nyt completeness theorem

At some point, they will have written every possible permutation of this story:

But competition for top middle schools has intensified as more families choose to remain in the city and others find themselves unable to afford private schools, and performance on fourth- and fifth-grade standardized tests is crucial to getting into one of those schools. So many parents — some wealthy, some not — are now shelling out hundreds and even thousands of dollars for tutors and for courses like the eight-week Saturday morning boot camp in TriBeCa. And that is on top of test preparation that almost all elementary schools now provide in class.

Or maybe this should be the nyt incompleteness theorem, and there will always be some new twist that can be put on the insanity of yuppie parents.

Vile

Bill Keller's very existence infuriates me in a way rabid reactionaries cannot. Right-wing punditry's mix of vulgar bourgeois economics and "culture war" dog-whistling is bad, of course, but it is an honest kind of villainy. The self-important centrism of the uber-journalist--who as Times editor played a not insignificant role in the run-up to the Iraq war, which he has since kind-of-sort-of apologized for--is in some hard-to-define way worse. Perhaps it is just that he professes to care about things the right wing will unashamedly disregard, or to be reasonable when "partisans" are doctrinaire, and so when he earnestly reproduces neoliberal commonsense as the height of wise statesmanship, it is more galling.

The middle is not the home of bland, split-the-difference politics, or a cult that worships bipartisan process for its own sake. Swing voters have views; they are just not views that all come from any one party’s menu. Researchers at Third Way, a Clintonian think tank, have assembled a pretty plausible composite profile of these up-for-grabs voters.

And in what respect is "Clintonian" distinct from the mainstream of the Democratic party?

¶Swing voters tend to be fiscal conservatives, meaning they are profoundly worried about deficits and debt.

In other words, they are stupid, but this is a stupidity shared by the entire political class, so it hardly serves to differentiate, does it?

¶They are mostly economic moderates, meaning they are free-marketers but expect government to help provide the physical and intellectual infrastructure that creates opportunity.

But they refuse to pay for it.

¶They are aspirational — that is, they have nothing against the rich — but they don’t oppose tax increases.

¶They want the country well protected, but not throwing its weight around in the world.

Combined translation: On important issues, they'll answer differently worded poll-questions differently, and so they can consistently vote for any candidate whatsoever.

¶They tend to be fairly progressive on social issues; they think, for example, that abortion should be discouraged but not prohibited.

Probably a bad example. Gay rights would be better. But yes, the one front of progress. Congratulations.

Bruce Gyory, who studies voting trends at the State University of New York at Albany, says the swing voters are predominantly white and suburban, have at least some college, and have decent incomes. In this time of precarious jobs, devalued homes and shriveled retirement savings, they are more anxious than angry, more interested in fixing the future than in affixing blame for the past.

In other words, they've got theirs. Oh, and why is the top third of education and income the group that gets to decide these things? What's going on with everyone else? Perhaps there is some factor, let's call it a "balance of social forces," that leads to the effective disengagement of nearly half of the electorate so that the outcome of individual elections follows the whims of ideologically incoherent, upper-middle-class voters, between two sides sufficiently similar to not unduly threaten either this demographic, or the other one that foots the bill for the whole charade?

Swing voters, I think, are looking not for a checklist of promises but for a type of leader — a problem-solver, a competent steward, someone who understands them and has a convincing optimism. We don’t know exactly how they identify that candidate, but it is some mix of past performance (especially for the incumbent), campaign messaging and chemistry.

Shit, paragraphs like this make me want to become a poststructuralist. So they want a leader who understands what they want, which is not particular policies but instead a leader who understands what they want, which is not . . . AAAHHHH!!!! DO THE SIGNIFIERS SIGNIFY ONLY OTHER SIGNIFIERS!!?!!?!

Both Mitt Romney and President Obama have some legitimate claim on these voters. They are analytical, pragmatic, upbeat men who won elections by promising to transcend dogma and get things working again. The middle is probably more ideologically attuned to Romney — at least the old Romney — but finds Obama more likable, especially after Romney’s primary-season impersonation of Lurch from “The Addams Family.”

Ok, briefly channeling Paul Krugman: in what respect have Obama's policies contradicted the ideological nonsense shopping list above?

In the Democratic Party, a battle for Obama’s teleprompter is now under way between the moderates and the more orthodox left. The president sometimes, as in his last two State of the Union addresses, plays the even-keel, presidential pragmatist, sounding themes of balance and opportunity. Then sometimes lately he sounds more as if he’s trying out for the role of Robin Hood.

The problem isn’t that the Buffett Rule is necessarily a bad idea. It isn’t that “social Darwinism” is a slander on Republicans. (Heck, it may be the only Darwinism Romney believes in.) The problem is that when Obama thrusts these populist themes to the center of his narrative, he sounds a little desperate. The candidate who ran on hope — promising to transcend bickering and get things done — is in danger of sounding like the candidate of partisan insurgency. Just as Romney was unconvincing as a right-wing scourge, Obama, a man lofty in his visions but realistic in his governance, feels inauthentic playing a plutocrat-bashing firebrand. The role the middle really wants him to play, I think, is president.

So is Obama trying to steal from the rich (or engaging in "plutocrat-bashing") or is the Buffet rule a not a bad idea? Is he the candidate of partisan insurgency or is he accurately describing the political positions of his opponent?

I propose a definition: Centrists are those who assuage a nagging sense that all is not right with the world with a belief that they aren't likely to do better than the political status quo, and thus who, out of fear of seeming unsophisticated, mask the fact that they are mostly indifferent to politics with vague expressions of displeasure with whoever happens to be in office. They are the perfect analogue to the musical philistine who, despite never listening particularly closely to the Mozart and Beethoven they go to hear, are offended when the conductor dares to sneak some Schoenberg onto the program. One suspects that the root of this reaction is that their manifest incomprehension of the modern works--or, for the centrists, of expressions of any actual political opinions--brings them to the edge of the terrifying realization that they don't even begin to understand the music--or the politics--they claim to approve of.

Will Wilkinson wants to be a novelist

I probably shouldn't find that funny, but I do. Apparently even the semi-serious, half-pretentious, probably underpaid intellectual water-carriers of the bourgeoisie long for creative expression. Oh, wait, duh.

Ouch (saving for future use)

Perry Anderson:

Now laden with as many European prizes as the ribbons of a Brezhnevite general, Habermas is no doubt in part the victim of his own eminence: enclosed, like Rawls before him, in a mental world populated overwhelmingly by admirers and followers, decreasingly able to engage with positions more than a few millimetres away from his own. Often hailed as a contemporary successor to Kant, he risks becoming a modern Leibniz, constructing with imperturbable euphemisms a theodicy in which even the evils of financial deregulation contribute to the blessings of cosmopolitan awakening, while the West sweeps the path of democracy and human rights towards an ultimate Eden of pan-human legitimacy.

I really like The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, but my general sense of his other work is of a mess of terms circling around and away from any real point. And his politics, it seems, have gone entirely off the rails in the last couple decades.

This achieved the rare distinction of being so reactionary I actually experienced a moment of vertigo

https://twitter.com/#!/CatholicLeague/status/190427506904539136

Janacek, Britten, and Debussy string quartets

Why do so many chamber concerts include generic, forgettable classical and romantic pieces when there are later works like these that are so much more interesting?

The eternal hostage situation

Via here. Left-center Keynesians sometimes like to make arguments that the constraint in mass purchasing power from the reduction of government spending or, for that matter, increased inequality has negative consequences for the operation of the economy as a whole. This argument amounts to a claim that in some cases, what is best for capitalism is to support the living standards of the majority of the population. The resistance these arguments receive from the representatives of capitalist interests suggests that this is largely wishful thinking. To wit (though I'm too lazy to look at how valid the findings cited actually are; there's apparently a lot of room for mischief in this kind of data analysis):

Economists have engaged in some lively debates about how to measure and evaluate the effects of large fiscal adjustments episodes in OECD countries (Europe in particular). But a careful and fair reading of the evidence makes clear a few relatively uncontroversial points, despite the differences in approaches. The accumulated evidence from over 40 years of fiscal adjustments across the OECD speaks loud and clear:

• First, adjustments achieved through spending cuts are less recessionary than those achieved through tax increases.
• Second, spending-based consolidations accompanied by the right polices tend to be less recessionary or even have a positive impact on growth.

These accompanying policies include easy money policy, liberalisation of goods and labour markets, and other structural reforms.
. . .
Tax-based stabilisations not only eventually fail, in the sense that they are unable to stop the growth of the debt-to-GDP ratio. When these fiscal packages are announced entrepreneurs’ confidence falls sharply, and this is reflected in a fall in output. On the other hand, spending-based stabilisations (especially if accompanied by appropriate contemporaneous polices) do not negatively affect economic confidence contemporaneously. Moreover they are often accompanied by an increase in output within a year.

A metaphor from middle school

I don't actually remember when exactly this thought comes from, but in school, as a kid, I had a tendency to draw on and poke holes in erasers with a pen. This of course turned the eraser into an ugly mess, which it was impossible to fix. I would then be struck by the fact that some things, once ruined, never heal or grow back. It's actually kind of weird how vividly I remember that feeling, especially considering how little else I remember from before high school.

Organizational vs. ideological accounts of political struggle

Assuming that the politics is the determination of the actions of the state through the competing claims-making of various groups, including the personnel of the state as an organization, the following are two conceivable ways for one group to gain leverage over others.

1. The capacity to impose costs on other groups through coordinated or uncoordinated collective action. The electorate can impose the straightforward cost on certain officials of refusing their re-election, but this is limited by the necessity of a rather extensive organization to put forward a viable alternative candidate. Outside of the ballot box, large groups can impose costs on the government or on powerful interests, which then make their own demands on the state, via protests that disrupt the normal functioning of social relations and especially the economy. This is the standard sociological account of social movements including the unions and others of the 1930s (epitomized by the wave of sit-down strikes) and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Notably, the more a particular interest group has more members but fewer resources as individuals, the more organization is crucial to mobilizing the one piece of leverage they do have: pure numbers. In contrast, interests with fewer members but much greater control of resources--the classic example being the owners and managers of capitalist enterprises--the more it is possible for relatively uncoordinated actions to impost large costs on policymakers, for instance, removal of support from key officials, or a general slowdown of investment activity, or even the threat thereof.
2. The successful attempt to attach to one's program symbolic markers that, although their application is disputed, are generally accepted as valuable throughout a society. Political struggle is, thus, in substantial part a discursive struggle in which the stakes are such symbols as 'freedom,' 'the general interest,' 'fairness,' 'equal opportunity.' In this kind of account, the civil rights movement was ultimately successful because it was able to position itself as the continuation of political ideals of equal rights that are evident in the American political tradition going back at least to the Declaration of Independence, while their opponents were stick defending regressive racial hierarchy. In this way, the civil society groups that led the movement were in effect able to coerce national political leaders into bowing to their demands at the pain of being de facto opponents of formal political freedom and rights--a position that was obviously untenable in the American political culture. The challenge for this view is accounting for why one set of claims successfully achieves the desirable symbols, while others do not, and in particular that despite relatively rare exceptions, it is established powerful groups that are better able to achieve the labels they seek for their positions.

It is possible to effect a crude reconciliation of these two views by stipulating that the attachment of widely accepted symbolic value to a set of claims is a powerful force for the achievement of unity of purpose and commitment to action among an otherwise large and diffuse group, though it is one such factor among many others. This reconciliation has the virtue of explaining the importance of such discursive fights particularly when one group making claims is numbers-rich and resource-poor, since it is such a group that requires the collective organization and commitment that unifying symbols can help provide; indeed, the emergence of such groups as effective political forces often requires a process to discover shared interests and goals that can serve as foci for mobilization. On the other hand, the proposition that good arguments are not in themselves sufficient to mobilize a diffuse group suggests an explanation for the elite bias of claims to symbolic legitimacy: as much as unifying symbols are tools for collective action, the broader social recognition of the legitimacy of such symbolic claims is as much a result as a cause of successful mobilization.

This reconciliation perhaps would not satisfy a strong adherent to the second viewpoint, which is I think quite prominent in the practice of and commentary on politics. That is because it tends to reconcile the two views only by subordinating the 2nd to the 1st: collective action imposing costs on other groups is the sine qua non of political struggle, and discursive struggle is just one aspect of that, in part contributing to the mobilization of effective collective action and in part merely reflecting the "real" balance of political forces through the lens of journalism and public intellectual commentary within civil society.

The question, for me, is whether there really are cases where by dint of the discursive struggles of the public sphere, officials of the state were "forced" to adopt a policy symbolically marked by as following from a society's generally accepted values, in defiance of the relative capacity of interested groups to impose costs either directly or indirectly via other powerful interests. Of course, it is possible to imagine relatively "low stakes" questions, in which any decision by officials would elicit little positive support or resistance, but this too is a rather belittling suggestion for the role of discursive struggle. On the other hand, if in general both considerations point in the same direction--if that is, at the time at which the crucial decisions are made, the side with the greater practical capacity to impose costs also has won the most desirable symbols for it cause, and vice versa--it might perhaps be hard to distinguish between the two in practice.

Thus, much legislation and practically all regulations issued by state agencies (which often determines the details of how laws are actually enforced) are written with a great deal of input from individual corporations and business groups (or the think-tanks they fund). Such input is invariably phrased in terms of "general" concerns such as economic growth and the minimization of state burdens on private activity and, crucially, consumer choice. When this input plays a key role in the wording of laws and administrative rules, it could be said that officials "accept the arguments" in which the interests of those who make the arguments are presented as of general validity. It could also be said that the capacity of such groups to provide input to the legislative/regulatory process and to have that input accepted is a reflection of their power. The problem is that in the "normal" course of things, those groups don't particularly have to flex their power. It's true that they provide certain material benefits--contributions to politicians, junkets to all kinds of officials--but there is reason to doubt these are, taken individually, sufficient to "buy" officials' support. Nonetheless, it can be plausibly suggested that official deference to the input of businesses and their advocates follows a recognition, "on credit" as it were, that they could, if necessary, impose considerable costs on officials seen as uncooperative--for instance, although the material payments from powerful interests to individual elected officials are insufficient to account for specific policy positions, the threat of exclusion from the entire ecosystem of lobbyist "access" and political contributions would represent a cost that would potentially be politically fatal. Yet, this line of reasoning shades back into the idea that the claims of powerful groups are given "the benefit of the doubt," which does not obviate the need for those claims to be phrased in terms of at least prima facie general validity. If this is so, then it would suggest that attacks on that general validity, which seek to "uncover" its real basis in "partial" or "special" interests would have to be taken somewhat seriously by officials. Of course, "somewhat seriously" might amount to nothing more than a sentence in an official report to the effect that, "Concerns that policy a would be detrimental to public goods x, y, and z were found to be without merit." Symbolic challenge vanquished!

Airline bureaucracy

On Monday, after our original flight was cancelled and we were told we'd be put on a later flight from another airline, my sister and I tried to check into our new flight but were informed that although the seats on the plane were reserved for us, we had not been ticketed by our original airline. We had several hours before this new flight was scheduled to take off, so the fact that it took an hour and a half to straighten out this bureaucratic snafu only meant that our time was spent standing at service counters instead of sitting and reading. So I had little else to do but to reflect on the situation:

1. Our situation was a typical bureaucratic problem: the airlines need to keep track of hundreds of planes carrying thousands of passengers each, making sure each passenger gets onto the correct flight, and those who aren't supposed to do not. (In part, the system needs to be rigid because of security requirements put in place by the federal government, and behind it public political pressure.)
2. The airline thus develop procedures for categorizing individuals as belonging or not belonging on a given flight, and these procedures have several steps that are supposed to be carried out in a particular way: (apparently as we discovered on Monday), first the seat on the plane is "reserved"; then the individual is issued a "ticket" indicating that they are allowed to be on the plane; and then ticketed individuals are issued "boarding passes" that are the final marker that lets them get through the gate and onto the plane.
3. Problems arise when for whatever reason the regular procedures can't be fully followed. What happened on Monday--what is probably the most common cause of trouble--was that weather (in this case high winds) disrupted most of the flights on the entire east coast in the middle of the day, requiring the rapid reshuffling of hundreds if not thousands of passengers. The problem is particularly bad when the reshuffling crosses from one airline to another. What happens then (and if the attitude of the employees of both airlines on monday were any indication, the problem is quite common) is that there can easily be a mismatch of procedures: one side thinks they've done what they need to, but as far as the other side can determine, the status of the individuals who are being processed by the system hasn't yet reached a point that is expected and required for the next step to occur.
4. Usually, when dealing with bureaucracies, if one finds oneself stuck in between steps of a procedure that isn't proceeding like it's supposed to, the simplest response is to make a stink until one gets kicked up to a higher level of the bureaucracy. The hope is that one gets set to an officials who has the authority to override the regular procedures and arbitrarily attach the correct categorization to you.
5. The problem on Monday was that there appeared to be no such person with the prerogative to just, as my sister put it, write out a ticket for us by hand. Is this a result of security concerns? Downsizing in the airlines (there did appear to be insufficient staff to deal with the mass of delays from the win)? Irrational rationalization in which the computer system becomes the final arbiter, which regular desk staff lack the capability to override?
6. Oddly, one thing did work: even while we were being sent back and forth trying to get "ticketed," the text message flight status notification system was somehow correctly informed that we were on the new flight, and sent us regular updates on its status.

Feudal state formation and class formation

1. Skocpol comments that it is conceivably possible for a state, in a revolution, to act against the interests of the class that is dominant within it. This is insightful, yet simultaneously goes too far and not far enough. It does not go far enough insofar as it implies this is an exceptional state of affairs, when in fact it is a common situation for pre-modern states. It goes too far in suggesting that the state could contradict the class logic of the social-property relations on which it was based. Instead, the tendency for conflict between the state and dominant classes is produced as an essential feature of the class strategies of feudal social property relations.
2. There is a tendency in studies of state formation to treat social groups as "inputs" into the structure of the state, when in fact they are simultaneously "outputs." This is related to tendency, e.g. in Anderson, to see urban classes as somehow external to the feudal social formations.
3. Even Lachmann errs in speaking of the conflict of multiple elites with different institutional bases, when in fact the institutional set-up that defines positions for resource extraction is itself the form taken by feudal state formation.

Wow. Just wow.

This paper has to win the all-time prize for marshaling scientific jargon to repackage Victorian economic ethics. (obviously via my favorite bourgeois economist)

Some individuals, despite facing recurrent, severe adversities in life such as low socioeconomic status (SES), are nonetheless able to maintain good physical health. This article explores why these individuals deviate from the expected association of low SES and poor health and outlines a “shift-and-persist” model to explain the psychobiological mechanisms involved. This model proposes that, in the midst of adversity, some children find role models who teach them to trust others, better regulate their emotions, and focus on their futures. Over a lifetime, these low-SES children develop an approach to life that prioritizes shifting oneself (accepting stress for what it is and adapting the self through reappraisals) in combination with persisting (enduring life with strength by holding on to meaning and optimism). This combination of shift-and-persist strategies mitigates sympatheticnervous-system and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenocortical responses to the barrage of stressors that low-SES individuals confront. This tendency vectors individuals off the trajectory to chronic disease by forestalling pathogenic sequelae of stress reactivity, like insulin resistance, high blood pressure, and systemic inflammation. We outline evidence for the model and argue that efforts to identify resilience-promoting processes are important in this economic climate, given limited resources for improving the financial circumstances of disadvantaged individuals.

Sorry, the bourgeoisie has gotten tired of the welfare state, so you're just going to have to grin and bear it.

Very clever

Anything that implicitly compares the contemporary ruling class with medieval english barons is welcome.

The outcry by the English baronage over this shortfall would have warmed the heart of today’s most avid fiscal conservative. There being no liberal social programs available to cut -- the peasantry was pretty much expected to suffer and die in unalleviated poverty in the Middle Ages -- the exchequer focused instead on reducing foreign aid, which in this case meant discontinuing the policy of bribing the duke of Burgundy.

Ah, internet comments are wonderful

I usually avoid reading them only out of fear I'll plunge in and never resurface. This was in response to a NYT article about the discovery of fossils of a very large dinosaur that appears to have been covered in something like down feathers.

Michael Antebi     New York NY

Short Reminder:
On December 9, 2010 in The New York Times, science writer Nicolas Wade wrote: "Anthropologists have been thrown into turmoil about the nature and future of their profession after a decision by the American Anthropological Association at its recent annual meeting to strip the word ‘science’ from a statement of its long-range plan."

The American Museum of Natural History has a life-sized African diorama with a hairy male and female homonids walking upright—based on the finding of a set of footprints! Ian Tattersall paleogeneticist said they debated whether they had eyebrows or not !

This whole field has proven again and again that many of these researchers have lied and continue to lie. The most brazen—and unfounded—theories are proclaimed only to find the research was faked or non-existent.

Read pro-evolutionist Bill Bryson's best seller "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and discover on almost every other page the charlatanism, chicanery, lies, outright fraud—even murder—rampant in the sciences—especially paleontology.

Murder!

Double awesome is this super-earnest response to the comment by another reader:

DocM    New York

Lying is not what's happening. There are possibilities for multiple interpretations of archeological data, and scientists in the field are very emphatic in stating their ideas--more so than in most areas of science. If my interpretation differs from yours, it doesn't mean that either of us is lying, it's just that we need more conclusive data.

Ack, I can't stop. 

My favorite bourgeois economist is at it again

Because it's overpaid workers ("protected service sector jobs" = what exactly?) and not the rentiers who call the shots at the ECB.

Inflation fear and privileged service sector jobs:
The greater the number of protected service sector jobs in an economy, the more likely those citizens will oppose inflation.  Inflation brings the potential to lower real wages, possibly for good.  How many insiders, if they had to renegotiate their current deals, would do just as well?

Get the picture?

This is a neglected cost of protected service sector jobs, namely that the economy’s central bank will face strong political pressures not to inflate even when a looser monetary policy would be welfare-improving.

Western Europe most of all.  If you see that the young people in an economy aren’t doing nearly as well as the privileged insiders, you should suspect that the privileged insiders fear renegotiation and thus fear inflation.

Inflation is easier to sustain in rapidly growing economies where people are moving up various ladders quickly.

Perhaps we have lost the ability and the political economy to support inflation when needed.

An outline

I. Principles of Historical Political Economy

1. Feudal vs. capitalist social property relations
2. Quantitative sketch of the longue durée of economic history
3. The dynamics of political accumulation and feudal class formation
4. The transition to capitalism: contrasting England and France in the 16th-18th centuries
5. The bourgeois revolution?

II. The Devil's Bargain

1. State reform and capitalist economic development: Continental Europe in the 19th century
2. The European state system and the world economy: imperial rivalry
3. A senseless crime? The costs and benefits of imperialism
4. The exceptional case: Meiji Japan
5. Class war and culture war: politics in the capitalist states in the late 19th century
6. Socialism or barbarism?

III. The Invisible Statesmen

1. The promise of left-liberalism: J. M. Keynes tries to cheat the devil
2. The orthodox liberal critique: "incentives," "rigidity" and "malinvestment"
3. The Great Depression and the New Deal in the U.S.
4. Postwar Social Democracy in Europe
5. State developmentalism in East Asia, and its less successful counterparts elsewhere
6. The crisis of the 1970s and the neoliberal turn: the devil claims his due

Call for papers potpourri

I suppose it's good that the academy can still sometimes surprise me.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life Call for Papers:
Thematic issue: Muslims and ageing

The International referred journal Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of
Muslim Life welcomes and encourages the submission of articles which
reflect on ageing, perceptions of it and the impact that it has on
Muslim communities both in Muslim majority countries as well as
Muslims living in the west.

Questions and topics for discussion include, but are not limited to:

- The concept of ageing as discussed among Muslims

- Ageing identity and self among Muslims communities
- Challenges faced by Muslim communities as far as an increased ageing
population
- Changes in the care of the elderly among contemporary Muslim communities
- Problems that elderly Muslims face in the West as far as care and
support are concerned
- Ageing and faith
- Relations between the young and the old: inter-generational
conflict, respect, and veneration
- Political and social discrimination against  elderly Muslims.

Justice and Traditional Authority

As the local warrior classes gradually wrenched power from the aristocratic estate owners for whom they served as "stewards" from roughly the 12th century onwards, a key milestone was the acquisition of the power to resolve disputes among the peasants of the estate. The importance of this power was that it made the steward the de facto arbiter of property and production relations within the state. Above and beyond the steward's ability to seize land or demand tribute from the local peasants by brute force, the possession of judicial authority gave him a powerful lever to deepen his control of the estate and its resources. As the final authority in disputes over the boundaries of plots, or over relations of subordination among the peasantry (which did exist), or over the transfer or inheritance of land, the steward had the capacity to decide in the favor of the claimant who was more favorable to his own interests (including, in order to gain that favor, willing to make payments or perform services of some kind).

The distributional consequences of judicial authority are visible in other contexts than early medieval Japan. In Europe, the distinction between manorial justice (decided by the lord) and royal justice (decided by officials of the crown's courts) was the essence of the difference between serfdom and the freedom of the peasantry. In England, the crown's justice supplanted that of the seigneurial lords (at least in part) in the early modern era, whereas it was consolidated--in return for submission to the prince's fiscal and military projects--in parts of Germany.

The judicial powers of local lords is an almost archetypal example of "traditional" authority. What the manorial lord in Europe or the local samurai steward in Japan enjoyed was the prerogative to be the one to determine what is "just" within a certain purview. This position, as well as limitations on it, became a matter of "tradition," but its origin lay in the struggle for power between lords and their peasants on one side, and on the other, between different strata of political authorities (the crown and the nobility in Europe, the local warrior families and the courtly proprietors in Japan). Tradition was the sedimentation of the balance of power, and though it became a rallying point for the defense of the status quo, it was always vulnerable to shifts in the balance--typically in favor of "higher-level" political powers in the face of ongoing conflict or peasant resistance.

In other words, though I remember being mystified by it the first time I read it, I've come increasingly to think that Thrasymachus was right. Justice--or, to be precise, the recognized prerogative to declare what is just--is a reflection of the advantage of the stronger. What remains so paradoxical about his assertion, however, is that as a matter of definition, "the advantage of the stronger" is not justice but instead, quite straightforwardly, strength. There is a question, then, why "the stronger" seek to call their strength "justice," instead of relying on unadorned force majeur.

It is, I've always thought, almost certainly irrational to continually fight out the exact balance of power, since the fight itself (say, over how much tribute or service peasants perform for their lords) destroys resources directly and disrupts the process of production. The advantage of the stronger is never absolute, and there are, in other words, costs to the direct test of strength. Given that, it makes sense for both sides to come to a consensus on what the rough balance is. This consensus acknowledges which side has the upper hand, but also enshrines certain expectations on how ambitious it will actually be. This consensus is, of course, fragile--hence the frequency of rebellions over "innovations" by lords or royal officials.

Missing the point, a little

For some reason, sociologists tend to get really into weak criticisms of neoclassical economics.

Classical political economy was premised on the labor theory of value—the idea that there is a concrete, economically meaningful measure of value that guides economic organization. Further, there was the idea that the economic needs that individuals had were also concrete—the consumption goods that permitted life to proceed. These goods included items like food, clothing, shelter, medicines, and perhaps schooling. So economic activity, according to the classical economists, was about something objective.

Neoclassical economy, by contrast, rejected even the idea of utility as a concrete or objective human reality. Instead, modern economics bracketed the reality of needs in favor of a metaphysics of subjective preference.  Economists no longer needed to think about what people needed, but rather simply what they preferred; so the utilities "consumers" ascribed to outcomes could be discovered by the quasi-experiments of “revealed preference.” Welfare was then defined as the extent to which the individual can satisfy the range of subjective preferences he or she happens to have.  So classical and modern economic paradigms differ substantially on what economic activity ought to achieve: satisfaction of material needs, for the classical economists; and satisfaction of subjective preferences, for the modern economists.

This might, in fact, correspond to neoclassicals' own account of their distinction from the economics of the first half of the 19th century, but I think it's at best a distinction without a difference. After all, economics has always retained a concept of the "wage bundle," which are the real commodities that the mass of individuals buy with their incomes. This is itself a matter of "revealed preferences": it is simply an empirical regularity that there are certain goods that individuals buy first and give up last. But how different is this from classical political economy? I don't remember what Smith and Ricardo say about this, but for Marx, while there is theoretically a "value of labor-power," which is the (value of) the commodities that workers need to reproduce their capacity to work from day to day, he concedes that what exactly  those commodities are (and in what quantity) is not only an open question but is also historically and socially variable. Indeed, if we think about it, the neoclassicals have a point (which is why I suspect this distinction is their preferred presentation): while there are certain categories of goods that a undeniably necessary (for instance food and shelter), once we get beyond the absolute bare minimum there is immediately room for variation in individual preferences: for instance, given the opportunity would one want tastier or more varied food, or a larger or more comfortable home, or maybe in a more desirable location . . . ?

Likewise, I think this writer exaggerates the incompatibility of Rawls' deliberation in the original position with utilitarianism. The two can be quite easily reconciled under the (entirely realistic) assumption that "levels" of welfare are not really symmetrical. It's generally accepted that the marginal utility of income is a diminishing function, and I'd further bet that after a bit of wrangling even neoclassical economists would accept that at the very bottom of the scale, the "disutility" of marginal subsistence, let alone death, is so large as to outweigh almost any increase in income on the top end. It's true that neoclassical economics assumes that an institutional framework enabling basically free expressions of individual preferences through market choices exists and again by assumption deals with situations in which choices are not constrained by immanent starvation and so can freely make trade-offs between goods with finite utilities. Yet to criticize them on these grounds can be easily met: "Sure, institutions matter," (this is, after all, the new mantra of the international neoliberal development apparatus) and, "Yes, poverty constrains consumer choice, but the solution to poverty is economic growth" (which has the virtue of  being more or less true).

The intellectual converter

1. Recently, some economists and politicians have suggested that a shift in emphasis is needed away from simple quantitative measures of income (based on assumptions about the role of rational calculation in human decision-making and satisfaction) and towards alternative more nuanced understandings of "happiness" and "well-being." However, a closer look at the reasoning of these suggestions reveals that they boil down to the recognition of the importance "behavioral" or "irrational" factors for the purpose of maximizing economic productivity of individuals as consumers and employees.

2. Advertisers often play on consumers' sense of cynicism about the advertizing itself and on their dissatisfaction with a life dominated by work and consumption, trying in this way to position the products they are promoting as "with us" in our alienation with the economic world we live in.

These two statements are cynical, but granted that, they almost pass for a kind of common sense. In the hands of the intellectual, however, they are converted into this (William Davies in the NLR 71)

1'. "At key moments of crisis, capitalist accumulation has alternately drawn on those criticizing its unfairness (the ‘social critique’) and those criticizing its dullness (the ‘artistic critique’) in order to find ‘routes to its own survival’. In promising to answer these critics, it pledges to treat the moral and human injuries that it itself has enacted, thereby renewing its legitimacy." (71)

2.' "Advertising, like management theory, is fuelled by a critique of the dominant normative-economic regime within which it sits, facilitating safe acts of micro-rebellion against the macro-social order. It acts as capital’s own trusted moral and artistic critic in order to inspire additional psychological engagement on the part of ordinary worker-consumers. Dissatisfaction is reduced to a psychological tendency to be fed back into processes of production and consumption. As a result, understanding such psychological qualities as impulse, libido and frustration—often in the micro-social context of the ‘focus group’—has been key to the development of advertising since the 1920s." (73)

I understand in principle what he's going for here. The idea is that there are ostensibly two opposing ways to look at the "behavioral" turn in economics:

T: It represents a scientific development that, appropriately, responds to empirical shortcomings in existing theories to propose a better, that is to say more accurate and more predictive, conceptualization of a key issue in economics, namely individuals' decision "function."

vs.

A: The cynical reading in (1) above.

Yet, it could be claimed that while (A) makes a valid criticism of (T), it is nonetheless something of a caricature, since it is true that behavioral economics is attempting to grapple, albeit in a inevitably one-sided way, with something that is manifestly inadequate with the current state of economics. Thus, the goal is to synthesize both the inherent limitations in behavioral economics, which provides the basis for the cynical outlook a (A), while resisting the urge to merely "debunk" (S) and instead locating its logic within those limitations, and in this way gesturing towards how this logic immanently, albeit by omission, highlights those very limitations. To wit:

Human ill-being is never merely an absence of pleasure, which is one thing that consumer society can usually promise to avoid; nor is it even an absence of any substantive meaning, which the ‘spirit’ of capitalism can partially deliver on, if only as an epiphenomenon. Followed to its logical conclusion, it is an absence of democracy, and consequently a basis for resistance and critique. Happiness economics starts with a psychological interest in hedonia and the mind, strays into ethical questions of eudaimonia and society, and eventually grapples clumsily with the Kantian dilemma of Enlightenment—what is all this rationality, efficiency and technology ultimately for? The meaninglessness of utilitarianism, and the emptiness of hedonism, are now subject to empirical and statistical analysis. On the one hand, this is a co-option and subsumption of core Enlightenment and critical thinking, to rival—but exceed—the capacity of management and marketing discourse to internalize the critique of capitalism. To the pessimist, the fact that economists have discovered unhappiness and history may look like the final triumph of immanence. The optimistic reading would be that when positivists seek to grasp and quantify the immeasurable problem of unhappiness, they encounter causes of that unhappiness that are far larger than economic or medical policy can calculate or alleviate. Is it too much to hope that, if critique can be rendered psychological, then the reverse may also be true: that mental ill-being may be rendered critical? (80)

 So yeah, I think I see how it's supposed to work but I'm not really sure it's worth the trouble.


While I'm talking about this particular essay, I think this is just a deep misreading of the dynamics of capitalism:

Capitalism would seem to require an optimal balance of happiness and unhappiness amongst its participants, if it is to be sustainable. The need for dissatisfaction is implicitly recognized by Keynesian economics, which sees the capitalist system as threatened by the possibility of individual or collective satisfaction, manifest as a demand shortfall. Capitalism’s gravest problem is then how to maintain governments or consumers in a state of dissatisfied hunger, and how to find ever more credit through which to feed that hunger. The defining difference between the Keynesian era and the neo-liberal era was simply that the former depended on an insatiable, debt-fuelled, ‘unhappy’ state, whereas the latter depended on an insatiable, debt-fuelled, ‘unhappy’ consumer. The question of who or what is to inject such an appetite in future has no apparent answer as yet. (71)

I seriously suspect this kind of confusion arising from reading Adorno without Marx. I suppose in principle "collective satisfaction" could suppress aggregate demand and thus create problems for the realization of profit by capitalists. Indeed, in a long historical perspective, the possibility of non-market subsistence by peasants was one of two structural factors distinguishing the economic dynamics of pre-capitalist economies from those of capitalism. However, once the mass of the population has been "liberated" from the peasant community and its mechanisms for the direct provision of subsistence, the problem becomes not that capitalists might not be able to entice consumers to pay for what they're selling but instead that capitalists are frequently disinclined to invest sufficiently in production to employ the entire population. Or to put it another way, the health of the economy--from the perspective of providing for the livelihood of the population--is held hostage to the "investment climate," or to use Keynes' phrase, capitalists' "animal spirits." The great paradox is that it's a hostage situation in which there is no one with whom to negotiate--this, as an aside, is the essence of neoliberalism. "Capitalism's gravest problem" is not the maintenance of "a state of dissatisfied hunger," but instead the irrationalities that arise necessarily from property relations that allows decisions about investment and thus production and employment to be contingent on the realization of profit by individual owners.

Feudal class formation and the ideology of the modern "upper middle class"

The modern upper middle class outnumbers the narrowly capitalist bourgeoisie significantly, and probably has for the entire history of capitalism. What is more, on the level of politics and culture, the label 'bourgeois' as conventionally used applies as well, if not better, to the strata of educated professionals and technicians, some of whom are employed by capitalist firms (often in support or managerial functions), but many others (probably the majority) are at least partially insulated from the capitalist market by institutional protections, including employment by the state. The intellectual producers and political operators of bourgeois society are usually drawn not directly from the capitalist class, but instead from this "upper middle" stratum.

I would suggest that this stratum is the direct descendent of, and shares important characteristics with, the educated legal and administrative officials of the absolutist states. This predecessor of the modern professional class was a product of the centralizing projects of the state, and bound up with its fiscal apparatus in various ways--indeed, since its rules of reproduction were essentially to secure a share, however small, of the extractive capacity of the state (and in some places, the residual seigneurial powers of the nobility), it can be characterized as a stratum of cadet members of the nobility.

Yet, the specific relationship of these "cadets" to the state's political power generated a set of strategies and orientations that were not only distinctive at the time (and gave rise to conflicts with the old nobility) but also have a clear family resemblance with those of the modern upper middle stata.

1) They were marked by a veneer of individual achievement: inherited wealth and office were important supports, but each generation needed to pursue its own career path (including crucially education), and some amount of competition for positions was unavoidable because the number of cadets far exceeded the capacity (or desire) of the state to provide well-remunerated places for them. As such, particularly in contrast to the aristocracy with its inherited titles and access to the royal court, members of this stratum tended to think of themselves as possessing "merit." This ideology, including the central institutional position of education (not to mention the state itself), has survived to this day.

2) In contrast with the aristocracy, which ideally possessed political power as a patrimony, members of this stratum were clearly agents of greater social powers, whether the monarchy or (in the case of lawyers working to improve seigneurial extraction) the nobility. This was true even if lesser offices were to some extent treated as private property, since the monarchy had a tendency to continually erode offices in its state-building improvisations. This of course contributed to the sense that members of this stratum needed to compete for their positions (and were thus socially mobile on the basis of their merit). Even if they obtained their positions by purchase or patronage, they to a greater extent than an aristocracy that merely enjoyed its patrimonial rights performed a social function (or, at least, rendered useful service).

3) From these factors arose a combination of individualism and a sense of membership in (and tendency to make claims in the name of) a political "public." The importance of this combination was in its difference from the characteristic orientation of a feudal nobility in position of some degree of autonomous political and coercive power. While a cadet official of the Absolutist era (like a professional or upper-level white collar worker today) possesses their own individual "merit" (and more concretely, their educational credentials and social ties), for the feudal aristocrat this kind of self-possession was secondary to mastery over an organization of military subordinates and territorial subjects. Conversely, while the feudal nobility could and did ally to defend the privileges of their "estate," these privileges were directly tied to the maintenance of the nobility's patrimonial political prerogative. The cadet stratum, however, had no such prerogative to defend, and no one of its members could seek to appropriate some substantial segment of political sovereignty--which was the program of the aristocracy right up to the end of the ancien regime (though of course it was always presented as a REclaiming of rights usurped by the crown). Instead, its political orientation centered on the control of the state as an institution--specifically, its openness to "individuals of merit" and to the public made up of such individuals. This has contradictions, no less than the position of the aristocracy (the fragmentation of sovereignty imperils the preservation of the rule of the nobility as a class), namely that there are too many individuals who think they have "merit," and the institutionalization of political power of a politically responsible "public" (i.e., one that excluded unwanted radical views) is far easier said than done. (In this, the notables' turn to Napoleon is the direct parallel of the current obsession of the American punditry with "moderates.")



If we reprise the question: What is the third estate? The answer should focus on these factors, which have more to do with absolutism than the rise of capitalism, and which can be traced as well in the "loyalist" ideology of 19th century Japan. The recognizable modernity of the enlightenment thought that became the discursive grist of the "bourgeois" revolution arises from the continuity of the forms of life of the "upper middle" strata that include the political and intellectual classes, even while the mode of production in which such strata enjoy a partially-insulated existence has been transformed fundamentally.