Category: Uncategorized
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A mini-review of Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education
Progressives are coming around to the idea that higher education is not a great leveler, and the segregated K-12 schools are increasingly a pipeline to prison rather than jobs for the least advantaged.
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An Ostrom Reader
Lexington Press has recently finished publishing a four volume collection of the work of Elinor Ostrom and her husband Vincent–before that I do not believe the work has been gathered anyplace easily accessible. Since the price is astronomical–though well worth it for the serious scholar or scholarly library, I’m sure–I’d love to have a single-volume reader…
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Provoking pedagogically-effective discussion in college courses, with an example using Danielle Allen’s Cuz
Today is the first day of classes in my seventeenth year of teaching. I have taught a lot over those years–sometimes as much as a 5/5/1 (5 courses in Fall, 5 in Spring, and one over the summer.) My sense from that time is that the value of a philosophy course is largely not derived…
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Ideology and Education
Thomas Edsall has a good review of some recent research on polarization in the New York Times today: The strength of a voter’s identity as a Democrat or Republican drives political engagement more than personal gain. Better educated voters more readily form “identity centric” political commitments to their party of choice, which goes a long…
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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…
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Going Negative: Angry Ads and Negative Partisanship
It’s been twenty years since Ansolabehere and Iyengar published Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink & Polarize the Electorate.
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Man AND Rabbit: Naturalizing the Ethics of Belief
We need trust to know–even if we’ll also be misled into error by that trust.
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Moana, Complacency, and the Enduring Appeal of Steady-State Economics
(Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night with a reading of the political economy of Moana, and you just have to write it down. I regret nothing!)
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Loyalty, Research, and Prison Education
I’m in Dallas, Texas for the the National Conference for Higher Education in Prison. Today I’ll be presenting a paper from a larger project on loyalty and social science research methods which draws on an argument I first encountered in Peter Levine’s work. Here’s a link to the PowerPoint of my talk. It is fairly…
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Matter, Motion, Atheism
What is the connection between hylozoism, atheism, and egalitarianism? Kojin Karatani suggests an answer, and I wrangle with the New Atheists along the way.