Archive for the ‘Philosophy of Social Science’ Category
Fractal Inequality & The Great Divergence
posted by Frank Pasquale
Share of capital income earned by top 1% and bottom 80%, 1979-2003
Within the US, many factors may explain the “great divergence” in incomes, including trade, immigration, technology, government policy, and education. It’s difficult to tease out the relative impact of these factors. There are confounding variables, and a factor that may be extremely important in one sector could be unimportant in others. But it’s worth focusing on at least two developments: the vast growth of the global labor force over the past two decades (as formerly command economies opened up for global investment), and the steady increase in CEO and Wall Street income over the past forty years. Both have caused (and are still causing) a hollowing out of many developed countries’ middle classes. A 2008 HBS study indicated that up to 42 percent (57.2 million) US jobs are offshorable, including “high-skill jobs such as financial analyst and microbiologist.”
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September 13, 2010 at 7:39 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality, Philosophy of Social Science
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Future of the Internet Symposium: An Iron Cage for the iPhone Age
posted by Frank Pasquale
William Gibson’s essay on “Google’s Earth” deserves to be read by anyone interested in the “future of the internet.” Gibson states that “cyberspace has everted. . . . and [c]olonized the physical”, “[m]aking Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world.” He’s reminded me of James Boyle’s observation that:
Sadly for academics, the best social theorists of the information age are still science fiction writers and, in particular cyberpunks—the originators of the phrase ‘cyberspace’ and the premier fantasists of the Net. If one wants to understand the information age, this is a good place to start.
Some legal academics have taken this idea to heart; for example, Richard Posner apparently began writing Catastrophe in response to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. With that in mind, I wanted to point to some speculative fiction that I think ought to inform our sense of “the future of the internet.”
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September 8, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Posted in: Philosophy of Social Science, Privacy, Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Sociology of Law, Symposium (Future of Internet), Technology
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The Question Concerning Finance: Party Like It’s 1929? Or Prepare Like It’s 1957?
posted by Frank Pasquale
Another day, another story of Wall Street’s failure to allocate capital responsibly. Today’s installment appears on ProPublica, and describes how “Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history:”
Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses: They created fake demand.
A ProPublica analysis shows for the first time the extent to which banks — primarily Merrill Lynch, but also Citigroup, UBS and others — bought their own products and cranked up an assembly line that otherwise should have flagged. The products they were buying and selling were at the heart of the 2008 meltdown — collections of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs.
As the housing boom began to slow in mid-2006, investors became skittish about the riskier parts of those investments. So the banks created — and ultimately provided most of the money for — new CDOs. Those new CDOs bought the hard-to-sell pieces of the original CDOs. The result was a daisy chain that solved one problem but created another: Each new CDO had its own risky pieces. Banks created yet other CDOs to buy those. . . .Because of Wall Street’s machinations, more mortgages had been granted to ever-shakier borrowers.
The article explains the details of the deals, whose byzantine structures should be numbingly familiar to anyone who’s read ProPublica’s earlier work on Magnetar, or chapter 9 of Yves Smith’s book Econned. Smith calculated that, “if you look at the non-synthetic component, every dollar in mezz ABS CDO equity that funded cash bonds created $533 in subprime demand” (Econned, 261). (If mezz ABS CDO means nothing to you, I highly recommend Smith’s blog, or John Lanchester’s I.O.U., the most stylishly written of the “crisis” books.)
Behind all the reticulated swaps of risk and reward, in article after article, the crash of 2008 is boiling down to a familiar story: endless leverage designed to support ever more fee-generating deals. Read the rest of this post »
August 27, 2010 at 9:19 pm
Posted in: Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Corruption, Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Technology
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Inequality and the Great Recession
posted by Frank Pasquale
Over at Religious Left Law, Steve Shiffrin has blogged on Robert Reich’s recent analysis of the relationship between inequality and the recession. As Shiffrin explains, “when wealth is concentrated at the top, the rest do not have enough purchasing power to support the economy.” I wanted to elaborate on that point; I’ll try to address some challenges to it in future posts.
1) Paul Krugman appears to disagree with Reich’s (and others’) “underconsumption theory.” For Krugman, inequality’s negative impact on macroeconomic stability (if it exists at all) is mediated by the political system. Politics gets more polarized during times of inequality, and that polarization may be preventing constructive, cooperative approaches to developing the infrastructure that a thriving market needs.
2) Robert Brenner predicted a “crisis of overproduction” years ago, and we may well be in it now. We know that “businesses are only producing 3 percent fewer goods and services than when the recession started, but Americans are working 10 percent fewer hours.” Economic theory might predict that more productive employers will hire more workers. But when unemployment is as high as it is now, employers can also choose to force the “survivors” at their firms into working longer hours for the same amount of pay.
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July 22, 2010 at 8:31 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics
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Extractive Industries
posted by Frank Pasquale
Barry Meier’s portrait of Transocean, owner of the rig behind the oilocalypse, describes a “push-the-envelope” mentality at the corporation:
Human rights advocates have called for an investigation into Transocean’s recent dealings in Myanmar. . . . Transocean has disclosed in Securities and Exchange Commission filings that its drilling equipment was shipped by a forwarder through Iran and that until last year it held a stake in a company that did business in Syria. The State Department says Syria and Iran sponsor terrorism. . . . In Norway, Transocean is the subject of a criminal investigation into possible tax fraud. The company has said in S.E.C. filings that Norwegian officials could assess it about $840 million in taxes and penalties. . . . Transocean is also the target of tax inquiries in the United States and Brazil.
Owners and operators of oil rigs can be slippery targets for regulators. As David Kocieniewski explains,
Transocean . . . moved its corporate headquarters from Houston to the Cayman Islands in 1999 and then to Switzerland in 2008, maneuvers that also helped it avoid taxes. . . . [A]n examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process.
How does a destructive industry become one of the most subsidized?
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July 8, 2010 at 1:27 pm
Posted in: Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics
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The Messy Political Economy of Finance and Energy
posted by Frank Pasquale
(This is Part 3 of a review of Ian Bremmer, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? (Portfolio, 2010); Part 1 appears here and Part 2 here.)
If pervasive governmental intervention is inevitable in any developed economy, the question then becomes: what intervention is worthwhile? For Bremmer, the answer appears to be either a) not much or b) intervention that is not designed merely to enhance the power of the governing regime. Unfortunately, one of his central arguments for the value of the free market—the performance of multinational oil and gas companies—founders on the messy politics of energy. The second category of “pro-commerce” intervention appears less and less coherent as we look at the full breadth of programs state capitalist regimes engage in. State capitalists in China may well be promoting the sustainable commerce of the future by forcing certain sectors to act “politically” today.
Crude Distinctions in the Petroleum Industry
Bremmer notes that “the 14 largest state-owned energy companies control twenty times as much oil and gas as the eight largest multinationals” (56). He accuses state-owned energy companies of being corrupt, inefficient, and dangerous, and makes that case in some detail. He also says many of them are amoral, willing to work with the most repressive regimes imaginable. By contrast, he lavishly praises multinationals like Shell, BP, and ExxonMobil:
[E]fficiency gaps between privately owned companies and their state-owned rivals wider in the energy sector than in any other area of an economy. Multinationals offer higher wages, attracting better workers. They’re more likely than state-owned firms to benefit from economies of scale. They’re more innovative. Their managers and engineers are more experienced, and they use better equipment. These advantages will continue to matter in places like the Gulf of Mexico . . . where the technical demands of bringing oil to the surface are extraordinarily high. (62) (emphasis added)
If the BP hemorrhage continues indefinitely, that hole in the world might shake Bremmer’s confidence. Admittedly, the disaster happened after the book was released, but the more we dig into it, the more we find permanently captured regulators at Interior giving these companies whatever they want. Stories of the environmental devastation of Nigeria and Ecuador by Shell and Chevron have been familiar for years.
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July 6, 2010 at 3:55 pm
Posted in: Book Reviews, Corruption, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Sociology of Law, Uncategorized
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Some Realism About Interventionism
posted by Frank Pasquale
(This is Part 2 of a review of Ian Bremmer, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? (Portfolio, 2010); Part 1 appears here.)
Throughout his book, Bremmer contrasts “state capitalist” regimes (where the government is the lead economic actor) with “free market” nations which preserve more room for private initiative. While virtually every country has a few state-owned enterprises (SOE’s), in state capitalist regimes like China SOE’s predominate in “diverse sectors” and are used to enhance the political power of government (65). Such regimes also intervene in the economy pervasively. For example, Russia in 2008 “identified forty-two ‘strategic’ economic sectors in which restrictions applied for foreign investment” (109). In a chapter entitled “State Capitalism Around the World,” Bremmer piles up a litany of suspect interventions in places ranging from Nigeria to Mexico to Saudi Arabia.
Bremmer paints a stark contrast between the economies of liberal democracies and the state capitalist other. But at least since legal realist Robert Hale published his Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-Coercive State in 1923, the question of what constitutes state “intervention” in the market has been contestable. For example: at what point does licensing of doctors move from being a natural aspect of any competent health system to being termed a suspect “intervention”? If there is to be free trade in services, don’t we at least need some information about what constitutes genuine medical care? “Perfect information” is a cornerstone of idealized markets—isn’t some baseline of information necessary to any actual market?
Bremmer does not talk much about health care in his book, but it appears to be one important sector where the relative role of the government in state capitalist and “free market” regimes is flipped. On a cursory reading of Blumenthal and Hsiao‘s 2005 article in the NEJM, the US would appear to be more interventionist than China:
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July 5, 2010 at 8:17 pm
Posted in: Administrative Law, Corruption, Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Sociology of Law
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Zero Cheers for State Capitalism?
posted by Frank Pasquale
(This is Part 1 of a review of Ian Bremmer, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? (Portfolio, 2010).)
Ian Bremmer’s The End of the Free Market is already one of the most celebrated nonfiction books of 2010. Reviewed worldwide, the book has been praised in many quarters. Bremmer’s deep knowledge of world political economy is evident throughout this work. Yet the book’s case for “free market” as opposed to “state” capitalism relies on generalizations that are too gross to capture the real fault lines in globalization. If we are lucky, Bremmer’s work will encourage American policymakers to compare their own interventions in the economy with those of “state capitalist” regimes like China, and to copy best practices. If we are unlucky, its ideas could lead to economic stagnation in “free market” havens and new tensions between the U.S. and China.
For Bremmer, “state capitalism” denotes a level of government control of the market that is less dirigiste than a “command economy,” but more heavy-handed than the social market institutions of Europe. Countries become more state capitalist when their “government[s] play the role of lead economic actor,” moving to the left along a spectrum ranging from communism to libertarianism. They move “right” when the government lets businesses make decisions for “commercial reasons” rather than trying to encourage them to meet political goals.
On this view, moving rightward toward non-intervention is usually advisable, provided some baseline of regulation and sound business culture prevails. Bremmer admits this is a “profoundly simplistic model” (44), and perhaps in penance he explicitly condemns “utopian libertarianism” when he introduces it, declaring that “any argument that the state should remove itself entirely from the marketplace is absurd” (153). He laments the fact that theories of “shareholder value” have led “CEOs and company management [in free market capitalist countries to] become obsessed with maximizing quarterly profits at the expense of investment in a sound long-term growth strategy” (152). To his credit, he explains the recent financial crises in the US as the product of a few decades of deregulatory dogma, and not merely aberrational.
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July 4, 2010 at 5:25 pm
Posted in: Book Reviews, Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Inequality, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Sociology of Law
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Independence Day Thoughts: From Richard Rorty to Andy Grove
posted by Frank Pasquale
I was just reading Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and Social Hope, which is by turns entertaining, enlightening, and frustrating. But I thought these words were spot on for today:
Many of us, despite the outrage we may feel about governmental cowardice or corruption, and despite our despair about what is being done to the weakest and poorest among us, still identify with our country. We take pride in being citizens of a self-invented, self-reforming, enduring constitutional democracy. We think of the United States as having glorious—if tarnished—national traditions. . . . Like every country, ours has a lot to be proud of and a lot to be ashamed of. But a nation cannot reform itself unless it takes pride in itself—unless it has an identity, rejoices in it, reflects upon it and tries to live up to it. Such pride . . . often takes the form of a yearning to live up to the nation’s professed ideals. (253)
The book also has a nice little essay on Love and Money, which reflects on the work of Forster to talk about the material foundations of noble action. Readers of Forster’s Howard’s End know full well the value of an independent income, and the disaster that can set in when work is taken away. Rorty worries that such disaster will not merely affect the unemployed, but society generally. In the fantastical essay Looking Backwards from the Year 2096 (written in 1996), Rorty darkly “predicts” a social collapse in 2014, as a well-armed populace refuses to accept the austerity measures planned by elites.
Though that last vision may seem like the paranoid ravings of a pomo professor, Yale School of Management senior faculty fellow Bruce Judson’s book, It Could Happen Here, suggests similar possibilities. Famous economists and historians have also taken to playing the “disaster” card, as Paul Krugman claims a “Third Great Depression” is in the offing, and Niall Ferguson predicts an inflationary spiral if policymakers follow Krugman’s advice. Apocalypse chic may break through the clutter of a saturated media, but ultimately threatens the credibility of anyone who cries wolf twice.
What is clear this July 4th is that, in too many ways, the U.S. is a dependent nation—dependent on imported goods, foreign oil, and capital flows unguided by any semblance of morality, efficiency, or long-term thinking. In dealing with such massive problems, Rorty suggests that “the only thing we know of which might help are top-down techno-bureaucratic initiatives” (227). For exhibit A in that category, take a look at former Intel chairman Andy Grove’s article How America Can Create Jobs, in this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek. A taste:
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July 4, 2010 at 1:43 pm
Posted in: Law and Inequality, Philosophy of Social Science, Uncategorized
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Banks, Bankers, and the New Political Economy
posted by Frank Pasquale
As post-mortems of the financial crisis proliferate, it’s helpful to keep an eye on some foundational causes. Michael Lewis recently commented that “the people who squandered the most money paid themselves the most”—and continue to do so. We’ve all heard about agency problems, but rarely are they as crisply illustrated as in this post by James Kwak:
[The hedge fund] Magnetar made the Wall Street banks look like chumps. [In] one deal . . . Magnetar put up $10 million in equity and then shorted $1 billion of AAA-rated bonds issued by the CDO. It turned out that in this deal, JPMorgan Chase, the investment bank, actually held onto those AAA-rated bonds and eventually took a loss of $880 million. This was in exchange for about $20 million in up-front fees it earned.
But who’s the chump? Sure, JPMorgan Chase the bank lost $880 million. But of that $20 million in fees, about $10 million was paid out in compensation (investment banks pay out about half of their net revenues as compensation), much of it to the bankers who did the deal. JPMorgan’s bankers did just fine, despite having placed a ticking time bomb on their own bank’s balance sheet. Here’s the second lesson: the idea that bankers’ pay is based on their performance is also hogwash. (The idea that their pay is based on their net contribution to society is even more absurd.)
I was recently at a conference on “Too Big to Fail” banks organized by Zephyr Teachout, and several experts explained how the tail of massive compensation was wagging the dog of societal capital allocation. William K. Black‘s theory of “control fraud” is one of many efforts to illuminate the persistent conflicts of interest between banks, bankers, and investors, but one needn’t designate any of these conflicts “fraudulent” in order to see how socially destructive they have become. Rather, pulling back to see the big picture—from the lens of political economy—illuminates the key drivers of the crisis. As Kwak notes, “the crisis was no accident: it was the result of the financial sector’s ability to use its political power to engineer a favorable regulatory environment for itself.” Thinkers across the political spectrum—from Kling to Kuttner—can recognize the critical role of political connectedness in driving bankers’ compensation.
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April 13, 2010 at 11:42 pm
Posted in: Antitrust, Corporate Finance, Current Events, Economic Analysis of Law, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics
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Book Review: Divergent Opinions: Why Community Matters — A Review of Sunstein’s Going to Extremes
posted by Marc Roark
Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, by Cass Sunstein. Oxford University Press: New York 2009. Pp. 171. $21.95
Cass Sunstein argues in his new book Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide that extremism is a phenomenon that is enhanced when people of like minds get together to talk. When we think of people that lie at the extremes of society, our minds are often drawn to reclusive characters. People like John the Baptist living in the wilderness “wearing clothes made of camel hair, eating locusts and wild honey;” (Matt. 3:3-4) or people like Raskolnikov from Fydor Doystoyveski’s Crime and Punishment – a reclusive character who develops a radical and warped sense of morality in response to his perception of society’s values. In reality, people that live on the extremes are rarely alone. They are surrounded by a network of like thinkers who confirm the attitudes, beliefs and interpretations of sensory data that those persons embrace as normal. Extremes are about information. That is, where you get your information from; whether you believe that information to be reliable, and how willing you are to accept information outside of your preferred source.
Going to Extremes is about how, when and why extremes develop in communities. The theme of the book is that “[w]hen people find themselves in groups of like-minded types they are especially likely to move to extremes” (p. 2). Sunstein’s work fits into the genre of human behavioral psychology proposed by James Sidanius and others that views extremists’ cognitive complexity as more complex than moderates. See James Sidanius, Functioning Sociopolitical Ideology Revisted, 6 POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY 637, 639 (1985). This is in contrast to extremism theory, which largely assumes that political extremists display less-sophisticated cognitive behavior than moderates. About the form of extremism we call terrorism, Sunstein writes at one point,
it is tempting to think that terrorism is a product of extreme poverty, lack of education, or a kind of mental illness. It turns out that all of these thoughts are quite wrong. Most of the time, [terrorists] come from middle-income families. Nor have terrorists lacked education. There is no evidence that they suffer from mental illness…. Alan Krueger argues that terrorism is a form of political protest, and those who lack civil rights and civil liberties not having other means of engaging in protest resort to terrorism. To Krueger’s point, we might add that when civil liberties do not exist citizens have only one prominent source of information – the state – and that source cannot be trusted. (p. 115)
Terrorism then becomes a reaction against information that the extreme positions assume can’t be right. Thus, in Sunstein’s work, the why and how of extremisms (like terrorism) can be associated with how individuals interact in communities – the trust they place in the information received, the confidence they derive from like-minded members, and the authority or submission they respond to as a member of the community.
February 4, 2010 at 12:09 am
Posted in: Articles and Books, Behavioral Law and Economics, Book Reviews, Law and Humanities, Law and Psychology, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Sociology of Law
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PhD/JDs: Fads or Future?
posted by Dave Hoffman
Llewellyn Knew All About Lamposts
My post on the value of having a PhD in the academic hiring market of 2015 has gotten a surprising amount of attention. I thought I’d respond to some of that feedback here.
By email and by blog, I’ve gotten pushback from those who continue to contest that we’re in an empirical “bubble.” I take that to mean a fad – a passing interest –rather than an empirical claim that we are valuing work or candidates at more than their intrinsic worth. (How could we get any handle on either side of that equation!) My point about the economics of supply-side data is that it’s a trend that is only going to get stronger in the future. Larry Ribstein certainly is correct to observe that this creates a “looking-under-the-lampost” problem. But of course, legal academics have been in a century-long crouch under a lamppost of their very own. As Llewellyn said:
“I am a prey, as is every may who tries to work with law, to the apperceptive mass . . . [T]he appellate courts make access to their work convenient. They issue reports, printed, bound, to be had all gathered for me in libraries. The convenient source of information lures.” (Bramble Bush)
Looking at newly cheap data about legal institutions encourages people to run fast regressions without thinking. But reading opinions, which are free, has encouraged thousands of legal articles about a dataset which is biased & shaped by selection. (Irrational behavior in response to a “radical price“? Nah.) Truly sophisticated empirical work doesn’t discount the role of opinions in shaping legal norms, but it does conclude that opinions are skewed and rhetorically hot versions of what judges do, and thus unrepresentative of how practically-grounded lawyers make judgments about how to litigate their cases. Making that insight concrete is but one of the many projects undertaken by the New Legal Realists. Others – law and psychology, law and criminology, cultural cognition, etc. – together convince me that the future of the empirical revolution is pretty bright. And having a PhD/JD is an increasingly important entry credential in the field.
December 9, 2009 at 9:32 am
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Psychology, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Legal Theory, Philosophy of Social Science
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Politicized Prognostication at the Congressional Budget Office
posted by Frank Pasquale
Back in 2007, wise wonks were already warning that the Congressional Budget Office could torpedo health reform. The CBO dealt Clintoncare a heavy blow by saddling it with huge cost projections — and failing to take into account the savings the program would realize for individual citizens and the private sector. Current CBO director Doug Elmendorf has been riding a wave of notoriety as an objective “referee” in an increasingly bitter reform battle. But as his office’s one-sided estimates enervate reform, it’s beginning to risk its reputation for impartiality. Consider the following observations about CBO’s work:
Bruce Vladeck: “The CBO’s track record in predicting the effects of health legislation is abysmal. Over the last two decades, the CBO has routinely overestimated the costs of expanded government health care benefits and underestimated the savings from program changes designed to reduce expenditures. Most recently, it overestimated the five-year cost of Medicare Part D — the prescription drug benefit — by more than 35%. Even more dramatically, the CBO’s estimates of the Medicare savings from the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 underestimated the impact, on average, by a full 100%. That’s right: In the BBA’s first three years, Medicare spending fell fully twice as fast as the CBO had projected.”
Timothy Stoltzfus Jost: “[A] moment’s reflection would lead one to realize that the CBO’s guess that [a reform proposal] would save [only] $2 billion is about as worthless as an estimate that a loaf of bread will cost $5.65 in 2019, or a gallon of gasoline $4.73. Indeed, the CBO admits as much, stating that it actually believed the proposal would save nothing, but “there is also a chance that substantial savings might be realized.” . . .[T]he media needs to stop reporting CBO reports as though they reflect the real costs of reform.”
Maggie Mahar: “When I read Elmendorf’s testimony suggesting that the [House] bill wouldn’t bend the trajectory of federal health spending, I couldn’t help but wonder: Did he understand how the proposals in the 1,018 page bill dove-tailed with the excellent recommendations that the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPac) has made in recent years? Has Elmendorf read the lengthy MedPac reports?”
When respected experts like Maggie Mahar are wondering if Elmendorf has understood key literature in the area, something’s gone wrong at CBO. The media’s uncritical acceptance of his figures can only last as long as it fails to report the true complexity and uncertainty involved in both substantive reform and the do-nothing option that CBO’s handiwork is unintentionally advancing.
July 28, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Posted in: Health Law, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics
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Post on Legal Scholarship
posted by Frank Pasquale
Yale announced today that Robert Post will succeed Harold Koh as Dean of its Law School. I am thrilled to hear the news. I read Post’s book Constitutional Domains: Democracy, Management, Community while I was in college, and it helped convince me to go to law school. During my recent visit at Yale, Post struck me as one of the most intellectually interesting and friendly faculty members. Virtually every student I talked to who worked with him described him as an outstanding mentor.
Many of our readers might be interested in Post’s take on legal scholarship.
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June 22, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Posted in: Law and Humanities, Legal Theory, Philosophy of Social Science
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McCain–Sage of Stability
posted by David Gray
During the ending days of the Presidential campaign it seemed to those on both sides of the Red-Blue divide that we might be facing the end of days; some because a man of African heritage with documented exposure to Muslims might be elected, and others because he might not be elected because he is a man of African heritage with documented exposure to Muslims.
John McCain took an uncomfortably agnostic position in this battle of the social apocalypses. He suggested in the offing that Barack Obama was a man of mystery who had known associations with terrorists that had yet to be fully explained. Yet, Senator McCain was always cautious to stop short of overtly plucking the strings of lingering racism and well-nurtured xenophobia. His running mate was famously, and perhaps shamelessly, much more reckless, as were a substantial portion of his official and unofficial champions. His supporters in the electorate quickly connected the dots marked by the candidates, their deputies, and members of the media who regard the seeding of dark and seething suspicion as simply part of “showbiz,” to conclude that then-candidate Obama was, himself, a terrorist, a “sleeper cell,” a “racist . . . loon” and, quite famously, an “Arab,” and therefore unworthy of trust.
Senator McCain’s response to the “Arab” allegation was not to overtly deny the claim. Rather, he emphasized that Obama is “a decent family man, citizen, [with whom] I just happen to have disagreements . . . .” Senator McCain was criticized for that reaction by some who thought he should have more firmly denied the claim itself, or corrected the underlying assumption of the speaker that Arabs are not to be trusted, but I think McCain’s instincts were right, revealing a pretty sophisticated political theory of social stability with which I agree. More on why after the jump.
January 31, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Posted in: Philosophy of Social Science
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LawProf as Philosopher-King
posted by Frank Pasquale
Carlin Romano’s fascinating profile of Harvard Law Prof Roberto Unger should prove inspiring for any academics who long for a policy role. Here’s a taste:
His political involvement in Brazil dates to the late 1970s, when military dictatorship gave way to a “political opening.” Unger offered his services to the united opposition party. In 1978 he became that party’s chief of staff . . . . In those days, he says with a grin, he consoled himself “during solitary evenings … with readings and translations of Chinese imperial poetry, one of the themes of which is the presence of the exiled intellectual in the dusty steppes.” . . .
In April 2007, [Socialist President] Lula invited Unger for two long conversations in Brasília, then offered him a new position running a “Secretariat for Long-Term Actions.” Unger accepted, informing Lula that he’d start after finishing his Harvard semester. . . .
“I have the only position in the government that is about everything, except for the position of the president,” Unger exults. “He has all power, and I have none. But I have one advantage over him. I don’t have to manage daily crises. I’m therefore free — as he is not — to deal with the future and to deal with our direction. It’s been fantastic.”
Unger’s ideas for change are interesting, though the scholarship that underlies them has gotten a mixed reception in the American academy.
June 30, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Posted in: Culture, International & Comparative Law, Jurisprudence, Philosophy of Social Science
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Defense Spending as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
posted by Frank Pasquale
In a recent editorial, Robert Scheer wonders “Why is U.S. military spending at the highest point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than at any time since the end of World War II?” Scheer further wonders:
Maybe one can make a case that it is appropriate that more than half of the discretionary funds in the 2009 budget go to defense, and all the other federal programs for science, education, infrastructure, global warming and nonmilitary international programs compete for the rest. But isn’t it bizarre that the biggest peacetime military budget in U.S. history — 35% higher than when Bush came into office and larger than the military budgets of all other nations combined — is not even discussed in the current presidential contest?
I found Scheer’s questions particularly interesting as I read another article (this time from economists) challenging the view that the US can afford to spend 30% of its GDP on health care in 2050. If health spending reached such a level, the authors predicted a productivity crisis that would drag down the US economy in comparison to other countries’. We see glimmers of such arguments in periodic panics over the Medicare and Medicaid budgets at Washington think tanks.
I think it’s helpful to think about defense and health spending together because they reveal there is no objectively correct answer as to how much public spending there should be in any given category. In a world of escalating military tensions, military budgets may well have to rise. When a general “pax” prevails, there can be more investment in health and safety. Sadly, the perception of rising military tensions (and ensuing buildups) may well become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If your neighbor gets more arms, you’re well-advised to arm yourself. In such cases, the wasteful and destructive potential of positional competition is most evident.
June 10, 2008 at 9:10 am
Posted in: Philosophy of Social Science, Politics
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The Ideology of Privatization
posted by Frank Pasquale
When a majority of doctors back a national insurance plan, how do we keep getting health care that is more fragmented, private-insurer-driven, and risky? Zygmunt Bauman offers an insightful look at the ideology of privatization that cripples “collective responses” to problems like these:
May 14, 2008 at 9:33 am
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Health Law, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics
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“In much wisdom there is much grief . . .”
posted by Frank Pasquale
Conservative pundit Arthur C. Brooks has been discussing his book Gross National Happiness in a number of venues, including the NYT Freakonomics blog. Having criticized the progressive Robert H. Frank for using such data to support egalitarianism, I’ll now question Brooks’s subjectivism (which has led him in exactly the opposite direction as Frank on the inequality question).
Brooks is happy to report that his political allies are “winning the happiness game hands down.” He gives several hypotheses for conservative joy; stronger religiosity, more time with family, a preference for “simplicity” over “complexity,” and less likelihood to see oneself as a victim. Brooks occasionally concedes Mill’s argument that it is “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” But he appears most amenable to the view that liberals are likely to be whiny, complaining, resentful people, while conservatives resolutely consider themselves in control of their fate and satisfied with their lives.
Brooks’s research raises a number of interesting policy questions. First of all, what’s his root concern–happiness or virtue? We might map the classic tension between freedom and virtue to the present case: is it good action or the subjective feeling (Brooks alleges) it creates the desideratum here? If the latter, why not just provide people with soma? If the former, it’s a bit odd to introduce the “happiness evidence” as a reason for being, say, conservative, or good. Who’s Brooks’s audience? Exhausted hedonists just on the brink of giving up their Don Juan days to find more lasting pleasure at anti-tax rallies?
May 6, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Feminism and Gender, Philosophy of Social Science
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Department of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, Women in Science Edition
posted by Frank Pasquale
Recently Ben Barres, a professor of neurobiology, gave a fascinating talk at Harvard titled “Some Reflections on the Dearth of Women in Science.” His talk was based on his Nature article “Does Gender Matter” (to achievement in the sciences). I found the talk an extraordinary confirmation of my earlier worries about self-fulfilling prophecies and bias in the blogosphere.
Barres was responding to Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which, according to Barres, argues that men are innately “more aggressive and ambitious” and women innately “feel emotions more strongly” and “prefer to take care of children.” Barres explored how Rosalyn Barnett and Carolyn Rivers’ book Same Difference: How Gender Myths are Hurting our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs extensively undermined such ideas, exploring the numerous “nurture” based rationales for differences Pinker saw as innate. Barres recited several studies evidencing “gender prejudice” that influences choices from the very earliest stages of child development. His slide show (available here) also raised serious questions about Pinker’s neo-Darwinian agenda, tracing bias in it all the way back to Darwin’s 1871 Descent of Man, which argued that “The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman.” (In 1985, Richard Lewontin responded that “biological determinists have never found any credible concrete basis for such differences.”).
After punching various holes in Pinker’s scientific program, Barres concluded that “When faculty tell their students that they are innately inferior based on race or gender they are crossing a line that should not be crossed –the line that divides responsible free speech from verbal violence.” His comments bring to mind a struggle for the soul of academia–whether the university is defined by either a) a libertarian willingness to entertain *any* idea or b) a communitarian belief that academics are part of a larger process of social inquiry designed to improve the world. The former idea is a tempting for many, but when we try to recognize the range of research programs that are actually worthwhile to accomplish, we quickly see that such rules of recognition are themselves parasitic on situated concepts of what is important to us and what aspects of our tradition are most worth promoting. Barres points out that the mere act of setting an agenda of inquiry can itself not merely manifest, but also promote, the very biases the inquirer claims merely to be exploring.
Consider, for instance, an academic department set up to explore Pinker’s hypothesis that “Religion is a desperate measure that people resort to when the stakes are high and they have exhausted the usual techniques for the causation of success.” Or the question of whether academics should study the propriety of torture in the service of national security. We may all want to pat ourselves on the back for being brave enough to consider such inquires. (In the same manner as, say, Pinker appears to be proud to consider dangerous ideas.) Yet as Raimond Gaita has argued, sometimes an “open mind” can also be a (morally) empty one. Gaita argues that “Society is in fact defined by what is undiscussable.”
May 5, 2008 at 9:55 am
Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Philosophy of Social Science
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