anotherpanacea

Month: September 2012

  • Talk Ain’t Cheap

    Deirdre McCloskey describes her project: I have been trying for thirty years to revive the rhetorical tradition, and lately to introduce language into the economists’ models in which talk is cheap and therefore of no consequence.   On the contrary, sweet talk, persuasion, is one quarter of national income, earned by managers and teachers, police…

  • Peter Levine on Super PAC game theory

    Here’s the post: Game theory and the Super PACs. Levine points to the recent shift in campaign finance focus from the presidency to Congress, and adds nuance to a debate that is frequently overrun by absolutist intuitions: No wonder Karl Rove is spending his money on behalf of Senate Republicans. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that conservative super-PACS were spending…

  • What is the belief you hold that is most likely to be wrong?

    Another way of putting this question is: how does your ideology and social setting blind you? One way to answer is to look at those beliefs that you have the most incentive to deceive yourself about. What are your biases? For instance, I’m probably not as smart or as caring as I think I am, because…

  • Public-sector unions as Public Work: The Case for Teachers

    (This post is a continuation of Arendt, Antisemitism, and the Chicago Teachers’ Strike.) Another way of thinking about public sector unionization is as an effort to force democratic public institutions to remain accountable to the professional standards and know-how of those who work within them. Citizens want better, more accountable teachers, yet they don’t know how…

  • Arendt, Antisemitism, and the Chicago Teachers’ Union Strike

    I am one of those ideologically-impure liberals that worries a lot about public sector unions. On the one hand, I favor workplace democracy and collaboration; on the other hand, I worry about the fact that as union membership has declined, the majority of remaining union members haved tended to be at the top of the…

  • Chesterton’s Fence

    I try to defend conservatism sometimes. I also like Chesterton. Here’s one reason why: In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say,…

  • Status Emotions and Punishment

    I haven’t written much about status emotions, recently, but I came across one of my favorite Facebook memes and remembered again how central it seems. I don’t endorse the misogyny here, but it perfectly describes the way that fundamental attribution bias transforms resentment into contempt, and thus leads, in my view, to both epistemic and…

  • There is no college bubble

    Megan McArdle’s Newsweek cover story, “Is college a lousy investment?” is an odd beast. Parts of it are really great, and there are some very important observations throughout to which my colleagues and fellow progressives should pay attention. But the title, framing, graphics, and many of the arguments are just silly, which makes it a…

  • Nietzsche on Remembrance Imperatives

    Apparently, they are for losers: ‘To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and even his misdeeds seriously for long–that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget…. A man like this shakes from him, with one shrug, many worms which…

  • Typologies of Philosophical Personalities

    There’s a somewhat disused trend of identifying philosophical methods or schools by the personalities required for them. I associate this with Karl Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldviews and Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, but there are precursor typologies in Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and William James. It largely fell by the wayside in the second half of the twentieth…