Cure-alls and Remedies
I love Peter Levine’s latest post, “don’t let the behavioral revolution make you fatalistic.” “Tversky’s and Kahneman’s revolutionary program spread across the behavioral sciences and constantly reveals new biases that are predictable enough to bear their own names. […] These phenomena are held to be deeply rooted in the cognitive limitations of human beings as creatures who evolved…
I have lots of feels and lots of arguments about these two pieces by Peter Levine on an alt-left populism: “pluralist populism” and “separating populism from anti-intellectualism.” (This post on identity politics is also relevant.) Peter even goes so far as to call himself a populist, which is a surprising move to restore the term’s…
Corey Robin got some nice jabs in at the current class of younger non-academic pundits a while back : A lot of these pundits and reporters are younger, part of the Vox generation of journalism. Unlike the older generation of journalists, whose calling card was that they know how to pick up a phone and track down…
When civic studies scholars write about civics and citizens, as Peter Levine does today , we will usually mention the following trinity: facts, values, and strategies. Here’s Levine: The citizen is committed to affecting the world. Some important phenomena may be beyond her grasp, so that she sees them but sees no way of changing them….
What should schools do about the fact that politicians are frequently both wrong and immoral in ways that violate educational norms? How can civics education be civil if civic engagement rarely is?
Happiness studies say parenthood is bad for you. Probably this tells us more about happiness studies than happiness. Lisa Feldman Barrett: What Emotions Are (and Aren’t) Five Philosophy Books for Children Emily Oster: Everybody Calm Down about Breastfeeding (But see also) “Knowing whom to ask and also how to ask is also often more valuable than a detailed knowledge…
At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a broad consensus among reformers in the United States regarding the perniciousness of economic monopolies and winner-take-all politics. After that period of rampant growth and cronyism known as the Gilded Age, groups who had been disproportionately disadvantaged by political patronage and voter fraud began to organize…
Here’s the post: Game theory and the Super PACs . Levine points to the recent shift in campaign finance focus from the presidency to Congress, and adds nuance to a debate that is frequently overrun by absolutist intuitions: No wonder Karl Rove is spending his money on behalf of Senate Republicans. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that conservative super-PACS…
Late night television takes on moral particularism : via Peter Levine I’m still trying to get my head around Dancy’s view, so perhaps this post will be more confusing than it ought to be. Here’s the gist from the Stanford Encyclopedia: Moral Particularism, at its most trenchant, is the claim that there are no defensible moral…
Generally, I respect Harvey C. Mansfield’s work on classical political theory , and think his attempts at contemporary cultural and political criticism are absurdly small-minded. His piece in The Weekly Standard on Obama’s non-partisanship is a mixture of the good Mansfield and the bad Mansfield, so I recommend it to fans of ambivalence. Here are…
Peter Levine’s blog has been more-than-usually insightful over the last month or so. He has pieces on Charter Schools , agency collaboration with citizens’ groups , The Tempest , Massachusetts v. EPA , and a wonderful declaration of principles almost identical to those I’ve espoused in this blog and my actual scholarship. Despite all the…