Cure-alls and Remedies
Yesterday, George Mason University economists Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen announced MRU , a modular course design platform that they’ll be using to offer free and potentially paid courses in economics, online. I’ve learned a lot from their blog since I started reading during the run-up to the financial crisis, and I plan to at…
John Quiggin raises some interesting questions about the BIG+VAT in the comments to the last post: I’m unconvinced by your transition strategy, though of course the nature of a transition strategy depends on the starting point. I don’t see how a ‘small’ [UBI*], say $3000/person/r or $1 trillion per year in the US context let’s…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Apparently, it did! On Thursday, I produced a graph and some older papers in economics that made the case that there is a pretty clear trend in campaign spending that was completely unaffected by the 2002 BCRA. However, I’m a philosopher, not an econometrician, so I left off the most important part: comparing growth in…
So I’ve just completed grading 55 papers on Citizens United v FEC , and though I’d kind of like to reflect on it a bit, I’m also finding that grading has totally exhausted my interest in the legal questions. (But seriously: the personhood question is a red herring!) Maybe later this week I’ll post…
Most discussions of the Commons assume that common-pool resources are supplied by nature, like the English fields that were available to locals for grazing, cultivation, and hay-cutting until the Inclosure Acts . However, it is equally possible to create new common pool resources for local control. Kojo Nnamdi spent an hour on his radio show…
In his new book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism , Ha-Joon Chang offers a progressive explanation for what Tyler Cowen calls “The Great Stagnation ,” the slowing growth in public goods available for consumption or redistribution. Between his various jibes at a strawman version of the standard economic model, Chang offers a…
I asked Tyler Cowen what he thought of the public policy game show idea . He posted my request for comments, and there has been some helpful stuff from his readers: Sandeep notes that Scott Adams already thought of it: As president, I would solve all the world’s problems by creating a reality TV show…
John Protevi, Mark Lance, and Eric Schliesser have created a bit of a stir in the blogosphere with their call to shun sexually harrassing philosophy professors: We believe there are informal sanctions that could make a difference. The Feminist Philosophers blog recently suggested not inviting serial harassers to conferences. One could easily extend this to not inviting…
Tyler Cowen’s new e-pamphlet ( The Great Stagnation ) takes on the slowing gains to be had from social and technological progress and offers an interesting explanation of some of the trends that many people see as troubling: the flat arc of median incomes since 1973 and the apparently universal surprise that the last decade…
[caption id=”” align=”alignleft” width=”336″] US Customs and Border Protection officers enforce our labor market protections with paramilitary techniques.[/caption] One of my favorite liberal policies is the basic income proposal. The idea is that all citizens have a basic guaranteed income, below which no one may fall. As the argument goes, this supplies more flexibility than…
I’m revamping my Critical Thinking syllabus, and I’m looking to ramp up the heuristics and biases section, perhaps to four or five weeks. Most of the material I’ve reviewed is either too technical or too simplistic, akin to the “memorize a list of fallacies” model. I’d like something a bit more in-depth, but I’m balking…
Megan McArdle discusses budget negotiating strategies . She’s right. Ezra Klein outlines why liberals don’t like it . He’s also right: Obama’s got 156 million people splitting $214 billion in tax cuts and benefits. The GOP’s got 4[.8] million people splitting $133 billion in tax cuts. On a per-person level, the GOP’s tax cuts are…
I’ve been thinking about a game show version of Ackerman and Fishkin’s ” Deliberation Day ” or David Estlund’s ” Queen for the Day .” In both cases, they asked: why not let ordinary folks take a shot at solving our nation’s hardest problems? My question is: why not let them do it on national…
Dr. J responds to my criticism of her position on plagiarism detection. I am, she accuses, guilty of Cold War paranoia and preemptive warfare with my students: That is to say, the classroom is a millieu in which everyone is suspicious and noone can be trusted, so every preemptive security mechanism one can employ should be employed. This is,…
Dr. J protests that her school has purchased access to the service Turnitin.com : If I participate in Turnitin, I am negating their Honor Code promise and, effectively, treating my students as if they never signed it. Quite simply, I do not know how I can reasonably expect students to take the Honor Code seriously…
Last week, Greg Mankiw posted this graph without comment: I thought there was something weird about the graph, and it’s been nagging at me. For one thing, it compares the bottom four quintiles to the top 5 percent of Americans. For another, it ignores non-federal taxation. (State and local taxes are more difficult to calculate,…
(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…
Bureaucracy .
DIY U by Anya Kamenetz (2010) A regularly updated version of this guide can be found here. I teach at the third-most expensive school in the country, where I regularly persuade students that they should major or minor in philosophy. For many students, this is a value question, and as I like to put it,…
The New York Times has this infographic : In the University of California system, there’s a similar trend :
I’ve linked to Warren before , but my favorite public policy theorist/practioner has a new lecture on regulating consumer financial markets, which is only ten minutes long and very persuasive: Elizabeth Warren on Consumer Protection (MMBM) from Roosevelt Institute on Vimeo . Also, from this recent interview : The consumer credit market is broken. While…
The other night I was discussing Lacan with a friend who practices psychotherapy, and he suggested that Lacan’s work ‘only makes sense in the clinic.’ We agreed that when philosophers and critical theorists try to invoke Lacan, they inevitably bungle the job. Today, I discovered Andrew Robinson’s nice little takedown of Zizek, Laclau, and Mouffe’s…
There is a deeply interesting discussion of energy policy going on at ask.metafilter. It hits on some of the best thinking in environmentalism right now, and takes that long-range speculative view that may not satisfy the average policy wonk but gives me the philosophical shiver that lets me know that some deep thinking is occurring….
I just came across this early Joseph Heath/Andrew Potter article based on their excellent book Nation of Rebels . It’s called The Rebel Sell . They argue that consumerism, more than capitalism, is the reigning political-economy of our times, and that we are being sold our insurrections: Take, for example, Volkswagen and Volvo advertising from…
The Tanner Lectures are available online . Here’s a selection that I found interesting: Ben Barber’s “” Democratic Alternatives to the Mullahs and the Malls ” Seyla Benhabib’s ” Reclaiming Universalism: Negotiating Republican Self-Determinism and Cosmopolitan Norms ” Stephen Breyer’s ” Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution ” Umberto Eco’s ” Interpretation and Overinterpretation: World,…
I came across a blog a while back that argued that Walmart’s size and distribution has put them in a state-like position vis-a-vis their workers, the communities in which their stores are based, and the regulation of their distributors. When you think about it, there’s a strong congruity between communist architecture and Sam’s Club chic….
Right now, I have tabs open to three different great sites, all of which I discovered from fifteen minutes of browsing MeFi . Fora.tv is what PBS should be, but isn’t: awesome, interesting panel discussions, lectures, and conferences. Dr. Lester Brown discusses ways to restructure the global economy so that it can sustain economic progress…
Steve at Cows and Graveyards correctly connects the upcoming oil extraction agreements in Iraq to peak oil. Yes, Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, and as the global demand (mostly due to 40% increase in yearly consumption caused by the burgeoning Chinese economy) outstrips supply, prices will skyrocket unless the US…
Paul Waldman argues : If there’s one thing Republicans have understood and Democrats haven’t, it is that politics is not about issues. Politics is about identity. The candidates and parties that win are not those aligning their positions most precisely with a majority of the electorate. The winners are those who form a positive image…
The Diamond Age has arrived, but no one will admit it. Experts chafe at the mass-production of diamonds. The leading gem analysts refuse to rate them . Duh. “If we could succeed , at a small expenditure of labour, in converting carbon into diamonds , their value might fall below that of bricks .” Capital…
SKates comments on Andrew’s post about anti-Spanish language sentiment among anti-immigrationists (and why haven’t they found a name that’s pro-something or other?): This policy in no way harms the quality of anyone’s life, nor does it judge anyone as lesser people. It does, however, ask people who are about to be gifted with alot of…
Kant is famous for inverting the claim that “there is no disputing taste.” Despite the fact that most people cannot imagine an argument for the pleasure or displeasure of flavors and foods, he supplies us a perspective from which we might establish a “common sense.” Namely, that each of us, in tasting or experiencing, might…
Today I went to see Spike Lee’s Inside Man. It was a wonderful film: Lee is really quite good at letting his awestruck adoration of New York City shine on the screen, though it wasn’t quite as lovely as 25th Hour. Most of the film was shot near Exchange Street, which is very close to…
I still haven’t solved the problem of governmentality, but I do have some more things to say about the Schmittian sovereign and the status of exceptional powers. If we compare the New Deal with the Patriot Act, we can see that emergencies don’t have to necessarily supply the executive with one-way options for action. It’s…
What is the relationship between the state of things and the political State? This is Badiou’s question, after you take away all his mathematical obfuscations. Machiavelli suggests the initial connection: starer , the verb for persistent existence. From this we derive the ‘state,’ the thing that lasts beyond particular politicians. Politics, after all, doesn’t mean…
The other night, my friend Steve Maloney was asking me whether politics, and specifically political theory, has been reduced to public relations. I like to think that, while it may be that our task is PR, (a) it may always have been, and (b) that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Peter Hallward has…