Cure-alls and Remedies
John Quiggin has been taking up the case against the basic income guarantee at Crooked Timber recently. See here and here . Unfortunately, he is attacking a weak man version of the policy. It doesn’t look like he actually opposes the BIG, in theory, but his objections all appear to demonstrate that a Basic Income…
I’ve been putting off finishing my series on the Bleeding Hearts / Crooked Timber debates, because Chris Bertram had suggested that there might be a reply to critics. Now he says it might be a while longer, so I’m going to finish up. In my last post , I suggested that none of the methods…
The virtue of the Crooked Timber bloggers’ objections to the Bleeding Heart Libertarians’ line is that it implicitly suggests the difference between liberal and republican conceptions of freedom. Libertarians have usually substituted theories of interference and coercion for a full-blown theory of domination. When Chris Bertram stopped by, he suggested that they wanted to avoid…
In his initial response to the the Crooked Timber bloggers , Cowen also suggests that he doesn’t like the “mood affiliation” of the CT bloggers: I am not comfortable with the mood affiliation of the piece. How about a simple mention of the massive magnitude of employee theft in the United States, perhaps in the…
Tyler Cowen returns to the issues of employer/employee domination today , but since I never blogged his first response , I want to start working through this debate from the beginning. The Crooked Timber bloggers offered a lengthy list of workplace depredations , and then suggested that these depradations require government intervention in the form…
Charles Stross is doing an “IamA” on Reddit right now. Vincent Ostrom died. (Am I wrong to find this kind of quick death following the loss of a spouse and co-researcher seriously romantic? Probably, but there it is.) Children bully an elderly bus monitor. The internet responds with $650,000 in donations. Also, many plot elaborate revenge…
What follows is a proposal I’ve been working on to convince my university to switch from its General Education requirements to a first-year seminary, given the data in Academically Adrift . Executive Summary The best research available suggests that courses with demanding reading and writing requirements are the only way to teach the core competencies…
[This is an uncorrected transcription of some remarks Hannah Arendt gave to the first annual Conference on the Cybercultural Revolution. I’ve copied it from the Library of Congress, here . Notice that her concerns with the end of work are quite strong in these remarks. Her comments on the necessity of a social safety net in…
On Tuesday we had a university-wide faculty meeting on revising the general education requirements at Morgan State, and predictably President Wilson held up a copy of Arum and Roksa’s Academically Adrift and made some comments about how we had to do better while horribly mangling the actual findings of the book. Though there’s a lot…
I’m thinking of adding rules and a FAQ to my syllabi. Thoughts? Read More. Write More. Think More. Be More. Do the homework and come to class. [Woody Allen has said that “80 percent of success is showing up.” But be sure to show up for your homework, too; there will be approximately two hours…