Crooked Timber Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made

Time 2020-09-15 17:04:34

Web Name: Crooked Timber Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made

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Budapest (or should that be Beijing?)-on-Thames by Chris Bertram on September 9, 2020 These are unpleasant times to be British, if you also happen to be of cosmopolitan disposition, if you value good governance, and if you think that government ought to be restrained by the law. Boris Johnson s government has announce its intention to break international law in limited and specific ways as the UK s negotiations with the EU over a future trade deal founder and we slide towards no-deal and international isolation. Henry explores some of the background to this in the Northern Ireland backstop over at The Monkey Cage. Johnson proposes to tear up parts of an international treaty, which he hailed as a good deal as recently as January and which was the basis on which he campaigned in the last general election. It was put into UK law by this Parliament, only a few months back, on a tight timetable with restricted opportunity for scrutiny. Various Tory politicians, including Johnson s predecessor Theresa May, are unhappy with the prospect of breaking international law, arguing that nobody will have reason to trust the word of the British government ever again. The government s senior legal civil servant has resigned over the issue and its implications for the rule of law. Critics point out that it weakens the UK s ability to complain when other states, such as China, break their international agreements at will. (I assume that assurances will be given and any rebel Tories will back off, as they have done repeatedly over the past four years.) Johnson s more extreme supporters, in places like Spiked,1 are already engaging in the familiar rhetoric of treachery to defame anyone who is critical of the UK s negotiating position . Presumably Johnson is banking on Trump s re-election, a further trashing of international norms and a friendly US government, because without that complete isolation beckons.Meanwhile, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, a member of the Cabinet that is happy to disobey the law, has characterized climate protestors as criminals and suggested that Extinction Rebellion could be classified as an organized crime group. She s also been active around a confected refugee crisis concerning a few people who have crossed the Channel in dinghies (most of whom, it turns out are bona fide refugees) and the government is making noises about changing the law to make it easier to deport people, raising the possibility in the minds of observers that the UK could walk away from its obligations under the Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights. It is almost as an afterthought that I mention that because of the Johnson government s mismanagement, the UK has one of the highest death rates in the world and a strategy for fighting the disease that seems to consist mainly of announcing world beating measures that fail to materialize. Meanwhile, because of COVID-19, rights to political protest have been severely curtailed,2 and organizers of gatherings face financial penalties of £10,000 each. If COVID doesn t go away soon, then restrictions on our ability to resist the policies of the Johnson government will be in place when no-deal Brexit comes in January and the economic hit from COVID is compounded by food shortages and further mass job losses. Will the UK even survive all this? Pro-EU Scotland will want to secede as soon as it can, which might mean a hard border at Berwick-on-Tweed and a united Ireland would be one solution to the problems caused by the Conservative and Unionist Party s Brexit outcome. I d say Hungary here we come , but at least Hungary, as an EU member, continues to enjoy access to European markets.Spiked is the website of the network of the former Revolutionary Communist Party, some of whose members are intertwined with Johnson s administration. Johnson has recently decided to elevate one of its senior cadres, Claire Fox, in earlier times an enthusiast for IRA bombings, to the House of Lords.↩It almost seems superfluous to recall, amid this litany of perfidy, that in the case of Johnson s adviser or controller, the Rasputinesque Dominic Cummings, the legal restrictions on movement because of COVID didn t apply. Another instance of one law for them .↩ Teaching in-person by Harry on September 7, 2020 The Wisconsin State Journal ran this article (for which I was interviewed) about return to school. (For reasons I don t understand, the article is not accessible in many countries: sorry). A colleague in the Economics department emailed me after seeing the article saying that, quite apart from admiring the picture of the back of my head, he envied me the in-person experience, and wished that the campus had a physically distance-able space for his 420-person class. The email brought into focus the thought that I’m kind of a free-rider here. If everything were in-person I don’t think I – or anybody – would be feeling safe, or enjoying it very much. But, given how we are actually doing it (with most teaching online), I feel very good about teaching in-person, and will regret it if we aren’t able to continue through to Thanksgiving (which is the plan). I have those of my colleagues who are not teaching in-person to thank.How are we doing actually doing it? Well, it’s true, as the article says, that 43% of classes have some in-person component. Every single in-person element is small, socially distanced, and masked. And the 43% figure might really mislead you. For many classes component is a key term. I m thinking of a 240-person 4-credit class in which everything is online, except for 3 discussion sections. That class is included in the 43%: but out of 960-person-credit hours, only 60 are actually in-person. I don’t know the exact proportion of credit hours that are in-person, but judging by conversations I’ve had with students, and comparing the trickles of students on campus with the usual crowds I would be really, really, surprised if it is as much as 15%.And I really do mean trickle. One of my classes is T/Th 11am in the Business School building (one of the few buildings new enough that all the rooms really were designed for learning). Usually during that slot the building is heaving with students – like Christmas shopping on Oxford Street but without the packages. Normally all the classrooms are fully occupied. Last Thursday, at what would usually be its busiest time of the week, the building was almost empty, with most classrooms free. It was no challenge at all to keep a 6 feet gap between yourself and the next person. It wouldn’t have been a challenge to maintain a 60 feet gap, if that were your preference. [click to continue ] { 11 comments } Choose your own 538 adventure by John Quiggin on September 6, 2020 Like lots of others, I m anxiously watching forecasts of the US election outcome. But it s hard to figure out what s going on, with Biden way ahead in the polls, behind in the betting markets and rated a 70 per cent chance by the model at 538.com. Inspired by this post from Andrew Gelman, who is working on the Economist model (Biden currently a bit over 80 per cent), and an informative tweet from Nate Silver, I ve managed to improve my own understanding a bit. At least I think so.Silver s tweet confirms that the Electoral College system gives Trump a significant advantage relative to an election by popular vote. He syasChance of a Biden Electoral college win if he wins the popular vote by X points:0-1 points: just 6%!1-2 points: 22%2-3 points: 46%3-4 points: 74%4-5 points: 89%5-6 points: 98%6-7 points: 99%With that information, it s easy enough to fit a normal distribution to the margin, and get an estimate probability of winning. By fiddling with the numbers, it s easy to replicate the 538 probability estimate and also to get a probability distribution looking fairly similar to those displayed on te site. My best estimate is N(5,4), that is, the mean value for the margin is 5 points and the standard deviation is 4. The mean value is consistent with the description of the state level estimates on the 538 site, which (very roughly speaking) take the existing polls (which currently have Biden ahead by 7.4 nationally) and then give Trump 1 point for an incumbency advantage (reducing the margin by 2 points).Looking at the Economist model (which doesn t necessarily agree with 538 on the exact distribution of the Electoral College advantage) it fits pretty well with N(6,3) [click to continue ] { 23 comments } Dutch university protests, start of another year by Ingrid Robeyns on September 5, 2020 Last Monday was the opening of the academic year at Dutch Universities. Over the last three years, it has become a tradition for the activist group WOinActie to organise some sort of protest. This year, there was the challenge of how to organise a protest given COVID, but a solution was found.WOinActie organised together with the labour union protest bicycle tours between various Dutch universities. The idea was to symbolise the lives of temporary part-time teaching staff, who teach a few years (often on a contract that doesn t allow for research) at one university, and then have to move on to another university, since they are not offered permanent contracts (they universities don t want to offer those because they claim they can t take the financial risks). But those temporary instructors teach courses that are part of the regular curriculum, and the claim of WOinActie is that work that is permanent should be done by tenured teachers; instead, the Netherlands has in international comparison one of the highest percentages of temporary teaching staff. Of course, the protest was used to talk again to the press, and also to have a brief, open-air and corona-proof, conversation with the minister of HE before the cyclists took off at the University of Nijmegen to cycle to the University of Wageningen.The students from Utrecht University supporting WOinActie painted 10.000 red squares in Utrecht, from the historic Academy Building in the city center all the way out of town to the University Headquarters (Bestuursgebouw) at Utrecht Science Park. Each of the red squares symbolises one hour of unpaid work that is done by staff at Utrecht University each day; the students estimated that this amounts to 10.000 hours on a daily (workday) basis, and protest that their education should not depend on the unpaid overwork of their teachers. That estimation is probably an overestimation, but the point stands. It was pretty impressive to see those red squares through town, as you can see in this clip that my son Ischa made: #10.000 In Groningen, students also staged a protest around the 10.000 hours. [click to continue ] { 4 comments }For the most part, disputes over sharing the benefits of remote office work will be hashed out between employers, workers and unions, in the ordinary workings of the labour market.But what about the other half of the workforce, who don’t have the option of working from home? In particular, what about the mostly low-paid service workers who depend on people coming into offices?If the productivity gains made possible through remote work are to be shared by the entire community, substantial government action will be needed to make sure it happens.The other article, in Inside Story, looks at the end of the goods economy and its replacement by an information and services economy, a transformation that s been highlighted by the pandemic. An important implication is that investment demand by private firms is likely to stay low, even as greater public investment is desperately needed.Tech firms like Microsoft, which now determine stock market values, don’t need much capital. The book value of Microsoft’s capital stock is less then 10 per cent of its market value. The rest is made up of intangibles, a polite word for monopoly-power network effects, intellectual property, and good old-fashioned predatory conduct.Without any need for private sector investment, interest rates will remain low unless public investment picks up the slack. With the physical goods economy fading into the past, though, we don’t need more of the transport infrastructure projects governments automatically turn to at times like these. Rather, we need to invest in human services like health (mental and physical), education and childcare, and in information platforms that break the monopoly power of the tech giants.These are the investments that will allow Australia to flourish in an economy dominated by information and services rather than industrial production. { 16 comments } Unmarked categories by John Quiggin on September 1, 2020 Following on from the discussion between Chris and Kenan Malik, I thought I would take another look at this post from last year, where I used the term default identity . Since then, I ve seen that this idea is more usually phrased as the unmarked category a term originating in linguistics[2]. An example, where both the linguistic and social senses are present is that of the distinction between hyphenated Americans and the unmarked category of Americans in general. This post by Paul Campos at LGM makes the point that much of the support for Trump comes from white men who were once the unmarked category and are now marked as a distinct category.Being in the unmarked category represents more than not being discriminated against . For example, we might consider a situation where one religious group is subject to discrimination, but others are not. That does not, in itself, make the other groups privileged. Now think about the case when one group, say Christians, is taken as the unmarked category whenever religion is discussed for example, by using the word church to cover religious meeting places in general. That group is privileged even if there is no active discrimination against others, or if some groups are given (implicitly, given by the dominant group) apparently equal status, as in formations like Judaeo-Christian[2]. Even where members of the marked categories receive equal treatment, it is always provisional. Conversely, a situation where discrimination is unthinkable (say, discrimination based on shoe size) is one where there is no unmarked category. [click to continue ] { 167 comments } White privilege and class. A reply to Chris Bertram by Kenan Malik by Chris Bertram on August 30, 2020 This is a guest post by Kenan Malik replying to two posts by Chris Bertram last weekChris Bertram published two posts on Crooked Timber last week, the first1 challenging critiques of the concept of “white privilege”, the second2 arguing that certain claims about race and class are irrational. As one of the targets of these articles (Chris linked to one of my posts as exemplifying the problem, and we had previously debated the issue on Twitter), this is a response. Chris’ two posts are not directly linked, but they clearly deal with linked issues, and it is worth looking at them in tandem.In the first post, Chris argues that “the ‘white privilege’ claim sits best with a certain sort of metaphysics of the person, such that individuals have a range of characteristics, some of which are more natural and others more social, that confer a competitive advantage or disadvantage in a given environment, where that environment is constituted by a range of elements, including demographics, institutions, cultural practices, individual attitudes, and so forth.”But he also acknowledges that “I’m not establishing that, as a matter of fact, “white privilege” in the form I describe is a real thing, although I believe that it is”. It is difficult to see, though, how one can have a debate about whether “white privilege” is a meaningful category without have first established whether it is “a real thing”. It is possible to have an abstract debate about whether such a phenomenon could exist, but not to critique those who challenge the concept as inchoate in reality. Chris, in common with many proponents of the “white privilege” thesis, takes as given that which has to be demonstrated.Underlying the “white privilege” thesis are two basic claims. First, that being “white” is a useful category in which to put everyone from the CEOs of multinational corporations to the cleaners in an Amazon warehouse. And, second, that being in such a category imbues people with privileges denied to those not in that category. Are either of these claims true?The idea of whiteness as a “certain sort of metaphysics of the person” derives, of course, from racial thinking. In recent years it has found an important expression in the notion of “white identity” – the idea that all those deemed white have a common identity and set of interests which may conflict with those of non-whites. Most anti-racists (and, I assume, Chris, too) reject such a claim. We recognize that all whites do not have a common identity, that the interests of white factory workers or shelf-stackers are not the same as those of white bankers or business owners, but are far more similar to those of black factory workers or Asian shelf-stackers.Why, then, do we ignore this when it comes to the question of “white privilege”? Because, proponents of the white privilege thesis argue, white people do not suffer the kinds of discrimination suffered by non-whites by virtue of their skin colour. At one level this is true. “Racism” refers to the practice of discrimination against, and bigotry towards, certain social groups; there may be many reasons for such discrimination and bigotry, but one is clearly that those who are non-white are often treated unequally. Viewing the issue in terms of “white privilege” is, however, deeply flawed for a number of reasons.First, it is not a “privilege” not to have to face discrimination or bigotry; it should be the norm. I doubt if Chris, or, indeed, most proponents of the white privilege thesis, would disagree. Framing the absence of oppression or discrimination or bigotry as a “privilege” is to turn the struggle for justice on its head.Second, the concept of white privilege fails to distinguish between “not being discriminated against or facing bigotry because of one’s skin colour” and “having immunity from discrimination or bigotry because one is white”. The distinction is important. Many whites, because of privileges afforded by wealth and class, do have immunity against discrimination. But many others, who are poor or working class, do not. Their experiences of state authority or of policing is often similar to that of non-whites.3 [click to continue ] { 213 comments } Where do you get your ideas? by John Quiggin on August 28, 2020 The most memorable answer to this question came from science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who said Poughkeepsie (on checking Wikipedia, I learn that he died a couple of years ago). But in the context of discussions about remote work, I m interested in the claim that random physical meetings (the archetypal example being corridor or water-cooler encounters with colleagues) are an important source of ideas, and therefore a reason for not working remotely.This seems to be the kind of topic for which the data will consist mostly of anecdotes and introspection. A marginal improvement is too look over my own list of publications to see if I can identify any where the source arose from some particular interaction. Looking at my 100 most-cited papers in Google Scholar, most collaborations are the result of planning rather than chance. In pre-Internet days, most of my collaborations started from seminars and conferences I spoke at or attended because the topic was of interest, or else from direct approaches by a colleague, usually in the same department. From the early 1990s onwards, direct approaches mostly came by email, and work has often been done the same way. In several cases, I have written joint papers before ever meeting my co-author(s), though in other cases in-person collaboration with one or two co-authors works better. More interesting to me, are the cases where the idea has come from blogging. Some notable examplesMy Zombie Economics book. Starting with blog discussions, the idea for a book came from blog commenter Max Sawicky, and was picked up by Seth Ditchik at Princeton UP, who also commissioned Economics in Two Lessons and my current book-in-progress Economic Consequences of the PandemicCross-disciplinary collaborations with Henry Farrell and LA Paul both arising from my involvement with Crooked TimberThis paper, which started with a comment on a blog post to the effect that future generations are in fact already alive (At least I think that s how it happened. I could never locate the comment to acknowledge the source.) It seems to me that that these are much more like the kind of serendipitous links that are supposed to be generated by water coolers.Of course, academic research is a special kind of work, and I m much more involved with the Internet than most of my colleagues (or, at least, a few years ahead of the general adoption trend). So, I d be interested in anecdotes from others and links to actual research, if there is any. { 15 comments } On an objection to the idea of white privilege by Chris Bertram on August 27, 2020 The term white privilege has been getting a lot of play and a lot of pushback recently, for example, from Kenan Malik in this piece and there are some parallels in the writing of people like Adolph Reed who want to stress class-based solidarity over race. Often it isn t clear what the basic objection from class leftists to the concept of white privilege is. Sometimes the objection seems to be a factual one: that no such thing exists or that insofar as there is something, then it is completely captured by claims about racism, so that the term white privilege is redundant. Alternatively, the objection is occasionally strategic or pragmatic: the fight for social justice requires an alliance that crosses racial and other identity boundaries and terms like white privilege sow division and make that struggle more difficult. These objections are, though, logically independent of one another: white privilege could be real, but invoking it could be damaging to the struggle; or it could be pragmatically useful for justice even if somewhat nebulous and explanatorily empty.One particular type of argument is to deny that some white people enjoy privilege on the basis of noticing that some groups of white people suffer outcomes that are as bad or worse than non-white people on average or some non-white groups in particular. The claim is then that it is nonsensical to think of these white people as enjoying white privilege , or, indeed, any kind of privilege at all. But whatever the truth turns out to be about the explanatory usefulness of white privilege , I think these outcome-oriented assessments, sometimes based on slicing and dicing within racial or ethnic groups in ways that create artificial entities out of assemblages of demographic characteristics (white+rural+poor, for example), don t ground a valid objection because they misconstrue what the privilege claim is about. [click to continue ] { 122 comments } Every day, coal is killing us by John Quiggin on August 25, 2020 That s the headline for a piece I just wrote for Independent Australia, looking at a new report from Greenpeace about the harm done by air pollution from coal-fired power, in addition to the climate-destroying effects of CO2 emissions. The report estimates 800 deaths per year, and is, from what I can see, consistent with other studies.As a possible recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic comes into sight, it’s time to place human health above the desire to maintain the economic status quo. Australia can and should get off coal by 2030, without harming workers employed in the industry. In doing so, we will be saving both lives and money. { 41 comments }

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