Dylan Matthews

2011

This, again, is only a record of what I was listening to at this point in time, posted for my own archiving as much as anything. All things listed are things I like a lot; "The Words That Maketh Murder" is a fantastic song. Also I just like making lists. Overall I thought it was a terrible year for albums and a great one for singles.

Albums:

1. Bon Iver - Bon Iver

2. EMA - Past Life Martyred Saints

3. Saigon - The Greatest Story Never Told

4. St. Vincent - Strange Mercy

5. The Weeknd - House of Balloons

6. James Blake - James Blake

7. Drake - Take Care

8. M83 - Hurry Up, We're Dreaming

9. Florence and the Machine - Ceremonials

10. Cults - Cults

11. Sloan - The Double Cross

12. Jay-Z and Kanye West - Watch the Throne

13. Björk - Biophilia

14. Tom Waits - Bad As Me

15. Frank Ocean - nostalgia, ULTRA

16. Wye Oak - Civilian

17. Acid House Kings - Music Sounds Better With You

18. Washed Out - Within and Without

19. Yuck - Yuck

20. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart - Belong

21. Smith Westerns - Dye It Blonde

22. The Decemberists - The King Is Dead

23. The Dodos - No Color

24. Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes

25. Das Racist - Relax

26. The Go! Team - Rolling Blackouts

27. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

28. Girls - Father, Son, and Holy Ghost

29. WU LYF - Go Tell Fire on the Mountain

30. Wild Flag - Wild Flag

Songs:

1. Jamie xx - "Far Nearer"

2. Avril Lavigne - "What The Hell"

3. Bon Iver - "Towers"

4. M83 - "Midnight City"

5. Wavves - "I Wanna Meet Dave Grohl"

6. Beyoncé - "Countdown"

7. The Antlers - "Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out"

8. James Blake - "Unluck"

9. EMA - "Marked"

10. Lana del Rey - "Video Games"

11. Nicki Minaj - "Super Bass"

12. St. Vincent - "Surgeon"

13. Jay-Z and Kanye West - "Otis"

14. Azealia Banks - "212"

15. Friends - "Friend Crush"

16. The Weeknd - "Wicked Games"

17. Tyler, the Creator - "Yonkers"

18. Beirut - "Santa Fe"

19. PS I Love You ft. Diamond Rings - "Leftovers"

20. Rihanna - "We Found Love"

21. Girls - "Honey Bunny"

22. Madeon - "Pop Culture"

23. Adele - "Rolling in the Deep"

24. Drake - "Take Care"

25. Saigon - "Preacher"

26. Xaphoon Jones - "The Jackson Pit"

27. Acid House Kings - "Would You Say Stop?"

28. Lykke Li - "Love Out of Lust"

29. Smith Westerns - "Smile"

30. Frank Ocean - "Strawberry Swing"

31. Washed Out - "Amor Fati"

32. The Vaccines - "Norgaard"

33. The Decemberists - "All Arise!"

34. Yuck - "Get Away"

35. Air France - "It Feels Good to Be Around You"

36. Florence and the Machine - "Never Let Me Go"

37. Cults - "Abducted"

38. Tune-Yards - "Bizness"

39. Burial - "Stolen Dog"

40. Youth Lagoon - "July"

41. Holy Ghost! - "Some Children"

42. Sloan - "The Answer Was You"

43. Shabazz Palaces - "Swerve... The reeping of all that is worthwhile (Noir not withstanding)"

44. Pepper Rabbit - "Rose Mary Stretch"

45. Foster the People - "Pumped Up Kicks"

46. Das Racist - "Relax"

47. AraabMuzik - "Electronic Dream"

48. Tom Waits - "Get Lost"

49. The Dodos - "Black Night"

50. Seapony - "Blue Star"

51. Wild Flag - "Future Crimes"

52. Okkervil River - "Your Past Life as a Blast"

53. Panda Bear - "Alsatian Darn"

54. Dum Dum Girls - "Wrong Feels Right"

55. WU LYF - "14 Crowns for Me and Your Friends"

56. The Go! Team - "Ready to Go Steady"

57. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart - "My Terrible Friend"

58. The War on Drugs - "Baby Missiles"

59. Vetiver - "Wonder Why"

60. PJ Harvey - "The Words That Maketh Murder"

In Defense of High-Minded Theorizing

Corey Spaley points to Nick Smyth's post making a pithy argument for an anti-theoretical approach to ethics:

We are human beings. We are embedded in a massively complex social context, and within this context there exist many powerful sources of reasons. We are social creatures: The roles we play, the relations we enter into, the norms we accept, and the ideals with which we identify are constantly interacting with our practical thought, our judgment and our action. We are also organisms with basic needs: the mere fact that we are embodied generates an enormous number of important practical imperatives for us, individually and collectively. We are also citizens: we live under laws and institutions that shape our prerogatives and which can provide reasons for action on their own. We are also goal-driven: a human life is probably not complete without the active pursuit of coherently organized ends...

Gee, look at that! No moral theory, yet somehow we can still speak of acting for good reasons, we can still praise and blame one another, and we can still hold each other responsible for what we do according to various standards.

But what if some of those standards aren't actually standards? Take the assertion that "a human life is probably not complete without the active pursuit of coherently organized ends." That is profoundly arguable! I'm a hedonist. I think, when push comes to shove, that someone who has no coherent goals to speak of and plugs herself into an experience machine for her entire life will have acted in her true self-interest. She's not goal-driven at all but she's living a better life than I'm living, despite all my goals. Smyth, I assume, will contest this claim. But to do that he'd have to give an account of why there's more of value in life than hedonic well-being. And many people have! But such an account, I think, is likely to be a ethical theory of the kind Smyth finds largely useless.

Or what if these standards conflict with each other? Jean Valjean had reasons to steal bread deriving from loving his nieces and nephews and wanting them to not starve. He also had reasons to not steal bread deriving from being a French citizen. Are the former reasons stronger than the latter ones? I think so, and if it came time to defend that position I'd note that the good caused by saving childrens' lives outweighs the harm done to the producer of the bread. But what does an anti-theorist say? I suppose he could say that it's just the case that Valjean has more reason to steal the bread. What kind of monster could say otherwise?

But this kind of intuitionism is (a) itself a kind of theorizing and (b) only takes you so far. Peter Singer and Peter Unger have argued very convincingly that if you share intuitions like this one about Valjean, you are also committed to giving away most of your income to UNICEF or Oxfam. Even if Valjean's rectitude is obvious, the Singer/Unger position is not at all obvious, and if it's the case (as I think it is) that you have to support both or neither, then ethical theorizing is necessary for us to think clearly and consistently about these sorts of problems.

I suppose my point is that the best kind of ethical theory draws on precisely those resources that Smyth presents as alternatives to ethical theorizing. It doesn't deny that there's such a thing as being a good uncle or being a good citizen but instead tries to piece together when being a good uncle is more important than being a good citizen, or what other beliefs we are committed to by virtue of our beliefs about what being a good uncle entails, or how the kinds of "good" we're talking about in these cases are connected to one another.

I also think it's worth distinguishing the kind of "realism" about ethical theory's limitations that Bernard Williams argued for (and Smyth is echoing here) from the skepticism of people like me about the role of this kind of academic theorizing in real-world political debates. I doubt that recapitulating arguments from Living High and Letting Die is going to convince anyone in the House to vote for more foreign aid or more open borders, and it might in fact alienate potential allies, but I also think that's bad and that the world would be a better place if more politicians and people in general acted on the basis of well thought-out ethical beliefs, while also accepting that people with different beliefs (like, say, Rawlsians and utilitarians) can and should work together when those beliefs intersect (such as on increasing government aid to poor people).

Judith Butler Makes the Case Against Her Own Bad Writing

From her NYT letter to editor after winning the Bad Writing Contest:

The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who maintained that nothing radical could come of common sense, wrote sentences that made his readers pause and reflect on the power of language to shape the world. A sentence of his such as "Man is the ideology of dehumanization" is hardly transparent in its meaning. Adorno maintained that the way the word "man" was used by some of his contemporaries was dehumanizing.

Taken out of context, the sentence may seem vainly paradoxical. But it becomes clear when we recognize that in Adorno's time the word "man" was used by humanists to regard the individual in isolation from his or her social context. For Adorno, to be deprived of one's social context was precisely to suffer dehumanization. Thus, "man" is the ideology of dehumanization.

So why do we have to write sentences like "man is the ideology of dehumanization" when ones like "Early 20th century humanists used the word 'man' when considering individuals in isolation from their social contexts, a usage which ignores that precisely what makes us human are our social contexts" (a) by Butler's own account, can express the same ideas and (b) express those ideas in a clearer manner that's intelligible to more people?

Having Opinions Isn't Autocratic

As an old-school hedonic utilitarian who believes quite strongly that you need a single criterion to settle public policy disputes, or any disputes with ethical content, there's a lot I disagree with in Will Wilkinson's latest takedown of Richard Layard (see here for an earlier go-around). But I'm not going to convince anyone of my whole moral framework in a blog post, and smarter people than me are doing that anyway, so I'll just focus on what strikes me as the cheapest of the shots in Wilkinson's post:

Happiness isn't the only thing we care about and it's not the only consideration worth according weight to in our deliberations. To make it the one and only consideration that counts—to use happiness the way Mr Layard wants to use it—would require the abolition of democracy. But the happiness data clearly show that the happiest places on earth are democracies. Thus it would seem that Mr Layard is bound by reason to abandon either his dreams of "rational public policy" determined by "a single criterion" or his allegiance to happiness as the single criterion.

Well, no. Even if one accepts that democratic governance is a good idea, someone still has to be right and someone has to be wrong. It could be the case – and I think it is the case – that attempting to institute a dictatorship of utilitarian technocrats who issue laws based on the hedonic calculus will actually produce less happiness than our current system of government does. But it could simultaneously be the case – and again, I think it is – that the best policies that our democratic system can adopt are those supported by a utilitarian calculus. It then follows that utilitarians acting within the context of a democratic system should push for policies that utilitarian reasoning supports and oppose those it doesn't.

This, I think, is what Layard is saying. Declaring that non-utilitarian thinking doesn't make for "rational public policy" is an inflammatory piece of rhetoric, but it's basically a more testy way of saying that utilitarianism is going to produce the right answers and non-utilitarian theories are going to produce the wrong answers. And obviously, most people participating in a public policy debate think they have the right answers. That's how it should work: people throw out their arguments, elected representatives weigh those arguments and vote, and participants in the debate agree that it's better for that result to be binding than not. Similarly, I think moral absolutists who argue for an inviolable rule against torture are participating in a healthy debate about that issue, and aren't just crypto-autocrats who want to impose their civil libertarian views by any means necessary. It seems like only utilitarians get accused of latent dictatorial tendencies when they argue for what they believe in.

P.S. This is a side note, but rereading Wilkinson's last fight with Layard brought mere here, where Wilkinson calls "Benthamese" to be "the vulgar dialect of the morally insensate (economists, Asperger’s cases, etc.)" which gave this Asperger's-diagnosed Benthamite a good chuckle. Pretty sure I'm not morally insensate, but I'm not one to take offense at such things.

The Late Office: A Defense

The comment thread to Alyssa's very good post on the politics of Parks and Recreation reminded me that the belief that The Office should have ended after season three is (a) extremely prevalent and (b) wrong. For one thing, I tend to think that complaints that shows have gone too long are, as a rule, incorrect. Unless the show's existence is precluding that of a better show, who cares if it keeps producing bad episodes? It doesn't negate the excellence of the earlier ones. I stopped watching The Simpsons about a decade ago, but a lot of people like the new episodes, and its survival doesn't preclude me from enjoying seasons one through ten.

But more importantly, The Office has produced some of its best material in season four through seven. In fact, I'd say that season five is the strongest season so far. Let's tick through some reasons.

It got darker: My favorite episodes of The Office tend to be the bleakest and most despairing ones, and there's a lot more of that in season four and onward. Once the focus got off Jim and Pam, the show had a lot of fun by making its other characters miserable. Michael's dysfunctional relationship with Jan got way worse in season four, particularly in the one-two punch of "The Deposition" – where Michael is brutally interrogated about his personal life by Jan and Dunder Mifflin's lawyers – and my all-time favorite episode of the show, "Dinner Party", which reaches Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? levels of domestic turmoil. "Night Out" showed Ryan as having descended into drug addiction, and by the end of season four he was in handcuffs.

Season five upped the ante. The main intra-office romantic intrigue involved Dwight repeatedly cuckolding Andy. Dwight is hardly meant to be a good guy, per se, but it's still sort of amazing that a network sitcom had one of its main characters do something so unconscionable for so long. Michael found his soulmate in Holly, and then the company ripped her away from him just as they were falling in love. "Business Trip" is just brutal in showing how much hurt and rage built up in Michael over Dunder Mifflin's decision to transfer her. Even Jim and Pam's plotline was pretty depressing, which brings me to…

It let Pam and Jim stumble: This started subtly in season four, with subplots focusing on the ways the dream couple could screw people over. See Jim pissing everyone off by suggesting the office combine birthday celebrations in "Survivor Man", or the two of them locking the entire office in for the night in "Night Out". And then, in season five, it really let them fail. From the show's beginning, Pam's dream was to go to art school and become an artist, and in season five she went to the Pratt Institute to do just that. And she failed. She failed literally by not passing her classes, and more broadly she gave up on art as a career. Then she joined Michael's paper company. Which failed. Then she became a saleswoman at Dunder Mifflin. And sucked at it. Only in her very recent position as office manager is she having professional success.

Meanwhile, Jim, who once said he'd have to throw himself in front of a train if Dunder Mifflin became his career, buys a house in Scranton in season five and becomes co-manager in season six. As I wrote at Alyssa's last summer, this is a pretty astonishingly bleak trajectory. Jim and Pam, after all, originally bonded over hating Dunder Mifflin and wanting to get out and support each other as they pursued their dreams. The show let them pursue their dreams, and then made them fail and accept that they were stuck where they were. This, to me, is a much more unusual and compelling thread than the "will they won't they" stuff in season one through three.

It made Michael human: Alan Sepinwall has a good slideshow highlighting episodes where the show has humanized Michael, and it's no accident that the vast majority come after season three. While the show had made it clear that Michael is a good salesman before, seasons four and onward are where they make you empathize for him. You don't delight in his suffering when Jan controls him throughout "Dinner Party"; it's horrible. His relationship with Holly was genuinely endearing and it hurts when the company rips them apart. You want the two to be happy together.

But the best sub-season arc the show's ever done, the Michael Scott Paper Company, is where the show really lets him come into his own. It shows Michael standing up to the corporate overlords who had abused him and beating them. He learned he couldn't beat them in the marketplace, and then proceeded to beat them in negotiations. In "Broke", you keep expecting him to trip up, but he doesn't, and ends up getting him, Pam, and Ryan good jobs at Dunder Mifflin – and in Pam and Ryan's cases, promotions from their last positions there. Most impressively, you don't resent Michael's win. I, at least, was really thrilled to see him beat Stringer Bell Charles Miner. Michael went from a cartoon to a character you can root for after season four, and I think the show would have really missed something without that element.

It's still funny: I think people forget this because there's so much other good comedy on the air right now. And sure, it doesn't make me laugh out loud as much as Archer or Parks and Recreation do. But when it hits, it really, really hits. I recently rewatched "The Lover" and that's just hysterical, straight-through. I could rewatch the scene where Michael tells Jim he's sleeping with Pam's mom fifty times, and it'd still be funny. Same goes for "Scott's Tots", which features some of the best cringe humor the show's ever done. Jim and Pam's drunken escapades in "PDA", Dwight's fake fire in "Stress Relief" (complete with Angela throwing cats into the ceiling), Stanley's dream of living in a lighthouse-cum-spaceship: these rank as high in my mind as any of the comic setpieces in the first three seasons.

Utility and Truth

Via Ned, H. Allen Orr's review of Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape says most of what needs to be said. I haven't read the book, because I am a mortal creature and I have better ways to spend my time on Earth, but Orr's review does remind me of something incoherent in Harris' reasoning that's been nagging me since the book came out. Here's Orr quoting Harris:

The very idea of “objective” knowledge (i.e., knowledge acquired through honest observation and reasoning) has values built into it, as every effort we make to discuss facts depends upon principles that we must first value (e.g., logical consistency, reliance on evidence, parsimony, etc.).

While there are a number of different philosophies of science and epistemologies that can accommodate the scientific method, Harris is certainly correct that you have to accept one of them for the whole thing to work. Harris' choice appears to be scientific realism, which, in short, is the view that science describes a world that is really "out there", and that a scientific observation is true when it corresponds to this real world.

Which is funny to me, because Harris is a utilitarian. At least that's what I and Orr make of his conclusion that the good is the "well-being of conscious creatures". A quick scan of the book shows that Harris explicitly identifies identifies as a consequentialist (see page 62; sadly there's no Google Books preview I can link to). Consequentialism + a hedonic conception of the good = good old fashioned utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism, unlike some other ethical theories, has philosophical implications outside of ethics. In particular, I think it commits you to some form of pragmatism. If the answer to "what should I do?" is "whatever action maximizes the general happiness" then the answer to "what should I believe?" is "whatever belief is conducive to maximizing the general happiness". That starts to look a lot like pragmatists' argument that what is true is what is most useful to believe.

As Richard Rorty pointed out in my favorite essay of his –  "Religious faith, intellectual responsibility, and romance" – this affinity between utilitarianism and pragmatism is historical as well as logical. William James was a great admirer of John Stuart Mill, and The Will to Believe can be read, in Rorty's words, as an attempt at a "utilitarian ethics of belief". And James, of course, believed strongly that religious faith could be a force for good.

This makes sense. Under pragmatism, the statement "God exists" is true if it is useful to believe that God exists. This may seem a flimsy reason to believe, and Rorty lays out a number of ways in which it limits what one can believe, but it is no flimsier a foundation than pragmatism offers for believing in science, and most would consider that foundation pretty strong. No one would mistake Quine and Sellars and Dewey for arch opponents of science, after all.

So Harris has a problem. He can be a scientific realist, which rules out both pragmatism (which rejects the idea that there needs to be a real world "out there" which true statements reflect) and utilitarianism (because it implies pragmatism). Or he can be a utilitarian, and a pragmatist, and acknowledge that religion is often a source for good in the world and a source of joy for many privately. But you can't be a utilitarian and a scientific realist, and you certainly can't try to get to utilitarianism through scientific realism, which is what he's trying to do now.

Moving the Bounds of the Possible

When it comes to humanitarian interventions like the one taking place in Libya right now, I tend to favor an "airdropping cash" heuristic. Military intervention is expensive. Military intervention using the US armed services, the most costly security force in the history of the world, is really, really expensive. Chances are that, in most cases, calculating the amount of money a military intervention would cost and then airdropping that amount in cash over the relevant country (or, better still, a poorer country) would be better for human welfare than undertaking the intervention. It's possible to imagine cases where this isn't true; Bosnia and Kosovo were borderline cases, and an intervention in Rwanda very well could have passed this test. But Libya, which isn't experiencing mass slaughter or anything close to it, pretty clearly doesn't count.

Ezra made a very good argument along these lines, and Jonathan Chait offered up a not wholly unconvincing counterargument:

Why intervene in Libya and not elsewhere is a question that needs to be asked. But it's not a question that needs to be asked to determine the wisdom of intervening in Libya. Should we also spend more money to prevent malaria? Yes, we should. But I see zero reason to believe that not intervening in Libya would lead to an increase in in American assistance to prevent malaria.

This is true so far as it goes. Political necessity really does constrain how we think about opportunity costs. It would, of course, be better for the world if the money currently allocated to implementing the Affordable Care Act were reallocated to buying anti-malarial bednets, clean water straws, and so forth for people in the developing world. But all other choices aside, a world with the Affordable Care Act is better than one without it, and so I supported it, fervently.

But the difference between that situation and the one in Libya is instructive. There were 535 Congressmen and Senators whose preferences were determinative of the outcome of the health care reform fight. It is not unduly hubristic on the part of policy writers to think that their writing could help sway at least one of them. Given that possibility, it feels irresponsible to look at the bill and say, "this is great, but more foreign aid would be better," when saying, "this bill is the biggest expansion of the American safety net since the Great Society" has the potential to affect things.

On foreign policy, however, there's only one actor whose preferences are determinative of outcomes, and that's Barack Obama. Blog posts aren't going to persuade him one way or the other, especially after the bombs are already falling. In this case, it makes less sense to write in order to influence real-time political debates than to write in order to change the way people in and out of government think about policy issues. The fact that people working in public policy don't think to compare the benefits of the Libya intervention to those of buying bednets for Africans is exactly the sort of thing political writers can help correct, by making that comparison themselves.

This is why Leon Wieseltier's defense of the intervention is so infuriating. He mocks Ezra's point on the relative benefits of spending money fighting Libya versus spending money fighting malaria, asking, "Did our inaction in Rwanda reduce the frequency of malaria in Africa?" The point seems to be that malaria eradication may be a better goal, but it's not politically tenable, and in light of that, intervening in Libya is a good second-best option in humanitarian terms.

But one reason that humanitarian intervention is so much more politically tenable than anti-malaria spending is that Leon Wieseltier, most everyone else at The New Republic, and a whole lot of other liberal hawks in DC have made it their mission for the past 20+ years to make it politically tenable. If he and his comrades thought anti-malaria spending was a better idea, then they should have spent time arguing that instead. But they didn't. And turning around when called on it and saying, "Well yes, this is a second best option" is really bizarre.

In Defense of Globalize/Grow/Give

I'm horribly late on this, but I've been thinking about Freddie's post last month critiquing the "globalize-grow-give" model of social democracy, and there are a couple of problems with it which I thought were worth delving into.

The first has to do with the gap between the argument he makes about unions and the one he makes on trade. Freddie's basic gripe with the liberal blogosphere seems to be a lack of respect and support for the American union movement. A lot of this, I think, has to do with the union movement's rejection of free trade, which some liberal bloggers (myself very much included) see as a major moral failing. When hundreds of millions of people have escaped poverty over the past few decades due to Western countries importing their goods, it seems perverse to support a movement that pushes restrictions on those imports.

So Freddie disputes the underlying logic that free trade is leading to growth (and an ensuing decline in poverty) in developing countries:

There are often serious questions about the role of globalization in economic growth, although that free trade spurs growth is axiomatic in most political circles. In particular, some make the case that many of the strongest economic actors in the world, notably the Asian miracle economies of Japan and Korea but also most certainly the United States and Britain, grew through the protection of infant industries until those industries were capable of competing on the international stage, and only then was trade liberalized. This means that the dominant economies of the world are essentially asking third world economies to undertake trade policies that they themselves didn't when it was to their advantage not to.

But think about what an international trade regime under a infant industry protection framework would look like. If we're serious about giving developing countries' industries a leg up, then developed countries should unilaterally get rid of all trade restrictions with developing countries, and developing countries should either subsidize their industries, restrict imports, or both. Whatever can be said about this approach on the merits, it's the exact opposite of what unions in America want to have happen.

For the sake of illustration, imagine that Tanzania wants to get serious about exporting textiles. An infant industry approach would imply Tanzania should subsidize textile companies and block American textile imports, while the US should eliminate restrictions on importing Tanzanian textiles. This isn't what Workers United wants at all! They want a trade regime that benefits US textile workers, which would presumably entail restricting imports from Tanzania and/or fighting Tanzanian subsidies and restrictions at the WTO.

So whether or not infant industry protection is better than straight-up liberalized trade for poor countries is irrelevant to whether the union position on trade is defensible. Unions representing workers in export-intensive industries in the US of necessity have to fight to screw over workers in poor countries that are attempting export-based growth. They're unions; they have to look out for their members. That's their prerogative, of course, but it's also a perfectly good reason to not be so enthusiastic about the US union movement.

Of course, this could all change if the union movement accepts, as SEIU sometimes seems to, that the future of jobs in the US is going to be more in the service sector than manufacturing, and as a consequence stops fighting liberalized trade. I'd be thrilled if that happened. But I'm pretty sure Freddie wouldn't be.

My second point is about this:

I have no doubt that the well-meaning and enthusiastic bloggers that support the globalize-grow-give model want only the best for workers, but wanting what's best for others and allowing them to provide for their own needs are two separate things. The g/g/g model is inherently paternalistic…I do want to advance egalitarian ends; egalitarianism starts with equality of power.

To borrow a phrase from Amartya Sen's critique of Rawls' focus on "primary social goods", this argument strikes me as fetishistic. Unless you're Marlo Stanfield, pursuing power as an end in itself makes no sense. Power is only good if you use it for something. It's not a political victory for AFL-CIO's members if its membership and budget were to quadruple and it then didn't spend anything on lobbying or political campaigns. It'd have more power, as it could (probably) change more legislation and win more elections if it wanted to, but what's the point if it doesn't use it? The equation of "worker power" with the power of unions is also problematic, given that individual members don't always play a huge role in union decision-making, but let's leave that aside for the time being.

Now, an instrumental case could be made that pursuing progressive domestic policies depends on the existence of a healthy union movement. Hacker and Pierson have a good deal of evidence for this, and I'm generally convinced. It's not an accident that Western Europe and New Deal/Great Society-era America have/had far greater union density than the US does now. But this hinges on whether a growing union movement today would lead to a much stricter trade regime, such that growth in developing countries would slow down significantly. If the harm to the world's poor abroad from such policies is large enough to overwhelm the benefits to America's poor and middle class of a Scandinavia-level domestic welfare state, then it's a bad deal overall.

As an empirical matter, I don't think that would be the result of a healthier union movement. Sure, unions hate bilateral trade deals, but a lot of smart trade economists hate bilateral trade deals too, and the long-run economic growth of developing countries isn't going to be threatened if the US negotiates and passes fewer of them. What would worry me more is if union-backed Democrats obstructed WTO rounds or even tried to pull out of the body, or if they got anti-Chinese tariffs passed, but really serious action on either of those strikes me as a stretch. Presidents want to make nice with other countries, generally, and so I don't think even a union-backed Democratic president who ran on an anti-trade platform would be too keen on obstructing the WTO or antagonizing the world's next superpower.

So I'll take the bargain. I think the wrong turn on trade that would be generated by a stronger union movement would be mild and inconsequential enough that getting universal pre-K and child care, paid parental leave, an expanded earned income tax credit, much-too-late (by the time any of this would realistically happen) action on climate change, and so forth would be well worth it. But it really depends on the empirics. If a stronger union movement means 50% tariffs on all Chinese goods and confining much of the Chinese countryside to decades of unnecessary poverty, that's bad no matter how many US workers are empowered in the process. So Freddie's embrace of worker power for the sake of worker power, consequences be damned, strikes me as hard to defend.

2010 Favorites

This is meant entirely as a record of what I was listening to at this point in time, but if for some weird reason you care what music I like, enjoy. Also, just to be clear, all of these are albums and songs I like a lot. I left off stuff (like LCD Soundsystem's This Is Happening) that just didn't work for me at all. Ring and "Hey Boy" are still really great.

Albums:

1. Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz

2. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

3. Sleigh Bells - Treats

4. Big Boi - Sir Lucious Left Foot

5. Das Racist - Sit Down, Man

6. Los Campesinos! - Romance is Boring

7. Joanna Newsom - Have One on Me

8. Robyn - Body Talk

9. Menomena - Mines

10. ceo - White Magic

11. Vampire Weekend - Contra

12. The Gaslight Anthem - American Slang

13. Girl Talk - All Day

14. Gorillaz - Plastic Beach

15. Gayngs - Relayted

16. Titus Andronicus - The Monitor

17. M.I.A. - Maya

18. Belle and Sebastian - Write About Love

19. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

20. Hot Chip - One Life Stand

21. Frightened Rabbit - The Winter of Mixed Drinks

22. jj - jj nº3

23. The National - High Violet

24. The Walkmen - Lisbon

25. Delorean - Subiza

26. Yeasayer - Odd Blood

27. Glasser - Ring

Songs:

1. Sufjan Stevens - "Impossible Soul"

2. Delorean - "Stay Close"

3. Los Campesinos! - "There Are Listed Buildings"

4. Robyn - "Dancing On My Own"

5. Kanye West ft. Pusha T- "Runaway"

6. Joanna Newsom - "Good Intentions Paving Company"

7. Marnie Stern - "For Ash"

8. Big Boi - "Back Up Plan"

9. Menomena - "Taos"

10. Kate Nash - "Paris"

11. Tennis - "Baltimore"

12. Glasser - "Home"

13. Katy Perry - "Teenage Dream"

14. Keepaway - "Yellow Wings"

15. The Gaslight Anthem - "Bring It On"

16. Vampire Weekend - "Giving Up the Gun"

17. Kisses - "Bermuda"

18. ceo - "Come With Me"

19. Salem - "King Night"

20. Sleigh Bells - "Rill Rill"

21. Titus Andronicus - "A More Perfect Union"

22. Jónsi - "Go do"

23. Zola Jesus - "Sea Talk"

24. Hot Chip - "One Life Stand"

25. Frightened Rabbit - "Skip the Youth"

26. The Roots - "Right On"

27. Cults - "Go Outside"

28. How to Dress Well - "Ready for the World"

29. The Mynabirds - "What We Gained in the Fire"

30. The National - "Bloodbuzz Ohio"

31. Gayngs - "The Last Prom on Earth"

32. Das Racist - "You Can Sell Anything"

33. jj - "Voi Parlate, Io Gioco"

34. Wye Oak - "Civilian"

35. Kingdom - "You"

36. Yeasayer - "Ambling Alp"

37. M.I.A. - "Tell Me Why"

38. Gorillaz - "Glitter Freeze"

39. Japandroids - "Younger Us"

40. Freddie Gibbs - "National Anthem (Fuck the World)"

41. Cee-Lo Green - "Fuck You"

42. The Like - "He's Not a Boy"

43. Magic Kids - "Hey Boy"

More on Lotteries

My column in The Crimson yesterday argued that Harvard should start admitting students by random lottery (albeit with a minimum SAT score / GPA cutoff). This has provoked a good number of responses, many of which I actually agree with but raise issues I did not have room to address in the column.

Matt Yglesias doesn't think I went far enough. Specifically, on the minimum SAT/GPA provision, he notes, "A system like that would still maintain the backwards allocation of resources where the richest schools have the best students." I don't think this is exactly right. The point of the cutoff is not to ensure that the best students go to Harvard, but that whatever students are randomly selected to attend do not fail out.

My intention, in the column, was to propose a policy Harvard and other schools could adopt immediately, and barring a huge change in the school's teaching practices and support mechanisms, there will be some people who apply to Harvard who cannot handle the workload. Given that these students would not benefit much at all from going to Harvard, it seems perverse to admit them. That said, the cutoff would still be low enough that many people without the natural advantages of current Harvard students could get in, and so some degree of redistribution of resources from the talented would take place.

In the long run, like Matt, I'd support policies that more dramatically reallocate resources away from the best students. For example, I'd love to see a tax on university endowments with all proceeds going to reduce community college tuition. But when looking at what Harvard alone can do right now, I think a lottery with a cutoff is the best first step.

Monica Potts argues that a lottery would be biased against poor and minority students, because persistent achievement gaps would mean fewer would meet the minimum cutoff, fewer poor students apply to elite institutions to begin with, and other institutions would crop up to help elites the way Harvard did pre-lottery.

A national lottery with many schools participating, along the lines outlined in the column, would address the latter two problems. If applying to Harvard is no different from applying to any other school, then presumably fewer low income applicants would be deterred from doing so. And if all schools were required or strongly pressured to participate in a uniform admissions process, the chances of a school defecting and abandoning the lottery would be low.

The achievement gap problem is tough, as adjusting the cutoff through class-based preferences would necessarily mean letting students into the lottery who would not be capable of doing work at the college that admits them. There isn't a short-run fix here. Instead, a broader equalization of resources between elite and non-elite institutions, such that students would have no reason to want to go to a school where they can't do the work, seems like the best bet. Oh, and closing the achievement gap to start with, through better early childhood education and other measures, should be on the agenda.

Sam Barr objects more to my philosophical foundations, intuiting that I'm arguing on Rawlsian terms and responding that John Rawls would actually not object to the current admissions system. This is basically a misunderstanding. I'm not a Rawlsian by any means, for one thing. For another, the association of Rawls with luck egalitarianism – the belief that peoples' prospects in life should not be determined by factors beyond their control – is a huge misreading.

<jargon>

Rawls famously called natural talent and other things beyond our control "arbitrary from a moral point of view". But for him, this only means that in the original position, when we are deciding on principles of justice, they should not come into play. It does not mean that they should be treated as arbitrary in a just society. In fact, he argues just the opposite.

Rawls places huge importance on "equality of opportunity" in his theory, and indeed argues that it should trump his famous "difference principle", which says that economic inequalities must provide absolute gains to even the worst-off. Equality of opportunity, for Rawls, means that peoples' "life chances" must be determinedly solely by effort and natural talent. That is, even if helping untalented people is in accordance with the difference principle, Rawls rejects it as unjust for violating equality of opportunity; he says this explicitly on page 265 of A Theory of Justice. Richard Arneson's "Against Rawlsian Equality of Opportunity" is an excellent explanation of the disturbing implications of Rawls' view.

<⁄jargon>

Apart from this mixup, Sam argues that admitting students based on lottery is just as arbitrary as admitting them based on natural talent. Given that admissions is going to be somehow arbitrary, he continues, we should focus on what people do with their elite education, not whether they get it to start with.

The first part of this assumes that all arbitrary procedures are equally objectionable, which is wrong. Relying on natural talent is objectionable not just because it is random, but because it provides resources to those who need them least, and because it creates a stigmatized class who are discriminated against based on a feature of their character which they cannot change. A lottery does neither of these things. Rejection, in the current system, amounts to a negative comment on an inalterable feature of oneself, and is thus a real harm to those who are rejected. Rejection in a lottery says nothing about one's character, and is thus far less damaging. That strikes me as a real improvement.

I agree with Sam that recipients of elite educations should put those educations to good use. It's unclear what the policy implications of this are, but if there's something Harvard can do to encourage better career paths for its students–say, by banning investment banks or consulting firms from recruiting on campus–I'd be all for it. But this assumes that there should be such a thing as elite and non-elite education to start with. In the long-run, we should be equalizing resources between elite and non-elite institutions, which would render moot the question of what to do with the increased resources of an elite education.