Cure-alls and Remedies
Most academics know some version of the critique of elite rule, administrative power, and centralized regulation by experts. Hannah Arendt called bureaucracy the “rule of No Man;” Michel Foucault described the overlap of legislative power, knowledge-production, and the apparatus of discipline and control; Iris Marion Young defended simple street activism against the demand that political…
(This post is especially for my friends who are reading William Gaddis’s The Recognitions right now.) Post-structuralist trickster or stuffy monetarist? You guess: If modernity is characterized by loss of the sense of the real, this fact is connected to what has happened to money in the twentieth century. Everything threatens to become unreal once…
(What follows are some reflections on two related problems. One is Robin Hanson’s discussion of prediction markets to counteract status quo bias , and the other is my friend Leigh Johnson’s meditation on strong moral relativism . Because of length, I have cut my extended reflections on Dr. J’s “strong relativism” for a post tomorrow.)…