Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation

Jeff Ely's Intermediate Micro Course

Jeff El’s Intermediate Micro Course:

• Welfare Economics
• Utilitarianism
• Incentives and Game Theory
• Auctions
• Vickrey-Clark-Groves
• Second-Best Mechanisms
• Market Mechanisms
• Large Public Goods
• Profit-Maximizing Mechanisms

Aimai on Right-Wing Reaction to Chicago's Olympic Bid

No More Mister Nice Blog: The whole thing is fascinating on a number of levels. First, its been standard operating procedure for the right wing to find an “enemy city” and an enemy people within the US itself to run against—and from that point on everything that is good or bad about that city, or for that city, is seen through the lens of a zero sum game. If its good for that city/its bad for the republicans, if its bad for that city/its good for the republicans. "Ford to [New York]: Drop Dead!" anyone? George Bush ran against Massachusetts over and over again, as well as against other states—naming names, distinguishing himself by denying (for example) that he was born in CT/the east coast. No modern democratic candidate would ever dream of running against an entire part of the country. Dean, for example, explicitly tried to include southerners in to what he was doing. You never saw Kerry attack Texas or Texas mores. He wanted Texan votes. You saw the entire Republican party swing into action and attack New Orleans and the state of Louisiana as well as individual Katrina victims and the press didn't think anything of it.

At a media level: O’Reilly, as others have noted, explicitly wished for the destruction of SF—that it be left undefended as a kind of non America. Cokie Roberts referred to Hawaii as not really American and Obama as somehow foreign for vacationing there. Savage (IIRC) loudly proclaimed his hatred for New York and specifically for the 9/11 victims and widows.

But the Republicans always need an internal enemy. This is just the latest incarnation.

The other thing that is going on is a similar strange over identification with the body of the king and therefore with the strength and potency of the usurper’s body. When Bush was King the strength, manliness, genitalia, swagger, compassion, and even thumbsucking need for his own pillow at night were explicitly celebrated. Bush was our King, and thus all credit that accrued to him accrued to us. But what happens when the new King is a usurper or a changeling child? This is explicitly the case, for Republicans at this point. And they are going through all the stages of discovering how uncomfortable it is to be identified with a symbol and a person who you otherwise reject. We're all Dixie Chicks now!

When the Republicans obsesses about our “Foreign Image” and Obama as strong dictator/weak pussy. As other people have pointed out they consistently represent him as “Chamberlain on Foreign Policy” and “Hitler on Domestic Policy” but they are happy to play off these oppositions and flip it where the flip makes Obama look bad, or worse look illegitimate.

We have to understand that the Republican Party at this point has no real program—neither foreign nor domestic. Their programs and policies are purely reactive, as well as reactionary. Senator DeMint’s pro-coup policy is a perfect example. The Republican Party and the American People have no legitimate dog in this fight. Why’s he there? Why does a dog lick its balls? All that they have is an unbroken cry of primal rage that they don’t control the horizontal and they don’t control the vertical. And all that they can try to do is get back in the game by controlling, as they see it, the optics of the situation.

So the whole focus is on trying to figure out what makes Obama look bad to other people. They don’t care whether its logical (countries like to have the Olympics, brings money in), or historically relevant (Bush wanted the Olympics to be in Chicago and would have lobbied hard for it), or even sane (Obama wears mom jeans! the sexiest man alive is not sexy! Obama uses a teleprompter! A well known author, speaker, teacher is actually really stupid!). That’s the strategy. What’s the payoff? Well, at this point, they are hoping the payoff is real, as in their “side” sort of “owns” the week in news. But really of course the payoff is purely psychological. They can’t help themselves. They are really hurt and angry that their politics and policies are dominated by “that one” from “the other side.” And they want and need to share their hurt with the rest of the country.

Can we avoid becoming part of their little psychodrama? This point was raised on an earlier thread at Baloon Juice. And the answer there—Elle’s (or Elie?) and General Winfield Stuck, I believe, argued that we have to keep politely and insultingly focused on what is important, while making fun of them a teeny bit. I think that’s right. And ultimately I think that is what is happening. The tea parties, the cheering for the loss of the Olympics, the sobbing “he’s a terrorist” and “where’s the birth certificate” and “you’re going to kill granny” is starting to look bad to the general public. They had to turn the control of the imagery over to a stupid, slovenly, fat, hysterical, angry, sobbing, spiteful, set of “not ready for prime time” losers with the August recess. They don’t fully control the image of their party anymore—not on TV and not on the streets. That is really hurting them with the general public. And they know it.

So we can’t ignore them because that enables them to maintain a two track system in which dignified elder statesmen speak up for a frightened but powerless imaginary majority of white Americans. We have to let them, or force them, to own their hysterics and their holy rollers and their sobbing, bitching, whining, moaning, out to lunch minority. We have to keep pointing out just how childish, spiteful, stupid, and besides the point the right wing’s fixation on Obama is.

They are explicitly saying that if Obama is America then they hate America. And any thing or person they identify with Obama will come in for the same kind of hatred and obsessive spite. But while this works for them it can't really work for the rest of the country, can it? I mean, for the duration, Obama is America on the world stage. And if they are going to aim their anger at everything and everyone that has ever touched Obama, or been touched by him, they are going to have to aim their fire at pretty much everyone in the country. That's what it comes down to, doesn't it? If Obama is Hawaiian Hawaii's out, if Obama is Chicago, Chicago's out, if Obama is Black, black people are out, if Obama is mainline Christian, mainline Christian's are out, if Obama is an elitist banker type, elitist banker types are out, if Obama is a sexy husband, sexy husband's are out (they threw a fit over his taking his wife out to a special dinner, remember!), if Obama talks to school kids, talking to school kids are out, if Obama visits the public parks, public parks are out.

Within the party this can look like another round of the Life of Brian's famous PFOJ sketch. Its all fun and games until you start insisting that "if you really want to join the People's Judean Front...you have to really hate the Romans..." if everyone around you, at some point, is going to be called a Roman. In very short order there will be no constituency, no part of the country, and no individual voter who the Republicans and their media representatives haven't first tied to Obama and then attacked as race, class, culture, or religious traitors. The bigger Obama gets and the more evil, well--the more evil all his imagined supporters. Its hard to walk that back. They are trying to walk it back already--they started out the summer calling Medicare botched socialism and eventually realized that they were telling grandma she was a botched socialist leech. Graham tried to split the baby on that one yesterday when he said this:

"Do I want some of his policies to fail? You better believe it," he said. "Do I want him to fail? No. Because he's my commander-in-chief."

Graham realizes the danger that his party is in--they are tied to a very vociferous, angry, hysterical, irrational, and spiteful base and as long as that is the public face of their party they won't be able to win back any voters. But he's not a Republican for nothing--he's not smart enough, or not sane enough, or honest enough to be able to differentiate between his party's will to power and a rational democratic system. A good person would never have wound up his pitch to the voters with "I want Obama's policies to fail." No liberal ever said that they wanted Bush's war in Iraq to "fail"--they might have thought and believed that it was bad policy, and that it wouldn't work. But failure of any major policy initiative has so much punishing fallout that we never, ever, hope for it. The fact that Graham couldn't figure out a way to say that is shocking but not surprising. He went as far as he could go with a party and a base that will take even that anodyne fact of political life as a slap in the face.

Daniel Davies: Ask a Nineteenth-Century Whaling Expert

Ask a Nineteenth-Century Whaling Expert: My latest column at “Whale Central Station” is up, exposing the leftist myth of finite whale supplies.

1. Whales breed. Therefore, the potential supply of whales is unlimited.

2. As whaling technology improves, our ability to exploit this limited supply of whales becomes ever-greater. A few years ago, 40 whales in a four year trip was regarded as good going. Modern Norwegian whalers capture and process 40 whales a month. All of the estimates of the “sustainability” of the whale-based economy were put together before such inventions as exploding harpoons. And remember that the supply of whales is se

lf-replenishing. Leftists seem not to understand that whales have sex. 3. Reducing whaling would cost vast amounts of money and destroy our economy; credible estimates would suggest that without whale-oil lamps we would all sit around in the dark until we die. This money would better be spent on providing aid to the Inuit.

1. We can’t give the Inuit property rights over their whales to help them manage the speed of whaling, because that’s just politically impractical.

2. Arrrrr!

Andrew Seal: Stuart Hall and the Birmingham (U.K.) Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) and Its Progeny

The Valve - A Literary Organ | The Hardest Road to Renewal or, Cultural Studies Now!: Joel Pfister ("The Americanization of Cultural Studies,” Yale Journal of Criticism 4:2 {Spring 1991}).... Pfister actually took a very different view... assessing the conflict between the U.S. scholars and Stuart Hall (who spoke at the conference and pronounced U.S. cultural studiess to be in a “moment of danger") as indicative of the path U.S. scholars had taken toward a “post-political” engagement with popular culture, toward cultural studies as “interpretive performance” rather than critique,” toward an abandonment of history and a reconstitution of “power solely as a problem of ‘textuality.’”...

Foremost, Pfister says, the context of the British Old Left was the starting block for the CCCS, but also its main antagonist: “Hall’s stress on culture grew out of the pressing need to unlearn some of the assumptions, strategies, and goals of the Old Left,” doing so by “recogniz[ing] culture as a productive, determining force in its own right and not merely as a reflection or expression of the economic base” rather than by privileging “members of the working-class as the universal subjects of history” and focusing on the “determinations” of “mechanisms like competition, monopolistic control, and imperial expansion.” Furthermore, the work being produced by CCCS was being disseminated through non- or semi-academic channels (NLR, Marxism Today).... “The New Left’s cultural studies was indivisible from the project of regrouping in response to the predicament of socialism within the crisis of cold war capitalism.” This context simply could not be imported to the U.S. along with the texts (Althusser, Gramsci, et al.) which the CCCS researchers and theorists were using to make their breakthroughs.

Instead, the field of action shrank from society to the academy; rather than social transformation, disciplinary sublation was the goal.... Pfister also questions some of the terms used to describe cultural studies work as already inviting a considerable degree of de-politicization or introversion, and this is probably worth quoting in full:

Words like ‘intervention’ and ‘interrogation’ are meant to signify the cultural studies critic’s serious ‘oppositional’ stance towards hegemonic traditions of knowledge production. These two words carry some obvious militaristic and disciplinary connotations: armies intervene and spies are interrogated; police intervene and suspects are interrogated. ‘Intervention’ and ‘interrogation’ have given critical theorists in US English departments a powerful self-image and sense of mission. Personally, I am delighted that literary critics in both Britain and the US are ‘intervening’ in literary criticism and ‘interrogating’ a canon that have [sic] frequently been misrepresented as having no political agenda. But I am also bothered because this discourse of intervention seems to romanticize the critic’s academic role as sufficiently ‘oppositional’… What is needed in the US now is certainly not a postmodern romanticization of the ‘political-intellectual’ but a greater historical understanding of the social, political, and academic conditions within which a discourse of ‘intervention’ seemed to make sense for those British intellectuals who practiced cultural studies because it was unmistakably one necessary dimension of a larger intervention underway...

The exchange between Bérubé and the UC-Davis students is fairly exemplary.... Bérubé seems to be hoping for a culling or a tightening or focusing of cultural studies onto a few specific (and highly valuable) questions: “complicating the political-economy model in media theory, […] complicating our accounts of neoliberalism, and… convincing people inside and outside the university that cultural studies’ understanding of hegemony is a form of understanding with great explanatory power—that is to say, a form of understanding that actually works.” But while these questions seem to be setting the terms for a definition of what a successful intervention might be, they actually draw back from doing so. The rhetoric he uses of “complicating” is, I think, taking a step back from the more confrontational discourse of “intervention,” as in the end “complicating” terms like ‘neoliberalism’ already understood to be immensely fraught and unstable seems more gestural than substantive—it pushes the focus back onto the object: the participle “complicating” is so blank that we move immediately toward whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing this underdefined action to. And a similar thing happens with the last phrase: “an understanding that actually works” again directs us away from the action and towards what it stands in apposition to—the point is that hegemony is important, not what specifically we’re doing to it.

Similarly, the UC-Davis students interestingly do not read Bérubé’s critique as being one about how they should be going about their work, but as a dismissal of what it is they work on.... ‘No,’ they’re saying, ‘it’s not just Madonna; it’s the war on terror too.’...

Pfister, I think, helps us see that this type of move away from self-critique of methodology toward squabbles over content or subject matter isn’t just about re-focusing on methodology in an abstract manner, but that what is required is a firm historical understanding of methodology, how and why the specific methods of “intervention” or “resistance” are taken up. Without this historical understanding, the discursive formulations we use to describe our methodology ("complicating," “problematizing,” etc.) lose their character as actual maneuvers or strategies and that becomes the type of problem Pfister saw in 1991 and that we can still see quite plainly today.

Michael Berube: They call it Theory Monday

They call it Theory Monday — Crooked Timber: Let me propose that cultural studies can be considered a salient field, though not fixed for all time, in the following ways:

(1) it developed (and continues to develop) a rich “culture and society” school of criticism, in which the many and various meanings of the first term (from the Arnoldian to the anthropological) are tracked with relation to the contours of the formal and legal apparatus of the latter term.  For instance: in 1993, Stuart Hall argued, “far from collapsing the complex questions of cultural identity and issues of social and political rights, what we need now is greater distance between them.  We need to be able to insist that rights of citizenship and the incommensurabilities of cultural difference are respected and that the one is not made a condition of the other.” This is not simply a condition-of-England question (as some people have complained about the “culture and society” tradition); it is critical to any attempt to think about hijab-wearing schoolgirls in France or Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists refusing medical care for their children in the US.  Yes, this school of thought arose out of radical historians’ work on the English working classes, but it didn’t stay there and doesn’t need to. The Empire Strikes Back:  Race and Racism in 70s Britain and Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack:  The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation are responses to (and therefore part of) this tradition, and their revisionary accounts of British identity arguably helped result in the Parekh Report.

(2) it developed (and continues to develop) a rich tradition of analyzing the functions of mass media and mass culture in industrialized democracies.  The tradition was kicked off by Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and the broadly provocative final chapter of Williams’ Culture and Society, and has gone in, oh, roughly a thousand directions since, mostly in critical dialogue with the tradition of the Frankfurt school and the political economy wing of communications studies.  As with (1), there’s a lot of room for maneuver here, and any number of ways to go in the future.  But usually, cultural studies sees the “political economy” approach to mass media as Grossberg does—as necessary but finally insufficient for an explanation of how people understand media.  As I put it in my post on Manufacturing Consent, sometimes people respond to mass media by saying “this is bullshit,” and writing scathing liberal/left critiques of the mass media; or sometimes people say “this is bullshit” and proceed to blow a lot of Hot Air about how Rachel Ray is sending seekrit terrorist keffiyeh messages with the help of Dunkin Donuts and the librul media.  People are funny that way: for a variety of reasons, they sometimes refuse to believe what they’re told.

(3) in the 1970s, it developed New Left-inflected analyses of youth subcultures, “resistance through rituals,” and subcultural formations hovering around things like punk and ska.  This is the branch of the field that eventually led to too-celebratory accounts of fandom in the 1990s, and indeed it could be (and has been) argued that it romanticized white working-class boys back in the day.  But it served as a necessary rebuke to moral panics about “mugging” in the 1970s, as well as to a persistent kind of leftish moralism that sees only decay and hears only noise when it turns to the passions and pastimes of These Kids Today.  And it gave rise to some great, terrain-transforming feminist work on romance novels, slasher movies, soap operas, porn, etc.

(4) out of its work on subcultures, its work on mass media, and its work on culture and society, it developed (and continues, etc.) a Gramscian or neo-Gramscian or post-Gramscian analysis* of the dismantling of the postwar welfare-state consensus, the rise of the new right, and the workings of hegemonic political projects in civil society.  The impetus for this school was the rise of Thatcherism in the UK, but, again, it didn’t have to stay there and doesn’t need to.  It served as a necessary rebuke to the “body snatchers” theory of the left’s decline, as when Hall wrote, “Of course, there might be an essential Thatcherite subject hiding or concealed in each of us, struggling to get out.  But it seems more probable that Thatcherism has been able to constitute new subject positions from which its discourses about the world make sense.”  And it also tries to serve—though, as I argued in the Chronicle essay, not with great success so far—as a corrective to the “blame it all on neoliberalism” and “blame it all on false consciousness” tendencies in leftist thought.  Additionally, this tradition’s insistence on the diffuseness of “wars of position” enlisted it on the side of the “merely cultural” left in Ye Olde “Two-Lefts” Debate.  Again, Hall, from “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity”:

The effect [of Gramsci’s work] is to multiply and proliferate the various fronts of politics, and to differentiate the different kinds of social antagonisms.  The different fronts of struggle are the various sites of political and social antagonism and constitute the objects of modern politics, when it is understood in the form of a “war of position.”  The traditional emphases, in which differentiated types of struggle, for example, around schooling, cultural or sexual politics, institutions of civil society like the family, traditional social organizations, ethnic and cultural institutions and the like, are all subordinated and reduced to an industrial struggle, condensed around the workplace, and a simple choice between trade union and insurrectionary or parliamentary forms of politics, is here systemically challenged and decisively overthrown.  The impact on the very conception of politics itself is little short of electrifying.

(5) As the UC Davis letter says, and many many others.  You’ve got transnational cultural studies dealing with diaspora and global flows, refugees and immigration; you’ve got cultural studies of science and technology; you’ve got cultural studies of disability and embodiment (hey, I do that stuff!), and so forth.  But I think it might be the effort to call these things by (something like) these more specific names, and to try to explain where they do and don’t intersect with the schools of thought sketched out above.

Finally, I think one of the best responses to my argument was one of the first, from way back when I delivered that paper to the Cultural Studies Association this past April:  that of my Penn State colleague Jeff Nealon, who said in the Q/A after that panel, and then developed the argument later that night over a couple of beers, that one could argue, contra me, that cultural studies has changed a great deal about the way humanists and social scientists think and work—insofar as nobody goes around anymore proposing to study this one text or that one event in isolation from everything else.  Everyone (well, just about everyone) knows that you’re not done with the analysis, you can’t punch out and go home, until you’ve located the text or event or object in some wider network of relations and explained what it’s doing there.  (Or to use the proper terms of art, until you’ve located the object or practice in relation to the various cultural formations and historical conjunctures to which it is or has been articulated.)  In that sense, Cultural Studies® may have had much less of an impact that people hoped or feared twenty years ago, but a lower-case and amorphous cultural studies has become lingua franca, so to speak, in dozens of fields.  I told Jeff at the time that I would still want to show up at a Cultural Studies Association conference panel on “the university after cultural studies” and refuse the invitation to triumphalism.  But I think his counterargument has considerable merit, so I’ll close with it, and turn things over to you.

John Emerson: Attendant Lords: Trollblog

Attendant Lords « Trollblog: The discipline of economics provides another striking case of the paradigm-enforcement described by Preston, which is in fact characteristic of much of the modern university. In 1982 Nobelist Wassily Leontieff wrote “The methods used to maintain intellectual discipline in the country’s most influential economics departments can occasionally remind me of those employed by the marines to maintain discipline on Parris Island.” (q. Redman pp. 158-9: compare Putnam’s quote above.) As in philosophy, the training serves to drive out many or most potentially independent thinkers: “By the time that students are a couple of years into their studies, both these questions [about rationality of agents and about the validity of modeling] are forgotten. Those students that remain troubled by them have quit the field; those that remain have been socialized and no longer ask about such things” (John Sutton in Coyle, pp. 249-50). In economics, the dominance of the unnamed old boys network (”more club than profession”, according to Schumpeter: Redman, p. 166) is at least as strangling as in philosophy: “The leading journals are extraordinarily dominant and consequently receive many more submissions than they can publish” (Coyle, p. 250). The power of the old boy networks, in economics as in philosophy, is shown by the fact that their members are never named, not even by their opponents — survival within the profession depends on gaining their approval. Few or none of the critical books I’ve read about philosophy or economics have ever fingered any specific person as an oppressive influence on the profession.

The orthodoxy enforced in economics is methodological — specifically, mathematical modeling. “The reason why many economists think that Galbraith wasn’t one of us lies in his methodology…. many of us spurn Galbraith because he wasn’t a modeler.” (Coyle, p. 231 ) “Our argument is that modern mainstream economics is open to new approaches, as long as they demonstrate a careful understanding of the strengths of the recent orthodox approach and are pursued with a methodology acceptable to the mainstream…..our view is that the elite are relatively open-minded when it comes to new ideas but quite closed-minded when it comes to alternative methodologies. If it isn’t modeled, it isn’t economics, no matter how insightful. “(Rosser, p. 11) “[Mainstream economics'] content is not as focused as mainstream researchers would like, but it is connected by its methodology of technical model building…..Those economists who don’t [do highly technical work] are far less likely to influence the mainstream of the profession directly. They may, however do it indirectly by influencing others who then translate their work into more technical and acceptable methods” (Rosser pp. 17-18).

The economic paradigm is backed by a toxic stew of self-serving positivist philosophy. It began with Milton Friedman’s “Preface to Positive Economics”, which claimed that, since Newton used them, counterfactual presuppositions are perfectly acceptable as long as they lead to predictive theories. This idea was never quite right (Keen, pp. 148-164), but it got worse. Following Lakatos, the profession next rejected the very idea of falsifiability: “Lakatos recommends scientists to select certain of their hypotheses, christen them a ‘hard core’ and decide not to modify or renounce them in the face of empirical difficulties. He tells us little about how such hypotheses are to be selected. As it stands, therefore, his methodology gives carte blanche to any group who want to erect their pet notion into a dogma.” (Redman, pp. 146-7). Finally, it eventually became clear that the predictive powers of economics would always be much less than Friedman had hoped, thus knocking out one of the main legs of his argument and leaving orthodox economics in a dubious position, intellectually speaking, at about the same time when its institutional domination had become almost total.6

The outcome of all this was a hermetically sealed science impervious to the external world (albeit a hermetically-sealed science with enormous worldly power). The presuppositions could be as implausible as the economist wished, the “hard core” was invulnerable to criticism, and no realism was required, as long as the modeling was sophisticated. The profession has a bias against anyone who tries to communicate with a nonspecialist audience (Rosser p. 21; Coyle p. 247) and often ignores economic realities even when they burst into the room: “….the willingness of the mainstream to accept these [new] ideas has varied with time. Sometimes it takes external events for work at the edge to be considered. For example, the more than 20 percent decline of the U.S. stock market on October 19, 1987 for no obvious reason led many economists to be more open to models that allowed such an aberration to occur (the standard models did not)” (Rosser p. 19, my emphasis).

To which I can only ask: Why was it “many” and not “all”? And for an economist, what is “external” about an stock market collapse? Isn’t a stock market collapse a kind of data? Given the feeble response of the economics profession to the 1987 crash, and the 2000 crash, can we hope that economics will learn anything form the most recent crash of our recession-proof economy?7

There are many who believe that economics, despite its self-serving methodological principles, is corrigible. This belief strikes me as wishful: like some of the nobility of the French ancien regime, some of the old boys might be nice people, and selectively open to new ideas if approached deferentially enough, but with economics as with philosophy, we’re dealing with sociology, not ideas. Personal reputations, networks of friendships, career competition, and (in contrast to philosophy) political power and wealth are at stake, and we cannot be sure that the old boys will not succeed in cloning themselves when they die off. (Redman’s book ends on a hopeful note, but twenty years later Coyle, Colander, Holt, and Rosser are still hoping).

The advice Colander, Holt, and Rosser give to economists hoping to do original work tells them how to approach the always-nameless old boy network: “The dynamic approach to change that we are introducing here involves stealth changes….The change, however, is so gradual that the profession often does not notice that it has occurred (Rosser, p. 5) ….Heterodox economists are highly unlikely to get funding through normal channels such as the National Science foundation….(Rosser, p. 9), “Our argument is that modern mainstream economics is open to new approaches, as long as they demonstrate a careful understanding of the strengths of the recent orthodox approach and are pursued with a methodology acceptable to the mainstream…..our view is that the elite are relatively open-minded when it comes to new ideas but quite closed-minded when it comes to alternative methodologies.” (Rosser, p. 11) “Whether that work at the edge is considered heterodox or mainstream is primarily a matter of the individual’s proclivity to fit within the existing mainstream and the degree to which he or she directly attacks rather than softly criticizes…. Working at the edge has its problems, especially for those whose proclivity is toward attacking, rather than working within, the existing field and hence finding themselves in heterodoxy….. economists considered heterodox often find it difficult to gain funding for their work, and they likely will be squeezed out of the decision-making process in their universities”. (Rosser, p. 14)

Even the progress that is made doesn’t filter down; besides being an old-boy network, economics is scholastic. Since the main product of the econ biz is Econ 101 students, this is very significant, or at least it would be if economists cared about the human world. In point of fact, Econ 101 tends to lead beginning students toward a fallacious, antiquated form of free market dogma, and even the reformers don’t expect this to change. “This process from conception of an idea to graduate textbooks can take up to ten years. Intermediate and upper-level graduate textbooks usually take another five to ten years to include the idea…. Principles books take another five to ten years to actually incorporate the idea as a central element….. The more central the idea, the less likely it is to be included in a central way in the texts….. Such major changes are unlikely to show up even with the long lags discussed.” (Rosser, pp. 12-13) “[M]ost of the work discussed in this book has been done by the leading economists, many of them winners of the Nobel memorial prize, and by no means all of this work has reached current textbooks even at the graduate level” (Coyle, p. 5). 8

External Influences

An extensive, well-developed literature on the political factors in the development of the American university exists, and I don’t intend to summarize it. My general conclusion, which I will develop below, is that methodologization, paridigmatization, enforced value neutrality, enforced objectivity, positivism, scientism, etc., have made American scholars, in their depoliticized scholarly work, into passive supporters and advocates of corporate administrative liberalism: politically timid, null, and (above all) reluctant to address the public.

Rightwing McCarthyist attacks on the university are a well-recognized part of this story. From June 22, 1941 to September 2, 1945 the US was allied to the USSR, and some liberals and Democrats also had had friendly relations with Communists during the pre-war New Deal era. When the Truman Administration switched from an anti-fascist crusade in alliance with Communists to an anti-Communist crusade in alliance with fascists (”We have always been at war with Eastasia”), many American liberals found themselves in a delicate situation, and simultaneously, anti-Communist Americans (some of them pre-WWII isolationists) turned mean. The new Democratic anti-Communism turned out not to be vicious enough, and free-lance anti-Communists started attacking the university, where many of the refugee Communists, indigenous Communists, and not-anti-Communist-enough leftists were employed. Almost all university administrations cooperated with the investigations and purges, and while no one was killed and only a few were jailed, a fair number of careers were ended, university radicals were rather quickly silenced, and the university was pacified — remaining hostile to the far right, but unwilling to involve itself in anything leftist. Academics still tended to be Democrats and liberals, but the Democratic Party had lost both its left wing and its populist wing to become a centrist administrative-liberal party.9

There’s also another, much less familiar side to the story, however, as seen in Mirowski and Hargittai, and this side is more important to my argument. During the Roosevelt Administration, and above all during World War II, academic experts and the university did very well for themselves: “Scientists don’t cause war, but war causes scientists”. The university became more closely tied to government than it ever had been before, and government money helped many fields flourish — not just nuclear physics (as told in Hargittai and also Schmitt) but linguistics, foreign languages, anthropology, psychology, economics, and even philosophy and English10. (The pacifist Kenneth Rexroth called this “the gravy train of human blood”). This governmental intrusion in the university was not completely new and was easily justifiable on national defense grounds, and it was welcomed because it brought cash, but along with the money came bureaucratization, hierarchy, and interference from external (non-scientific) players — often military men. Furthermore, a lot of the non-government money going into the university from non-profits such as the Ford Foundation or the Cowles Foundation was driven by wartime needs or other political agendas and came with strings attached. Philosophers and economists with the right style found themselves getting grants and jobs, and philosophers and economists with the wrong style found themselves doing much less well.11

According to Reisch (p 350) Quine, Tarski, Carnap, Davidson, and Reichenbach among the philosophers were all employed at some point by the RAND Corporation, a military consulting group. (Note that this is not a left-right question: during WWII and before McCarthy, radical views were not necessarily a problem — at that time J. Edgar Hoover was looking for Nazis, not Communists). The best description of how the university was penetrated by the state and the military is in Mirowski (2001), who tells how, under the direction of the Cowles Foundation and others, economics was transformed by the combined forces of systems theory, game theory, operations research, strategic planning, and strategically distributed funding to produce a formalistic, disembedded, acultural, psychologically impossible, value-neutral form of mad-dog rationality12.

The story in analytic philosophy is known in less detail, but the outcomes were similar and some of what we know about the processes leading up to them also is similar.13 With the McCarthyist purges of the university, which struck philosophy harder than almost any other department, the political engagement disappeared while the scientistic, formalistic, ethically-neutral aspects remained, and philosophy became dominated by its politically null specializations: metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, analytic ethics (Healy, “Specialization and Status in Philosophy”).

In philosophy, the nullity is the message: analytic philosophy’s role is mostly to pre-empt other forms of philosophy. (By contrast, economics has an actual positive function). Analytic philosophy’s compulsive-obsessive insistence on rigorous argument, combined with its antinomian laxness about hypotheticals and arbitrary methodological stipulations, unsuit it for participation in persuasive, “normative” and constructive discourse. As Inwagen says (The Problem of Evil, Oxford, 2006, p. 55), analytic argument never convinces anyone — indeed, analytic philosophy has renounced persuasion, which is intrinsic to political and ethical discourse, and basically wants every debate to last forever. Bertrand Russell’s solution (which disgusted Wittgenstein) was to divide his work into unphilosophical political journalism and apolitical philosophy, and given the analytic methodology he had helped create, he really had no other choice.14

Daniel Davies: The Punchbags Of Notre Dame

The Punchbags Of Notre Dame — Crooked Timber: Do you find yourself considering the financial crisis and thinking “well, neoclassical economists have certainly come through this one with their reputations enhanced! Anyone with a world-class heterodox economics department should certainly be thinking about closing it down right now, there’s no interest in that sort of thing!”. Well, if you do, then you’re almost certainly working as an administrator at Notre Dame University (or for that matter, the University of Notre Dame, thanks Ben in comments), because nobody else does.

I mean, what the byOurLady heck do they think they are playing at. Back in April 2008, the decision to place clear fresh water between the nice professional efficient market types in the “Economics and Econometrics” department, and the dirty f**king hippies in “Economics and Policy Analysis” might have made some sort of sense, in that while cynical and not very academic-freedom-y, it would have improved students’ chances of getting into prestigious economics graduate programs where they could write “counterintuitive” and “fascinating” job market papers about penalty shootouts and speed-dating (these being the only remaining social or anthropological questions not thoroughly answered by neoclassical economists, cf “Freakonomics”).

But today? With the whole field blown wide open and all sorts of questions of the role of economic analysis wide open to debate again? With Richard Freaking Posner coming out as a post-Keynesian? I suppose that if you truly believe that it’s impossible to time the market, this is one way to prove it.

Free Exchange: What's college all about?

What's college all about? | Free exchange | Economist.com: IN YESTERDAY'S Link exchange, I linked to a Henry Farrell post on the economics of 3D-movies, in which Mr Farrell quoted an old piece of his:

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book [Tyler Cowen's "Good and Plenty"] is one that goes on a tangent from Cowen’s main argument – his discussion of how changes in the ability of producers to enforce copyright are likely to affect cultural production. Here, he argues that the likely consequences will differ dramatically from art form to art form. Simplifying a little, he adapts Walter Benjamin to argue that there is likely to be a big difference between art forms that rely heavily on their “aura,” and art forms that can be transformed into information without losing much of their cultural content. The former are likely to continue to do well – they aren’t fundamentally challenged by the Internet. In contrast, forms of art which can be translated into information without losing much of their content are likely to see substantial changes, thanks to competition from file sharing services. Over time, we may see “the symbolic and informational” functions of art [becoming] increasingly separate,” as the Internet offers pure information, and other outlets invest more heavily in providing an “aura” and accompanying benefits of status that will make consumers more willing to pay for art (because it is being produced in a prestigious concert hall, exhibited in a museum etc).

I think this is a very nice insight that is likely to prove true. It's not always so easy to determine what kinds of what forms of expression fall into which category, however. I believe that many newspaper producers long believed that the "aura" of reading the newspaper—having the physical item in one's hands—was an important part of news consumption. This may have been true to some extent, but the advantages of information digitisation overwhelmed the aura, with obvious consequences.

Where else might we apply this framework? Ezra Klein links today to Kevin Carey, who writes:

In recent years, Americans have grown accustomed to living amid the smoking wreckage of various once-proud industries — automakers bankrupt, brand-name Wall Street banks in ruins, newspapers dying by the dozen. It’s tempting in such circumstances to take comfort in the seeming permanency of our colleges and universities, in the notion that our world-beating higher education system will reliably produce research and knowledge workers for decades to come. But this is an illusion. Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.

In combination, these two trends threaten to shake the foundation of the modern university, in much the same way that other seemingly impregnable institutions have been torn apart. In some ways, the upheaval will be a welcome one. Students will benefit enormously from radically lower prices — particularly people like [online student Barbara] Solvig who lack disposable income and need higher learning to compete in an ever-more treacherous economy. But these huge changes will also seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next.

So, the question: are colleges selling an information-based product or an aura-based product (or something else altogether)?

There is no question that much of what counts as the educational part of college is digitisable and nearly endlessly duplicable. Texts and papers fall into this category, as do lectures and demonstrations. In the past, the economics of universities were based on provision of these things; books and experts were scarce, and so it made sense to gather students in one place, in proximity to those things, in order to learn from them. If this is all that underpins the modern institute of higher education, then it is only a matter of time until it vanishes.

But it may be the case that aura is more important than pieces of information where colleges are concerned. It could be that the key value is in being in a room with an expert and other interested students, in participating in dorm-room bull sessions, in napping on a pile of texts in a musty old library, and in running naked across the quad at three in the morning. These things can't be digitised and infinitely replicated. If the primary benefit from a university education is to be found somewhere in that aura, then many colleges will do just fine.

In fact, there are aspects of both that are important, in different contexts and to different students (and employers). Potentially, things could go either way for institutes of higher education. Of course, there are powerful lobbies waiting to do what's necessary to support the traditional university. Among them are alumni, who cherish their college experience and who control hiring practices, for the most part. There are university employees, who are often wealthy and influential. And there are television stations who make millions of dollars off of collegiate athletics. These groups may be every bit as committed to maintaining the status quo as have been record labels in the music industry, and more effective.

One other thing to think about; it could be that a key value of universities has nothing at all to do with what a student does while enrolled, and instead stems from the filtering mechanism of the admissions process. College degrees may be useful because the admissions department has done the difficult background work of identifying promising candidates for employment. They act as ratings agencies, in a sense, screening products and declaring them "safe" or "risky". It would be interesting if in the future there are organisations which play this role more explicitly, offering to investigate a candidate's history and skillset for a fee, and certifying qualified candidates, all in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of an actual university education.

But one way or another, the digital and internet revolution should ultimately reveal just what everyone is paying for when they write that tuition cheque.

Mark Field on Chris Edley and John Yoo

Mark Field:

Balkinization: The bulk of Dean Edley's memo is simply irrelevant to the issues raised by critics and seems designed to prejudice the issue in Yoo's favor. When the Dean does reach the actual point of contention, he limits himself to the discussion of criminal actions. These are NOT the only basis for faculty discipline (Standards are here. The Standards consist of two basic parts, namely ethical guidelines and "types of unacceptable conduct". It's critical in understanding these Standards that the "types" are merely examples and do not limit the University from proceeding in other cases as well. Specifically,

The Types of Unacceptable Conduct listed below in Sections A through E are examples of types of conduct which meet the preceding standards and hence are presumptively subject to University discipline. Other types of serious misconduct, not specifically enumerated herein, may nonetheless be the basis for disciplinary action if they also meet the preceding standards."...

With this in mind, it's easy to see that Dean Edley is not giving a full and complete assessment of the issues in at least two respects. First, if the principles of academic freedom were somehow to apply to Yoo's conduct as a lawyer, as the opening portion of his letter suggests, he failed to mention the relevant Standard. The Standards provide that "Violation of canons of intellectual honesty, such as research misconduct..." are unethical and subject to discipline. Yoo's critics, including those here, have repeatedly argued that his memos were intellectually dishonest. Second, contrary to the implication of Dean Edley's letter, discipline is NOT limited to cases of criminal misconduct which results in conviction. That is merely a "type" of misconduct, that is, an example of the misbehavior which can lead to discipline.

In addition to these glaring omissions, Dean Edley's focus on criminal conviction allows him to omit another important question: whether the university has an independent obligation to investigate Yoo's conduct without waiting for the Justice Department or a State Bar. Clearly it does -- the Standards state that

Conduct which departs from these precepts is viewed by faculty as unacceptable because it is inconsistent with the mission of the University. The articulation of types of unacceptable faculty conduct is appropriate both to verify that a consensus about minimally acceptable standards in fact does exist and to give fair notice to all that departures from these minimal standards may give rise to disciplinary proceedings."

In short, violation independently affects the university, which therefore has an independent obligation to investigate. In failing even to consider this issue, Dean Edley does a disservice to his readers and to the University he represents.

Chris Edley:

Assuming one believes as I do that Professor Yoo offered bad ideas and even worse advice during his government service, that judgment alone would not warrant dismissal or even a potentially chilling inquiry. As a legal matter, the test here at the University of California is the relevant excerpt from the "General University Policy Regarding Academic Appointees," adopted for the 10-campus University of California by both the system-wide Academic Senate and the Board of Regents: Types of unacceptable conduct: … Commission of a criminal act which has led to conviction in a court of law and which clearly demonstrates unfitness to continue as a member of the faculty. [Academic Personnel Manual sec. 015] This very restrictive standard is binding on me as dean, and in any case disciplinary authority over faculty is lodged not with deans but with the Provost, Chancellor and Academic Senate...

Economist: California's universities in trouble

California's universities in trouble: Before the fall | The Economist: THE best public higher education in the world is to be found at the University of California (UC). This claim is backed up by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, which provides an authoritative ranking of research universities. The UC’s campus at Berkeley ranks third behind two private universities, Harvard and Stanford. Several of the other ten UC sites, such as Los Angeles and San Diego, are not far behind. Californians are justifiably proud.

It is therefore no small matter that this glory may be about to end. “We are in irreversible decline,” says Sandra Faber, a professor of astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz who has inadvertently become a mouthpiece for a fed-up faculty. University excellence, she says, “took decades to build. It takes a year to destroy it.”

California has been suffering serial budget crises, the latest of which was resolved last month in a rather desperate deal between the governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the legislature. It contained huge cuts, including $2 billion lopped from higher education. The UC alone has lost a cumulative $813m of state funding in the last fiscal year and the current one, a cut of 20%. The second-tier California State University (Cal State), with 23 campuses the largest in the country, and the third-tier community colleges have also been clobbered.

The cuts threaten the legacy of two visionaries, Edmund “Pat” Brown, governor from 1959 to 1967, and Clark Kerr, who was in charge of the UC during those years. Kerr envisioned the state’s public universities as “bait to be dangled in front of industry, with drawing power greater than low taxes or cheap labour.” In a 1960 master-plan he created the three-tiered system.

His ambition was simple. First, to educate as many young Californians as affordably as possible. The best students would go to the UC, the next lot to Cal State and the rest to community colleges with the possibility of trading up. Second, to attract academic superstars. Kerr went about this like a talent scout, and his successors have continued the practice. The UC campuses have collectively produced more Nobel laureates than any other university.

But the master-plan has been under strain for years. State spending per student in the UC system, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by 40% since 1990, says Mark Yudof, the current UC president. The Public Policy Institute of California, a non-partisan think-tank, projects that California’s economy will face a shortfall of 1m college graduates by 2025, depressing the prosperity of the entire state. Public universities, which award 75% of all the state’s bachelor degrees, will be largely responsible.

Academic excellence is likely to be the first victim. Both the UC and Cal State are planning to send professors and staff on leave, cram more students into classrooms and offer fewer courses. Attracting and keeping academic stars, and the research dollars that usually follow them, will become much harder.

It is already happening, says Ms Faber. She recently hired three world-class assistant professors whose salaries are now at risk. Other universities have begun to get in touch with them, she says, and they will probably leave. Their best students may go with them. “We are eating our seed corn,” the professor laments.