anotherpanacea

There’s a great piece in the Boston Globe on the relationship between the African slave trade and current global inequalities: Shackled to the Past.

One thing that’s always irritated me about broadly materialist historical explanations is the tendency to miss the importance of contingent historical events. Geography is not destiny, as Jared Diamond suggests, but rather it becomes a destiny when mixed with certain kinds of choices and chances. In The Longterm Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades, Harvard economist Nathan Nunn has shown that Africa’s exceptional poverty is directly linked to the slave trade:

if the slave trades had not occurred, then 72% of the average income gap between Africa and the rest of the world would not exist today, and 99% of the income gap between Africa and the rest of the underdeveloped world would not exist. In terms of economic development, Africa would not look any different from the other developing countries in the world.

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To some conservatives, the fact that both Clinton and Obama have connections to Saul Alinsky (of Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals fame) is the dirty Communist Party affiliation of this election. In truth, Clinton’s thesis (pdf) on Alinsky provoked more comment as a secret than it has as a public document, while Obama’s participation in the Gamaliel Foundation has supplied little more than a rhetoric and practice of civic participation. Now that more sympathetic audiences are trying to suss out the consequences of the Alinsky connection, it has become clear that Clinton and Obama actually take two different approaches to the Alinsky method: Clinton mobilizes, while Obama organizes. *Cue Scary Music* (Continued)

Discussions of inequality usually focus on charity: what can we give or do for those in need? However, as the breakdown of last year’s WTO discussions demonstrates, most poor countries would much prefer fair dealing and equal opportunities to trade rather than handouts, especially when those handouts come in the form of ‘dumped’ surpluses created through our massive agricultural subsidies. So we should welcome a new round of Doha trade talks, and charitably forgo subsidizing our own farmers at the expense of agriculture around the world. The notion that charity always involves such trade-offs is the really hard point to digest. Worse still, this kind of charity might also be the best way to pursue our own self-interest. Uh oh.

The other night I was discussing Lacan with a friend who practices psychotherapy, and he suggested that Lacan’s work ‘only makes sense in the clinic.’ We agreed that when philosophers and critical theorists try to invoke Lacan, they inevitably bungle the job. Today, I discovered Andrew Robinson’s nice little takedown of Zizek, Laclau, and Mouffe’s Lacanian inflected political theory, which proves the point. (Continued)

There’s a nice little article in the Washington Post about who counts as rich, which is an important question given the tax priorities that the Bush administration set with regard to the inheritance tax and other tax cuts for Americans. (Continued)