C.R. in The Economist:

IN THE years since the publication in 1936 of "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money", John Maynard Keynes’s name has been irretrievably linked to the idea that fiscal stimulus should be used to combat recession during downturns. Such ideas came to dominate economics in the 30 years after the second world war, so much so that Republican president Richard Nixon declared in 1971 that “we are all Keynesians now”.

Although Keynes’s ideas went out of favour in the 1980s and 1990s, they came back into fashion as the financial crisis of 2007-09 unfolded. The use of fiscal stimulus to fight recessions in America, Britain and Asia led Keynes’s most prominent biographer, Robert Skidelsky, to declare the “return of the master”. Keynes's notoriety among the public rose so much that a hip-hop video of him arguing the merits of fiscal stimulus with his rival, F. A. Hayek, went viral on YouTube back in 2010.

But whether Keynes’s ideas were ever as simple or consistent as some modern-day Keynesian economists suggest is a matter of great contention. The Economist noted as long ago as the 1960s that the ideas of Keynes the man were diverging from contemporary Keynesian economics. While Keynes emphasised austerity in the good times as much as stimulus in the bad, many Keynesians considered stimulus a “one-way road” in the 1960s and 1970s. As Keynes himself wrote in 1937: “The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.”

More here.

Florence Aubenas over at the Verso blog:

His office has no door. Truth be told, it is not an office at all: it is a kind of box room, open onto the corridor. Each morning in 1958, the young woman crossed Tunis to sit there. She waits. For what? She does not know. The head doctor, her superior, does not address her. His gaze passes across her as if she did not exist. Sometimes she catches something he says, and she chews it over for whole days. An example? "In Arab culture, breasts are not an erotic object."

She is the only French woman working at the Tunis psychiatric hospital. She is Marie-Jeanne Manuellan, 31 years of age, maiden name Vacher, born in Meymac (Corrèze). She has a check skirt, she has three children, and is a field social worker married to a coopérant [a man doing a social service instead of military service]. The others in the team are all Tunisians and Algerians. Manuellan knows nothing about psychiatry. Too bad. Tunisia, which has just won its independence, has appointed her to this position, in order to show that the new government is doing better than how things were under the French protectorate.

The chief doctor in this department "doesn’t hang round with French people." He told her as much in a glacial tone. He explained: "I have responsibilities in the FLN," the National Liberation Front in the middle of its fight for Algeria’s independence. The young woman warns her husband "I’ve come across a sadist." The "sadist" is Frantz Fanon, 33 years of age. He is already — all at once — a fervently anti-psychiatry psychiatrist, a high-profile essayist, a Nègreintoning against négritude, a revolutionary and son to a wealthy Martinique family.

Manuellan spends two months in the box room, till the day when the Sadist appears in front of her, telling her: "You are going to follow me during my rounds, listening and noting everything I say." He introduces her to the patients, "This woman is not a woman, but a tape recorder." She was his assistant for three years.

More here.

Andrew Berman in 6sqft:

On 2nd Avenue, just south of 9th Street at No. 140-142, sits one of the East Village’s oddest structures. Clad in metal and adorned with Cyrillic lettering, the building sports a slightly downtrodden and forbidding look, seeming dropped into the neighborhood from some dystopian sci-fi thriller.

In reality, for the last half century the building has housed the Ukrainian National Home, best known as a great place to get some good food or drink. But scratch the surface of this architectural oddity and you’ll find a winding history replete with Jewish gangsters, German teetotalers, jazz-playing hipsters, and the American debut of one of Britain’s premier post-punk bands, all in a building which, under its metallic veneer, dates back nearly two centuries.

138 Second Avenue with 140-142 to its left, via HDC/Six to Celebrate

The exact date of construction of 140-142 Second Avenue is not known, but evidence indicates it was built around 1830. Then one of New York’s most fashionable streets, this stretch of Second Avenue had been part of Peter Stuyvesant’s farm, which after his death was divided among his heirs. In the early 1830s, urban development reached this area, and stately federal-style single-family homes were built for successful merchants along this street and nearby St. Mark’s Place. 140-142 Second Avenue was probably first constructed at this time as two such houses, which likely looked very much like nearby 4 St. Marks Place. It also probably looked a lot like its neighbor to the south, 138 Second Avenue, before it had a full fourth floor added in the late 19th century and a two-story commercial addition in front in the early 20th century.

More here.

Over at the LRB:

Olivier Roy, professor at the European Institute in Florence and writer on political Islam, tells Adam Shatz about his experiences with the Gauche prolétarienne in the 1960s and his early travels in Afghanistan. This is part one of a two-part podcast. Listen to Part Two »

Alissa Quart and Barbara Ehrenreich in The Guardian:

There certainly is room for outrage about both the mistreatment of thespians and models, and the manhandling of waitresses or women picking berries in the fields (We should try for a both/and campaign. It could be called #MostofThem!).

Then again, that inclusive strategy rests on a tacit assumption that the airing of the pain of, say, actor Mira Sorvino will inevitably help less well-born women. And we think the associative property here is probably a fallacy. It’s basically a trickle-down theory of female empowerment. We know how well trickle-down theories of all kinds tend to pan out.

So how can we excavate the vast iceberg of sexual harassment that lies beneath the glittering tip of celebrity abuse?

This is a powerful moment for sharing our stories, but it can sometimes feel like we are only reproducing class divisions that have long existed in the feminist movement – where we are aware of the elegant suffering of celebrity comics, businesswomen and starlets but not those of the working mothers who are handing us our fries or fluffing our pillows. We are not seeing the way the latter are harassed in so many other ways. Working-class women regularly have their purses searched (ostensibly for stolen goods) or are expected to work overtime without pay. This kind of casual hassling is part of the general humiliation that most low-wage workplaces inflict.

More here.

Manu S. Pillai in LiveMint:

If ever there was a man who was attentive to the tribulations of kings, that man was Kautilya. While there might have been several minds invested, across spans of time, in the composition of his Arthashastra, Kautilya’s manual of statecraft was a model of exactness to guide the hands of power. Thus, for instance, for relatively more ordinary varieties of criminal offence, the punishment suggested is “tearing apart by bullocks”, but for the singular error of romancing the monarch’s wife, things could only end with the seducer “cooking in a big jar”. Torture, in general, was to be perfectly timed, with meals in between for the torturer and the subject of his attention, though exceptions of format could be made if the criminal in question were a Brahmin—so while a regular sinner might discover parts of his body set on fire, one with the sacred thread wasn’t permanently charred, keeping his life, but losing his eyes.

Kautilya’s treatise is one of the many sources from ancient times that Upinder Singh studies in her authoritative new book, Political Violence In Ancient India (Harvard University Press). It is an unembellished title and the language of the book follows this pattern, offering a 1,000-year overview of how violence and its philosophical corollary, non-violence, were treated and reconciled by thinkers many centuries ago. So while some hagiographies might show Ashoka roasting his brother and rival for the Mauryan throne and slaughtering 18,000 Ajivikas before his evolution into a crusader for peace, the fact is that we don’t really have reliable statistics for how (or how many) people died in political settings all those ages ago. The book, therefore, is necessarily “a history of ideas”, which studies intellectual responses to violence, from sources such as the Vedas to the plays of Bhasa and Kalidasa, alluding to Harappan remains as well as to the times of the Guptas.

Singh sets out, in a very balanced fashion, to challenge a basic principle many of us have, over years of schooling and nation-building, systematically absorbed: that India has been an eternal beacon of non-violence and harmony. The truth, as the author demonstrates, is as complex as the other truths of life. For what we see is the emergence of non-violence as an ideal mainly among Buddhists and Jains, subsequently adopted by Hindu sources as well, but always with a parallel understanding that in the practical universe of economics and politics, involving masses of people, non-violence is a principle that cannot always be upheld. So we find even Ashoka struggling to persuade his palace establishment to accept a fully vegetarian kitchen, as much as we encounter Eastern oligarchies, sites evidently of greater political confrontation than the monarchical West, welcoming Buddha’s doctrine of peace and offering patronage without irony.

More here.

Madhav Khosla in the LA Review of Books:

The Ordinary Virtues lacks the psychological sophistication of a work like Shklar’s Ordinary Vices. Many readers are likely to find the book unsatisfying in important ways. Parts of it seem like a work of political theory, though its contribution in this regard is not fully clear. On other occasions, it appears as a collection of pieces in political journalism without the dramatic insights into human behavior to which narrative nonfiction writing aspires.

None of this, to be fair, is lost on Ignatieff. He regards the book as an anthropological and sociological inquiry into ethical behavior. This ambition is, alas, poorly served by the book’s sweeping character. Yet its animating theme — that what human beings share is “a common desire, in their own vernacular, for moral order” that can infuse their lives with meaning — is a significant one. It forces us to notice that we are meaning-generating creatures, and that any study of human behavior must not only acknowledge this fact but also try to understand how meaning is generated.

Two valuable reminders, in particular, emerge from Ignatieff’s study. The first is that successful societies, which is to say societies that manage to avoid severe forms of violence and disorder, often rest on prosaic social practices. There is a temptation — how could there not be? — to present the success or failure of societies in the grandest of terms, as evidence for the rightness or wrongness of this or that ideology or worldview. But whether or not our social world is likely to implode is more often than not determined by small acts between individuals. Communal bonds, exchanges between neighbors, the attitudes of employers toward employees, silent forms of understanding, and predictable forms of state action are all matters that may seem beneath the theorist’s notice, but Ignatieff asks that we remember their significance, and their fragility. Moreover, a society that is well ordered is one in which virtue is made banal. Its quiet practices become so deeply entrenched that it does not require heroes to triumph.

More here.

Anita Desai in The Guardian:

Alipur Road was a wide avenue lined with enormous banyan trees, and my mother and I would go for walks along it – to Maiden’s Hotel, which had a small library, or further on to the Quidsia Gardens. And, across the road, I’d see a young woman pushing a pram with a baby seated in it and a little girl dancing alongside it. She was a married woman clearly, and I a student at the University of Delhi, but glancing across the road at her, I felt an instinctive relation to her. Why?

She was revealed to be a young woman of European descent – German and Polish – who was married to an Indian architect, Cyrus Jhabvala, and lived in rooms in a sprawling bungalow just off Alipur Road. When her mother, a German Jewish woman from London, visited her, Ruth searched for someone she could talk to. I think it might have been Dr Charles Fabri, the Hungarian Indologist who lived in the neighbourhood, who suggested she might meet my German mother, who had also come to India on marrying an Indian, 30 years before, in the 1920s.

A coffee party – a kaffeklatsch – was arranged so the two could indulge in their shared language in this foreign setting. I can’t imagine how or why, but Ruth decided to follow their meeting, after her mother had returned to England, with many others, on a different level – that of daughters. With extraordinary kindness and generosity she would have me over to their house, one filled with books, the books she had brought with her from England where she had been a student at the University of London when she had met Jhab. Perhaps it touched her that I was so excited about being among her books, talking to her about books.

More here.

Mark S. Weiner over at the Niskanen Center:

To understand the philosophical significance of climate change denial for Trumpism, it’s helpful to turn to the work of a thinker whose writings, it’s been suggested (and here), underwrite the movement’s “intellectual source code”: the German constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985).

For readers acquainted with Schmitt, the outlines of the emerging political philosophy of Trumpism seem eerily familiar. Over the course of his campaign and presidency, Trump has consistently expressed in action principles that Schmitt developed at the level of theory.

On Schmitt’s view, liberal states are weak and vulnerable, subject to corrosion from within—through capture by private interest groups—and conquest from abroad. In the American case, as Trump would have it, the United States has been “crippled” and reduced to “carnage” by self-interested financial and cultural elites, radical Islamic terrorists, cunning foreign trade negotiators, and illegal immigrants from Mexico.

The source of this vulnerability, Schmitt argues, is modern liberalism’s thin conception of political community and the state. Because liberals misunderstand the very nature of political life, they create conditions under which their nations implode.

According to Schmitt, a political community arises when its members coalesce around some aspect of their common existence. On this basis, they distinguish between their “friends” and “enemies,” the latter of whom they are ultimately prepared to fight and kill to defend their way of life.

A political community, that is, is created through an animating sense of common identity and existential threat—indeed, that’s how “the political” as a fundamental sphere of human value comes into being, and how it provides the cultural foundation of sovereignty and the state for a community of equals.

More here.

Alan Marsden in Scientific American:

New research published in the journal Royal Society Open Science attempts to tackle this issue by investigating the links between the emotions of lyrics and the musical elements they are set to. While the methods used are sophisticatedly statistical, the conclusions are extremely dry. The finding that a single chord type is most associated with positive lyrics is a huge simplification of the way that music works, highlighting the sheer scale of the challenge of creating a machine that could understand and compose music like a human can.

The data came from combining information from three large-scale public sources, two of them originally intended for entirely different purposes. The authors downloaded the lyrics and chord sequences of nearly 90,000 popular songs from Ultimate Guitar, a longstanding community website where users upload their own transcriptions of music.

To match the lyrics of the songs to emotions, the researchers took data from labMT, a crowd-sourced website that rates the emotional valence of words (the degree to which they represent good or bad feelings). The details of when and where the songs originated from were taken from Gracenote, the same database as your music player probably uses to show artists’ information.

By correlating the valence of words with the type of chord accompanying them, the authors confirmed that major chords were associated more with positive words than minor chords. Unexpectedly, they found that seventh chords—chords with four different notes rather than the usual three—had an even higher association with positive words, even in the case of minor seventh chords. This is in constrast to other studies which have placed the valence of seventh chords between minor and major.

More here.

Hugh D. Reynolds interviews Juliana Baggini over at 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: In the first chapter, Eternal truths, you write: ‘One of the problems we face is not the absence of truth, but its overabundance.’ You make a case for maintaining divergence into two streams of truth: revealed, religious truths, and those more grounded in science. I can see that this is a pragmatic, perhaps vital split to reduce conflict, but isn’t it permitting a kind of truth bypass?

JB: There are lots of very sophisticated religious believers who make religion out to be a kind of primitive science – and it really isn’t. They’ll talk about Stephen J. Gould and the two Non-Overlapping Magisteria (see his Rock of Ages (Random House 1999)). I think that they are prescriptively right and descriptively wrong.

A lot of religious belief – even the majority – involves making factual claims about the world which do come into conflict with science and history. For Christians, a test of this is the Empty Tomb. I ask Christians: ‘are you saying that it does not matter – as a matter of fact – whether or not Christ’s tomb was empty and that he was resurrected?’ At that point, I find that, to a lot of them, it really does matter, despite all the fine talk about not wanting to confuse science and history with religion.

Having said that, it is the right door to push against. There are believers who are already there or half the way there. Rather than say ‘let’s forget about religion – let’s get rid of it’ – I think we should try and force people to walk the talk: to take more seriously the idea that, whatever religious truth is, it’s not the same thing as science and history. People find that easy to say, and difficult to do.

More here.

Dani Rodrik in Boston Review:

A journalist calls an economics professor for his view on whether free trade is a good idea. The professor responds enthusiastically in the affirmative. The journalist then goes undercover as a student in the professor's advanced graduate seminar on international trade. He poses the same question: Is free trade good? This time the professor is stymied. “What do you mean by ‘good?’” he responds. “And good for whom?” The professor then launches into an extensive exegesis that will ultimately culminate in a heavily hedged statement: “So if the long list of conditions I have just described are satisfied, and assuming we can tax the beneficiaries to compensate the losers, freer trade has the potential to increase everyone's well being.” If he is in an expansive mood, the professor might add that the effect of free trade on an economy's long-term growth rate is not clear either and would depend on an altogether different set of requirements.

This professor is rather different from the one the journalist encountered previously. On the record, he exudes self-confidence, not reticence, about the appropriate policy. There is one and only one model, at least as far as the public conversation is concerned, and there is a single correct answer regardless of context. Strangely, the professor deems the knowledge that he imparts to his advanced students to be inappropriate (or dangerous) for the general public. Why?

The roots of such behavior lie deep in the sociology and the culture of the economics profession. But one important motive is the zeal to display the profession's crown jewels in untarnished form—market efficiency, the invisible hand, comparative advantage—and to shield them from attack by self-interested barbarians, namely the protectionists. Unfortunately, these economists typically ignore the barbarians on the other side of the issue—financiers and multinational corporations whose motives are no purer and who are all too ready to hijack these ideas for their own benefit.

More here.

Dani Rodrik over at the Milken Institute Review:

Adam Tooze over at his website:

In May 2009 as the scale of the fiscal shock became clear, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journalreported that markets were up in arms. Yardeni was once more to the fore warning that “Ten trillion dollars over the next 10 years is just an indication that Washington is really out of control ….” On May 29 2009 the WSJ announced that in light of “Washington’s astonishing bet on fiscal and monetary reflation” the bond vigilantes were swinging back into the saddle. “It’s not going too far to say we are watching a showdown between Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and bond investors, otherwise known as the financial markets.” “When in doubt,” the Journal advised its readers, “bet on the markets.” It was a message that had particular resonance inside an Obama administration staffed by veterans of the Clinton years and haunted by memories of the 1990s. In May 2009 Obama commissioned his budget director Peter Orszag to prepare contingency plans for a bond market sell off. Orszag was a protégé of Clinton-era Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. In the locust years of the Bush Presidency, Orszag had worked with Rubin to craft an agenda of budget consolidation for the next Democratic Presidency.

In early 2010 the appearance of “Growth in a time of debt”, a highly influential paper by Professors Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, added intellectual weight to fear of the bond market. The two former IMF economists claimed to have identified a critical threshold. When debt reached 90 percent of GDP, growth declined sharply leading to a vicious downward spiral. As Reinhart and Rogoff warned: once debt reached critical levels towards 90 percent of GDP or above, there was always a risk of a sudden shift in market attitudes. “I certainly wouldn’t call this my baseline scenario for the U.S”, Reinhart admitted in one interview – “but the message is: think the unthinkable.” On Fox TV historian Niall Ferguson invoked the collapse of the Soviet Russia to make the same point. A world power could be brought down by financial excess with catastrophic speed. Ferguson’s message to American audiences was stark: “The PIIGS R US”.

More here.

Simon During over at academia.edu:

Why is it just now that a need is felt for courses on the humanities as such, and why, too, are histories and defences of the humanities pouring from the presses? As we all know, a good part of the answer is that the humanities are currently under financial and ideological pressure. This has had the effect of flattening them—by which I mean that the humanities are often no longer so much regarded as a suite of specialized disciplines but rather as a distinct formation on their own account. When, for instance, politicians, business people and university administrators worry that the humanities are insufficiently geared toward training students for the workplace they usually don’t distinguish between history, philosophy, archaeology and so on—it is simply the humanities that are in their sights, and, from that perspective, we—students and teachers— are “in the humanities” rather than in a particular discipline. We might say, in sum, that the humanities are becoming a “meta-discipline.” For all that, a concept of the humanities that transcends or,at any rate, overflows the established disciplines is a beast that has been vaguely denoted rather than concretely apprehended.

Luigi Guiso, Helios Herrera, Massimo Morelli, and Tommaso Sonno in Vox.eu:

Several studies have addressed the issue of populism recently. Algan et al. (2017) study the political consequences of the Great Recession in Europe, documenting that in post-2008 elections, EU regions experiencing higher unemployment gave more support to populists. They also document that regions where unemployment rose experienced the sharpest decline in trust in institutions and traditional politics. Dustman et al. (2017) report similar results, showing that in the aftermath of the crisis, mistrust towards European institutions – largely explained by worse economic conditions in Eurozone countries – is positively correlated with populist voting. Foster and Frieden (2017) nuance this result using individual characteristics from the Eurobarometer survey data, and also show how the link between mistrust and populism is more pronounced in debtor countries. Inglehart and Norris (2016) observe that cultural variables affect the decision to vote for a populist party (instead of abstaining or voting for a non-populist party) more than economic variables. But their finding of a weak direct effect of economic variables is due to the fact that they fail to observe that economic security shocks significantly affect the incentive to abstain, which is instead the key intermediate channel that we emphasise in our research.

Beside the fact that these studies do not consider the crucial role of the incentive to abstain from voting, the other distinguishing feature of our work is the balanced effort to understand both demand and supply of populism, rather than focusing exclusively on the demand side. Rodrik (2017) is the only recent paper that focuses on the supply side. He traces the origin of today’s populism (mainly, if not uniquely) back to the globalisation shock, arguing that past history as well as economic theory imply that waves of globalisation can predictably lead to a populist backlash with a specific timing (when the shock hits) and geographical pattern (in countries that are most adversely affected by globalisation).

More here.

Wendy Orent in Aeon:

We think of evolution, described by Charles Darwin in 1859, as a slow dance: nature chooses the best-adapted organisms to reproduce, multiply and survive in any given ecosystem. As organisms adapt to changing ecological circumstances over millennia, the varieties best-suited to the environment thrive, allowing species to emerge and evolve. This is the process known as natural selection, or differential reproduction, which simply means that the organisms best-adapted to their particular, immediate circumstances will pass on more genes to the next generation than their less-well-adapted conspecifics (members of the same species).

Permanent change, of the kind we see in the fossil record, takes more time. Just look at the plodding trajectory of the several-hoofed Hyracotherium, a dog-sized forest-dwelling mammal that gradually lost its side toes (four on the front legs and three on the back) as the central one enlarged. It took 55 million years for it to evolve into the large, single-hoofed, grass-feeding horse we know today.

But sometimes evolution happens fast. As the biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant at Princeton University in New Jersey showed in their studies of Galapagos finches, small beaks can change into large beaks in a single generation, depending on climate conditions and the type of food to be found on those harsh islands. The small-beaked birds might die out, while the large-beaked prevail, for a while at least. But those rapid changes aren’t often permanent. Though the Grants might have witnessed the evolution of an entirely new, heavy-bodied finch species, many of the changes they saw in finches’ beaks were reversed, again and again. Changes in vegetation could mean that large beaks become a handicap. This shifting process – small changes over short periods of time – is called ‘microevolution’.

The evolutionary biologists David Lahti of Queens College at the City University of New York and Paul W Ewald of the University of Louisville both argue that there’s nothing exceptional about fast evolution.

More here.

Xan Brooks in The Guardian:

If modern day Hollywood has a Harry Lime figure, it is surely Harvey Weinstein, another hubristic monster who played by his own rules. Weinstein, sources say, would typically explain his volcanic temper and voracious appetites as being all part and parcel of his “passion for movies”. This implied that the ends always justified the means – even if the means were compulsive sexual harassment, and allegedly worse; even if the end was a film like Madonna’s W.E. Ultimately, he was no more a great artist than smirking Lime. And yet Weinstein’s fall has cast the whole industry in an ugly light. It’s like directing a UVA lamp at a crime scene. That gleaming interior is thick with thumbprints, blood and semen.

Weinstein’s disgrace is still rolling news. It remains to be seen where more evidence is uncovered and which other film-makers get caught in the net. Beauchamp hopes that the repercussions will prompt a wider societal shift. Failing that, it may result in a few repeat offenders being abruptly scared straight.

“Fear is the operative emotion in this town,” she says. “And the priority is always the next quarter’s bottom line. Right now, after Weinstein, everybody’s floundering, looking over their shoulder. If it’s because of fear that some people will stop intimidating other people, then that’s good, I’ll accept it. At least it means that they’re stopping.”

So what should we choose – cuckoo clock or Renaissance? Alternatively we could agree that the distinction is false.

More here.