See: Tyler Cowen, Will Wilkinson, Russell Arben Fox, Bryan Caplan,Matt Yglesias, and more. Haven't we done this on Facebook at some point?

I'm unsurprised by how alien Russell's and Bryan's lists are to me (in almost-opposite directions, of course). By contrast, even where my list doesn't overlap with Will's, for the most part I can recognize and to some degree share his reactions.

But, man, Rand and Nietzsche are showing up a lot, even on lists where I wouldn't expect them to. Neither's ever had a moment of hold on my mind. A friend in grad school thought that there was something odd and revealing about my complete lack of connection to Nietzsche: "You've never had a Nietzschean moment?" he asked-- a moment when I got it. Nope.

Anyway, I'll take the "formative influences" tack: books I first read before I graduated from college. And I'll arbitrarily stick to nonfiction in my general fields of professional inquiry.

1) Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose. An adult friend gave this to me when I was 11 or so (and when it was very new-- the copy of it, which I still have, is in hardcover). So for me, the exposure to libertarianism and to social science/ social analysis and to serious nonfiction that contained ideas that could really give my brain exercise were simultaneous. It's hard to know what the counterfactual looks like-- how differently I would think if I hadn't read this, then. The friend said that he gave it to me because it was already clear that I would appreciate it-- that it reflected rather than (only) shaping my intellectual tastes. In any case, the ideas of regulatory capture and unintended consequences were among the first serious ideas about social analysis I ever encountered-- and the simplified moral-political philosophy of the introduction to the book genuinely inspired me.

2) John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. Read when I had just turned 16, during slow periods and coffee and lunch breaks at my summer supermarket job. (I think this is the moment when lots of smart teenagers encounter Rand or Nietzsche-- when they're looking for something to read to keep their brains going while they're off school, especially if they're in the kinds of summer jobs working/ lower middle class kids get rather than internships and the like.) It wasn't technically my first primary text in political philosophy; by then I had read Thoreau's "Resistance," a couple of the Federalist Papers, and smatterings of Plato, Smith, and Marx in my Great Books collection. But it was "On Liberty" that really fired me up about great works in political philosophy. I agreed with its conclusions, of course, but I already knew enough to know that there were things to worry about/ argue with; I wasn't excited primarily by the agreement. I was excited by the prose, the power of the arguments, and the sense of what it could be to assemble normative arguments about big questions.

3) Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Read about the same time: the first work of scholarship I ever read, and still one of my favorites.

4) Leonard Levy, Original Intent and the Framers' Constitution. The second work of scholarship I ever read. The overarching argument of the book was a little beyond my reach at the time, but the detailed legal-historical analysis of the various constitutional provisions greatly impressed me, and complemented what I had learned about the era from Bailyn.

5) John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. First read it my first semester of college; it aggravated me and annoyed me and in many ways defined the intellectual world I've lived in ever since.

6) Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice. Spheres annoyed me even more, the first two times I read it, and not in the same "I must engage with and respond to this" way that Rawls did. First two times I read it, I didn't see the point of it; by comparison with Rawls (or Nozick), Walzer never seemed to have any arguments. Eventually, as I followed the path I now understand as leading from political philosophy to political theory, I came to see Spheres of Justice as a wise and profound book, and an important exemplar of how to think normatively but not abstractly. There's still almost no argument in it I find compelling, nothing that I'm brought to agree with by Walzer's reasoning. But I do love to reread from it, when the occasion presents itself.

7) F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 1 (Listed together because I really think they belong together-- I think LLL v1 completes the argument of Constitution and makes the earlier book much more satisfying than it is on its own.) First read Hayek in a freshman seminar taught by by university's president on the history of liberalism. (Also my first exposure to Acton and Tocqueville.) More than any of the books listed so far, Hayek shaped how I think about the basic shape of the social world, and also how I think about the connections among normative, explanatory, and empirical social analysis. Though I'm not an economist, and one of the (minor but real) aims of my next book is to reject the intellectual history offered in Constitution, and to the best of my recollection the phrase "spontaneous order" doesn't appear in anything I've ever published, I still comfortably describe myself as a Hayekian in my intellectual outlook.

8) Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic. I read this in Wood's own class on the American Revolution, from then on I not only had my model of what to try to live up to as a classroom teacher, I also had my real understanding of how research at the highest level and teaching at the highest level enriched, complemented, and completed one another, and why the profession of university professor hung together as a single vocation. (It's also, simply, a great book, but its influence on me was not only intellectual.)

9) Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture. This book gave me my first actual research agenda-- and was written recently enough before I became a graduate student that I felt like I could be a contributor to a live intellectual debate. Incidentally, this was probably the first dissertation-book I read all the way through. (I couldn't make it through Liberalism and the Limits of Justice on my first attempt; at a certain point I said "I get it, already," and put the book down.) I tell doctoral students in political theory that they should have a couple of dissertation-books on their minds and on their shelves that they think are relevant to their work. This may sound cruel: a dissertation-book is not a dissertation, and students shouldn't be made to think that they need to write an Oxford University Press-quality manuscript in order to have a submittable dissertation. But I found it tremendously useful to have a model for size and scope. Good graduate students often want to propose dissertations that are vastly too big and too ambitious, and then get frustrated when they realize that doing what they want would take decades and thousands of pages. A dissertation-book that you admire can reassure you that something important and worthwhile can be accomplished in something about this big-- and that it's okay not to answer every possible question or master the whole of human knowledge. Kymlicka provided that book for me: a reminder of how much could be accomplished in a project of about that size, and also a reminder that a dissertation can be an impressive accomplishment without doing everything. Kymlicka convincingly opened up a space for more research (others' research as well as his own); he didn't wait until he'd done it all himself before scheduling his defense.

10-11) Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the Revolution; Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity. You'll have noticed a lot of American Revolution/ American founding material on this list, and I was as prone as anyone to a simple Whiggish sense of the connections among freedom, reason, and the 18th-century revolutions. Tocqueville and Berlin, in their different ways, helped to break me of that.

Encyclopedia of Political Theory

According to Amazon, today is the last day to pre-order Sage's new Encyclopedia of Political Theory for the low, low price of $340. I suspect that about half of my blog's readers contributed enough entries to the volume that they're expecting complimentary copies in the mail, so this is primarily a heads-up that the volumes are apparently finally about to get published.

Fun and games with citation counts

Justin Wolfers at the Freakonomics blog on Hayek's scholarly impact:

Taking social science seriously surely means teaching the insights of the most prominent, most important, or most influential economists. This involves teaching important theories—even those you disagree with. There’s no doubt about the influence of Smith, Marx and Keynes; Friedman also belongs. But does Hayek belong on this list?

Let’s use data to inform this debate. I counted the number of references to each economist in the scholarly literature indexed by JSTOR, finding 30,708 articles mentioning “Adam Smith”; 25,626 articles mentioning “Karl Marx”; and 4,945 mentioning “John Maynard Keynes” (the middle name was required to avoid articles by his father, John Neville Keynes). “Milton Friedman” sits easily with this group, and was mentioned in 8,924 articles.

But searching for “Friedrich von Hayek” only yielded 398 articles; adding “(("Friedrich von Hayek") OR ("Friedrich Hayek"))” raised his total to 1242 mentions; also allowing “FH Hayek” raised his count to 1561.

He later corrected FH Hayek to FA Hayek and got up to 1745. This seemed odd to me.

So I went to JSTOR to replicate the results.

JSTOR, full text search, no restrictions as to years or discipline or kind of publication.

"Friedrich von Hayek"-- 397. Close enough to think I'm conducting the searches the same way Wolfers did.

"Friedrich von Hayek" OR "Friedrich Hayek"-- 1231. The discrepancy grows a little bit, but I'm still in Wolfer's ballpark. So these unrestricted full-text searches are what he was doing.

Next step, to get a ceiling estimate:

full-text search on Hayek . 12088 results. Browsing through these yields very few false positives-- so now I'm suspicious.

I notice a lot of references to "Professor Hayek." This seems to have been the convention in some academic journals at midcentury. "Professor Hayek" by itself yields 582 hits, and a quick browse yielded no false positives.

I also notice that the search engine cares about the difference between "F.A. Hayek" and "F. A. Hayek" (with a space between the first period and the A). This makes a big difference. Simply performing the search as "'F.A. Hayek' OR 'F. A. Hayek'" already yields 2219 results-- more than Wolfers' most complete version of his search.

Adding in F. A. von Hayek and Friedrich Hayek as options gets us to 3342.

Now there are more permutations than JSTOR can readily handle. But stretching out the search to ("Friedrich Hayek") OR ("Friedrich von Hayek") OR ("F.A. Hayek") OR ("F.A. von Hayek") OR ("F. A. Hayek") OR ("F. A. von Hayek") OR ("Friedrich A. Hayek") OR ("Friedrich A. von Hayek") OR ("Professor Hayek") yields 4267.

Proceeding from the other direction: a search just on Hayek restricted to business, economics, finance, law, linguistics, philosophy, political science, psychology, public policy, and sociology eliminated all the false positives I could find. 9385 . Searching for "milton friedman" in those same disciplines (and as far as I know there's no ambiguity in how to refer to him): 8088.

Now, I don't really think that citation counts are going to do the work Wolfers wants them to do here. But on his terms, Hayek is now out of Larry Summers' company, and into Friedman's.

Update:

See Wolfers' reply, and mine a few below his, in comments at Marginal Revolution. There's just a problem here in comparing names that are difficult to compare. "Hayek" almost always refers to the relevant person in academic searches (unlike, say, at Dan Drezner's blog.) You get very few false positives with just the last name. But the false negatives are extremely sensitive to variations in how you specify his given names. Approximately the same is true of Keynes, though as Wolfers notes Keynes' father was also well-known.

Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx are opposite cases. Last names only will yield a huge number of false positives; the last names are just too common. But there's very little variation in how given names are specified-- I can't think that I've ever seen any of the three referred to by initials or with a middle name. So simply applying "the same" rule to Hayek and Friedman will get incomparable results-- vastly too many false positives or vastly too many false negatives. And so any of these count-comparisons are going to look more precise than they really are. But my strong impression from trying lots of variations: Smith, Marx, and Keynes are in a class by themselves, and Hayek and Friedman are basically comparable.

See also D-squared, who rightly emphasizes that "if something isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing well".


Further update:
As long as I'm getting so much traffic sent here by Marginal Revolution and other blogs, might as well link to my own most recent engagement with Hayekian themes: Not So Novus an Ordo: Constitutions Without Social Contracts, Political Theory, Vol. 37, No. 2, 191-217 (2009)

CREUM postdocs in ethics for 2010-11

Deadline: April 30.

Two upcoming conferences: "Hegel After Spinoza" and "Basic Income at a Time of Economic Upheaval"

April 9-10, 2010: "Hegel After Spinoza: A Symposium
McGill University, Thomson House

Friday - 4:00 pm
Keynote Address

John McCumber, "Nature vs. Spirit: Hegel’s Reconciliation with Spinoza"

Saturday - 10:00 am

Jason Read, "'Desire is Man’s Very Essence': Spinoza and Hegel as Philosophers of Transindividuality"

Caroline Williams, "Thinking the Subject between Hegel and Spinoza"

2:00 pm

Vittorio Morfino, "Spinoza in the Science of Logic"

Vance Maxwell, "Hegel’s Treatment of Spinoza: Its Scope and Limits"

4:15 pm
Keynote Address

Warren Montag, "Hegel, sive Spinoza: Towards a History of the Problem"


April 15-16, 2010: Basic Income at a Time of Economic Upheaval: A Path to Justice and Stability?
McGill University, Faculty Club

9.30: coffee & registration

9.45: welcome: Jurgen De Wispelaere, CRÉUM

10.00 – 11.00: Opening Lecture

Louise Haagh, University of York & BIEN

“Basic Income and Public Finance”

Chair: Almaz Zelleke, The New School & USBIG

11.00 – 12.45: Panel A – Basic Income Models in Canada and the US

Sally Lerner, University of Waterloo

“Education for a Canadian BIG Society”

Jim Mulvale, University of Regina

Rob Rainer, Canada Without Poverty

“Mapping out a Pragmatic Guaranteed Income Architecture for Canada”

Karl Widerquist, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, Qatar

“Exporting the Alaska Model: A Model for Reform Around the World”

Chair: Peter Dietsch, CRÉUM

12.45 – 14.00: lunch

14.00 – 15.45: Panel B – Basic Income at the Margins of Employment

Andrea Vick, University of Toronto

Ernie Lightman, University of Toronto

“Precarious Jobs, Precarious Workers: Income Security for Canadians with Episodic Disabilities”

Matt Stahl, University of Western Ontario

“Copyright, Creative Work and the Basic Income Grant”

William DiFazio, St. John’s University

Stanley Aronowitz, City University of New York

“The Jobless Future and Democracy: Wither Agency?”

Chair: John Rook, National Council for Welfare

15.45 – 16.00: coffee

16.00 – 17.45: Panel C – The Ecological Imperative

Anita Vaillancourt, University of Toronto

“Reconnecting Basic Income in Canada with Indigenous and Ecological Roots”

Michael Howard, University of Maine

“A Cap on Carbon and a Floor on Income: A Defensible Combination in the US?”

Gianne Broughton, Canadian Friends Service Committee

“Outline of an Ecological Argument for BIG”

Chair: Pat Evans, University of Carleton & BIEN Canada

17.45 – 18.45: Keynote

Guy Standing, University of Bath & BIEN

“Basic Income for the Precariat”

Chair: Jim Mulvale, University of Regina & BIEN Canada

FRIDAY 16 APRIL, Hall B 3325

9.00 – 10.45: Panel D – Economic Crisis and Income Security

Chandra Pasma, Citizens for Public Justice

“The Great Recession: What Happened to Economic Security in 2009?”

James Bryant, Manhattanville College

“The Basic Income Guarantee as an Automatic Stabilizer”

Philip Harvey, Rutgers University

“More for Less: The Job Guarantee Strategy”

Chair: Pierre-Yves Néron, CRÉUM

10.45 – 11.00: coffee

11.00 – 12.45: Panel E – Funding a Basic Income

Gary Flomenhoft, University of Vermont

“Progress on Basic Income from Common Assets In Vermont”

André Presse, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Götz Werner, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

“Stimulating the Economy: Basic Income and the Consumption Tax”

Jeffrey Smith, Forum on Genomics

“Are Geonomies Both Imperturbable and Bountiful”

Chair: David Casassas, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona & BIEN

12.45 – 14.00: lunch

14.00 – 15.45: Political Forum “The Politics of a Universal Basic Income Grant”

Senator Art Eggleton, Chair Standing Committee Social Affairs, Science & Technology

Amélie Chateauneuf, spokesperson FCPASQ

Tony Martin MP

Rob Rainer, Executive Director Canada Without Poverty

Al Sheahen, Committee Member USBIG

Senator Hugh Segal, Deputy Chair of the Subcommittee on Cities

Chair: Sheila Regehr, Director National Council for Welfare

15.45 – 16.30: Closing Lecture

Senator Eduardo Suplicy, São Paulo, Brazil & BIEN

“Steps Towards a Citizen’s Basic Income”

Chair: Steve Shafarman, Income Security for All & USBIG

16.30: Closing & Thanks: Mike Howard, USBIG & Jim Mulvale, BIEN Canada

Grad school

Those trying to decide among graduate schools should read this Brian Leiter post and follow its advice: talk to current students.

I'd add as secondary advice: beware of thinking that you can avoid the problems in a problematic department. Academia is in many ways a very solitary life, but grad students and faculty alike really are very enmeshed in the worlds made up by their departments and universities. All the problems he lists out there can poison a whole department. Be worried and careful if you find yourself explaining to yourself that the problematic professors/factions aren't in your part of the department and so won't affect your life as a grad student. It ain't necessarily so.

The Plural States of Recognition

Now available: Michel Seymour, ed., The Plural States of Recognition

Table of contents

Introduction--M.Seymour
Aristotle and Hegel on Recognition and Friendship--R.R.Williams
Hegel, Taylor and the Phenomenology of Broken Spirits--R.Bhargava
Respect as Recognition: Some Political Implications--A.E.Galeotti
Esteem for Contributions to the Common Good: The Role of Personifying Attitudes and Instrumental Value--H.Ikheimo &--A.Laitinen
Models of Democracy and the Politics of Recognition: Respect for Reasonable Cultural Diversity as a Principle of Political Morality--S.Thompson
Difference, Multi and Equality--J.Maclure
Political Liberalism and the Recognition of Peoples--T.Modood
Multicultural Manners--J.T.Levy
The Public Assessment of Indigenous Identity-- Avigail Eisenberg
Conclusion--M.Seymour