Cows and Graveyards

Arizona Passes Stop Offline Piracy Act...

2012-01-18T08:46:00.000-08:00

...also known as banning books. Brian Leiter describes this as Arizona "going crazy" and a "disgrace." Certainly true on both counts. But it also seems to be a puzzle of human behavior for which we clearly do not hold the key. I wish to offer a couple of conjectures to try an explain "How could Arizona do something so terrible?" These are only untested conjectures, but I think they are a good place to start when looking for mental leverage on the problem.

The obvious and boring part of the explanation: In terms of being able to form a stable mean voting population out of the general population, Arizona is an absolute quagmire. Disproportionately elderly, concentrated populations without enough natural resources to sustain everyone, a sizable population of residents living in the state illegally, racial divisions beween Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, Indigenous Peoples, and Whites of the old transplant and the new transplant variety, the fractures, historical baggage and pressures of new demographic trends make the state a likely candidate for immoderate popular government. To say nothing of the added pressures of nationalized politics, with money and influence from out of state added to to the powder keg. We might call this obvious, boring explanation portion of the problem the social choice model side of the explanation. There is nothing wrong with the explanation, and none of these claims appear to be rejectable. BUT, they require supplementation, because the facts do not dictate the way that people as they actually are will make decisions in an environment like this. We need to add...
The cognitive side of the explanation. The emerging field of Cultural Cognition has demonstrated that the least transigent people are those who have strong attachment between (1) cultural cues and (2) a substantial set of information that happens to be substantial but insufficient to be reliable. Arizona is not just a quagmire of demographic conflicts of interests and cultures, it is a veritable quagmire of cognition. If we take the Cultural Cognition hypothesis, and combine it with known heuristics that have reliability gaps from Kahnemann and Tversky, we get a more complete picture of the problem...

Conclusion: Arizona has a myriad of interrelated problems that have to do with overpopulation, illegal immigration, drug trafficking, the legacy of how Arizona became part of the United States, the flight of people from Los Angeles to the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, and the arizona retirement boom, to name a few factors. These problems take on an enormous degree of complexity given the fact that they are not discrete, which is to say they cannot, in the case of Arizona, be disentangled from any of the other problems they coexist with. Arizonans take cultural cues for trying to solve these problems, they also, as human beings, are susceptible to the "What you see is all there is" (WYSIATI) bias. WSIATI, combined with the common human heuristic of solving an easier problem than the one you are confronted with when confronted with a problem of serious complexity, makes it cognitively attractive for the majority to stifle criticism because they are trying to get to a certain place in the policy space of in Arizona's social problem set, as the majority they have the power to move institutions towards that space, but they can only use that power if they simplify the policy problem set to get there. Thus, banning books from different cultures with different cognitive cues simplifies the ease in which the majority can coordinate policy.

Lest you be one of those individuals stricken with the terrible affliction that you believe that explaining behavior means excusing behavior, the explanation of why this is happening in Arizona does NOT excuse it in the least bit. As should be clear from the above explanation, the majority is wrong in banning books not merely in principle, but in oversimplifying the difficult problem set that the state of Arizona faces, they are undoubtedly wrong in the policy portfolios they are proposing to solve the states woes. As is hopefully clear, explaining how human beings can collectively make egregiously stupid decisions does not apologize for the decisions, but to the contrary, puts the stupidity clearly in evidence.

But we need to be careful ourselves. Understanding how this can happen allows us to get leverage on how to think about democratic decision-making so that we might practice it more reliably. If our goal was simply to say "shame on Arizona," we would be making the same heuristic mistake of solving the easy problem (Q: "Is Arizona morally culpable in banning books?" A: duh) rather than the hard ones (Q: "How can Arizona be a better place?" or Q: "How can I keep my state from making the sames mistake?") The first question makes us feel better, and as son as we are comfortable with assigning blame, we have answered the question and get the mental satisfaction of a question answered and a job well done. But aside from the stimulating of a few chemicals in our private mental soup, nothing else changes when we answer the first question. The second set of questions is where our intelligence is truly tested, and the consequences of our thoughts and actions are truly reflected in the world itself.

The Hamilton Mixtape

2012-01-18T07:59:00.000-08:00

IS COMING!!! Lin-Manuel Miranda is performing selections at Lincoln Center which seems to indicate we are not far away from a finished product.

See the cause for excitement below...

Downton Abbey and The Love of the World

2012-01-17T16:01:00.000-08:00

Roger Berkowitz has a post at the Hannah Arendt Center Blog on Downton Abbey. Watching Downton Abbey has led Roger to reflect on Hannah Arendt's "The Crisis in Culture," and I think in using the latter to reflect on the former, I do not quite agree with his interpretation of either the show or Arendt's essay.

Roger writes:

The challenge posed by the mania around a show like Downton Abbey is that it is part and parcel of a cultural moment when art abandons its transcendent and protected realm and appeals to the needs of overly busy "educated philistines" who want their entertainment also to be useful. Arendt's examples are rewritten versions of classics like Shakespeare that are made as entertaining as My Fair Lady.

The indictment here seems to be that if we see Downton Abbey as Middlemarch-lite (apparently because someone else says so), then Downton Abbey is a pop version of something more substantial. Perhaps I am setting myself up for a massive assault, but I do not think it is fair to think Downton Abbey as some sort of pale retread of a novel.

First of all, it is a television program, which means that is the collaborative endeavor of a massive amount of moving parts that an author need not bother with. The accomplishment of a successful television program from a techne standpoint has its own hidden triumphs and revolutionary advancements in technique, sparks of collaboration, and inspirational acts in the moment that are hidden to the viewer of the final product but necessary for its creation.

As for being a piece of the world, any work that goes into the "making of the world," as Arendt refers to it, has a complicated relationship to the world it appears in. The motifs and message of the story are just one part of the work's relationship, and I would argue that this piece is ultimately a small part at that. The series as something that people talk about marks the time in which we live as ours, serves as a means of relating to others, both through the ways in which we might learn to relate to others by learning to relate to characters in a story, and by the way that having stories in common draws us in to one another as people we share the world with. A small example of this complexity, my favorite character is Mr. Bates, and the reason is actually tangentially Arendt related. The actor who portrays Mr. Bates (Brendan Coyle) was SS thug Heinrich Muller in HBO Films Conspiracy. I show Conspiracy in class when I teach Eichmann in Jerusalem because the film is a dramatic reenactment of the Wannsee Conference. Not a textual link, but seeing Mr. Coyle play to emotionally reserved characters in such dramatically different contexts so that one appears te epitome of stout kindness and the other the epitome of thoughtless evil, I feel as though I learned something about character, setting, and performance acting from seeing both.

Roger's critique does not take these suggestions on when he first writes, and I would imagine that is because he is comments about Downton Abbey are related to the show as textual interpretation and also as pop phenomenon. Thus, everything I have said in response to Roger' critique could be taken as outside the scope of his initial comments or arguments for the "usefulness" of the show (which he is pushing back against). Those are his points to stand on, and fair enough. But I see the concepts he is throwing about as much stickier than his critique implies. I don't think television programs can be fairly given a textual analysis the way a novel can, because the performative relationship between work and audience is different.

Further, and this might be a more relevant issue from a scholarly inquiry point, I am more cautious about the way Arendt talks about the relationship between culture and world. Roger takes Arendt's examples as prescriptive in ways that may take Arendt to be suggesting more than she does when she writes of the crisis in culture. It seems to me in the "funning up Hamlet"example, the point is that Arendt is worried that even Hamlet will not engage our minds anymore, because directors will have contrived ways to make watching Hamlet a passive activity. The crisis in culture is about a crisis of thinking and feeling as though we belong to the world because we have evidence of this belonging by our participation in the world itself. Insofar as no one would mistake Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet for Kenneth Branagh's Thor, I think the place of culture is not falling off the precipice that people seem to have claimed it is always falling off since the beginning of time.

As for Downton Abbey itself and its place in culture, I could not be more thrilled. When I was growing up, my parents would tel me about how I Claudius and The Pallisers were television phenomena on PBS. I first learned about Upstairs/Downstairs from Sesame Street's rather liberal interpretation of the story on "Monsterpiece Theater." This is the first PBS "hit show" that is such a hit that I am talking about it literally everywhere I go as a grownup. I think culture should be measured by the way it becomes a platform for others to begin new thoughts, feelings, and relationships with others, and in this, Downton Abbey is not only a great show, but in a world that certainly leaves the option of passivity wide open for all, Downton Abbey is an opposing force. It sucks the viewer in, rather than leaving them at arm's length.

How Much Will Mitt Romney Need the Right Wing?

2012-01-10T11:53:00.000-08:00

Mitt Romney as "bland," "not a true conservative," etc., has sent the Republican party out, with the recent surge of John Huntsman, in search of literally any possible alternative they can find. Romney presents a difficult problem for the right wing of the Republican party: he doesn't need the right wing to get elected President. My guess is that Romney is going to propose himself as a candidate fairly close to the national median voter, characterize President Obama to the left of the median voter, and then try to reduce the valence of Obama through a series of blistering attack ads that make any divergence of opinion with the President seem far more substantial than they actually are for most voters. If Romney succeeds in doing this, he could win a general election. Nothing about this strategy requires that Romney cater to the right wing of the party for support, and that's is why they will withhold support as long as possible.

Ultimately, if no acceptable alternative is found, the right wing of the party will have to choose whether or not to support Romney or not. Supporting him risks legitimizing the move away from the so-called "base" of the Republican party, but rejecting him risks legitimizing the impotency of the right wing. Normally the threat of a mass walkout from your side of the ideological spectrum means forcing a candidate to try to sell themselves as more moderate than they actually are. In Romney's case, he seems equally comfortable selling himself anywhere along the ideological spectrum... the more people on the right don't come out, the more he'll just slide back towards his Massachusetts governor version of himself.

Meaning that when Romney is clearly out of the woods when it comes to the primaries, the right wing has nothing left to threaten him with. Meanwhile, the right wing of the party cannot decide on whether or not to take a candidate based on their credentials as a conservative (Gingrich, Santorum) or at least settle on someone who is at least a little more conservative than Romney (Huntsman). Faced with a set of disappointing choices, the right wing of the republican party seems unable to choose the paths that would minimize the political damage and are staring down the possibility of gaining almost literally nothing out of this election... which may end up being good news for Romney and bad new for the President.

Philosophy of Cosmology?

2012-01-10T11:31:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I wish I was just going to graduate school right now so I could get involved in something like the emerging philosophy of cosmology.

Christopher Hitchens on Hannah Arendt

2011-12-17T11:39:00.000-08:00

Roger Berkowitz has generously shared Christopher Hitchens' essay from his presentation at the conference on Arendt up at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. I can think of no more fitting tribute to Hitchens' life than to open up some of his writing to a wider audience.

Go read the piece, and also the book in which it appears, Thinking in Dark Times, is recommended to all.

Rethinking the Capture of Cass Sunstein

2011-12-17T11:30:00.000-08:00

I was thinking today again about the post I wrote the other day, "Agency Capture and Education" and it occurred to me to think about how ironic it was that someone like Cass Sunstein could be dragged down by problems of which he is so keenly aware. Then it occurred to me to think that Sunstein's protestations that the lobbying was "intense but had no influence" was something he was saying to be politic. Then I moved on thinking about other things and going on with my day.

But then it came back to me to raise another question: "how do we know, in fact, that agency capture took place?" My original thinking went something like this: Lobbyists? Check. Former government employees with personal ties to the administration? Check. A policy victory for the special interest? Che... oops.

There, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. I had been talking about Kahneman's wonderful summary of his own life's work Thinking, Fast and Slow (recommended to all thinking persons everywhere) earlier and it occurred to me that I might have fallen for a particularly slippery bias. I may have set the wrong standrad for comparison.

The original New York Times piece tells us that the administration initially promised much tighter restrictions on for-profit educational institutions. This sets up a comparison between an original proposal and the end result:

PROPOSAL: Very Tough
INTERVENING VARIABLE OF LOBBYING
RESULT: Less Tough Legislation

This sets us up to do what human beings naturally do: hold an asymmetrical view of loss as opposed to gain. Watch what I mean by this. Set up the story with the opposite baseline:

ORIGNAL LAW: Weak
INTERVENING VARIABLE OF LOBBYING
NEW Law: Tougher Legislation

In the second story, the story of lobbying doesn't seem to pose as serious a threat to the outcome of the process. BUT THEY ARE BOTH THE EXACT SAME STORY!!!

So which story better explains the actual situation? The second story seems to deserve some sort of privilege in our mental accounting because the change from original policy to revised policy is real, whereas it is hard to gauge how concrete the original "very tough proposal" really was. Perhaps President Obama intentionally overstated his intentions to make the more moderate proposal seem more palatable to the industry he was regulating. Maybe he was trying to tap into populist rage about student loans and wanted to look tough. Perhaps he really intended to go through with the tough version, but various legal and administrative issues made them realize their initial solution was unworkable. Who knows.

Of course, the second story, that sets the status quo as the point of comparison does not make for as compelling story, because then it is just a story about public administrators boringly administrating stuff. Nevertheless, there is a high probability that this really is all that there is to the story, and that means that the only really interesting story here is one more demonstration as to how we need to be more careful when reading and telling stories and linking them to conclusions.

Cognitive Asymmetry and America's Partisans

2011-12-15T19:12:00.000-08:00

Dan Kahan's writes about the asymmetry of cognition between Republicans and Democrats as uncovered by John Bullock's APSR piece "Elite Influence on Public Opinion in an Informed Electorate." While there is evidence that Republican partisans rely more on heuristic cues when they are looking to sift through new information whereas Democrats use more "System 2" focused interrogation of new pieces of evidence, Kahan urges caution about jumping to conclusions about what such findings mean.

This point generalizes: it is impossible to say anything about the quality of cognition that individuals display unless one knows what they are trying to accomplish. Too often in psychology, individuals who are using heuristic processing or even motivated systematic reasoning are viewed as irrational when in fact those forms of information processing are reliably advancing their interest in adopting stances that express their group identities.

I'm not so sure I understand the value of "expressing a group identity" or what this means, or why there is some sort of value (psychological or otherwise) to such behavior. Nevertheless, I think that the broader point by Kahan is something that bears remembering: regardless of what motivations there are, both heuristic and more deliberate reasoning are by and large motivated reasoning in that they are supposed to be accomplishing something. Ultimately, I take Bullock's results and Kahan's comments on them as instructive because when Republican partisans are incorrect in their views they are still likely to be mistaken rather than ignorant... and so are Democratic partisans.

In other words, concerted efforts to reach both sets of partisans with relevant information that ought to trigger belief updating from poorly supported beliefs to better supported beliefs ought to be possible, and part of the way that this can, in fact, be possible is to understand the motives of the motivated learning of positives regardless of whether or not their motivated learning is primarily "system 1" or "system 2" learning.

The Constitutional Problem of Citizens United

2011-12-15T16:49:00.000-08:00

Josh Miller has an interesting set of reflections on Citizens United v. FEC, which is certainly one of the more testing and taxing Supreme Court cases in recent history. My own view is that I find the Majority opinion by Kennedy philosophically naive to the point in which it does give me pause about trusting the court such decisions. On the other hand, BCRA's drawing of legitimate distinctions in what was and was not allowed are not particularly defensible positions, and the "appearance of corruption" standard advanced by Stevens in the dissent seems supremely lax in giving justices the latitude to uphold anti-corruption legislation. Which, regardless of how this particular law would have limited corruption, or the appearance thereof, I tremble at the thought of the legislature using this as a grant of authority in the future to make all sorts of creative manipulations of the rules of political office-seeking in the name of "limiting the appearance of corruption."

In short, Citizens United strikes me as a case whose largest problem is that it is the manifestation of a legal controversy generated not by legislation, but by a defect in our political constitution. Interest groups have the ability to disrupt the policy making process through two means:

Creating epistemic distortion in the public discourse through sophisticated Political PR techniques
Offering policy-makers employment opportunities on the off chance that favoring their policies cost them their occupation as a political elite.

Both of these tactics by interest groups, generally speaking, are not simply the appearance of corruption, they are corruption. They are, to paraphrase Theodore Lowi, the revaluation of "conflict of interest" to a reason to question the integrity of decision-makers to the view that conflict-of-interest is the way that business ought to be done.

As a result, the Kennedy rhapsody about the "marketplace of ideas" is pathetically comical in the way that it replaces mythology with what ought to have been a more systematic approach to how speech and reason actually work in the real world. On the other hand, the immensity of the problem of interest group influence on American politics is such a massive constitutional failure that there is no legitimate juridical solution to the problem. The minority's attempt to come up with some rules of how to deal with the conflict-of-interest that is inherent in the agency capture system of politics we practice today is misguided because, in making an extensive legal framework that tries to contain the influence of agency capturing interests, they would in fact be building one more political structure that would have to be undone in order to get to the root of the problem. In that way, the majority has likely done us all a large favor, though not for the reasons that they believe that they have.

On Muppet McCarthyism

2011-12-11T17:09:00.001-08:00

Not much needs to be said of the ridiculous nature of accusing the Muppets of being Communist propaganda as a claim on its face. But here are some broader points to make of the controversy.

"Communist" is an utterly meaningless phrase in political discourse. Here's a basic test for calling someone a "Communist": can you define dialectical materialism, the 4 modes of alienation in capitalist labor, the reason that owners have no choice but to behave the way they do in a capitalist system according to Marx, etc. Almost no one can, and that's in part because no one is a serious communist. The only people who can explain these terms are academics like me, and a select few outside the academic set who probably bothered to try and college and have this knowledge stuck in their heads.
To call someone a "Communist" is simply to act as a heuristic merchant.
Fox's Follow the Money is watched by almost no one. This explains why no one should care and also why the host of the show is acting as a heuristic merchant.
Must we call any speech we disagree with "brainwashing"? I mean honestly, could any position regarding speech be more utterly nauseating than the view that any view espoused by someone I disagree with and believed by others is the result of brainwashing? You know, because my own view of the world is so obviously correct that no sane person would disagree with me. This is the absolute pinnacle of anti-democratic behavior, because it assumes that there exist those who know better and those who are "beyond help," and usually the ones "beyond help" are oh so conveniently the people with the most relevant objections to our own views.
Besides being an utterly obnoxious presumption about why people hold the beliefs that they do, the belief is empirically false. If your child is so impressionable that it can have their political beliefs irreversibly altered by watching The Muppets, I'd recommend you take them to a neurologist... because the human brain does not normally work this way.

Now, let's all take a deep breath and enjoy Beaker, the Swedish Chef, and Animal performing "Carol of the Bells"

That's better.

Agency Capture and Education

2011-12-11T13:57:00.001-08:00

The New York Times has an interesting piece detailing the "intense pressure" by for-profit "schools" on the Obama administration. The Obama administration had vowed to respond to investigations that had given evidence to what should surprise no thinking person: namely, that for-profit schools are a means for taking well-intended federal student aid from students whose prospect of making good use of the educational "product" and repaying back those stunt loans as a result are unrealistically bleak. What happens next is, of course, a story that would be all too predictable to anyone with an actual education in the social sciences:

Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case.
Anita Dunn, a close friend of President Obama and his former White House communications director, worked with Kaplan University, one of the embattled school networks. Jamie Rubin, a major fund-raising bundler for the president’s re-election campaign, met with administration officials about ATI, a college network based in Dallas, in which Mr. Rubin’s private-equity firm has a stake.
A who’s who of Democratic lobbyists — including Richard A. Gephardt, the former House majority leader; John Breaux, the former Louisiana senator; and Tony Podesta, whose brother, John, ran Mr. Obama’s transition team — were hired to buttonhole officials.
And politically well-connected investors, including Donald E. Graham, chief executive of the Washington Post Company, which owns Kaplan, and John Sperling, founder of the University of Phoenix and a longtime friend of the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, made impassioned appeals.

This is what one can call a classic case of agency capture. Agency capture tends to be the effect of one of the more pernicious problems in American politics, the unholy alliance of lobbyists, politicians and bureaucratic administrators commonly referred to as iron triangles.

Agency capture is bad because it steers policy implementation away from the most preferred policy preference to less desirable alternatives. It is a means of interfering with the process of rationally choosing the best alternative so that some small group can benefit more at the expense of all others benefitting less.

The problem with "lobbying efforts" is not the way in which they advocate for interests, but for the way that lobbyists have the ability to dull the mechanisms that are supposed to keep bureaucrats and politicians honest. Lobbyists can offer politicians two things:

Lobbyists can reduce the chance of replacement by using PR and fundraising efforts to obfuscate the ways in which their arrangements with political decision-makers have damaged the public interest.
Lobbyists can reduce the cost of replacement by offering high-paying employment to politicians and bureaucrats who are replaced by voters if they make public-damaging decisions in lobbyists favor.

Long ago there was some sense of opposition to agency capture by American conservatives (such as Theodore Lowi) who would have pointed out that this is what happens when the regulatory state is given too much say over policy preferences. Today, the political parties and their messaging infrastructure are also "captured" to that the conservative response, rather than outrage at another instance of agencies hijacking well-intentioned interventionist desires from the political left, ends up nothing but an embarrassing apologist for the system of corruption.

No matter what one thinks about the Department Education and the utility of the student loan system, there is no doubt that many Americans are in effect paying a tax for a lot of federal money moving into the hands of people who are promising to educate others with no intent of doing so whatsoever, pocketing our federal money, and recklessly tossing out those recipients out onto the street with disastrously high risks of default. This means that the tax-payer is bearing the costs of putting the "profit" in "for profit" schools, as is the person who must live the rest of their life with the burden of student loan repayment failure. Are the benefits of the student loan program as a whole worth paying this tax? That's a different argument for a different day. For today, let's not kid ourselves about the fact that we, in fact, pay this tax. And following the capitulation of the Obama administration, it is clear that this strain on our education system is not going to disappear anytime soon.

Nozick's Reading of Locke

2011-11-21T16:22:00.000-08:00

I'm prepping Robert Nozick's "Distributive Justice" for lecture tomorrow. Having taught Locke's Second Treatise earlier in the semester, I am left wondering a little about Nozick's updating of what he calls Locke's "proviso."

Locke's proviso is that for legitimate appropriation to take place, Locke argues that one must leave behind "enough and as good left in common for others."

I'm a little surprised by Nozick's reading of this proviso. First of all, Locke indicates that this is the rule for just appropriation in the state of nature. The reason that nature sanctions the proviso, says Locke (and acknowledges Nozick) is because hoarding goods is purely wasteful. Where Locke seems to lose Nozick, unless I'm reading Nozick incorrectly, is where money is introduced in Locke's concept of property. For Locke, money facilitates exchange, and essentially demands a civil government to administrate it appropriately, but at a price. When we introduce money (and later civil government), according to Locke, we lose the sanction of nature. The advent of money now rewards hoarding rather than punishing it, and Locke's suggestion is that the protection from hoarding rests not with "the market," but with the administration of civil government itself. Locke even suggests that the exchange of one for the other is not ideal, but that that life with money and civil government is well worth the inconvenience of this uneasy loss of a natural right to property, for civil government secures more of our right to property not in securing the moral principle absolutely, but by securing more property because with the expansion of production brought about by civil government, there is more property to secure.

Nozick collapses the claims (straw mans?) about this historical move by Locke as if it is merely a claim that once there is no more stuff to claim, the proviso justifies equality of opportunity. That misses the point, as I understand it, almost entirely. The point is that the move from claiming property under the regime of natural law to a man-made civil commercial society creates a machinery that entails costs of its own, in the form of lost privileges and uneasy contradictions. We take it not because of the way it preserves "the justice of transfer the way logical moves preserves truth" (to paraphrase Nozick). For Locke, we take the trade into political economy instead for far more unsightly, but practically viable reasons: the pay is better.

Legends, Ideologies, Conspiracies

2011-11-20T15:16:00.000-08:00

And while the legend of the British Empire has little to do with the realities of British imperialism,it forced or deluded into its services the best sons of England. For legends attract the very best of our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.

- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

We are the 100%

2011-11-15T10:54:00.001-08:00

As the United States wakes up to the news of the police clean out of Zucotti Park, one gets the sense that it is world-weariness, rather than tensions, that has escalated throughout the "Occupy Wall Street" movement all this time. The most frequent conversation I have with others about the "Occupy" movement is some combination of sympathy intellectually coupled with exasperation. The exasperation part is usually the predominant dose in the mixture, and seems, in and of itself to be comprised largely of a fear of being made a punch-line for having political sympathies with the movement. Cal this group of pele the "sideline set."Such is the state of faith in the solidity of the world we inhabit. We are terrified that to say something like, "I would like to assert something I believe about human dignity" will be dismissed as the idle sentiments of children. The "occupiers," regardless of the cogency of their message, have at least taken the leap of faith that some out their might meet them at least half way with something approaching the understanding of other people in the world. Meanwhile, many of us are waiting until they compile an intellectual program with the solidity a master work of political theory before we commit. Which is not to say that the "occupiers" are not with out sources of embarrassment. Mobs can rarely be secured for coherent purposes, and all too often, the feeling of limitless discretion belonging to the mob brings about leads to choices that can only be characterized as unacceptable. Locking political opponents into a building, for example, is nothing else than the strength of the mob exerting its frustrations on people who they will later expect to willingly share the world with them if they were to win any political battles down the road. To expect those locked inside to be satisfied with the kind of world Occupy Wall Street hopes to bring about is, at this point, simply an unfair demand. To be indifferent to the unfairness of this demand or the anxieties of those who oppose their views goes further: it is downright immoral. This is to say nothing of those making signs and walking towards courthouses claiming solidarity with prisoners over the civil authority as if the American jails are filled with political prisoners rather than criminal prisoners. These embarrassments cannot be overlooked, but it is also the case that they normally would not be strong enough to keep so many sympathizes on the sidelines, not merely in terms of participation, but even on the level of support in the coffee house and at the dinner table. Why so cautious?One possibility is that we have simply lost our ability to speak. The American remembrance of the 1960's has centered on hippies, student protesters, disaffection with Vietnam, and New Left movements that became absolutely discredited by their treatment of the Soviet Union as a credible alternative to living in the United States. It is as if the history has been scrubbed, turned not into an idealized history, but a cartoon instead. A series of events that Forrest Gump stumbles through and not much more. Americans have never been particularly interested in Suharto, Pinochet, Hungary '56, Czechoslovakia '68, Indian independence, Algeria, etc., but the way America remembers those times today, these events are far worse than ignored, they actually have no place inside of our popular understanding of the times in which they actually happened. We have learned to contextualize the antagonisms of the era into a series of background sceneries, as if the actors themselves are no more important than the stage itself. In accepting this, we have disarmed ourselves--our disarming humor about hippies and "thinking outside the box" literally taking the lethality of criticism out of our own hands. Second, many of us have simply gambled on history to bail us out of our current predicament. Perhaps the economy will recover and everyone will feel better. Perhaps the tide of resentment against intellectuals will subside and people will go back to their business. Perhaps the institutions that are dismantling the world we have worked so hard to build will over-reach in such a manner that they will expose themselves and shrink away in due course of time. Meantime, the rest of us must go to work with colleagues we like and to family gatherings with people who care for us who side with those who bring weapons to town hall meetings. Perhaps we can elect someone who will fix things for us. Our political institutions may still have something left in the creaking frame to pull out one more recovery. The scientific community may still yet figure out how to roll back the destruction of many of earth's ecosystems. But it is worth noting that no amount of scientific consensus has, to this point, spurred credible political action to save the earth on its pre-industrialization trajectory. Further, the planners of the Bush administration's foreign adventures have proven no more competent than the Vietnam War planners, and neither has the Obama economic team for that matter. In short, the hopes of the political sidelines set are dwindling fast, and the odds are rapidly turning against their deepest hopes. Many of them got pHd's or MBA's or law degrees or majored in accounting on the claim that they would "get a job." what they really meant is that they believed that it was the most direct path to dignity. Now many in this set are faced with the prospect of being denied both. They hope against hope that being "productive members of society" has an almost Christianity-like redemptive power that will restore all that they may lose. This is a kind of magical thinking, and the illusion is everywhere being stripped around us. What should we of the sideline set be looking towards? I'm afraid here I must disappoint you with my answer. What is required is a reclamation of the difficulty judgment requires. We are each a special case and yet at the same time each share a world that requires us to have an enlarged understanding of this world beyond ourselves. This appears a contradiction, and one that neither social science or philosophy can resolve to satisfaction. The sideline set has either clutched at slogans or philosophy whose claim to resolving the conflict requires insistence more than judgment, or they have abandoned the contradiction altogether. The contradiction persists. The sideline set, if only they would embrace the cultivation of their relationship to this contradiction seriously, as if meticulously practicing the art of being themselves, they would be once again off the sidelines and once again in the world. No doubt, this suggestion disappoints because it charts a course that does not prioritize economic inequality nor does it fit the "us v. them" narrative, the only narrative still culturally permissible to reflect on in such casual non-scientific language as I am using here. The world--the relationship between human beings past and present--is in a sorry state, and many of us have taken to not looking as a means of deflecting the problem of what to do about it. We do not mind, on some level, the injustices perpetrated by the institutions that keep are illusion on an even keel. We know who and what they are. But "Occupy Wall Street" invites an uneasiness into our midst, as if, appearing from nowhere, they might be the "sleeping voices" T.S. Eliot here to wake us, and we drown. When that happens, it happens to us all as inhabitants of the world equally. We are the 100 percent.

What now for Libya?

2011-08-24T09:29:00.000-07:00

Do We Have Any Applied Knowledge of Revolutions?

As the sun apparently sets on Gaddafi's reign, (which, by the way, intrade never wavered in its view was more than likely to happen before the year was out, score one for prediction markets) our eyes turn more completely to a rebel alliance that's fragmented and will strain to hold together in forming a new government. It sounds like the plot of a horrible Star Wars paperback set immediately after Return of the Jedi. Yet, it is the question that we always ask once we get to this stage: now what?

Here's what political scientist believe we have learned about the general recipe for the creation of durable, long-term political communities.

Stable political institutions with accountability and replacement
Free access to information
Public investment aimed at expanding individuals' capabilities portfolio
Strong, sustainable ties between business interest and the public interest
Physical Safety

The first bullet point attracts the most media attention, presumably because it most resembles the "horse-race" coverage of domestic politics of newspapers covering events abroad. Who's in, who's out, what does it mean for the future. People like to read that story whether it's about their favorite sports team, casting for a movie, celebrity relationships, or politics, so media understandably taps this bottomless well whenever it feels like. But the other side of this "ragtag faction" story is that, threatened with falling completely to pieces if everyone doesn't hold together can also be the recipe for a democracy that holds together and slowly becomes more egalitarian. The history of India's democracy is one of very tumultuous competing factions that are never at peace, and yet, as Ramachandra Guha writes, Indian democracy remains.

The second bullet point got most of its coverage during the Arab Spring. Twitter, Satellite TV, Al Jazeera. Been there, done that. Except, the ability to access these information sources is not likely to constrict in the aftermath of dictatorship. In short, at least to a lare extent, the free flow of information is something that any post-Arab Spring country, no matter what their ultimate intentions, are going to have to live with. This is not to say that twitter access = democracy, but it is one extra obstacle, one extra cost you have to invest in thwarting if you were thinking of bailing on a coalition democratic government.

The third and fourth bullet points are covered in the media almost not at all. This is perhaps owed to the present ethos in America that such things are suffocating to liberty no matter the piles of evidence to the contrary. Governments are comprised of people who have ideas, and not ideas alone. Peoples methods of collecting and holding ideas to be true are highly contingent on factors beyond their control. For example, it is now believed that early bouts of malnutrition irreversibly damage the brains of children on the level of basic neurological development (for a scary picture of what this looks like, see this TED talk). The economic mission of any government ought to be twofold: 1. devote resources to maximize the economic potential of the business sector and 2. devote resources to maximize the capabilities portfolio fo citizens. These two tasks are intertwined, as one is dependent on the other. We can see this as obvious in the extremes. An unusable workforce because they are ill, malnourished, undereducated, unable to travel to work reliably, etc. is no good to business interests. A business sector that generates little to no wealth means that there are no resources to devote to improving the capabilities portfolio of citizens.

Speaking outside of whatever the realities may be of the internal political conflicts in the various Arab Spring polities (I set the aside only because I don't know them, not because they aren't important), I would suggest that there is at least some room for optimism on both fronts. none of the Arab Spring nations, by virtue of being massively over-wrought patron-client systems where the dictator networks patronage to ensure loyalty and stability, were running at what might be called peak economic efficiency. Which means that the there are plenty of production possibility frontiers that could be expanded in the domestic economy if the right roadblocks are cleared and the right public investment decisions are made.

If money gets sunk into covering the startup costs for individuals to then participate in sustainable political-economic activities, then the state can redirect its expenditures from start-up costs for growth to maintenance costs like health care, infrastructure and education.

Here, I would add, that Petrol-rich countries like Libya have the potential blessing and the potential curse of oil. The blessing would be that turning the oil pipeline back on represents a quick way to raise money, pump it into public investment that frees up economic opportunities and builds public confidence that this whole enterprise is actually going to work to boot. The potential curse, and the downfall of many, has been that because oil revenue is such a large pot of money, the temptation for factional interests is always to carve that revenue off for themselves, spurn public investment, and if you are the leader of this faction, live the life of luxury of a Mubarak or a Gaddafi while pretending to be a man of the people. At worst, a country like Libya is right back where it started, new cast, same play. At best, a country like Libya can become a Brazil, where the government is really an oligarchy that spouts the free market as cover the way Hugo Chavez spouts Marxism as a cover for his naked robbery of his people in Venezuela. You may be able to have pretty buildings, a very nicely dressed upper class, and buy nice things for your people (like hosting the World Cup). But you might also be notorious for being unable to stop diseases from running rampant in your city streets having a legal system so corrupt that it takes political pressure from foreign powers to return stolen children to their parents.

This problem gets at the business-politics relationship quite well. The right relationship is one in which the oil company has incentive to maximize its profits within the constraints of serving the public interest. That, to me anyway, clearly rules out the company being publicly run. There is not enough accountability in any nascent democracy, and certainly not enough trust between the factions to let public official handle production, sale, and distribution of the revenues. No chance. It also, to me, rules out the idea of turning it over to a private company and then just hoping all goes well. Foreign oil companies are a savvy lot and no that maximizing profits means acquiring oil at the cheapest cost then selling it on. The fewer checks they have to cut in the name of public accountability, the bigger their revenues. This usually means swooping into a country, bribing as few local officials as possible, and running away with everything else.

What's left in between? An arrangement between business and government in which business succeeds if it follows the rules and the public sector only sets rules for the company to follow that are minimally invasive contingent on advancing the public interest. They could be something like a tariff that could be written off by public investment by the oil business into the country, or requiring a minimum wage for all oil employees, etc. You might think that this is an impossibility to make such arrangements, and certainly the temptation to go the other way is strong. But, if there is ever time in which the state can demonstrate the concreteness of how important stable government is for business interests, it is at a time coming out of political instability when your government is now responsible for granting articles of incorporation to businesses (a step usually so common and invisible in most modern states that its obscurity leads people to believe the myth that the business sector is "private").

Finally, there is the question of safety. This too is a good news/bad news story. The good news is that all of your neighbors might be democracies in transition also, which would lead you to think your security concerns might be waning. However, if you or any of your neighbors falter in the transition, there is the threat of radical Islamic fundamentalism gaining appeal, knocking over governments, and showing little to no regard for the sanctity of borders.

In short, there is room for optimism for the Arab Spring countries: building towards a stable democratic polity is possible, and one that will improve the quality of life for a substantial number of citizens as it builds more and more towards that goal. But setting out on that path means making the right choices, and those choices are hard to see in the sea of great temptations to sway and the great tales of those who would seek to scavenge the fortunes off the labor of the Arab Spring and leave the freedom-fighters who fought and won with little more than they started with.

If America was truly committed to Arab democracy, the role it needs to play is one of guidance towards those healthy choices and away from the temptations, temptations that American business interests themselves will no doubt dangle in front of emerging Arab leaders.

Eichmann in Jerusalem Radio Program

2011-08-19T13:56:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of The Guardian's Big Ideas podcast. (thanks to the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities)

Thanks, Tim Pawlenty...

2011-08-14T09:01:00.000-07:00

Hope that you found making horrible long-term decisions for my state so that you could have conservative credentials in your Presidential race was worth it.

The Westen Game

2011-08-10T06:55:00.000-07:00

Drew Westen's piece in The New York Times on President Obama's messaging problem has kicked a veritable hornet's nest of commentary. Jonathan Chait and Ezra Klein both chastise Westen for perpetuating the idea that the Presidency is like the movies and that one great speech can turn the tide of American fortunes. Ezra Kelin comes back to take a second bite at Westen's piece by adding that Westen's view of the stimulus battle is misguided, as there were more than framing problems with the stimulus, there were actual procedural problems with spending the amount of stimulus that people suggested would be necessary to fix our economic problems.

While I think that Klein and Chait's points are well taken in that the material realities of policy dictate what happens far more than speeches do, both Chait and Klein strike me as excessively dismissive as well.

The deeper point of the Westen piece is that Obama has failed at holding his political coalition together effectively because of a series of signal failures to his activist base and to the voting public. Granted, President Obama's speeches do not change policy by themselves. But the administration is still a political entity, and their political clout depends largely on their ability to change the winning policy positions in future elections, and this is where Westen's critique seems to have its value.

According to the best model of elections we have, Miller and Schofield's, winning an election is a combination of three things for any given candidate: their policy portfolio, their activist contracts, and their valence.

Activists are those who do the work of political campaigns that have to be in place for the campaigns to literally operate on a day-to-day basis. You lose activist support, you lose people who volunteer to register voters, drive people to polls on election day, donate money to run your campaign organization, etc. Activists tend to be intensely partisan, which means that you have to keep their support while somehow not alienating the median voter. The more activists you can enlist, the more towards your own political views you can move the median necessary to carry an election and maintain power, because the more people you reach with campaign advertising, the more of your own partisans you get out to vote, the more the median starts to skew in your direction.

The other way to skew the median voter away from the actual median preference and more towards your own policy preferences is by projecting valence. Candidates project a level of competence that gives off a level of "stickiness" or "attractor-ness" for points of view that do not actually line up with the leader's actual policy preferences. If I trust the Republicans to handle the economy better, depending on how much I perceive their competence, I may permit a pretty wide latitude for them to act in ways that I personally don't think are correct. A silly example. When I heard that Christopher Nolan had cast Chistian Bale as Batman, I thought "horrendous choice." Then I really liked Batman Begins. When I heard Heath Ledger was going to be the Joker, it made no sense to me how that was going to work. Then I saw The Dark Knight. I wouldn't personally choose Anne Hathaway to be Catwoman nor do I think Bane makes for an interesting movie villain, but at this point I'm just done second-guessing Christopher Nolan. He seems to know an awful lot about what he's doing if he is trying to make movies I like, so I'm just going to let him do his thing and wait for the movie to come out. That's valence.

Bringing this all back to Drew Westen's piece, Westen's argument implies that President Obama has disenchanted his activists and thrown away a lot of his and his party's valence by not giving out stronger signals. I find this claim to be far from the "nonsense" that Chait claims it is. Many people in the activist bases in the democratic party are utterly confused at what the state of their contract with the President is and what it will look like if they go to bat for him a second time around. Many voters have been turned off by the seemingly haphazard messages they have received from the President on the stimulus, health care, etc.

President Obama, in each key policy instance he has faced, has let the policy process run its course. He has taken input from others, he has let Congress handle things without interference, he has done all sorts of things that if you only think about the legislative process as a law professor or a masters in public policy, would seem perfectly logical and sensible. But the "wonkish" view ignores the role that power plays in the system. Yes, Westen's argument does not stand on its own as an explanation for why policy decisions get made. But neither does Klein's position. If Klein's view is that delivering good policies is enough to satisfy voters on its own and that communication and signaling does not matter, that view is false.

Yes the economy, war, and all the other policy challenges dumped on this administration cause a loss of valence and enthusiasm that are dictated by the times and not speeches. But bad signaling has needlessly given away more of both of these critical load-bearing beams of any politicians public policy portfolio. The President has misjudged this because he doesn't seem to even get that the problem is real. But the mechanics of electoral systems are just as real as the mechanics of the legislative process, and you'd better believe the two are inextricably linked.

The "Throw the Bums Out" Myth

2011-08-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

Americans have a deep contempt for the way that the debt ceiling negotiations have played out. This seems more than fair, but public perception itself may be a contributing factor to why frustrations of this sort rarely turn into reform. Voters frequently blame the people in office individually, or parties, or Congress as a group of particular people for these sorts of failures, rather than focusing on the ways that structured incentives tend to push representatives into these sorts of undesirable situations. Call this the throw the bums out myth.

The myth is that there exist a current crop of representatives whose failure as people are to blame for the poor political situation the country finds itself in. What is odd about the "throw the bums out" myth is that it relies on two premises that seem to conflict.

1. That a pool of better candidates exist who could replace our sitting political leaders, AND

2. That the same procedures that selected the (supposedly) currently inept set of leaders will somehow now select this different, superior set of leaders.

The problem with the throw the bums out myth is that it over-emphasizes the value of replacement in democratic political systems. Replacement IS a critical element of electoral politics, but it is not a panacea. The rules for selecting leaders, their terms of service, the distribution of access of leaders to individuals, the structure of the coalitions necessary to pass legislation post-elections, the location and existence of veto points in the legislative process... all of these different factors are variables in what our representatives do once we have selected them for positions of representative authority in the legislature. In short, if those other variables are in dysfunctional locations, then representation will be dysfunctional... no matter which individuals sit in the actual chambers of government. It is understandable why the actual people sitting in the chamber come in for scorn and derision from frustrated citizens... but solving the problem requires we get serious about the health of our institutional design broadly speaking.

Some Thoughts on Cognition and Choice

2011-08-09T10:55:00.000-07:00

It is commonly assumed by classical liberal theory that the human mind is a reasoning machine that starts a blank slate, needed to be filled with information in order to reason properly, and that education is the task of filling this blank reasoning machine we call the brain with the right data and then all will be well. It would likely be difficult to overstate the significance of this move in breaking the intellectual logjam created by centuries and centuries of epistocracy, or rule by the knowers. The Hobbesian move that we are all "moved by appetites and aversions" equally made us equal in the only reasoning that matters, the reasoning that responds to incentives--thus we do not require rule by knowers.

But, to paraphrase Karl Marx, yesterdays radicalism is today's orthodoxy. The free choice model was a massive upgrade on the view that there were a few who really knew better, but the free choice model also leaks out some problems that it would be nicer not to have to live with. Ask Allan Greenspan.

One of the problems with the model is that we are not blank slates. In fact, recent data suggests strongly that we have a modular brain that has competing systems with competing claims on our cognitive resources. These competing systems compete for attention, mental and physical resources that the brain needs to perform tasks and dictate to some extent our ability to perform any task to a specified degree of quality. Change the physical performance aspects of the brain in terms of resources or regulation of resources, or even the physical matter of the brain in which these resources interact, and the cognition process changes. To assist in regulating these functions, the brain cheats by using heuristics: shortcuts for processing vast amounts of information. When we use the blue in a mountain to gauge its distance, this is a shortcut our brain uses, which is why it works in paintings as well as in real life. When we try to decide appropriateness conditions for action, we activate normative scripts that allow us to quickly evaluate and decide rather than remaining forever paralyzed as decision-makers.

How does knowing all of this help us to understand politics? Consider the following problem. Imagine that you are trying to increase the social benefit of some deed by getting more people to commit to a public action through means of offering them incentives to do so. Rather than assuming that all one needs to do is set the proper incentives and voila, we might have to think about the response to our inducement will generate the following breakdown:

People who understand the inducement and respond appropriately
People who do not understand the inducement and do not respond appropriately
People who understand the inducement and cannot respond appropriately anyway

Assuming the above is correct, then we suspect what will follow is the inducement will reward the group who can understand and follow the inducement, and the other two groups will not recieve these awards. The latter two groups might respond to the first group with resentment. The first group might respond to the latter two groups by believing they have deserved their fate for not acting on an inducement that seemed so simple from their perspective.

What this suggests we might be on the look out for in the social sciences, at least a t a casual glance, that the power of inducement might be overstated in liberal political theory. Self-interest is not in for replacement in thought, but it might be in need of modification, because it seems possible that the idea of social ordering from inducement might not be able to deliver the results that it sometimes promises, given an over-estimation of the human hardwarde that will interact with the inducement.

Klinsi...

2011-07-29T18:10:00.001-07:00

The USA has finally roped in Juergen Klinsmann. I, for one, am excited.

Klinsmann is often under-appreciated for his modern understanding of player management. He is on the frontiers of what fitness means both mentally and physically. He has a very specific view of how to put players in a chance to succeed, and he can implement it cleanly.

He had a disappointing run at Bayern Munich, but he tried to revolutionize a poisonous dressing room and a moribund board - both of whom had little buy-in on the Klinsmann way.

The USA, I believe, will be different. Klinsi will get respect and control. He will give his players an edge to their play that they have lacked lately.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:45th Ave,Isle of Palms,United States

We're All Keynsians Now?

2011-07-20T08:18:00.000-07:00

Ezra Klein had an interesting piece yesterday on Keynesian economics and the failure of the economic stimulus plan. I think that Ezra does a great job in highlighting two critical problems in interrupting the cycle of downturns.

The first problem was conceptual. What Keynes told us to do simply feels wrong to people. “The central irony of financial crises is that they’re caused by too much borrowing, too much confidence and too much spending, and they’re solved by more confidence, more borrowing and more spending,” Summers says.
The second problem was practical. “What I didn’t appreciate was the extent to which we only got one shot on stimulus,” Romer says. “In my mind, we got $800 billion, and surely, if the recession turned out to be worse than we were predicting, we could go back and ask for more. What I failed to anticipate was that in the scenario that we found we needed more, people would be saying that what was happening showed that stimulus, in general, didn’t work.”

But the real gem of the piece is the point that gets raised in the next paragraph of Ezra's piece:

And even if Congress was willing to green-light more money, spending it turned out to be harder than the Keynesians had hoped. “Anybody who is honest and knowledgeable will say it is harder to move money quickly and well in reality than it is in the textbook model. I don’t think the idea that lots more money could have been moved is credible unless there had been a whole set of prior planning,” Summers says.

This quote by Lawrence Summers strikes the unavoidable interconnectedness between politics and economics. The question "what is an idea economic strategy?" may not generate the same answer as the question, "what is the best economic strategy given that it has to be run through the entirety of our pre-existing political and social institutions?"

It is worth noting that what is missing from Ezra's piece is some sort of details about "shovel-ready" spending for when economic stimulus is needed. This is not meant as a criticism of Ezra's wonderful piece (he certainly has done enough for one article), but it leaves us as the reader with some serious thinking to do about what can the government do to stimulate the economy in downturns given the following practical barriers:

Downturns are extremely difficult to predict as to when they will happen and how long they will last.
Human perception is poorly equipped to correctly evaluate the problem publicly because: (1) human beings tend to overvalue risk and (2) human beings tend to over-value first-hand data versus data generated by public testing.
The "government" is not a unitary actor, but a series of fluctuating contract-relationships between institutional actors: (1) within institutions (2) between institutions; between institutional actors and the public; and between institutional actors, the public, and private sectors that are well-placed to influence outcomes.

Let us back up and take notice of something here. These three bullet points are something that Ezra's piece mentions, and to some extent they make up the core lesson of the piece that Ezra rights. What seems clear to me, at any rate, is that any view that refuses to acknowledge the realities of any of these three bullet points is automatically in the sub-optimal set of arguments and need not be taken seriously (trying hard not to look at House Republicans).

Let us also notice, that we have not actually narrowed down the optimal set of solutions when it comes to policy-making with regard to cyclical economic downturns. Given the realities enumerated above, it seems perfectly reasonable to conclude the best approach to the problem is to conclude that the Keynesian game is trying to chart a reliable course through noisy data. The path is not clear, and therefore trying only risks further distortion.

The other reasonable solution seems to be to conclude that yes, the uncertainties are numerous, but this is true about most public action, and when it is required, the responsibility is to pursue good strategies to alleviate financial distress intelligently from both a political and economic standpoint, given constraints as they are, hope that the policies are (1) effective in the present (2) iteratively valuable so that we can learn from the present and refine our methods of handling such crises going forward.

If a case can be made for both, the problem with the pursuit of the Keynesian strategy by President Obama is not that he chose a Keynesian strategy, but it rests in his choice of "shovel ready" projects. The Obama administration has chosen to surrender on broad policy positions like climate change and space exploration, supposedly because of the economic climate. But the administration's economic strategy required stimulus, and public projects that stimulus money can be justifiably dumped into requires not only the need for "stimulus" in a vacuum, but the need for clearly articulated policy priorities that the stimulus money can be funneled into.

When opposition comes out to "cash for clunkers," what is needed is not an articulation of the need for stimulus, but an articulation of the fact that man's relationship to nature is not a democracy. That if we do not change, people will die for no reason, species of organic life that cold hold the keys to countless questions of our understanding the world around us writ large will die off en masse and all we are doing is trying to provide start-up capital for consumers to upgrade the fleet of American-owned personal automobiles while leaving it up to any individual consumer whether or not they wish to take advantage of the opportunity.

The above paragraph is not meant to be an airtight argument in favor of "cash for clunkers," but it is instead meant as shorthand to exemplify that, if one is going to go Kenyesian when administrating an economic downturn, one has to be sensitive to the fact that policy priorities are not competing goods with economic priorities, they are the narrative that can move "shovel-ready" projects through the legislative and administrative processes that get stimulus into the economy.

When you have bad policy priorities, or you mistakenly think one must choose between policy priorities and economic stimulus, then you end up in the battered position the Obama administration finds itself. In what world does a President try to end a downturn through Keynesian policies and then: freeze the pay of Federal employees and allow state, municipal, and federal jobs to go unfilled in large quantities for massive periods at a time?

The conservative can look at this whole mess and say, "the problem isn't Obama, the problem is that too much has to go right for the Keynesian strategy to work." They might be right. But the intellectually honest Hayekian and the intellectually honest Keynesian share a common bond: both can be utterly appalled by the way our various political leaders are executing our game plans.

Gilead

2011-07-18T11:27:00.000-07:00

I recently read Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. This piece I found from The Times calls her the "world's best writer of prose." She is unquestionably a great writer in terms of form and style. However, there is something I find unsettling in Gilead at bottom. As elegant and eloquent as the prose is, I find the celebration of parochial folksiness problematic.

I waited a while after I had finished reading the book to write about it because there is so much about Gilead that I really admired. I enjoyed the stillness and quiet of the book. I liked that it felt no need to be exceptionally daring in its plot to be a good book. No walls are kicked down in the composition of this novel, the turmoil exists entirely within the contained structure of the community of characters that Robinson so expertly creates.

But as much as I want to detach the moral from the story itself, I bristle at the book's Calvinism. I could not help but think about the ways in which all of the characters funnel their curiosities are unhealthy ways to do so, asking the wrong types of questions, thinking about the wrong ways to answer those wrongly put questions about life, love, and what we should teach our children. As someone who does epistemology, there were times in which I thought to myself, "this must be what a health inspector feels like reading about the life of blue collar coal miners." Except that in stories about blue-collar coal miners, the author relates through the heartache of knowing what they have lost. Robinson's narrative seems to be telling me that I am the one missing out by not reveling in the mysticism of the world.

I do not think it is wise or healthy to think of ourselves as if "Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of proceeding civilizations." Phrasings of this sort are what allow Robinson to carve out a space for which we can ask ourselves deep questions... but where it is actually wrong to focus on the right ways to pursue them. This is the circularity that the parochial thinker hopes forms a protective bubble that no outsider may burst. For the wisdom that fathers can pass on to sons is insufficient next to the power of public reason, and the rejection of public reason in favor of parochial folk-belief systems rests on the idea that those who pursue a relationship to the world in a more healthy manner are not healthier, just snobs who cannot appreciate the quiet way of life of people truly in touch with their inner spirituality, which apparently we are able to do only by meditating on questions with others around us.

The problem with the content of Robinson's story is not that I disagree with her point of view (though I do strenuously), but the problem I encountered in my experience reading the book is that I find the story of finding peace in the way she writes it absolutely hollow. She does such a wonderful job creating her characters that I cannot help but wonder how it could possibly be that she does not ache for how they have mistaken smallness for modesty.

Arsenal: Are we Worried Yet? No.

2011-07-09T10:24:00.000-07:00

So, the Arsenal are on the verge fo selling their two best players at the same time. The reaction has been to consider this a calamitous step in Arsenal's continuing downward spiral. I have to say that for the first time in a long time, I am actually hopeful. Cesc was a terrible leader on a fractured team. Nasri was moody and inconsistent, and Gael Clichy is a graduate of the Denilson school of passing the ball to the other side (and getting caught dribbling in your own area).

But let's say the Arsenal actually do land all of their alleged transfer targets: Gervinho, Gary Cahill, Leighton Baines, and Juan Manuel Mata. The side then looks like this:

Sceszny

Sagna Cahill Vermaelen Baines

Song

Wilshere

Mata

Gervinho Arshavin

van Persie

RESERVES: Walcott, Ramsey, Diaby, Chamakh, Fabianski, Koscielny, Rosicky, Eboue

If this is what Aresnal looks like on the opening match, sign me up for it. Not only is this team stronger at the back, but it is also a side where the weaker players from years past become stronger players by being in roles more suitable to their actual playing level. This squad could would be a tough beat for anyone, and while it might lack star power, it looks a lot more like a football team and a lot less like a team on football manager than years past. I'd be delighted to go to war with this group in the Premier League.

Save James Webb Space Telescope

2011-07-09T09:28:00.000-07:00

Houston, we have a problem. The United States House of Representatives has cut funding for the James Webb Space Telescope in its newest appropriations bill.

If it works, it will be able to look backwards in time further than anything we have ever created. The practical technological knowledge and experience we will gain by attempting, even if it were to fail this time, of placing a satellite successfully in L2, a stable gravitational orbit 930,000 miles form the Earth would be invaluable for developing other intra-solar system travel concepts, including the Mars conveyor transit systems. Our ability to detect planets outside of our solar system, and the detail with which we could make such detections, will dramatically alter our understanding of what it means to live on planet earth cosmically.

This victory can be a victory won for our civilization, for the current generations of the earth to pass down to future generations as another step of massive importance of understanding the cosmos as a means to improving human lives.

I know that a lot of people are skeptical that such things are worth the cost. But learning more about the physical world and unlocking the mysteries that are hidden to casual human observation has been a consistent winner in providing growth, and rewarding civilizations who invest while stagnating those who decline.

Further, I would say that trying to manage the problems human societies face on this planet, the costs of social safety nets, health care, military spending, etc., we have for a long time tried to solve the ills of these problems without aggressively pursuing a program of human expansion into space, robotically or otherwise. How's that going?

Space exploration is costly, and the gains from doing it are uncertain... that's why it's called exploration. But if we look at the state of human societies on earth right now, and we are not thrilled with what we see, it seems strange to me not to venture off into the unknown to see if it might have some answers for us.

To win a football game, you've got take a couple of shots deep at the endzone. Save the James Webb Space Telescope... please contact your representatives.

Happy 4th of July

2011-07-04T21:44:00.000-07:00

There is one hour left of Independence Day in Minnesota. We will wake up tomorrow, the day after, with no state government.

For some Minnesotans this means no government service that they were planning for that was deemed non-essential and shut down. (Don't worry though, if you were planning to go to the IMAX theater at the Apple Valley Zoo - that made the cut and is open!) For others who draw a paycheck working for the state, this means wondering how to cover their bills or even the mortgage. This Independence Day, for many, is a day of anxiety.

Our political leaders are facing off in what is known in game theory as a "chicken game." If you have ever played chicken on the balance beam at recess, you already have a sense of this.

The least optimal solution for both parties in a chicken game is to have both sides refuse to cave. Think of all the lost revenue by closing state agencies (like the lottery) which, just guessing here, is not an ideal type of loss to be incurring during a negotiations over how to deal with a budget shortfall. Another example of both sides not backing down as the worst possible outcome is to think of the Cuban Missile Crisis. If neither side blinks: no humans. Not good.

The problem is in a chicken game that both sides believe that they will get much more benefit by forcing the other side to cave first, or to cave more than their side.

In Public Choice III, Dennis Mueller suggests that cooperation can come from a "chicken supergame," which is a term to refer to set of payoffs that over multiple long-run replays lead to optimal, more stable results if there is enforceable cooperation on both sides, or there might be broader benefits and costs in a larger context than the direct negotiation itself.

The scary thing in Minnesota is that both of the "chicken supergame" factors seem to indicate resolution is not forthcoming. Stable long-run play requires that the other side retaliate when the first side defects. Both political parties have been in retaliate mode for a long time. The second "chicken supergame" possibility, external incentives, appear to be largely lined up against compromise as well. As Minnesota is being seen by national political parties and interest groups of all sorts as a national budget battle in miniature, there will be all sorts of rewards promised to Minnesota political leaders for refusing to budge by national-sized interests with national-sized bank accounts.

Not to mention the allure of the national party: if you are a state politician, you want to keep your job, but even better is to go up a level to US Congress or maybe even Senate. Voters have a say over whether you will get there or not, but politicians have a say over voters by having organized national campaigns and outstanding advertising and PR tactics. Every increase in campaign promises, fundraising efforts, privately created advertisements for one side or the other, internet shills, op-ed columnists who come in on one side every new iota of contribution decreases the cost of irritating voters now and winning them back later, and every time this happens in the name of treating the lives of people in our state as nothing more than a practice for a national political fight, we get that much farther from, rather than closer to having a state government again.

Happy 4th of July, Minnesota. Hang in there.

Minnesota State Shutdown

2011-07-03T10:42:00.000-07:00

Everyone has a theory as to why Minnesota is in a state-wide government shutdown, some even have multiple theories to share with us. I see no reason not to go with a good, old-fashioned Downsian explanation.

Here are some important nuggets of Downsian insight to keep in mind when trying to explain the behavior of Minnesota politicians.

The primary goal for elected officials is to win re-election. You might say, "if this is true, then why do politicians ever do unpopular things?" The answer is because there are a lot of ways to manipulate this goal. First, political leaders take actions that are approved of in their electoral district far more than they do things that are approved of generally (which ought to tell you something about the strength of this theory right there). Second, public opinion is a two-way street. Public opinion can be manipulated by other party members, by professional opinion-manipulation firms (which require money, which require satisfying the interests of those who will give you the money), by activists who are willing to go out and advocate your policies and hit the streets for your campaign. Don't forget that the only opinion that matters for re-election is the measured opinion taken on election day by those who show up. If you take a slightly less popular position, but many more people on your side show up than the other side, then you are golden.

Two party systems are only stable if there is broad consensus about the public interest. The disagreements in the public interest have reached stakes that in some sense are too high to negotiate into stable arrangements. This one's not the politicians fault alone, this one falls on everybody a little bit.

In a Two-Party System, parties have an incentive to keep their interests vague. George Orwell once said that if you talk precisely, the advantage is that you will say things in a manner so that if you say something stupid, it will be obvious to all including yourself. Politicians and parties want to avoid this at all cost. All I can tell from the rhetoric in Saint Paul is that DFLers don't think it's fair that "millionaires are going to starve out the poor kids trying to pay for school at the U" and that Republicans "will not sit idly by while we pass debt on to future generations with reckless spending." Hey, look at me, now I feel angry at one side and defensive of another side even though neither side has provided me any real information whatsoever. It's almost as if all our politicians are experts at professionally manipulating our sentiments or something.

So what's going to happen? There will be some sort of a deal, I'm guessing one in which taxes are raised in a way that Republicans can claim that they were not (they'll say something like "alternative revenue") and a way in which programs will get cut. Both sides will use the length of time they held out as evidence to their commitment to their love of freedom and puppies, and that they only gave in at all because of the horrible heavy-handed tactics the other side used to force their hand. How long it will take to find this ground depends largely on how many days they think they need to buy them the credibility to spin this story. I don't see letting this play out change either sides position, and so the most infuriating part of the shutdown to me is the fact that state employees are out of work just so that we can carry through with the political theater.

Nozick and Wilt Chamberlain

2011-06-30T09:10:00.000-07:00

I know that I'm very late to this party, but I do want to join in the chorus of those who are wary about Stephen Metcalf's piece in Slate. Julian Sanchez correctly points out that Nozick uses the Chamberlain example serves to point out a flaw in the theory of patterned distribution put forward by John Rawls. This does not take a massive amount of textual digging, as one can find the Wilt Chamberlain example embedded in a section heading referring directly to Rawls entitled "How Liberty Upsets Patterns." See for yourself:

Whether or not one is committed to the Nozickian project, it seems to me impossible to sidestep the fact that the Wilt Chamberlain example challenges the idealist conception of social transfer payments by noting that the historical time slice in which such transfers are fair is one of many fleeting historical moments that follow the transfer of wealth. Nozick's example challenges Rawlsian idealism with an implied questions. First, how can state-run patterned redistribution be fair if, once we give everyone the freedom to spend their money as they see fit, everyone voluntarily chooses to redistribute their wealth in the exact same pattern that transfer payments attempt to correct for? Our choices are to either perpetually try to transfer wealth away from Wilt Chamberlain even though he will constantly have it returned to him, or to transfer money to the least advantaged and then tell the least advantaged they are not allowed to spend it watching professional basketball. The former option appears futile, the second option appears to be an encroachment on basic rights and liberties. Specifically as an attack on Rawls, being caught between these two options is a huge problem since Rawls claims our basic rights and liberties are prior to any distributive justice, which is to say that no distributive scheme may infringe on these basic rights and liberties.

One of the issues that is worth taking note, in light of Julian Sanchez's ongoing debate with Matt Yglesias on the subject, is that one need not delve into the later works of Robert Nozick to give Julian's arguments the traction he seeks. Rawls argues that the reason distributive justice schemes are morally permissible is because there are strong reasons to believe that the classical case for absolute property rights are overstated. Whether Rawls is correct or not, notice how the Wilt Chamberlain example declines to weigh in on Rawls claim about the status of property rights. The Wilt Chamberlain story causes the Rawlsian story to fail on its own terms. Nozick's case against Rawls rests on the idea that Rawls' idealist view fails, not because it has the wrong meta-ethics, but because the theory itself is too meta-ethical to notice practical concerns like the fact that the flow of time is continuous.

Both Rawls and Nozick, it should be added, acknowledge the moderateness of their positions adn that each view has its own degree of fungibility. Rawls basically concedes in Justice as Fairness that living in a reasonably plural society that goes back and forth between favoring the difference principle, Nash equilibria, or social utility maximization points in terms of the social distribution of resources is living pretty well regardless of where they find themselves between those three places. Nozick's "reparations" theory for past violations of people's rights that have had far reaching historical consequences never gets more sophisticated than saying adamantly that there ought to be such a theory. It would not be hard to construct an elaborate reparation scheme that, for the scale and scope of transactional relationships in modern society, ended up if not as large, at least nearly as large as a modern state like the United States. Given the intelligence, flexibility, and revision that both of these theorists put into their work, characterizing either of them as staunch ideological pillars that we must see for the charlatans that they really are is probably the biggest mistake you could make in reading either of them, and that's why I find pieces like the one appearing in Slate irresponsible.

The Case for Libya

2011-06-03T10:56:00.000-07:00

Speaker of the House Boehner proposed a resolution designed to give President Obama more time to make his case about the NATO military action in Libya.

If we set ideological allegiance's aside for a moment, I wonder what it is I am missing about the Libya action. We seem to be preventing a humanitarian intervention through the use of NATO airstrikes. This strikes me as nothing more than a mission that prevent an awful lot of harm to innocent people for, on the scale of these sorts of things, a low cost. I'm imagining the objections look something like what follows below, but I am not convinced that any of them are enough to be against the Libya operation.

We cannot force regime change: I don't think we have to for this mission to be worthwhile. As long as we can keep Gaddafi weakened to the point where he cannot get to rebel strongholds anymore, as far as I'm concerned, the benefits massively outweighed the costs. Some sort of equilibrium where Gaddafi cannot get to Benzaghi but Benzaghi cannot get to Gaddafi is not a solution that makes the world a place full of sunshine and rainbows, but it seems to me that it is clearly a better place where every rebel-controlled city is strewn with the dead bodies of residents who supported the rebels.

We cannot afford another Iraq: This is not Iraq, at least from where I sit. The evidence regarding Iraq's intentions to perpetrate some imminent harm in proportion to the response we took is not there. Qaddafi seems to be, from his Charlie Sheen like comments, quite intent on controlling his country by means that are both crimes against humanity and going to happen "but for" the intervention of NATO. The man has promised to kill everyone, is employing mercenaries from other countries to attack Libyans, and is not on particularly firm political footing.

How long will we have to keep doing this? This question echoes the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, but again, the costs we are bearing are substantially less in Libya than they are in Iraq or Afghanistan. With Libya we are sharing more of a much lighter load. Resolve in this case does not require NATO forces to commit troops for an indefinite period of time, it simply forces us to wear down Gaddafi's military resources so that Northern Libya and Southern Libya come to some sort of arrangement that protects the most amount of human welfare that we can manage to get out of the situation. I have to think Gaddafi will run out of the resources to spoil that before we'll run out of missiles.

What about the costs of personnel/civilians/rebels/mercenaries from other countries/etc? There is no way that I am aware of to discount the moral seriousness of this objection. It is heart-breaking to read that there are people in Africa so desperate that they would fight to keep a man like Gaddafi in power for $100. I cannot imagine, and probably never will imagine what it is like to be that desperate, and I would not dare pretend to know. But the United States and our NATO allies are not the ones who have set the costs of protecting Southern Libya at such at the moral price at which it is set. That decision has been forged by a variety of forces, some of which directly by Gaddafi, some of them no doubt can be traced back to the absolute disastrous effect that Western Civilization has had on the African continent. Regardless, the only choice the United States faces is between risking pilots, military personal and observers, civilian casualties, the killing of members of an army of desperately impoverished people, or risking a world in which the Arab Spring is turned back by brutal murders of innocent civilians on a scale that no other Arab dictator has dared stoop to since the protests in Tunisia began.

On my view, to allow Gaddafi to get away, not just with firing into protestors, or turning a couple of mobs of people loose in Tahrir square, but to systematically order a military-imposed mass killing on citizens, could potentially change the entire dynamic of the Arab Spring. As heinous as the political violence in Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen has been, protests and protestors endure in their resistance. PErhaps they do so safe in the knowledge that once the government use the police or mercenary "counter-mobs" to arrest or attack a few isolated groups of people, it indicates the last move that their despots can make. We cannot manufacture happy endings... but we can make sure that the most heinous acts of political violence are off of the table.

But even if there is no knock-on effect for the rest of the Arab Spring, the actions of the United States in Libya are justified in the lives of those directly threatened in Benzaghi. This is one of the few times ever in a humanitarian situation where lobbing missiles at a group of people generates meaningful results, because the other side is armed, just not as well, and because it is easier to determine who we are should be shooting at. This is a unique situation, and recognizing that events have unfolded to make this action cost effective, and therefore actionable, far from being cold and heartless rationality, might show that it would be cold and heartless not to pay the price for the good that we can do.

"The windows are locked now, so what will it be?"

2011-06-03T07:46:00.000-07:00

If there is anyone left to chronicle the farce of a global population sitting back and doing nothing over climate change, I would suggest chronicling the seemingly endless pattern of democratic governments setting policies that are radically insufficient to actually create solutions, immediately followed by the complete and total failure to to come anywhere near meeting even those meager standards.

Why is Felony Voting a Problem?

2011-05-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

In Minnesota today, Governor Dayton vetoed the Republican Voter Identification bill, but the sanity of the veto was accompanied by two troubling elements to the story. First, the Governor ordered a panel to look into other ways to curb felons voting. Second, Representative Kiffmeyer of Big Lake promised to try the bill one more time before resorting to a Constitutional amendment. Both are troubling to me on separate grounds.

The need to "look into" the fact that some 100 felons illegally voted in Minnesota's elections is troubling for two reasons. First, what exactly is it about someone who commits a felony that makes them unfit to vote? There is no justification of denying felons the right to vote that does nto ultimately come down to creating a double standard based on the fact that felons are an easy group to violate rights because they are an enormously unpopular group (understandably so). Nevertheless, the majoritarian tyrannizing of felons is not only grievous for the way it violates the rights of felons, it is equally grievous in giving the majority the chance to use ill-used majority tyranny for political ends without censure or sanction.

How can we be certain that denying felons the right to vote is majority tyranny, and something like collecting tax dollars to preserve our ecosystem is not majority tyranny? That gets to the second problem with the need to "look into" strictly enforcing felony voting laws. There is absolutely no public purpose served by keeping felons from voting. The only reason to keep felons from voting is the same reason to try and hinder any group from voting: because they are not going to side with you when they cast their votes. Felons as group, can at most tip the balance from one candidate that thousands of people who are not felons have supported to another candidate who thousands of non-felons also supported. Keeping felons out of elections, to the extent it has any impact at all, it has an effect on changing who the median voter is an election, by shifting it ever-so-slightly to the right. Frankly, I find it unconscionable to think that the rights of individuals can be treated so flippantly as to be used as pawns to move public opinion so slightly. Don't get me wrong. I understand why politicians see it as valuable, I just don't see why citizens would.

Further, the even more alarming trend, from an institutional design perspective of our government, is the recent national mania to propose constitutional amendments at the state level. Any bill that faces a threat of veto is now countered with the threat of being put up for constitutional amendment. What is wrong with all of the new spate of constitutional amendments: banning gay marriage, recognizing gay marriage, protecting the environment, etc., is that they are all instrumental and not constitutional in their aims. In other words, each an every one of them ought to either be legislation or the result of legal scrutiny by the judicial branch. That no one has faith in these standard constitutional procedures to deliver public policy should be setting off alarm bells everywhere, but the remedies that we have taken up: an increase in referenda, constitutional amendments, and increasingly vocalized dissatisfaction do not fix the problem. Instead they simply satisfy particular interests who have been frustrated by our constitutional problems, who, having received the policy outcome they were interested in, simply take their hard-won goodies and hope the deeper problem goes away. But of course it does not go away, and at least to this point, the constant failure to pay any notice to the massive institutional maintenance that reality requires of large democratic political regimes by partisans on all sides in the United States only strengthens their perverse drive to make the problem go away by shouting that they do not believe in the problem with increasing volume and frequency.

Great NYT Piece on Stanley Ann Dunham

2011-04-20T10:24:00.000-07:00

I wonder if Cornell West wishes he had read this great piece about Stanley Ann Dunham before running his mouth about Barack Obama.

Books for all the world...

2011-04-19T13:34:00.000-07:00

Kingdom's Come

2011-04-13T13:16:00.000-07:00

Portal 2 is coming!!

2011-03-27T12:10:00.000-07:00

Gerald Gaus - Philosopher Assassin?

2011-03-25T16:31:00.000-07:00

So I've been plowing through Gerald Gaus' The Order of Public Reason, desperately trying to catch up with the online reading group at the Public Reason blog. One of the things that is quite breathtaking about Gaus' book is that, while he does not really openly acknowledge that he does this, he is threatening to take out a lot of prominent theoretical positions if his project succeeds. Here's a brief survey of Gaus' hit list (so far):

Sir Isaiah Berlin - Gaus dissolves the negative/positive liberty distinction by arguing that moral obligations are about holding people accountable to "the reasons one already has." Both positive and negative liberty fundamentally rest on this logic for Gaus, and so the distinction is not nearly as important as interrogating the appeal beneath both claims. Negative liberty is just a false way to bracket some liberty claims from others.
Stephen Holmes - There is to be no "bracketing" of moral arguments in Gaus' view. Gaus believes that we come to give public justification to our social morality through the Deliberative Public Justification Principle (DPJP). This is different from Rawls' Original Position or Overlapping Consensus views of liberal agreement because Gaus believes that we come to this position as the people we are, not as people hypothetically screened by a "veil of ignorance" or by a commitment to reasonable pluralism that asks us to set aside moral controversies... which leads us to...
Communitarians - The Sandel-inspired communitarian critique of Rawls is simply irrelevant since Gaus is going to get largely Rawls-like things out of his view of social rules while granting the moral particulars of each individual that communitarians complain Rawls' screens out of Members of the Public when he tries to get people to be reasonable and not rational. Gaus gets the same contractarian deontic commitment out of his members of the public without making the move that offends communitarians. Add them to the Gausian hit list.
Michael Sandel - Gaus denies the virtue account of moral rules on multiple grounds. Most damning is the fact that under experimental conditions, people do worse abiding by and enforcing virtue ethical rules than they do deontic rules. Virtue ethics is a weird source of social morality given it's weakness as a command: "X so that you are Y-er" does not have the same value as a social morality as "X so that you have more Y" (Instrumental/Utilitarian) or "You have a duty to X!"
William Galston/Berlin (Again) - Gaus believes that the Value Pluralists insistence on the "incommensurability of values" breaks down upon examination. Particularly, upon examination of work by Gaus' long-time colleague Stanley Benn, many incommensurable values in the abstract are actually commensurable in particular instances. Gaus argues between competing values we have indifference curves between them, and very rarely, if ever, do we find ourselves actually on the curve in a choice between personal values and social rules. Usually the salience of a moral rule is either weak or strong compared to our values, and in the rare times that we are indifferent between them, then we're indifferent between them... and then who cares? Very rarely does the incommensurability of values actually generate massive amounts of moral ambiguity in terms of what our obligations are morally... this seems to both match our intuitions about moral decision-makers and also explains why. even to a value pluralist, some moral decisions seem obviously "below the moral floor" even while they claim incommensurability.

I'm not sure where this book is going still or if Gaus' project succeeds ultimately, but if it were to, it would be very exciting... if for no other reason than it would clear out a lot of the detritus of 20th Century liberal political thought.

New Symphony of Science!!!

2011-03-23T15:21:00.000-07:00

Woohoo!

Robonaut 2!! From the Makers of Robonaut 1!! (I'm assuming...)

2011-03-23T12:46:00.001-07:00

The Jay Demerit Story - Someone Fund This!

2011-03-23T12:46:00.000-07:00

From Prelude in German Rhymes

2011-03-23T12:17:00.000-07:00

NYT on Free Will as "The Only Choice"

2011-03-22T16:18:00.000-07:00

The New York Times ran a piece today called, "Do You Have Free Will? Yes, it's the Only Choice." The piece runs an argument as follows. Most people have intuitions that support the idea of free will, and most people report believing that they have free will, and believing in free will seems to positively improve performance of mundane tasks... therefore, free will exists. THERE COULD BE NO OTHER EXPLANATION!

For another explanation, try:

What is called “freedom of the will” is essentially the affect of superiority with respect to something that must obey: “I am free, ‘it’ must obey’ — this consciousness lies in every will. ... A person who wills —, commands something in- side himself that obeys, or that he believes to obey.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals (Quote comes from Brian Leiter's article "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will")

Ender's Game

2011-03-22T12:50:00.000-07:00

On a lark at the public library the other day, I picked up Orson Scott Card's famous science fiction book, Ender's Game. I made the mistake of reading the book's introduction, where Card tries to rebut the criticisms of those who felt his children were largely unrealistic in how they carried themselves. I don't find Card's response in the introduction very convincing (he claims that he always saw himself as a person even when a child, which is not really the point of the objections he is responding to), and suspecting that this was a flaw in the book made it difficult to keep the thought far from my mind at any point while reading.

I enjoyed the story's plot, and I feel as though the pacing Card used to develop his story is particularly good. Things unfold at a good pace, and we never get too much or too little of the world's mysteries at any point in the story. My one problem with the story is that I have a difficult time swallowing the humans generally, far more than any characters in particular. I think I got past the child psychology thing by imagining that everyone was actually twenty the whole time, and then being stunned when the book would mention that Ender was 12 years old. More than the characterization of the children is the utter un-reality of the world around them that they interact with. Ender's inner psychology seems fair enough, but the behavior of the grown-ups around him seem unbelievably pliable to the demands of the children's interests in the story. Without spoling anything, the unfolding of the B plot on Earth is ludicrous.

I can see why this is a well-regarded science fiction novel. Card is clearly a talented writer and does not fall into many of the horribly self-indulgent tendencies of science fiction genere writing... though he still falls into some in Ender's Game. I haven't fully decided whether I'm going to read the next one, but I am actually inclined to do so, for two reasons. First, Card has talent, and I'm willing to see if he improves. Second, I think the ending of the story, while hard to swallow, has a metaphorical symmetry to it as well as a moral/emotional payoff worth reinvesting in the next book to see where it goes.

I'm sure that I'm the last person to have ever read this book, any thoughts would be welcome, no spoilers about future books.

2011-03-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

If you were ever wondering what would be the English version of "Springtime for Hitler," wonder no more, it is this column by David Littlejohn in the Daily Mail. While the Mail has never been the pinnacle of journalistic integrity, they have seemingly invented a low heretofore thought impossible in a society that engages in the free exchange of public reason. I found out about this gem as Kevin Hunter Day and Roy Meredith, whose views on human rights and international relations are infinitely more advanced than the Mail's "journalists," were conversing on twitter of the regret they felt that their football (soccer) podcast is disseminated via the Mail after reading the piece. Curious about what could be so upsetting, Roy Meredith kindly sent me a link to the piece. When the title read, "Why My Wife's PoW Granddad Wouldn't Mark a Minutes Silence for the Japanese," I had a feeling that I was heading into a piece of historically bad writing.

Let's pretend you were trying to write an article so offensive that it would make it seem as if you had no business being in human society. Do you think you could come up with comments that could top these gems?

Despite filling our homes with Japanese electronics and our garages with cars made by Nissan and Toyota, despite the vivid images on TV and assorted social networks, it remains a faraway country of which we know little and understand less.

Anyone who has visited or worked in Japan will tell you it is like landing on another planet. Beyond the baseball caps and Western clothes, the Japanese people have a distinct culture of their own, which is entirely alien to our own values. They are militantly racist and in the past have been capable of great cruelty.

I have no objection to honouring the dead in public, if the occasion or sense of loss warrants it. At White Hart Lane we’ve recently said goodbye to some of the stars of Spurs’ double-winning side from the Sixties. There was genuine sadness over the loss of men many in the crowd had known personally.

But how many of the hundreds of thousands of supporters corralled into grieving for Japan could even point to that country on a map?

Do you think the Japanese held a silent tribute for the victims of the London Transport bombings in 2005? Me neither.

Unbelievably, the column actually goes on to other topics, like the enforcement of a no-fly zone on Libya. While not outdoing the comments on Japan, we ought to bear witness to the fact that Littlejohn has gone all-out for racism.

The decision to protect the people of Libya from genocide is noble. But we know nothing about the rebels with whom we are siding. They could be a front for Islamist nutjobs, or a bunch of sadists just as bad as Gaddafi.

No sooner had defence secretary Liam Fox announced that we were prepared to target Gaddafi himself than two warplanes were forced to turn back because of fears that civilians might get killed.

But once the TV starts bringing us pictures of bombed ‘orphanages’ and burned-out ‘baby milk factories’ strewn with strategically placed CNN teddy bears, sentiment will change and the Not In My Name crowd will be dusting off their Stop The War placards and taking to Trafalgar Square.

In this totally insane collection of words, there is a lesson to be learned: the general moves that Littlejohn tries to endorse are based on emotional appeals rather than reasoned argument. Littlejohn just happens to be so terrible at hitting the emotional notes, that they are an incoherent, repulsive mess. Some of Littlejohn's intellectual circle are Coppolla's of hitting their emotional cues... Littlejohn is the Michael Bay version.

For those of us who can find Japan on a map (not hard, seeing as it is BY ITSELF IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN), it is important to remember that globalization is happening so fast that there are actually still voices arguing against the process of globalization itself, apparently unaware that their argument is fifteen going on twenty years too late. As an aside, it might be hard for many older people to believe this, but World War II is coming up on being SEVEN DECADES AGO. Maybe that does not seem like a lot of time, but given how many game-changing things human beings have discovered between now and then, it might as well be the 1300's.

Many worry about the divides technology brings to our world. It seems to me a fair point. However, one divide that is unquestionably getting eroded in the process of technological innovation is the divide of people by nation-state. Good riddance. While globalization brings its own set of social problems (what era doesn't have them?), one divide I am not particularly worried about is the divide between people living in the mid-twentieth century and those who are current.

Laugh at people who think these things. Mock them. Share them with your friends for amusement. Use their pieces to galvanize people into remembering that the enemies of human decency exist. But fear not - people like this will be taken care of by a history that leaves them further and further behind. No one watches the 1960's versions of Michael Bay films. Time, it seems, weeds out all garbage.

Thomas Kuhn is a Tosser...

2011-03-08T07:05:00.000-08:00

...of ashtrays. At the head of Errol Morris. I have had many a discussion with friends about Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Having actually read his history of science book, The Copernican Revolution, as well, I often defended Kuhn when people accused him of believing that different scientific paradigms are incommensurable. Friends would object that it made no sense, and I would agree, and figured that was proof that this couldn't be what Kuhn meant, and in fact, The Copernican Revolution would itself be an incoherent work from that perspective. As Kuhn is the author of both books, I had simply assumed the inconsistency must be in our interpretation of Structure, rather than Kuhn's interpretation of what he himself was doing.

Little did I know that Errol Morris actually asked Kuhn about this, and was attacked by an ash tray and kicked out of Princeton's graduate program. I always try, as a rule, to extend maximum charity to all arguments. In the case of Thomas Kuhn, I seem to have clearly afforded too much. To those with whom I have disputed what Kuhn's argument in Structure really entails, it appears that I have been no ground left to stand on.

The End of Mental Alchemy

2011-02-25T00:32:00.000-08:00

"You could never've predicted,

That is could see through you

Kasparov-Deep Blue, 1996

Your Mind's playing tricks now

The show's over, so take a bow" - Arcade Fire, "Deep Blue"

This is how dualism dies. Not with a bang. Not even with a whimper. It gets a column from Stanley Fish. The sad fact about once-great theories is that, when it is obvious to nearly all that they no longer deserve status as a leading theory, they have to suffer the indignity of living their last days in incapable hands. Fish's "call for caution" about being to excited about what the triumph of Watson over Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings is not a call for caution at all, but an opportunity for Fish to engage in his weekly bait-and-switch where he pretends to offer education and instead provides snarling condescension.

Despite the fact that Watson is only a machine programmed for specific functions, this diagnosis by Fish(which thank goodness Fish is here to tell us all, lest anyone thought Watson was actually the HAL9000 computer) does not prevent him from using the straw man. One has to at least find some amusement that Fish has finally confessed that he is such a bully that he can even derive pleasure from mocking inanimate objects. He also has a nice little ad hominem saved for the end, referring to "those in charge of the artificial intelligence hype" as if it can be assuemd that artifical intelligence is mere hype or that there is somehow a conspiracy of people attempting to decieve the world about it.

Watson is not the end of the capabilities of machine intelligence, it is a new beginning. It is a step up in an order of magnitude in heuristic machine computation. Fish cites the great Hubert Dreyfus' work,What Computers Can't Do. It is worth noting that there is a dramatic difference between what computer's "couldn't do" when Dreyfus wrote his book and what they cannot do now. Fish links to theWikipedia page for Dreyfus' book, which ironically enough reminds us that Dreyfus ridiculed AI people who predicted the following things:

A computer would be world champion in chess.
A computer would discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem.
Most theories in psychology will take the form of computer programs.

The fact that two out of the three predicitons have, for all intents and purposes, been realized apparently is no reason to think that AI people are still a crazed, conspiratorial hype-machine.

Watson can take voice questions, break down the question into component parts, search for an prioritize relationships, and return an answer using speech. Fish would have you believe this is somehow not "contextualization" - as if contextualization is some sort of mystical, vaporous power only possessed by Gods and humans. Watson's contextualization powers are more limited then ours, certainly. But Watson is the beginning. If Watson can use heuristics to sort such a vast set of data to find and prioritize what's relevant, then it stands to reason that it is highly likely we will be able to teach machines prioritize and sort pixels in a visaul field with the same level of precision. A machine that can hear and see, and turn that hearing and seeing into data, process the data, and create a response that generates positive consequences is going to seem more and more like us -- and also more and more like what Stanley Fish will have claimed was impossible.

William Galston on Involuntary Commitment

2011-01-11T12:14:00.000-08:00

William Galston supports strengthening involuntary commitment. Agreed, but I am not sure why Galston agrees if he is a value pluralist. Galston's explanation of value pluralism allows for differences "above the moral floor," but the question of how much the state may allow for involuntary commitment of citizens hardly seems to reach the level of either moral consensus or moral seriousness necessary to make it one of those questions we cannot reasonably disagree about.

If, instead of being a question about the moral floor, Galston simply sees this as an issue of allowing both sides having a chance to win through politics, it is not clear to me how that is justified. It is not simply a policy dispute insofar as civil libertarians disagree with the policy, but that civil libertarians see involuntary commitment as a violation of liberty. In this case, the objection of civil libertarians need not even be reduced to "and who is to say they are wrong?" because the case for involuntary commitment being a violation of a person's rights seems quite plausible on its face.

So I am not sure how Galston, who is, after all, a person committed to siding with the parents side of the lawsuit in Mozert v. Hawkins, can be for involuntary commitment.

I'm for a more sensible path for involuntary commitment because I think that our best possible neuroscience indicates that some people do, in fact, have cognitive debilitation and/or suffer cognitive malfunctions serious enough to pose a high-risk threat to themselves and others and that such malfunctions make it difficult for the individuals who are malfunctioning to recognize their interests. But epistemic certainty is not an argument that, to my understanding, Galston recognizes as legitimate.

Charlie Rose Interviews Self

2010-12-21T17:52:00.000-08:00

I also find this video hilarious. I really need to get back to work...

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFE2CCfAP1o

Symphony of Science

2010-12-21T17:49:00.000-08:00

Still grading, but while I'm trapped in a mountain of papers, I thought I'd share my favorite "Symphony of Science" music video.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vioZf4TjoUI&feature=player_embedded

Mike Leach

2010-12-20T10:09:00.000-08:00

Well, it looks like Mike Leach will be coaching Maryland football. As a general principle, I think the emphasis on college athletics is well beyond unhealthy. As a personal matter, I wish that the Atlantic Coast Conference was still an 8 or 9 team basketball first league. As a single person who has no real leverage on any of this, I have resigned myself to at least enjoying the new offense next season.

Fun(?) with Budget simulation

2010-12-14T10:43:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago, I asked the students in my introductory American Government course to send me their decisions using this budget stabilization simulator. I aggregated each individuals submissions and created a collective budget based on the total decisions of everyone. Doing it this way offers no chance for coordinating activity like logrolling or deliberation, but it was not meant to pass an actual budget as much as to give a snapshot of policy preferences of students.

http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://www.stevendouglasmaloney.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/pols104_stabilize_the_debt_results21.pdfwp-content/uploads/2010/12/POLS104_stabilize_the_debt_results-1.pdf&embedded=true

I then asked them to try there hand last week, given the fact that the President has committed troops to Afghanistan at current levels and given the tax deal struck between the President and Congressional Republicans extends all of the Bush-era tax cuts. Here are the results from that exercise.

http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://www.stevendouglasmaloney.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/pols104_stabilize_the_debt_results21.pdf&embedded=true

Some observations:

Five students the second time reported they could not bear to stabilize the debt the second time around. They handed me budgets that did not meet their assigned targets and reported feeling that doing anything more seemed too draconian to endorse.

Several students sent accompanying justifications that read more like apologies the second time. Their confident policy priorities were left far worse off once getting out of Afghanistan and letting the Bush-era cuts expire were taken off the table.

Both budgets are harsh on the elderly. The second one enormously so. I have received a strong sense from students that they are deeply resentful of the older generations in far greater numbers. Many have expressed they would rather take their chances without an old-age safety net than continue with transfer payments that they perceive are robbing their youth to extend the old-age welfare of those older than they are.

The second budget is draconian to the point of farce. Funding cuts deep enough to reach the school lunch program, accompanied by every tax imaginable.

In aggregating the budgets, I noticed that the ideological interests of students only took them so far. ROTC students saved more of the budget for the military comparatively, but still made cuts and imposed extra costs on military life. Conservatives voted for Cap and Trade. No one voted for an increased corporate tax break. Liberals voted to make cuts to transportation and environmental projects and were likely to distribute the tax burden progressively, but not in a way that spared the lower classes at the expense of the upper class.

The moral of the story for most students, as they reported it, is that budget choices are difficult and path dependent once one owns up to the problem of scarce resources. Difficult in that one has to operate in constraints which will clearly upset others. Path dependent in that certain choices open and foreclose other choices later.

The moral of the story for me, though not scientific, was that students as choosers are not just capable of feeling the weight of their public choices, but they are easily capable of this. That students would hand in deficits of 70% of GDP when the assignment was to get it t 60%, and say, "sorry, I just cannot do it," when they are checking boxes in an extra credit assignment that effects no one in actuality (the students still got credit who did this, FYI) suggests that perhaps most of our polarization problems are problems of focused attention, and not, as popular theories on both the right and left seem to purport, because we are populated by disagreeable, sub-mental, conspirators out to destroy life as we know it.

David Brooks is on happy pills...

2010-12-14T08:07:00.000-08:00

I generally try to defend David Brooks even though I have deep disagreements with his outlook on life. As an intellectual, I think that he is someone who approached his work honestly, and uses his op-ed column as a civic resource. As a journalist, I have seen him be generous and giving with time and respect for the younger generation of writers, particularly when the initial reaction to their early days as "the bloggers" was greeted with derision by many of of Brooks' stature.

In the spirit of disagreeing with David Brooks without denouncing him, I have serious reservations about the general argument he makes in today's column in The New York Times. Let me begin by saying something I like about Brooks' column that you can see in his work generally. He links to the very cool Hans Rosling time lapse video on global development. It had already been making the rounds, but to make sure that all of Brooks' readership sees it is in its own way a public service.

David Brooks is very good at giving his readers data to look at. He is superbly gifted at cramming that data into a particular world view. This second ability is both his gift and his curse. I consider David Brooks a fellow-traveler in the political world of guarded optimists, but I find his realism about what the problems are and how they can be worked out to be suspect.

Let me share some examples from today's piece.

I do not believe that America is suffering a psychological crisis. America does not have a psyche. Plato's Republic was wrong about the statecraft=soulcraft relationship -- which is not surprising given how profoundly wrong it got both the workings of the state and the workings of the soul. No doubt Brooks means it as a metaphor, but it is an entirely unhelpful metaphor because it replaces real causal forces on the conditions of the American regime with a "magic box" explanation.

I do not believe America's global challenge is to define itself by its values. I am skeptical about the value of values, if you will permit the expression. The transition from having values ("I believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings") to valuing ("I recognize it as more important to buy a Malaria net than a movie") to action ("If a man in a lab coat asks me to shock a middle aged man with a heart condition, I will refuse") does not hold up under anything resembling observational scrutiny. To me, this is another "magic box" story. We put happy thoughts in our head and happy thoughts come out the other end of the process and the world is happy. When the world is not happy, it is because someone had bad values. They might say they do not, but we know better, because how else did we get the bad result? This folk story about intentionality has been able to endure for a long time because it prays on our historic inability to access the interiority of others with any type of observational reliability.

I am not convinced that middle-classness is an essential category. Brooks ascribes characteristics to the definition of being middle class based on a couple of observations of the middle class in America and Europe. It is unclear whether or not the nature of what middle-classness entails as the middle class itself changes in relation to the world and other social classes. Particularly as it grows in number globally. I do agree that a large middle class has encouraged something like what Brooks ascribes to it, a set of priorities that are healthy priorities. However, Brooks' gloss on why seems to derive straight from Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, which again ascribes a theory of intentionality and priority for action that appear incorrect from today's body of evidence. There appears to be a story, as yet fully undiscovered, about our biological-intellectual drive towards skilled social coordination that on aggregate drives the phenomenon of "middle class values." Brooks is generally correct about middle-classness, but I suspect he has an imprecise understanding of why it has happened, and imprecise theories of causation lead to the possibility of imprecise predictions about the future.

I do not see the suburban pastoral Brooks paints in his last two or three paragraphs as a representative view of American society. I am told the suburb five blocks to the west of where I am typing did not allow Jewish residents until the 1970's. The civic associations of David Brooks dreams are also contextual. They rise and fall in American life, and the pressing question today is whether or not they are completely dead. Middle class values have always been accompanied by hostile reactions to immigration because of the destabilizing effects on social costs and the employment market that new waves of Americans bring. A global middle class makes capital mobility cheaper, which may grow the middle class, but make each member of it feel increasingly more vulnerable of sinking all the way to the bottom, particularly in global recessions. This might bring out the worst in the middle class, not the best.

I do not believe that the middle class value system is triumphant. If values are the combination of genes and social coordination, then calling middle class values triumphant in the next century is like declaring the next century "the golden retriever century" because there are more golden retrievers than ever before. That would be ridiculous because (1) it is not clear that golden retrievers "did" anything in particular for this pattern of selection to take place and (2) because golden retrievers, while their population growth may be of interest, has no monopolistic claim on the narrative of future events. Both of these problems with the golden retriever story are true with the David Brooks middle class story. Ultimately Brooks has a positive outlook on the future in a cynical time. I share hi optimism, but I worry we will not get there if we listen to David Brooks too closely.

Juridical Democracy's Failure

2010-12-13T11:51:00.000-08:00

The recent news about the striking down of last year's health care reform reveals the problem of what political scientist Theodore Lowi has termed "juridical democracy." Lowi's hope was that a society that settled its disputes through the Court system could advance public interest politics out of the reach of the interest group pluralism that currently controls governing decisions in both the legislative and executive branch.

Interest group pluralism is the view that there exists no such thing as a defensible public choice system beyond legitimizing rules that are neutral between private interests. As long as the rules for settling our political scores with one another are neutral, says interest group pluralism, then the interest groups that win in our political system are likely to be representative of the interests of many. There are many criticisms of this view, but the main criticisms of the view center around interest group liberalism's (1) inability to plan for the long-term (2) disenfranchisement of those who cannot mobilize resources (3) Disinterest with the correctness of the decisions it makes.

Lowi had hoped that juridical democracy would ensure that there was still a place in our government where everyone receives a hearing and where decisions were made on the basis of deliberation interested in reaching correct outcomes.

The reason that today's news is indicative of failure is not because of the content of the decision itself, but because it is clear that the judiciary is handling the question of whether or not the health care reforms are constitutional in an entirely partisan matter. Regardless of your views on the legality of the reforms, or their desirability, it is clear that the our Courts have been "got to" by interest group pluralism.

The increasing demands for the election of judges (and their expensive campaigns with unlimited contributions post Citizens United), highly partisan judicial appointments, the constant cycle of holding up judicial appointments, the increased attempt to focus public pressure on "judicial activism" when cases protect societal underdogs -- whatever it means for the content of any particular case, it appears generally that the judiciary cannot be trusted as a deliberative body in the way Lowi imagined. Which would mean, at least on Lowi's view, that the American democratic principle is now fully overrun by faction.

It's no Metrodome, but it's home...

2010-12-12T13:00:00.000-08:00

Some pictures from my neighborhood in the late hours of our historic snow storm in the Twin Cities.

Message From Your University President

2010-12-08T09:49:00.000-08:00

Funny (Scary?) (via Brian Leiter)

Political Strategies and Public Interest Strategies

2010-12-08T09:05:00.000-08:00

As a political strategy, the extension of all the tax cuts makes strategic sense. As Nate Silver explained, the Democratic Party was caught between choosing to hold out for no tax cuts for anyone or tax cuts for the wealthy in order to secure tax cuts for the middle class. Obama opts for the latter option, some Democratic legislators opt for the former.

As a political strategy, President Obama seems to have taken the best path to a coordinated outcome, as everyone is getting something of their first choice out of the arrangement. This makes political sense.

As a public interest strategy, however, I have deep reservations about this move. The United States budget deficit is a massive problem, not only in terms of economic performance, but as Professor Mandelbaum said recently on Charlie Rose, it poses a major national security threat to the ability to implement United States policy abroad. Abroad now referring to the place where terrorists live, (potential) nuclear powers shell islands belonging to other countries, World Cup bids go to countries that do not recognize Israel, containing the spread of AIDS is becoming more costly, and the location of all overseas financial markets.

Two of the biggest deficit cutting measures available as tools of policy are (1) getting out of Afghanistan and (2) Letting the Bush-era tax cuts lapse. The President has now passed on both of these rather substantial levers of fiscal policy. Lost in American monomania is the idea that government is an organ of social coordination that coordinates outcomes in a larger pool of collective decision-making. The idea that government coordinates outcomes for Americans as a body of people has been perpetually waning for some time. When the not-so-surprising conclusion that there really is a real world out there comprised of more than our narrow personal interests comes "home to roost," to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt, the lesson is likely to be a painful one for many American citizens.

The media keeps the attention on dissatisfaction with President Obama from the so-called "lefty critics." The definition of what makes "lefty critics" "lefty" anymore is not clear to me, except an attempt at using an evocative term. What worries me the most is that the group the Obama administration has run from the most is what might be called the cosmopolitan class, those interested in turning the globalizing era into an era of global development and an international order dominated by public action rather than power politics. The traditional left wing is still amply supported in the Congress, but for interested cosmopolitans, President Obama was supposed to be a "change" President that would wield executive power to establish more productive national and international public action. For those who believe that global social coordination is going to happen, the only choice is whether or not it will be more democratic or more oligarchic, weakening the power of the United States as a governing institution and as an embodiment of the capabilities of representative government improves the position of global oligarchy to democracy.

The last thing I want to hear from my President is that I am "sanctimonious" for thinking that stabilizing our deficit requires raising revenues, and raising revenues is important because it changes our leverage in improving the lives of people wandering through poisonous fields of our discarded televisions in China with their unprotected children because their government subsidizes the political strategic options available to our political leaders. The "sanctimonious" lot must be forgiven for not standing behind American flags while talking and using as much symbolic imagery about our homeland as possible to distract that policy choices are Orwellian in that "all are equal, but Americans are more equal than others." Mr. President, have you met kettle?

For the cosmopolitan class, President Obama is proving more Neville Chamberlain than Abraham Lincoln. Wary of what forces may be on the march, I remain unmoved that my "sanctimonious" views should appease the forces hostile to human flourishing all the way to our proverbial Dunkirk.

Intolerance Scores an Own Goal

2010-12-06T12:41:00.000-08:00

I used to live across the street from Belmont College, and so I was very sad to learn about the circumstances surrounding the ~~resignation~~ dismissal of women's soccer coach Lisa Howe -- ostensibly for being gay and expecting a child. Lest anyone get carried away with generalizing about private Southern colleges, observe that at least some of the student population at Belmont is not happy with the news either. When I lived in that neighborhood, I found the young people at Belmont to be the most pleasant general student population I have ever encountered. To the student protesters, I shall raise a glass of coffee to ye at Bongo Java next time I'm in town.

"Advent Blows from the Sea..."

2010-12-05T09:41:00.000-08:00

I was asked to present a Christmas reading for the English Department Honors Society on Friday. I remembered a section of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow that I found particularly poetic and moving. The scene is about (at least as far as I can tell), the frenzied collision between the spirit of war and the spirit of Christmas, and how each is its own variation on the theme of entropy. This is a fancy way of saying that each "spirit" has its own story about destruction and recreation, about hope and sorrow. Pynchon puts them to work during the Advent season of 1944 in his masterpiece, and I find the passage here from 131-134 in the Google Books version stirring, though many I shared it with seemed more mystified than anything else. I convinced myself the passage means enough to me that it was worth risking obtuseness for the spirit of genuine sharing, but the spirit of sharing is its own package of themes of concerns for old and new as well, and I'm not sure it was a wise choice in the end.

http://books.google.com/books?id=iPDGp7VT8H8C&lpg=PP1&dq=thomas%20pynchon%20gravity's%20rainbow&pg=PA131&output=embed

Back

2010-12-04T22:31:00.000-08:00

I'm Back

Samir Nasri

2010-12-04T22:29:00.000-08:00

http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/video/xfy2li_ful21vj0g3e_fun?additionalInfos=0
ful21vj0g3e
Uploaded by arsenalist. - See more comedy videos.

The undermining social democratic downhill slide into abysmal (Ignoreland)

2010-07-12T15:42:00.000-07:00

The American University is not dead, and it may not be dying - but it is definitely heading into a dark and unknown future. The Chronicle of Higher Education has declared tenure dead. The Delta Project's studies on trends in college spending provide some bleak data (unless you are a college athlete).

The numbers seem to suggest something like the following model is playing out in higher education:

Public funding per student has decreased dramatically for higher education

The fundraising of elite private research institutions has been dramatically improved over the past ten years

The difficulty for other higher ed. institutions to provide comparable educations to scale of the higher institutions has been damaged by their inability to raise funds the way the elite private universities have, making it harder to justify the current level of public subsidy of the public, much less seek ore money to maintain their relative place in the academic universe.

To cut costs, universities have had to reduce the number of tenure offers and cut public service expenses out of their budget, making their product even less attractive to public investment.

Students have been asked to subsidize more and more of their own education, requiring higher education institutions to focus on competing for student money through improved exercise, entertainment, dining and residential facilities in order to secure more students.

The maintenance of all of these campus life elements requires a much larger core of administrators, who are tasked with attracting student money to the school and keeping students connected to giving to the school as alumni.

The increased spending on facilities, administration, admissions, alumni support, has forced instruction into a holding pattern. Research that funds itself is encouraged because ti pays for itself and then some, but academic work in sector that do not attract funds is supported only insofar as it is needed as a means of attracting students the way that having an olympic-sized swimming pool attracts students.

The glut of students who have self-paid for their advanced degrees creates a glut of teaching talent that is heavily invested in not giving up in making a career out of what took half a decade and a home mortgage worth of debt to accomplish.

In short, I endorse the hypothesis that while yes, the higher education system is in a very bad way, I do believe that Universities are generally structured to maximize the objectives that Universities ought to be pursuing. Yes, building fancy facilities for entertainment, exercise, and whatnot for students is distasteful when you have faculty who make less than a greeter does at Wal-Mart. But without the student, parent, and alumni money that comes in off such investments, it is not at all clear to me that the University could afford to purchase more of its more nobler aims.

Given the tumult and the tight budgetary situation nationally, there is not a lot of room for entrepreneurship, because there are not a lot of public or private investors in this climate who could afford to absorb the cost of an intriguing risk that does not pan out. I think the picture is going to have to change by a number of small entrepreneurial moves in higher ed. until either they add up to something that changes the momentum in some way, or until an idea catches fire enough that investing in it no longer seems risky.

Another dynamic at play here is that the patrons are actually unhappy. Peter Levine notes that millennials have a historically low amount of trust in other people. I have noticed over the past few years that students are getting more and more libertarian in their politics. When I ask about it, I hear a common theme of frustration that they have been thrust into roles of carrying political institutions for older generations without many of the tangible benefits older generations received from participating in those systems. Most of my students believe there will be no social security for them when they retire, believe that health care costs will be generally worse fro them than their parents, believe that they have to carry a higher debt load in order to run a profitable household than past generations and have a general sense that most of society is more than happy to stick them with living through the difficult times of covering programs to control the "skyrocketing" costs of prescription drugs while no one lifts a finger for the increased cost of attending college, which has increased in cost at a rate that puts prescription drugs to shame and has gone from guaranteeing a respectable job in the workforce to being a ticket in a national employment lottery - you have to have one to play, but there is no guarantee you will win anything at the end of the day.

We appear to have a situation where the public will not invest in education because it is more concerned in distributing the state's patronage to older citizens, which has created an education system which has had to cut spending on public service, and saddled students with costs, and is raising a generation of young people who have had less opportunity for public engagement and what experience they have had has been watching older generations use political institutions to shift costs unfairly onto their backs.

You get what you pay for, I guess.

Site Reforms

2010-07-05T23:50:00.000-07:00

Sigh... major crash happened. Recovered what I could... missing about a year. Found a nice template generator, can't afford the money to register it. For now, suck it up and deal with the stuff that says "Trial" on the borders. Bear with me on this stuff.

Moving to my own site (Take Two)

2009-06-10T07:01:00.000-07:00

I'm back over at stevendouglasmaloney.com. I think I'm up for hosting myself this time... wish me luck!

Obviously Technology Can't Help You Make Good Arguments...

2009-06-02T16:37:00.000-07:00

My university's center for E-Learning (I wonder how much more the school puts into that center compared to academic subjects) sent me a link to this article on "Legacy Demands and Technology Expectations." Here are some of the winning bits of commentary.

On campus, we educators behave as if computers have not yet been invented. Well, a bit of hyperbole, but isn't it odd that knowledge technology would so easily change our home and social patterns but have only a limited impact where knowledge is produced?

And this one:

Teaching and learning interactions seem like rituals that both teachers and students adhere to with religious persistence. The other institution we expect to remain unaltered--despite the televangelists--is church or mosque or synagogue. Many colleges started as religious institutions centuries ago and, not coincidentally, teaching is still thought of as aquasi-religious service. As a teacher, I've often been told that I must find my work "rewarding," a backhanded compliment meaning that I probably don't earn much money.

As much as the author laments the state of technology in the university, we are not presented with an explanation of what effective teaching actually is, or what, precisely technology has to offer it.

I suspect that many of my colleagues believe, as do I, that technology has little marginal effectiveness for enhancing the teaching/learning process compared to the costs of implementing it.

Beethoven's 9th Lectures

2009-06-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

Harvard has this great page with all sorts of fascinating videos and lectures and stuff. I had started watching the lectures on Beethoven's 9th in the summer of 2007, but never finished. We'll put this one back on my to-do list.

Brian Leiter lecture on Dworkin and Legal Realism

2009-06-02T08:08:00.000-07:00

Link. (anyone know how to use flowplayer on a wordpress.com blog??)

Is Anti-Philosophy still Philosophy?

2009-06-02T04:26:00.000-07:00

One of the nice discoveries of being in a Derek Parfit reading group - aside from encountering Parfit - is that I am going to stumble upon some other interesting and thoughtful blogs as others host the chapters. As such, I have very belatedly run into an Arendt question that apparently has people talking, both here and here.

Is Hannah Arendt a philosopher?

I believe that the answer is yes, but with a qualification. She is one "with a hammer," as Nietzsche would say. I think Arendt would agree with Hubert Dreyfus' reading of Nietzsche's aphorism about God having been killed by man in The Gay Science, as indiciating that God is not the Christian God, but God is the idea (going back to Plato) that there is a perspective on the universe that will completely explain all things, and that the judgment of our lives and their meaning is in accordance to this standard.

In following Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. down this road, Arendt is in some sense an "anti-philosopher." She takes multiple cuts at perceiving the same thing over and over again, the way an artist makes multiple sketches, and sometimes multiple versions (like Monet, for example) in order to work out her relationship with the world.

Many commenters on the two above cited blogs have stressed that Arendt says she is not a philosopher as a way that sets her up as an anti-philosopher like Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. Where I think we can take Arendt at her own word about what she is doing is when she said in an interview with Gunther Gaus, "I want only to understand." and that if her work helped others understand, that would feel like, "being home." For me, that is the Arendt comment on Arendt that is worth thinking through in order to understand what she has done.

On the Sotomayor Quote...

2009-05-29T03:29:00.000-07:00

Here again, is the Sotomayor quote that has some rankled:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life

Here's the context of where and why she said it, via the WSJ.

The idea of legal realism came back in the now-famous 2001 lecture Judge Sotomayor delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, titled "A Latina Judge's Voice." There she disputed the argument by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor that a "wise man" and a "wise woman" should necessarily reach the same verdict.

Let's play a game: Objective: PROVE JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR'S STATEMENT INCORRECT

HYPOTHESIS: It would be good if all justices should rule the same regardless of race in all cases

CASE: Korematsu v. United States

WISE WHITE JUDGES: "Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and, finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders -- as inevitably it must -- determined that they should have the power to do just this. There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some, the military authorities considered that the need for."

CONCLUSION: A Wise Japanese-American judge would agree with the "Wise White Judge Opinion."

Ummm... Q.E.D. ?????

The Limits of Anti-Realism

2009-05-29T03:07:00.000-07:00

It's funny. I watched the HBO movie Recount last night, where both sides of the Bush-Gore election are portrayed in a fairly positive manner, but the Supreme Court is not. It was an interesting thing to watch in the context of the nomination of Justice Sonia Sotamayor to the United States Supreme Court.

I'm not sure how anyone can look at Bush v. Gore and not say, at the very least, that the court always makes decisions as an exercise of political power that awards some as winners and others as losers. This is what President's do when they set particular administrative policy, and it is what Congress does when they pass legislation. In the olden days (see: Montesquieu, Madison), these three facts were called judicial power, executive power, and legislative power. Somewhere along the way, America has become bedazzled by this idea that judges somehow do not use power, and that their decisions on law are simply like "calling balls and strikes," to quote our now Chief Justice of the Court.

What is funny, actually, is that Justice Roberts' famed comparison not only misstates the duty of the court, it misstates the purpose of umpires. Yes, umpires are supposed to call balls and strikes as accurately as possible. But they are supposed to do so in order that no one feels as though the game's integrity is compromised. We use umpires because they are disinterested, not objective. Even with television exposing the shocking performances of officials in sports night after night, we need them in order to contain the impact that certain types of cheating and intimidation have on deciding winners and losers.

This, too, is in effect what the use of judicial power is for. It is designed so that it may allow politics to determine who wins and loses under the conditions that it finds most prudent for all. Judges are as disinterested as possible, but are not wholly disinterested. If one looks at the decisions of Justice Scalia, who is supposed to be one of the great examples of "judge as umpire," one can find passages about the core of our culture in gay rights decisions, implied harm to political candidates and the nation in Presidential recounts, and proclamations that Supreme Court rulings on releasing detainees have made our country "less safe." Even Justice Scalia has an understanding that the judiciary rules on the structure of power in society and deems some ways valid and others invalid. He has a particular view, that is colored by his particular notion of what's at stake in who it would be wise to privilege in these power relations. While I do not always agree with his sense of what is prudent in assigning these privileges, I do think he is, in fact, trying to make legal decisions with these concerns in mind, and is right to do so.

In this context, the "umpire" view of justice actually hinges on preserving the existing privileges in the structure of power in American society as much as possible. It is not, on the whole, a terrible impulse. It is also, clearly, not always the best impulse either. In fact, Sotomayor's comment, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Is directed specifically at egregious decisions by famed early twentieth century legal realists who made egregious legal decisions because they had no understanding of how underprivileged non-whites fit into the current and future constellation of the American regime.

As Brian Leiter points out in the link above, there is empirical evidence to show that race effects legal decisions. However, to firmly believe that this implies something about the law, argues some in the opposition, makes a judge not sufficiently disinterested to be competent. On this view, the only way to prove you are disinterested enough is apparently to lie about how disinterested you are.

I do not know if Justice Sotomayor would make a competent Supreme Court justice or not. What I think that I do know is that the idea that privileging the allocation of power to its default sources is what conservative justices do, and that this is not always either the best or the worst course of action. Neither is having the position of Sotomayor as I understand her position. In short, their is no implied holy covenant of jurisprudence that either a Scalia or a Sotomayor offends, so let's stop pretending that there is and move on.

Student Writing Education - Is it influence by the typewriter?

2009-05-28T01:51:00.000-07:00

In talking to students about papers this semester, I'm wondering about their writing priorities. They are so obsessed with PLANNING their papers before ever committing a word to the page. They are in fact, unanimously convinced that the best way to write a paper is to write it once and then to edit it to make sure that their grammar and spelling is correct.

I'm going to provoke a fight in saying this, but the best writing method is not massive planning, outline, paper, spell and grammar check. I'm a big fan of the following: just write. And then realize that what you have written is actually terrible. So write it again better. Repeat terrible paper recognition. Repeat improvement. Repeat cycle until paper is due.

Why is this better? Because students, as of now, are not interested in revising their IDEAS because they have a phobia of ripping out parts of their papers and redoing them. "Rewrite" is taken as a sign of failure, rather than a matter of course.

I wonder if part of the aversion to revision--and the writing method we teach students--is actually a throwback to typewriters. Stay with me here. Back when people typed papers on typewrites, mistakes in writing early drafts cost paper and ribbon. A priority was placed on doing papers in a way where you maximize getting as much right the first time as possible.

Now that we have computers, we may overvalue pressuring a quality first/only draft. The computer makes typeface the only non-perishable resource a student has in their writing process. My conjecture here is not that students shouldn't make good outlines or do competent pre-planning. Ideally, they'd do all phases with the greatest attention and care. But given that students have papers on deadline, I wonder if we do not teach them to economize poorly because we convince them that revising is the most time-consuming part of the writing process when it is not. Writing the first draft is the most time consuming process, and we actually appear to teach students to extend that portion of the process out as agonizingly long as possible.

Another consideration. If we have students do papers the way I am suggesting, the ideas they are writing down have more time to be called into question, struggled with, etc. Rather than locking the students into a plan (outline) early that the y feel like they are committed to defend to avoid having to do more work, students would have time to see their ideas as they can now see their papers. As works in progress, subject to revision. The will also be asked to exercise skills in editorial judgment, consider how to alter plans in the middle of projects to better accomplish goals, and maybe even, develop a better appreciation for the relationship between their research and their ideas (as opposed to thinking of citations as things to stick in papers as appeals to authority or to show that one has read something carefully when they have not, or simply because it is required). I doubt my change in emphasis will revolutionize results, but I bet we would see tangible improvement, and that's enough for my argument to be taken seriously. Better is better.

I anticipate an objection. Students write badly because they don't care. But students who write badly because they don't care are going to do step one of my process anyway, and nothing more. Students who don't care don't write careful outlines either. They just write bad first drafts. What I like to do is have multi-level paper assignments where the bad first draft is due and graded and then there is a second draft due that I expect to be substantially better (after a meeting). I believe that for many students it improves their understanding of both writing and thinking processes for those who try, and it shows more modest improvements for those who do not (which would be expected).

Philosophy and Legal Theory

2009-05-27T03:46:00.000-07:00

Brian Leiter posted a poll for the best political and legal theory journals... I find this interesting both for future reference if I ever publish again with Sybil, and also because the poll ranks Condorcet Winners.

Obvious Joke Check

2009-05-21T07:40:00.000-07:00

Have people made good use of the similarity in ridiculous formulation between Cap 'n Trade and Cap'n Crunch? Yes? Oh good.

Still Alive...

2009-05-21T02:06:00.000-07:00

In one of my student's papers comparing Henry V to Ligurio in Machiavelli's The Mandrake Root (Mandragola), the student writes that Ligurio's plan makes everyone happy and Henry's invasion of France makes "everyone who is still alive happy." Aside from the fact that this isn't even true in Henry V, I could not help but think about the final song in the game "Portal," where the creepy testing machine sings a song about your escape from her clutches. In the context of the song, it's a real backhanded compliment to Henry.

Anyway, back to grading...

The theme for Fall '09 at Saint Thomas... (drumroll)

2009-05-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

Every time I plan out a political theory course, I try to have a major theme that I organize the course around. The theme for my Fall 2009 POLS 275 Course: Enlightenment and Political Maturity.

"It's 95 Degrees in Minneapolis..."

2009-05-19T11:25:00.000-07:00

As if to underscore Nietzsche's psycho-physical view of human beings, I had a stomach ache before my last classes, which caused me to not eat lunch, which caused me to be a bit tired for my last classes... that combined with epic heat.

I oftentimes wonder what is the appropriate way to wrap up a course. Is it best to summarize the whole class? A thank you to students? Carry on as if nothing is different? I think I hedged between all three, and I have to say: not the right choice.

Brian Leiter: I'm a big fan...

2009-05-18T11:10:00.000-07:00

I've known about Brian Leiter for a while, mostly for his philosophy department rankings. However, in teaching On the Genealogy of Morals, I decided to have a go at reading Leiter's Nietzsche on Morality (thoughts on this topic later)- which I think is excellent. I also know that Leiter is a legal realist, and I was curious if he responded to the decision to expand the scope of Twombley to civil rights cases today (definitely more on this later).

While looking for such a post, I found a blog post that inspired my heart to soar. I now know that I love Brian Leiter. His post that I adore? "Does the NY Times Not Realize That Stanley Fish is Philosophically Incompetent?"

... Aaaaand cue the man-crush.

Designing an undergraduate theory curriculum...

2009-05-12T08:01:00.000-07:00

I have some thoughts on how to best design an undergraduate theory curriculum in ways that teach essential texts and keep enrollment and interest in the subfield high.

Here's the current layout:

200 Level: Intro to Political Theory
300 Level: Plato to Marx
300 Level: Marx to Present
400 Level: Occasional Special Topics

I'm wondering if doing the 300 level courses by subject or theme would be better, but I'm not entirely sure. The advantages of theme would be snappier course titles (to increase enrollment), rotation of course subject, coherence in teaching important theoretical developments that begin before Marx but end after him, a greater diversity of offered courses in theory.

The drawbacks to a change might look like: increased difficulty in creating a consistent curriculum, topics may sound intimidating to non-theorists, an appearance that the theory subfield isn't an actual program for students to go through.

Leila Josefowicz tonight!

2009-04-25T10:52:00.000-07:00

This time at the Minnesota Orchestra!! Program notes here.

Soccer Posts now at OleOle.com

2009-04-23T07:20:00.000-07:00

All,

Since my soccer posts have started to outpace my other posts here, I decided to separate them out. I have a site at oleole.com called Soccernomics. Bad title, or worst title ever? It's definitely the former, because it, sadly, was the best thing I could come up with. Everything else was too long or too obscure. I'm going to write primarily about institutional behaviors in the beautiful game and I couldn't think of anything that conveyed that in the title and was also short.

Anyway, if you like my soccer posts, go there. If not, they are gone from this site, so rejoice.

Signed,

The Management

If you are among the very Jung at heart...

2009-04-19T12:56:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking of trying to put together an undergraduate political psychology course as a proposed junior level seminar for '10-11. It occurred to me that I have never read anything by Jung. So, while out at the bookstore the other day I picked up Portable Jung. I have read Joseph Campbell's introduction, and already I feel that there is a mixture of hypotheses that are intriguing and some moments in Jung's autobiography that make him sound as crackers as the people he examined. I am both excited and weary about what I might find in these pages.

My general strategy for trying to understand someone's thought is to approximate an immersive contextualization for a while. When I start, I go too far, overemphasizing the value of the contribution, only to have it (hopefully) burn away over time until I keep a good amount of the good thoughts without going turning myself into an "-ian" (as in Kantian, Foucaltian, Hayekian, etc.) I apologize in advance for those moments when I will be over-doing the Jung thinking, I'm sure it will wear off as it does with everyone I read.

Also, anyone who has traveled the pages of Jung already, I'd be interested for any words of advice (and caution) you ay have.

Palmer House Blues

2009-04-03T03:31:00.000-07:00

I am writing this from the lobby of the Palmer House. The hotel is the setting for the MPSA conference. The hotel is also the setting of an early scene of Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day.". Industrialist Scarsdale Vibe meets Inventer Extrordinaire, Heino Vanderjuice and offers him a massive amount of money to eliminate the usefulness of inventions of colleague Nikola Tesla.
This theme of cancelling out runs through the book as Pynchon's fictional world spirals towards the cancelling out of humanity - which we call World War I in modern parlance. As I look around the lobby one hundred years after the fictional encounter in Pynchon's story, I see so many colleagues, and I wonder how much we cancel one another out for money in similar, more subtle ways. I wonder what the proportion is, in terms of new ideas, between what gets built and what gets destroyed.

MPSA: Preliminaries

2009-04-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

Palmer House Lobby:

Name Tag, Membership Card, Program:

MPSA Blogging

2009-04-01T03:54:00.000-07:00

I'm in Chicago for the Midwest Political Science Association. I had to get a photo of the sign welcoming MPSA participants at the airport, because I've never had that happen to me before... More on the conference once registration starts at 4.

Posner and Barber on the Geithner Plan

2009-03-31T01:25:00.000-07:00

Richard Posner's understanding of the Geithner plan on "toxic assets" and why we ought to be satisfied with it as a solution is very well stated.

A problem with that approach, however--a political rather than an economic problem, if politics can be separated from economics in a depression (I don't think it can be)--is that the government doesn't want to ask Congress for more money to lend to banks because "Wall Street" has been thoroughly demonized by an ignorant (or demagogic) Congress and the ignorant media. The Federal Reserve, it is true, could infuse cash into the banks, without having to go to Congress, just by buying the overvalued assets. But that approach has two problems. First, if the Fed just pays the actual value of the assets, it isn't doing much for the banks--it is not expanding their balance sheet--but if it overpays, it will be fiercely criticized as being in the pocket of Wall Street.

In short, since the most direct economic route is unfeasible politically, Geithner's plan represents a way to do the same thing indirectly while not triggering public anger.

On Benjamin Barber's blog, he writes:

But Geithner has a problem: capitalism’s recipe makes profit the reward entrepreneurs receive for taking risks. The collapse of trust in the global fiscal system, however, means no one wants to take risks anymore. They will take the profits, yes, but not the risks.

I suspect that Barber here is sounding an excessively populist note. Ultimately, he still endorses Obama and Geithner because:

Geithner showed a second face at the Council, as well, and this is the good news. For he said repeatedly that the greatest danger of our time was not government doing too much but government doing too little; that recovery would require persistent experimentation; that if market solutions and public-private partnerships fail, other option must and will be explored. Like the President he serves, Geithner may believe in markets but he is a pragmatist, a progressive and a Democrat, and seems willing, if market strategies fail (as they will), to abandon them in favor of whatever works.

Depending on what "market strategies" means, I am not sure that I agree with Barber that they will fail (not that it is clear what the standard is for "failing" either) I think that in this case, Posner is correct that the pragmatic strategy is a market strategy. I must confess that in reading Barber and from being his student for two courses, it is not clear to me precisely what markets do in his view of politics. He argues strongly that they do not trump the public good, and since he has many opponents that believe that markets and the public good are always the same, this takes the appearance of an important stand. However saying the role of markets "ought not be x" is not the same thing as saying what, precisely, markets are supposed to be doing. Barber's criticism of Geithner creates the impression one cannot be a pragmatist and a market capitalist because all capitalist strategies are inherently ideological strategies.

If I'm not mistaken, Barber is a dialectician. He believes that critical tensions invariably lead to critical failure of systems and so they must be resolved. This position, one could argue, is more ideological than pragmatic. For a pragmatist may very well conclude that some tensions must simply be accommodated. This seems to be the Geithner/Obama approach to our economic crisis. And, for what it is worth, for all the talk about market ideology in Barber's post, it is worth noting that it is Posner who demonstrates more practical flexibility in endorsing Geithner's plan than Barber.

Some Thoughts on USA-El Salvador...

2009-03-30T02:02:00.000-07:00

Match report here:

My own player ratings:

Brad Guzan - 5 - Had no chance on either of the goals, but he missed too many balls he came out to get, and could not organize the defense. With Califf and Pearce in the back, that's not an easy task to do, still he failed to do it.

Heath Pearce - 3 - Terrible. He doesn't get forward, he doesn't cover in the middle, he can't shut down wingers one on one out wide. What does he do?

Danny Califf - 3- I cannot remember when I saw a center back play so poorly... oh wait, it was Edie Pope against Italy.

Carlos Bocanegra - 7 - This dear fellow had to play in a back four in which only one person apparently knows how to defend. Bless you, Carlos. Jeff Carlisle's match report is unkind to him, but I think he's not taking into proper account the total anarchy he was trying to manage around him. He has to defend, well, basically, only with Michael Bradley. That means his outlets are Sache Klestjan and Demarcus Beasley, and Carlisle thinks its Bocanegra's fault for being all over the place and passing inconsistently? Gotta disagree.

Frankie Hejduk - 5 - I'm only giving him a 5 because he was a 7 as a midfielder and a 3 as a fullback. Everyone notices his spark going forward. Hasn't anyone noticed the not trivial fact that he is a defender who doesn't defend well? He jumps at everything.

Demarcus Beasley - 3 - Out of position, poor first touch, poor passing, and infuriatingly passive. All the Freddy Adu haters take note... Freddy can have all these faults while at least RUNNING AT the defense. Beasley's mistakes lead to easy transitions and never had any hint of danger. If someone like Freddy messes up 9 out of 10 times, the tenth time is at least dangerous.

Clint Dempsey - 5 - I pity him because he and Landon were stranded for a large part of the game. But Dempsey's belief and industry were about all the US had going for it in the first half. If everyone played with his determination, it would have been an easy win for the States.

Sacha Klestjan - 4 - Like Beasley, you have no idea which version is going to show up. Today we got the nervous and weak version.

Michael Bradley - 7 - This guy had to clean up the garbage on both sides of the ball as best as he could. If you think that's not impressive, remember he's one guy standing in the middle and it is a really big field. He made all sorts of plays he had no business being asked to make by his teammates, and he just keeps going. He is America's best outfield player.

Landon Donovan - 5 - Same thing as Dempsey. Landon and Clint were victims of bad tactics, and bad performances around them. El Salvador correctly focused on stopping them both at all costs. We had nothing else for too long. I love the criticism that he and dempsey "disappeared" in this game. They each had TWO GUYS MARKING THEM!!!

Brian Ching - 4 - I like Brian Ching a lot. But he is just not good enough for the international game. He doesn't have the ability to generate his own chances and that is a must for a forward at this level. Too much has to go right to score consistently on strong opponents if your striker needs good service to score. He didn't do anything terrible in this match, but niether did he meet the requirements of an international level forward... which brings me to...

Jozy Altidore - 8 - PLAY JOZY ALL GAME. Jozy came in and immediately was too much for El Salvador. He was too big. His passing was spot on. He could run at defenders. He allowed the US to KILL El Salvador with the long ball. Which, despite John Harkes' protests, was EXACTLY the way to play a side that was refusing Dempsey and Donovan the ball through the middle.

Jose Francisco Torres - 6 - Off the bench, he did what Beasley and Klestajn could not do, which is get wide, pinch into the middle, play the ball forward, and lock down his area when El Salvador tried to clear the ball out of their defense. Time to give this guy more of a look. Also, maybe instead of selling our mid range guys to clubs in Denmark, maybe we should sell them on to Mexico.

Maurice Edu - Cameo role. Maurice is a nice player, but he is likely going to be stuck behind Bradley in qualifying. In big time WC games against the super powers, he could be useful as a second defensive midfielder.

Bob Bradley - Manager's Rating - TERRIBLE. Let's not make any bones about it. Bob Bradley got the tactics WAY wrong. He has been able to skate by on his talent advantage in almost every match, but Bradley's attackers are never spaced properly. The team had no width, they were overwhelmed in the middle, and they didn't change their style of play until they were down 2-0, where, rather than playing desperate, they played exactly as they should have played the whole time. We are stuck with Bradley for this whole World Cup cycle. I predict the following. The USA will get the region's seed in group play, get a similar group to what Mexico got in Germany, we will eek our way into the knockout round, get completely outplayed by someone and everyone will look at it and say "look, we've improved from last time." Even though Bradley would drop all 3 matches to Italy, Czech Republic, and Ghana in a heartbeat.

DOTW: Paraguay-Uruguay

2009-03-26T07:38:00.000-07:00

It's a World Cup Qualifying weekend, so I'll highlight the battle for spots in South America. Uruguay hosts South American leaders Paraguay this weekend. Uruguay is sitting in the same 5th place spot they finished Qualifying in last cycle, which lead to their surprise defeat to the Socceroos. The 5th place game should be much easier this cycle, but I'm sure Uruguay would prefer the safe ticket. Not to mention a decent Ecuador side is breathing down their neck. Paraguay won their previous matchup to start qualifying 1-0.

Some Data on Citizen Debt...

2009-03-25T09:00:00.000-07:00

Five Thirty-Eight has a nice post on the increase in debt per household and it's effect on the economy. The data is interesting to me in part because it corrects my perceptions about credit card debt. The image below is from Nate Silver's post.

I thought it might be useful to post a Wikipedia graphs on the change in real median household income as a comparison to the change in debt.

If I read this properly, median household income went up about $5,000 from 1989 to 2005. The 5oth percentile went from a $40,000 in income per year in 1990 to somewhere under 50,000 in 2003. Whereas debt per family doubled in the same time period. Only the top 5% of earners income rose close to per dollar to the increase in average debt.

My understanding of what this means is that the root cause of this crisis is simply that people were given and took, more debt for themselves than they could manage. Whose to blame? I think the answer might possibly be pretty close to everyone. Financial institutions for bad lending practices, the government for poor oversight, both institutional sets for not generating more real income growth and family's and businesses for taking on excessive debt they could not manage.

How do we restructure the average family's debt/income ratio? Well, one way is for the state to assume some of this debt either from the consumer side or the lending side, and thus lessen the load on individuals. The government then shoulders the debt burden until in the long run, economic growth both pays down the debt and raises family incomes, thus improving the debt to income ratio of both the state and the average family.

I'm not an economist by trade, but I think this is the general outline of the situation we are looking at. If it is not, I am certainly amenable to having a better understanding.

Well, yeah, you used to play in St. Petersburg...

2009-03-25T07:54:00.000-07:00

Andrei Arshavin likes us, he really, really likes us. That's good, because that feeling is very mutual. Let me show you why.

Can I bring a Gavel? Can it be 3 feet long?

2009-03-25T07:42:00.000-07:00

I am now chairing my first MPSA panel.

New Layout

2009-03-25T06:54:00.000-07:00

What think you of the new layout?

Restructuring the NHL...

2009-03-24T13:05:00.000-07:00

I used to be a huge New York Islanders fan, and I used to really love the NHL. I also went to more Hershey Bears AHL games than I can count. I haven't watched hockey with any seriousness since I was in college. To me, there are too many teams, too many players to keep track of, and it is too difficult, once out of the loop, to work up enough interest to follow it again.

I, however, have moved to hockey-crazy Minnesota. I enjoy the local hockey culture, and would not mind being a part of it. I ran an idea past my dad on the phone tonight (a lifelong Rangers fanatic), and I have at least one devotee for my plan to make the NHL more palatable. My plan is this: adopt a more european-style soccer format for the NHL. None of my proposals could be adopted easily, or maybe at all, but I still think it's a fun idea.

Promotion and Relegation:

MEASURE #1: Following the 2008-2009 season, all minor league franchises are de-affiliated. AHL teams will be able to sell talent up to the highest bidder in a transfer market. All NHL clubs with previous two-way contracts with players may sell rights to the minor league club for players they have rights to, but cannot take on the parent club roster.

MEASURE #2: All teams running a deficit in the AHL that they lack the assets to cover are RELEGATED to the IHL (I have no idea if this would cover all teams or no teams or a few teams -- the league has 29 teams, Ideally, some would get kicked down to a larger IHL) If the team would rather fold than go dow to the IHL - then, goodbye.

MEASURE #3: All NHL teams running a deficit that they lack the assets to cover (cough, cough, Phoenix, Nashville) are relegated to the AHL. If they would rather fold then go down to the AHL, then goodbye.

MEASURE #4: The bottom 9 teams in the AHL at the end of the 2009-2010 season will play next season in the IHL. (unless budget issues already had some teams sent down).

MEASURE #5: The BOTTOM FOUR teams in the NHL (not counting Phoenix or Nashville) at the end of the 2009-2010 season will play the next season in the AHL.

MEASURE #6: For the 2010-2011 season and beyond, the bottom three NHL teams are relegated to the AHL.

MEASURE #7: For the 2010-2011 season and beyond, the two best conference records earn promotion. The eight next best finishes in each conference enter the Calder Cup playoffs. The winner of the Calder Cup is also promoted.

MEASURE #8: For the 2010-2011 season and beyond, the bottom 3 AHL teams are relegated to the IHL.

MEASURE #9: For the 2010-2011 season and beyond, the top two IHL point totals are promoted to the AHL. The next four best teams enter a playoff to earn a third promotion spot.

Merge Champions Hockey League and Victoria Cup:

MEASURE #1: The NHL shall establish a Victoria Cup competition which adds NHL teams to the qualification group, and knockout phases of the Champions Hockey League. The victor will hoist the Victoria Cup.

MEASURE #2: The winner of the Stanley Cup and the winner of the President's Trophy directly qualify for the Knockout Phase of the Victoria Cup. In the event that the President's trophy holder wins the Stanley Cup, the next highest point total from the regular season advances directly to the knockout phase.

MEASURE #3: The next two highest point totals advance directly to the group stage of the Victoria Cup.

MEASURE #4: The next two highest point totals advance directly to the qualifying stage of the Victoria Cup.

Allan Bloom quote to ponder....

2009-03-02T08:06:00.000-08:00

"Regimes depend on men's virtues, not on institutions; if the highest virtues are not present in the rulers, an inferior regime must be instituted."

Bloom is talking about what he thinks one of the critical lessons of The Republic is. I have to say that I am somewhat warm to the statement. It seems as if institutions need to be crafted around virtues (or lack thereof), and not as much the other way around. I see Bloom's comment not as a lament that we are not virtuous enough for the best regime, but that we are involved, as the rulers of our state, in coming to make wise compromises with our defects.

The New White House Dog Breed is...

2009-02-26T03:51:00.000-08:00

Not the same as mine. I'm just really glad that the Obama's did not choose a golden doodle. It saves me lots of questions about mine being the same age as theirs and is that why we picked it, etc...

Here's my dog...

General Motors...

2009-02-26T00:23:00.000-08:00

The phrase sunk cost comes to mind in hearing their latest news.

The role of leaders...

2009-02-19T08:01:00.000-08:00

In the class I am co-teaching, my colleague asked the students, with regard to Antigone, "was Creon wrong to think people would see him as weak for changing his mind?" The question led to a discussion on why we do not let our leaders change opinion. One student pointed out that leaders are loved when they represent our interest. Another interesting answer was that we expect leaders to deserve the privileges of their office more than us because they are better than us.

I really like the second answer, because it brings out the curious nature of ressentiment that companies a democratic society with a strong spirit of equality. If we are all equals, we want there to be impeccable reasons for the vast differences in our fate and prosperity. This might not only explain the complicated reaction to bad political decisions, but also our public reaction to Michael Phelps, Alex Rodriguez, etc.

DOTW: Catalan Derby

2009-02-18T05:23:00.000-08:00

This week's derby of the week takes us to Catalonia, the half-origin of Stephen Maturin, art, and cultural center, and a spirited and independent coastal region of Southern Europe. Barcelona seem to be the consensus best football team on planet earth right now, and Lionel Messi the best player. Espanyol are beyond struggling this year. They sit dead bottom of the table, and this club that was a UEFA Cup Finalist just two years ago is now facing relegation.

While Barcelona are the symbol of Catalan independence, Anti-Franco politics, and above all, anti-Madrid, Espanyol is clearly the city's second club... to the point where even when they were up 3-0 on Bayern Leverkusen in the 88 UEFA Cup final, the Catalan papers led with a story about than Barca manager Johan Cruyff... no respect I tell 'ya.

While one sympathizes with Espnayol's status, and it would seem sad to open a new stadium next year in the second division, the plot lines here are all Barcelona. They are running away with the La Liga title, they have more goals than 20-18 place combined. And two weeks ago, Henry, Eto'o, and Messi had more goals than ANY other side in the whole league. They are awe-inspiring right now.

But, it is a local derby, a 108 year old rivalry at that. Not to mention Barcelona will be traveling to Lyon on Tuesday for their first leg in the Champions League Quarterfinals. Nevertheless, it's hard to see this as anything but an easy Barcelona triumph.

Classical rivals...

2009-02-17T01:33:00.000-08:00

I'm going to see Joshua Bell play Barber's Violin Concerto with Minnesota Orchestra on Thursday. I like to be familiar with pieces before I go to hear them, so I went to download the piece. I didn't see a Bell recording, but there was on by Hilary Hahn who is Baltimore trained, world class, and was essentially traded by her record company for Joshua Bell. I've listened to the piece twice, and then I noticed something funny about the recording on my playlist. It is not just Hilary Hahn instead of Joshua Bell, it is Hilary Hahn and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Strictly speaking, Hahn and Bell are not really rival performers, and the MO and the SPCO are not either... but I found it a strange coincidence that I was preparing to listen to a concert by listening to recording by the colleagues that both the soloist and the group are probably compared with most frequently. The nice thing about the rivalry is that, in the end, all four parties presumably got a share of my money, and they are all good value for it.

Dos a Cero

2009-02-14T03:05:00.000-08:00

"Dos a Cero." The chant from Sam's Army must be getting quite tired for Mexican football. It has become such a part of the recent rivalry that you can pretty much write off Mexico when they get down 1-0 in the US every time because they are equally as close to hearing that mocking phrase by a bunch of Americans who can probably barely speak English properly, let alone Spanish as they are to tying up the match. The second came at the death in this match, but I guarantee you you will NEVER see Mexico come back from 2-0 down on US soil for at least the next 20 years.

Here's a youtube clip of the match highlights.

Some thoughts on the match:

Beasley needs to come home and play in MLS. His body cannot withstand a season in any of the seriously physical leagues. He doesn't seem appreciably effected by sitting on the bench at Rangers, and I think he's pretty much hit his ceiling as a player. Time to bring him back home, pair him with McBride in Chicago, and let him play in a league in which the defenders are too slow to ding him up and the official will protect him. He is clearly still a huge asset to this team as is, let's at least preserve his body in its current state.

I didn't think the Marquez foul was a red... until I saw the replay. Watch as Marquez eyes Tim Howards legs, lifts his studs and then shields his own body from the collision to give the appearance of playing the ball... very crass.

I also think that on Bradley's second goal, there were at least two yellow card fouls and even quite possibly, a straight red on the Altidore foul. Nothing was given of course to try and save the usual post-match punch-up from happening...

Which didn't work. Frankie Hejduk decided it was a good idea to to celebrate in the tunnel in a manner that could be misinterpreted as swearing at the other team, yelling "---- yeah" when the Mexicans claimed they heard "---- you." Hejduk, to his credit, said it was an honest mistake and no big deal. Why running through the tunnel gloating at the top of your lungs isn't the mistake still bewilders me.

One or two handshakes, but not many. Overall, I thought Mexico looked more disciplined under Sven.

Our back line is going to be in big trouble in Mexico City next year. The reason Mexico wins at the Azteca is not just the altitude. It is because the altitude kills the ability for people to cover and to play as a team. As Mexico's players are man-to-man, generally much better than ours, they are able to easily isolate and exploit this talent gap more easily. That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

People said Jozy didn't do much in his time, but what did Brian Ching do? If nothing else, it is clear that Jozy scares people by his size, and they tend to want to chop at him.. he's a foul magnet even when he isn't having his best game, and with Landon to take the free kicks, that makes him already better than Brian Ching.

I thought Dempsey was excellent in the midfield, in fact much more excellent than Bradley (who bagged both goals). Neither of Bradley's goals are astonishing, but Dempsey showed quality through the middle, and I think he looks great playing right behind Donovan and Altidore with Bradley coming in behind. Bob Bradley's tried very hard to build a side that is very strong through the middle of the park... I think he's actually got a very good thing going. I was very anti-Bradley (coach, not wunderkind) at first, but I have to say that it is hard to find fault with his long-term plan... especially since he has developed a long-term plan despite initially being a short-term second-choice appointment. Most managers in the world today would give their kidney for another six months, Bradley seems to be getting his team built as best as possible for 2010.

Which brings me to my next point. This team is still only good enough to get out of group stage with a good group and some luck. If they win the hexagonal, they won the Gold Cup, and if they can have a solid three games in the Confed Cup (winning any of the three matches is not too realistic... what a group -ouch!) they have to be the number one seed from CONCACAF. Last time Mexico was the one seed and their group was a who's who of afterthoughts in World Cup Finals. We're on our way to a similar draw, and then in the knockout round, who knows....

DOT(M)W - USA MEXICO TONIGHT

2009-02-11T08:10:00.000-08:00

How good is this rivalry? Voodoo dolls are being sold to Mexico fans of a USA footballer with the name "gringo" on the back of the kit. You cannot make this stuff up!

UPDATE: USA XI for tonight:

GK Tim Howard (Everton)

RB Frankie Hejduk (Columbus Crew)

CB Carlos Bocanegra (Rennes)

CB Oguchi Onyewu (Standard Liege)

LB Heath Pearce (Hansa Rostock)

DM Michael Bradley (Borussia MoechenGladbach)

LM Demarcus Beasly (Rangers)

AM Clint Dempsey (Fulham)

RM Sacha Klestjan (Chivas USA)

F Ladon Donovan (Bayern Munich)

F Brian Ching (Houston Dynamo)

Not a huge surprise really. I'm not a big Brian Ching fan, I think Altidore is already shown enough to get a run out, and I'd imagine he'll come in off the bench. We are weak at fullback, and Michael Bradley is not having the same success in Germany that he had in Holland. No Andres Guardado for Mexico and no Carlos Vela either. That will help out Hejduk and Pearce, who can be dangerous going forward. We should be much taller than Mexico and we tend to exploit that fact against them.

My head says the US will win, but my heart feels like our magic run against Mexico is long overdue for a reversal.

DOT(M)W: USA-Mexico 2/11/09 Pt. 1

2009-02-09T10:03:00.000-08:00

Some youtube clips worth making your acquaintance with if you want to be up on your NAFTA Derby.

Below: The last time they played, a friendly between USA and Mexico. (Programming note: Drew Moore, who did not do very well marking Johnny Magillon, will not be in Wednesday's match. USA Goal scorer's Jozy Altidore and Oguchi Onyewu were named to the team... as were players of note Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan)

Match report from USA 2 Mexico 2 (February 6, 2008)

Below: Last meaningful game: 2007 CONCACAF Gold Cup Final (Soldier Field, Chicago) USA 2, Mexico 1. Benny Feilhaber has fallen off the face of the earth, but here's his spectacular tournament clincher.

Below: A bit of the flavor of the rivalry. Landon Donovan scores a goal in a friendly and Mexico Keeper Oswaldo Sanchez slides in on Eddie Johnson during the celebration. Yikes!

Derby of the Week:

2009-02-09T07:51:00.000-08:00

As a potential new blog feature, I am planning on picking a major soccer rivalry/derby to cover for the week. I will try and give a sense of the history, the cultural interest and the news during the run-up for these big time matches. This weekend seems a good time to start as the greatest rivalry in all of sports, the Old Firm Derby between Rangers and Celtic is Saturday. But this week also requires some cheating. Inter plays AC Milan on Sunday, so I may have to slip in some double coverage.

To take cheating on the premise to an even higher level, Old Firm coverage will be preempted through Wednesday so that I can instead write about the USA-Mexico World Cup Qualifier. Why? Because USA-Mexico is the most intense (I didn't say best, everyone in South America can calm down) international rivalry in the hemisphere. It also is, to be quite brutally honest, the only time that an American side, club or country, plays a match that is "must see television" for the global football fan.

Our players fight their players during matches. Our players fight theirs after matches. Landon Donovan said publicly that he hated the Mexican team before the 2002 World Cup Round of 16 match against Mexico... and then beat Mexico. Our clubs play their clubs in friendlies and tournaments, they always fight after the match. Mexico has never, to my recollection, shook hands with the USA after a match the USA has won. I'm not condoning any of this behavior, especially the violence, but I mention these facts to emphasize the bitterness between the two sides.

Wednesday, 7pm Eastern, ESPN2.