To Review or Strut Your Feathers

I have been reading The American Prospect since it was launched back in 1992, and it is one of my favorite publications, but even with a magazine you like, you are bound to sometimes be disappointed. One such instance happened today when I read Chris Arnade's snarky review of Anne Case and Angus Deaton's new book "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism" and Nicholas Krystof and Sheryl Wudunn's "Tightrope - Americans Reaching for Hope." I have only read "Deaths of Despair", but I often read Nick Krystof's NYT columns, so I think I know where he comes from.

Arnade writes that Case and Deaton are "good enough scholars" and he can't really complain on their path-breaking research, "but it can’t replicate spending years in a neighborhood where you are woken up nightly by sirens, or a desperate knock from a neighbor whose son just OD’d, or the police investigating a killing out front." Well, he could have said the same thing about Karl Marx, who spent much of his time reading the British parliament's Blue Books at the British Museum's Reading Room. 

The critique of Krystof and Wudunn is even more bizarre, depicting them as naive philanthropists. "They insist that working-class kids leave behind their former lives, give up their worldview, and become educated. All with guidance, help, and enlightenment from America’s new noble class." 

At the end of the review Arnade goes all out, accusing the authors of "intellectual colonialism from the educated elite", which he accuses of wanting to "strip-mine" the poor, "taking what they want and leaving behind towns filling with death and despair. Lots of Americans want to stop being told they are on the wrong ladder. They want to live in a country that doesn’t insist you have to live like the elites. They want to stop being considered losers for not wanting to shape their life around building a résumé."

If there is anybody being condescending, it is not the authors, but the reviewer. 

I was surprised and disappointed to find this subpar piece in The American Prospect. 

Looking at Economic Policy from a Perspective of Economic Dignity

About a year ago, when spring was just another spring, Gene Sperling, who was National Economic Adviser for both Clinton (1997-2001) and Obama (2011-2014) wrote a very interesting essay for Democracy - A Journal of Ideas. The first paragraph makes you wonder if he reflects on missed opportunities, since he was there as an adviser during a time when two Democratic Presidents focused much of their attention on Wall Street (and where their top economic advisers came from firms like Goldman Sachs) at the expense of Main Street. Sperling opened his essay Economic Dignity with these words:

For all the things we find time for in the ongoing economic policy debates I have seen or been part of over the last 30 years, there seems to me too little reflection on the most basic economic question of all: What exactly is our ultimate economic goal in terms of increasing human happiness and well-being?

 And soon he adds:

Over the years, I have found myself stepping outside of the normal metrics that define our national economic dialogue to ask myself: What would a person on his or her death bed say mattered most in his or her economic life? That is the question that guides this essay. It seeks neither to explore highly technical issues of economic measurement nor sort out competing theories of social justice. It is rather one policymaker’s attempt to go out of the comfort zone of numbers to delve into this larger question. 

What follows is an interesting and thoughtful discussion of the role - and often lack of role for - economic dignity in modern economic-political praxis. It is admittedly a vague concept, but if you suffer from having your dignity ignored, you know what it means without having to google it.

As University of Michigan philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has written, compared to the focus on getting jobs, there is an eerie degree of silence on the arbitrary domination so many millions of Americans experience when they are actually working. To start, this means elevating worker dignity when making cost-benefit regulatory decisions—such as in the case of maximum line speeds in the poultry and hog industries. Oxfam and the National Employment Law Project have rightly called those industries out for leading to injuries or to the humiliation of denied bathroom breaks that leave workers no option but to wear diapers. 

Recognizing the fundamental importance of economic dignity has a deep impact on a wide range of policy strategies, including Universal Basic Income (UBI), which is a much more complicated and troublesome policy than some of its supporters understand.

It's a very interesting essay, and well worth your time.

A Brief Reflection on Hirschman's Shifting Involvements in the Time of COVID-19

Rereading Albert O. Hirschman's short, but extremely insightful book "Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action." (Princeton University Press, 1982).

We're now living in a moment of "shifting involvements", when "me first" is replaced by "us", where individualism and is replaced by collective action and public norms. Joe Biden will replace Donald Trump, and narrow-minded selfishness is replaced by progressive social change, much higher taxes on the rich, expanded public healthcare and a society where  inequality is replaced by inclusiveness.

Previous posts related to Albert O. Hirschman:

Are we heading towards a new 1968? (2014)

Robert Kuttner on A. O. Hirschman (2013)

First Biography of Albert O. Hirschman (2013)

The Social Impact of the Great Recession (2009)

On Pascal Boyer's Minds Make Societies - A Comment On A Review

I haven't seen a lot of articles about Pascal Boyer's book Minds Make Societies, but then I happened upon Mark Athitakis review, which is fairly good, although he was mistaken when he wrote:

"What’s missing from Minds Make Societies is a sense that humanity could educate or adapt its way out of its worst activities, rather than simply regress toward them. But if we are intelligent enough to comprehend these processes, we’re theoretically capable of addressing their worst outcomes. This isn’t an impossible goal: Societies have fought their way out of tribalism before, even without warfare."

As a counterexample he refers to Kwame Anthony Appiah who in his book The Honor Code discussed "dueling, foot-binding, slavery in the British Empire." However, this critique doesn't affect Boyer, who wrote about how foot-binding was overcome when opponents made a pact that they would not let their children marry a women with bound feet. So it is not true that Boyer leaves us without hope of changing oppressive cultures.

on Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create, by Pascal Boyer
(October 14, 2018)