Tag: The City

  • The Enduring Appeal of Perversity Arguments and Unintended Consequences Warnings

    The Enduring Appeal of Perversity Arguments and Unintended Consequences Warnings

    James Forman, Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize last week for his book Locking Up Our Own. It is well-deserved. That book–and his earlier work wrangling with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow–shows the ways that we have arrived at the wicked problem of mass incarceration through something much harder to disdain than evil scheming by distant elites. We…

  • “The purpose of law enforcement, with respect to transactional crimes, is to make sure that they have ‘good’ criminals.”

    Keith Humphreys shares this interview with Vanda Felbab-Brown. There are no dull moments, but here’s one I think should give us lefties pause: what will replace the underground marijuana economy? Felbab-Brown explains: Most of the time governments tend to fight illicit economies and not think about what will replace them. Policies are often premised on the…

  • 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…

  • Democracy Means Asking the Right Questions

    Whenever I talk to students about democracy, I like to emphasize that the original term for democratic rule was isonomy. Consider the account Otanes gives in Herodotus’ History: “[T]he rule of the multitude [plêthos de archon] has… the loveliest name of all, equality [isonomiên]…. It determines offices by lot, and holds power accountable, and conducts all deliberating…

  • Land Use, Density, and Local Control

    I’ve been looking for good articles on local governance, in part related to the Tufts Summer Institute, and in part related to my goal of transforming my ethics course so that it takes up the paired questions of the Good Life and the Good Citizen. One resource for this is Sharon Meagher’s textbook Philosophy and…

  • What can small groups do?

    I’ve just returned from two weeks at the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies, which culminated in a conference attended by 117 researchers, practitioners, philanthropists, and public officials interested in expanding the role of citizens in our democracy. Peter Levine summed up the conference here: The Frontiers conference was modeled on No Better Time, a…