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Tuesday, February 24, 2004

The emperor’s new jobs

Shorter Virginia Postrel (from this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine):

I was getting my facial, manicure, and massage the other day, and it occurred to me-- you know, a lot of people work in these “aesthetic” industries!  I don’t have any real data or anything, but I bet there are a lot of jobs out there that the government just isn’t counting because we just don’t think creatively and dynamically about what “jobs” are!  I bet I can sell this to The New York Times Magazine!  Wow, I’ve already generated more wealth in the New Dynamist Economy, just by thinking!

“Mad Max” Sawicky and Brad DeLong have more substantial responses to Ms. Postrel-- they’re great, in the sense that they show what a libertarian fantasy-land she’s living in, but then again they take her seriously, which is a mistake I made two years ago when I corresponded briefly with her about disability, cloning, and prenatal screening (in the course of working on a paper for a conference on disability and deafness at Gallaudet University), and found that despite writing volubly on these subjects, she hadn’t thought very long or very well about any of them.

Details on request, of course.

Posted by Michael on 02/24 at 07:09 AM
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Monday, February 23, 2004

In all seriousness

All right, a few serious words about Nader.  I didn’t vote for him in 2000-- on the contrary, I signed the last-minute petition circulated by liberals and progressives urging people not to vote for him (me and Toni Morrison and most of the writers at Dissent).  But yes, of course, I agree that Gore was a terrible candidate.  Tell me about it.  When he picked Lieberman as his running mate in August 2000 (a Monica prophylactic, sure, but also a move that took the Democratic ticket to the terrain of Eisenhower Republicans with a bit of Lynne Cheney culture-war hectoring thrown in), I turned to my wife and said, “that’s it, I’m voting for Eugene McCarthy.” (Not Nader-- after all, he was also a terrible candidate, if you’ll recall.) And after the second Bush-Gore debate, I got into the habit of defusing every family argument with Janet and Nick by tilting my head and intoning portentously, “I agree with the governor.” Finally, Gore blew everything about the Florida recount, everything.  I don’t even want to begin to relive it.

Still, the argument worth having in 2000 was not about Gore.  It was about Bush, and what he and his far-right friends would do to the country.  So when, over the past few years, I’ve read Green activists like Medea Benjamin saying (in an April 2003 Salon article), “I’m stunned by how extremist the Bush presidency has become on foreign policy. We never could have predicted this,” I’ve tended to reply, “Actually, yes, you could have predicted this-- by paying attention, for the love of God.  By reading that 1998 PNAC memo and realizing that the project of keeping its authors from wielding state power was far more important than the ‘project’ of voting your conscience.  Voting your conscience?  What is this, Pinocchio? We’re supposed to listen to the small still voice of Jiminy Cricket?  We’re faced with lunatics like Richard Perle and Dick Cheney, here, people-- it’s time to vote for the only guy who can prevent them from taking over the country.” In retrospect, I find it weird that only two groups of American voters were deluded into thinking that there were no substantive differences between Gore and Bush:  (1) the “swing voters” who started paying attention to the race six weeks before election day 2000 and didn’t like what they heard about Gore claiming to have invented the Internet and being the model for a character in Love Canal (this is more or less what my neighbors in Champaign County, Illinois took away from media coverage of Gore) but did like Bush’s “conservativism that is compassionated,” and (2) the Nader voters, who, being reasonably well-informed and well-educated people, really should have known better. Yes, including you, Medea, though I appreciate the fact that you’ve come around since.

As for whether Nader cost Gore the election, please, I don’t want to wade one more time through the thickets of Naderite denial on this.  Nader deliberately tried to throw the election to Bush (even going to far as to say he would vote for Bush in a Bush-Gore race), and then, having succeeded, began to backpedal, saying, in effect, “I didn’t cost Gore the election, and what’s more, I’m glad I did.” (This being the counterpart to the coherence of his position that (a) there were no substantive differences between Democrats and Republicans and (b) his candidacy would help Democrats.)

This time, the man doesn’t even have the Green fig leaf to hide behind-- he’s not trying to build a party, or a movement, or an alternative.  He’s just running as Ralph qua Ralph.  No, I know, he’s not truly LaRouchean, because being “truly LaRouchean” involves believing that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s candidacy for governor of California was masterminded by Jacob Rothschild, among other things.  But I do mean to suggest that despite his lifetime of heroic service to-- and leadership in-- progressive causes, Ralph Nader in his senescence has dropped off the edge of the map of political positions that responsible liberals and progressives can respect.  It’s time for responsible liberals and progressives to file him next to LaRouche in the mental rolodex.

UPDATE:  Max says it better.  As a former Barry Commoner voter (1980) and New Party member (1996-demise), I tip my hat to the sage Mr. Sawicky.

UPDATE UPDATE:  Did Nader really say he would have voted for Bush in 2000? Yes, Nader really said he would have voted for Bush in 2000.  In fact, he said it in June 2000, as you can see for yourself right here.

Posted by Michael on 02/23 at 07:52 AM
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Nader/LaRouche 2004

Ralph is running! Finally, a presidential campaign for everyone who knows that

(a) a Kerry Administration will be virtually identical to a Bush Adminstration (nine cents’ worth of difference, max);

(b) on orders from Queen Elizabeth, NATO will move to destabilize the world gold market in early 2005;

(c) the mainstream mass media will completely ignore all the evidence for (a) and (b).

Send a message to the Republicrat/Rothschild duopoly!  Vote Nader/LaRouche in 2004!

Posted by Michael on 02/23 at 03:34 AM
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Sunday, February 22, 2004

Meanwhile, over in the Econ department

Rick Perlstein writes (to me and to Andrew Sullivan) to say:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but: this argument about anti-right bias on campus will only get interesting once people start talking about what happens to the left-leaning in economics programs-- you know, where the people who actually run the world get trained. And public policy programs, which are quite in thrall to microeconomics thinking. Someone close to me is in a public policy Ph.D. program at a very prominent university (apologies for vagueness), and was asked in one of her problem sets in a labor economics class-- taught by a prof considered moderately liberal by the standards of the field-- the following:

“In April 1992, childcare workers in Seattle, Washington, went on strike for one day protesting their low wages and poor benefits. They noted that while their hourly wages ranged between $5 and $6 per hour, the wages of zookeepers in the Seattle zoo averaged $12 per hour. Because care givers of children were being paid less than half the pay received by care givers of monkeys and tigers, they argued that the ‘free market’ was not functioning in the child care industry. Does this outcome mean that something is wrong with the free market?”

The answer from the professor? Hint: it isn’t that human caregivers are predominantly women, simian caregivers predominantly men, and that any profession that is female-dominated tends to pay less, holding skill constant. It isn’t that caregiving is undervalued by the market because of a distortion in information: the incorrect assumption that “anyone can do it.” It isn’t the public goods problem: that people don’t want to pay higher taxes to pay caregivers in the public sector better because they can free ride on the services either way. It isn’t the negative externality problem: that the long-term social cost of inadequate care isn’t accurately reflected in the price we pay for caregiving, just as the long-term social cost of extractive industry isn’t accurately reflected in the price of petroleum. It certainly isn’t any possible long-term market failure associated with trying to keep a consumer economy going when workers only make $5 an hour. All of the above suggest that, yes, something is wrong with the “free market.”

No. The “correct answer” provided on the answer sheet is that, well, the laws of supply and demand dictate that it must be so, and there is no alternative. Well, actually, the alternative is to make it harder to children to get adequate care: “One solution to the caregivers’ problem would be to cut back on the number of ‘qualified’ persons able to do the task. This result might be achieved by convincing the state to license persons as ‘qualified’ after a rigorous and time-consuming testing process. Such a licensing procedure would reduce the supply of ‘qualified’ workers and industry wages would rise. Alternatively, if as many persons were qualified to care for monkeys and tigers (more supply) or if Seattle did not have a zoo (less demand) the wages of zookeepers would be lower.”

Voila! The optimal solution! Kill half the babysitters, free the tigers, and everyone wins!

Many thanks, Rick.

All I can add to this is that it’s a good thing Perlstein’s friend didn’t have one of those “rational choice” theorists who dominate so many conservative economics departments-- that is, the kind of economist who suggests that the solution here would be to let the tigers do the babysitting, thus moving everyone’s cheese and freeing both childcare workers and zookeepers from the burdens of employment.

Posted by Michael on 02/22 at 05:51 PM
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Saturday, February 21, 2004

Letters, we get letters

Hundreds of well-wishers have written in to say,

Michael!  Get a grip!  Stop arguing with people about conservatives in academe already!  Stop helping right-wing nuts pretend that bright young conservatives are trying desperately to get into graduate programs in the arts and humanities so that they can study for five to ten years in the hopes of completing a doctorate and going out into a job market that employs only half of all new Ph.D.s-- and only half of those in tenure-track jobs!  Seriously, Michael, we know that liberals are overrepresented in the arts and humanities.  They’re also overrepresented among public-school special-ed teachers and cast members of Off-Broadway plays, for goodness’ sake!  Do we really have to have a full-scale national investigation into “liberal bias” in those fields, too?  Enough about this tired subject!  We need to hear more about how your hockey season is going-- that’s the reason we stop by your blog!

I have to say it’s a little weird getting hundreds of letters like this. Anyway, my season in the B league is going well.  My team, the Capitals, is 19-8-2; I’ve played in 21 of those games, and I’m second on the team with 38 goals and 20 assists (bettering the 55 points I scored in the B league last year, with about ten games left to play).

My A season is hardly worth mentioning-- let’s just say that I have not been able to bring my A game to the A league.  So far, six goals, four assists, and three injuries (leg, thumb, shoulder-- still recovering from the shoulder thing as I write), down from 29 goals last year.  I can play hurt at the B level, but not at A, at least not well.  I’ll try to salvage something from that season before the semester ends, though.

In the pros, it looks like the two teams I care about will be watching the playoffs on TV.  The New York Rangers, having put together what might be the strangest assemblage of underachievers, head cases, and defensive-lapse specialists the NHL has ever seen, won’t even make it close this year. However, my signed copy of Rod Gilbert’s autobiography remains as dear to me as ever, sitting on its shelf next to Gerald Eskenazi’s A Year on Ice, a lively record of the Rangers’ 1969-70 season and a fine companion piece to the late Dave DeBusschere’s journal of the Knicks’ championship that season, The Open Man.  Meanwhile, out in St. Louis, the Blues are fading fast without key defensemen Barret Jackman (season-ending injury) and Al MacInnis (career-ending injury).  When I taught at the U of Illinois I used to catch a Blues game or two each year, and then when they became serious contenders in 2000 and 2001 I drove down for some playoff games as well-- including their double-overtime win in game three of the 2001 conference finals against Colorado (the only game they won in that series).  Now it looks like the Blues aren’t going to be getting back to that level anytime soon.

I will check out the New Jersey Devils next week, though-- I’m going to their game against Atlanta on Friday the 27th.  Last May I caught their 1-0 victory over Ottawa in game three of the Eastern finals, picking up a ninth-row seat via Ticketmaster the day before the game.  Great team, the Devils, and a great hockey organization.  Too bad they play in a swamp and no one comes to see them.  Maybe they can move to Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues in Brooklyn along with the Nets.  After all, Brooklyn could use a team whose name is associated with evil incarnate.

Posted by Michael on 02/21 at 11:42 AM
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Feserfest:  final words

Professor Edward Feser is unhappy with me, to gauge by his followup to his earlier two-part essay on the academic left.  But I really don’t see why he bothered to include me in his reply to his “critics”: he’s quite right, I haven’t engaged substantively with his initial argument, and that’s largely because I don’t think his initial argument merited substantive engagement.  So I’m not really a “critic” of Feser, in any meaningful sense of the term.

As for Feser’s latest, I can’t possibly manage a better reply than that offered by Paul Myers over at his lovely site, Pharyngula.  Feser had written:

Since Professor B?©rub?© is, despite his experience in teaching literature, apparently as literal-minded as the hapless students he likes to badmouth in national publications, let me briefly explain for him the (apparently too subtle) meaning I was trying to convey.

No, I don’t really think that left-wingers like Hitler. The point was rather that, given the actual content and historical development of Fascist and National Socialist doctrine, there are far more connections between it and the modern Left than there are between it and the modern Right. Therefore if, as so many Leftists like to do, you are going to play “pin the Swastika on the donkey,” it follows that it is far more plausible to pin it on the Left than on the Right. So, Leftists should, if they are intellectually honest, stop playing that stupid game, and in particular quit using the tired “Nazi” and “Fascist” labels to smear anyone who disagrees with them. All clear?

To which Professor Myers replies,

All clear, sir. You don’t think left-wingers like Hitler, they are like Hitler. And leftists don’t get to play stupid games and smear their opponents with tired insults because that’s your job. Yes, sir.

Also, Feser shouldn’t call me “Shecky,” as he does a bit later on in his piece.  I’m not a Jewish comic.  I come from a rich tradition of French-Canadian humorists, like Jean Beliveau, Raffi, and Celine Dion.

All clear?

Good.  But I will make one thing clear (I hope) about Wednesday’s post (and I’ve been crazy busy all week, or I’d have kept up my US FDA recommended daily allowance of blogging these past two days): it is true, as I’ve said before-- in fact, I think that even when I said it before I’d remarked then that I’d said it before: some departments in the arts and humanities, emphatically including my own, are dominated by liberals, and some are actually sprinkled (liberally!) with genuine leftists.  Now, this in itself doesn’t make such departments monolithic, as any intellectually serious person will tell you: just because a hallway full of professors voted for Clinton in 1992 doesn’t mean that they can’t tear each other up over the Habermas-Lyotard debate or Michael Warner’s advocacy of a queer counterpublic sphere-- or, for that matter, over the most ordinary job search for a new assistant professor in British literature of the late seventeenth century.  The left is a house of many mansions, some of which (as I’ve, ahem, made clear in the course of my career) I personally have no use for. You claim to be a man of the left-- but you’re eating a cheeseburger! That kind of thing-- you know, the politics of personal righteousness and moral witness and cryptoreligious arguments about who’s an “apostate.” Still, we do dominate a handful of departments, really we do.  And as I’ve remarked before (many times!  really!), sometimes this makes us intellectually lazy, because we get in the habit of taking a number of premises for granted that can’t be taken for granted when you address broader publics.  As I wrote in Public Access way back in 1994 (this would be a self-promotion moment, right here),

Public gatherings of the academic left are singularly deficient in this regard: one cannot get out of an academic conference without hearing X number of appeals to a politics of coalition and alliance, but then one usually cannot get out of the same academic conference without hearing a great deal of hostile if not contemptuous criticism directed at academe’s potentially closest allies in the culture at large.  We appear to have developed an academic subculture that can theorize ‘hegemony’ up and down the historical bloc [this is a Gramsci joke, by the way-- it slayed them in Turin about 70 years ago] but that in practice proves less skilled at cultivating actual political alliances and coalitions than at pissing off contrary factions in faculty meetings.

Still, it’s silly-- that is, disingenuous-- for people like Edward Feser and David Horowitz to pretend that hardcore leftists control the entire damn campus.  This kind of talk is appropriate, as Horowitz knows very well, when you have to throw a bit of red meat to the faithful in order to get them to whip out their checkbooks (and “the faithful” here means, roughly, “the people who associate the name Stanley Fish with the name Leon Trotsky, and who hear the news that ‘Katie Couric will deliver the commencement speech’ as ‘Rosa Luxembourg will deliver the commencement speech’").  But in any other rhetorical setting, people who say “every American campus is overrun by members of the extreme left” are going to be heard as close cousins of people who say “if only Michael B?©rub?© would stop sending me messages through the fillings in my molars, I could think straight about these damn leftists.”

For the record, my essay arguing on behalf of courses in the literature and philosophy of Western civilization is available from The Common Review (not online, though; go buy a copy).  That’s the essay in which I write,

The ‘Western canon,’ as too many of its polemical defenders tend to forget, is not a static repository of Great Ideas or an unbroken string of Deep Thoughts connecting Americans to Athenians.  It is a vast repertoire of ways of thinking, writing, and feeling, a record of how humans have imagined the world-- often contradicting one another, always in dialogue with one another.  To present that repertoire, that record, in fine detail-- and in historical context-- is only to try to do justice to the men and women who created it.

And now that that’s clear, let’s hope that all graduates from American colleges come out more willing and able to think critically and seriously about the world than they were when they came in.

Posted by Michael on 02/21 at 07:07 AM
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