Comparative European Politics has a symposium on Mark Blyth's Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, with comments from Nicolas Jabko, Jamie Peck, Wolfgang Streeck, Helen Thompson and Mark Blyth. Wolfgang Streeck:

Why write a comment on a book that must command as much respect and indeed admiration as Blyth’s? Fortunately one can always ask questions, extend one or the other line of argument to see where it may lead and probe for underlying assumptions that might usefully be uncovered. Having convincingly demonstrated that ‘austerity doesn’t work’, Blyth in my view remains conspicuously silent on what would work and for whom. This is, of course, entirely legitimate in principle; he or she who undertakes to explain a problem cannot be obliged to deliver a solution as well. However, although Blyth refrains from explicitly telling us what might replace austerity, it seems to me that implicitly he suggests that the alternative is just around the corner, too obvious to be in need of discussion, in the form of monetary and fiscal expansion. It is here that I have my doubts.

Before I get to them, let me reassure the reader that I have not overlooked the last chapter of the book where Blyth does turn policy advocate, if only with respect to public debt, for the reduction of which he recommends a combination of fiscal repression and higher taxes. In recent months that combination seems to have become popular even among governments and their economists, and Blyth is to be commended for having seen this coming. Whether there are good reasons to be as enthusiastic about it as he is, however, a different matter. Fiscal repression is predicated on high growth, real or nominal or a combination of the two, plus low interest rates secured by, presumably, monetary expansion. As to real growth, the problem, nowhere mentioned by Blyth, is that is has been and continues to be on a long-term decline. Up to now nobody can convincingly say how that trend may be reversed; while opinions differ, however, few if any have suggested that the thing to do would be raising taxes. To the contrary, the mantra has been and still is that growth is stimulated, not by raising but by cutting taxes, promoting investment at the high end of the income distribution or consumption at the lower end. (There is also the minor problem of tax flight, although governments are about to take care of this, or so they say.) Hence, the growth trick must almost entirely be done by monetary expansion, and indeed against the odds of the growth-impeding effects of a tax increase.

Fortunately, if the real growth trick refused to work, monetary expansion could also do with the nominal growth trick. Inflation, however, seems hard to engineer in the absence of strong trade unions, that is, by easy money alone. This at least could be the lesson of recent years, when central banks were expanding as though there was no tomorrow but inflation remained miraculously absent. Maybe this would at some point change. However, what would be supposed to cure public indebtedness could have serious side-effects. If easy money eventually did cause inflation, this would disproportionately punish people on fixed incomes. Of these, because of a changed demography, there are many more today than in the 1970s.

More here.

Annie Lowrey in the New York Times:

This fall, a truck dumped eight million coins outside the Parliament building in Bern, one for every Swiss citizen. It was a publicity stunt for advocates of an audacious social policy that just might become reality in the tiny, rich country. Along with the coins, activists delivered 125,000 signatures — enough to trigger a Swiss public referendum, this time on providing a monthly income to every citizen, no strings attached. Every month, every Swiss person would receive a check from the government, no matter how rich or poor, how hardworking or lazy, how old or young. Poverty would disappear. Economists, needless to say, are sharply divided on what would reappear in its place — and whether such a basic-income scheme might have some appeal for other, less socialist countries too.

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John Quiggin in Jacobin:

David Graeber’s denunciation of “bullshit jobs” resonated with many, producing a string of responses. Alex Tabarrok and Brad DeLong have suggested that the apparent inverse relationship between earnings and the social value of work done is simply an illustration of “diamond-water” paradox, that prices and wages are determined by marginal, rather than absolute values and that marginal values reflect scarcity as well as utility. Peter Frase refutes this claim in both empirical terms (noting for example the fact that the price of diamonds is set by the De Beers cartel rather than pure market forces) and as a resurrection of the discredited marginal productivity ethics of the 19th century.

I’d like to look at a specific question raised by the discussion of private returns and social value, namely: can Wall Street, in its present form, be justified? That is, does the share of income flowing to corporations and professional workers in the financial sector reflect their marginal contribution to the total value of social output, so that, if their work ceased to be done and their skills were allocated elsewhere, we would all be worse off?

I argue that society as a whole would be better off if the financial sector were smaller, and received much smaller returns. A political strategy based on cutting the financial sector down to size has more promise for the Left than any alternative approach now on offer, and is a necessary precondition for a broader attempt to make the distribution of wealth and power more equal.

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Esther Inglis-Arkell in io9:

Sleeping Beauty is put under sedation on a Sunday. A coin is flipped. No matter what, she is woken up on Monday. She is briefly interviewed, but before she is put back to sleep, she is given a drug that wipes out her memory of the interview, and being woken at all. If the coin comes up heads, she is only awakened on Monday. If the coin comes up tails, she awakened on Monday and on Tuesday. During each interview, before she is given the amnesiac drug, she is asked what she believes the result of the coin flip was. Should she say heads or tails? Or should she just bolt for the door?

There is always the conventional view. The coin came down on one side or another. When Sleeping Beauty awakes, she has no way of telling whether it's Monday or Tuesday, and she doesn't know whether she's been awakened before. No matter what she guesses, she has a 50/50 chance of getting it right.

Or does she? Consider a world so depraved that it could get 1000 different volunteers to participate in this experiment. The coin will be flipped 1000 times, and 500 times it will come up heads, and 500 times it will come up tails. But Sleeping Beauty won't wake up 1000 times. She'll wake up 1500 times. Every time the coin comes up tails, she gets two interviews — making for 1000 wake up calls. When the coin comes up heads she gets a paltry 500 awakenings. Out of 1500 creepy interviews, two-thirds will be prompted by tails, and one-third by heads. Therefore, she should guess tails, knowing that there's a 2/3 probability she'll be right about a fifty-fifty coin flip.

There is a third school of thought about this experiment. Its philosophy runs thusly: who cares? Each interview is the same.

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Simon Schama at the Financial Times:

Kennedy knew better than to hide his wiry Irish mop beneath a titfer. It was the crest, the crown, the brand. Everything about him was calculated to give the impression of an almost casual ease beneath the weight of power: the splashing around on Cape Cod; the kid daughter romping through the Oval Office, the droll wit which came as naturally to him as his habitual satyrism. Of the acute physical pain, the relentless drug treatments, the hospital visits, Addison’s disease, spastic colitis we knew nothing. Horsing around with the brothers and the children on the Massachusetts beach, he was President Fine Fettle, rough-house glamour with the bonus of brains. When we looked around at our own politicians we saw pipes, tweeds, the brandy snifter or the mug of tea. So of course we took his murder personally, angry at being robbed of the merry mind; a big chunk of the future blown away in the Dallas motorcade. Norman Mailer spoke for all of us when he said, “For a time we felt the country was ours. Now it’s theirs again.”

A lot of the Best and Brightest who had worked for and with JFK felt much the same way. Nine months after his death, during the 1964 Democratic Convention that was more like a coronation than a nomination for Lyndon Johnson, you could hear the sound of one hand clapping among the survivors of Camelot.

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David L. Ulin at The LA Times:

Als is not denying Mathers' whiteness, just saying that it's trumped by class, by economics, by his awareness of being on the outside looking in. It's a terrific point, and Als pushes it further by suggesting that “rap's dissonant sound … was as familiar and natural to the burgeoning artist as the short story form was to Flannery O'Connor.” Notice what he does there: arguing not that rap and short fiction are the same (this would devalue both forms by forcing a false equivalency) but that for these artists, the drive to create comes out of a common otherness.

The O'Connor reference highlights another kind of doubling, since Als has already written about her in the book. What he's getting at is how these artists come together in his imagination, echoing one another and himself. This makes “White Girls” more than a collection of disparate pieces but rather a coherent portrait of Als' inner life.

The focus is privilege, who has it and who will never have it, and what those without it are supposed to do. As Als notes of Capote, “It is hard to garner privilege when you begin with none — for those who have to reach for it, it remains perpetually out of reach.”

more here.

Marilyn Robinson in The New York Times:

This slender, charming book must be approached with a special tact. To read it feels a little like an intrusion on inwardness itself. The volume contains, alongside a lightly corrected transcription, a facsimile of the Sterling notebook in which Flannery O’Connor, just 20 years old, began a journal addressed to God. Written in her neat hand, it is reproduced complete with the empty final pages (her concluding words are “there is nothing left to say of me”) and not omitting a bit of musical notation floating on the inside of the back cover. The prayers, attempts at prayer and meditations on faith and art contained in it were written in 1946 and 1947, while O’Connor was a student in Iowa. The brilliance that would make her fictions literary classics is fully apparent in them.

The complexity of O’Connor’s thinking, together with the largely flawless pages in her hand, suggest that these entries may be fair copies of earlier drafts. Clearly O’Connor’s virtuosity makes her self-­conscious. Young as she was, new to writing, she could only have been pleased, even awed, at having produced these beautiful sentences. Perhaps nothing written is finally meant to go unread, even if the reader is only a creature of the writer’s mind, an attentive and exacting self that compels refinements of honesty. After a little joke about the pedestrian uses we would make of a knowledge of heaven if we had been given one, she says, remembering her intended Hearer, “But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to be clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever & want to be considered so.” Her mind is examined, faith questioned, weakness confessed, powers tried as they might not have been under the eye of any human observer. Youth and loneliness and the unspent energies of a singular mind are testing the possible and must be allowed free play.

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Raheel Lakhani in Aaj News:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field; I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

-Rumi

When one reads the Persian mystic Rumi allegorically, it feels as if both the creator and the created are speaking. As if Truth is saying that He dwells beyond the fields of paradise and hell, essentially everywhere and the creation shows readiness to indulge in love and praise of HIM. If this talk of sacredness is outside the measures of right and wrong then Rumi here is inviting us to embrace pluralism while appreciating God’s creation.

…A poet from Sub-continent who refers Rumi repeatedly is Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai. He was a Sindhi mystic saint, poet, and musician. His collected poems were compiled as Shah Jo Risalo. Hossein Nasr described Shah Latif as a direct emanation of Rumi’s spirituality in the Indian world (Nasr, 1974).

The whole creation seeks Him,

He is the Fount of Beauty, thus Rumi says:

If you but unlock yourself, you will see Him

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A Crow

In a vast expanse of field
a crow with the sun on its back
flying vigorously
suddenly died.
It fell straight down from the high sky.
And at the same time
its huge shadow
dashed into its dead body
at lightning speed
from the horizon of the crimson field.
Having cast a great shadow on this earth
the crow’s heart quit.

by Shinjiro Kurahara
from Iwana
publisher: Dowaya, Tokyo, 2010
translation: 2010, Mariko Kurahara, William I. Elliott, Katsumasa Nishihara

Mohammed Hanif in The New Yorker:

During his four years as the head of the T.T.P., Mehsud raised the Taliban game in Pakistan. No longer were they just tribal men fighting to preserve their way of life; they started dreaming they could convert everyone to it. Mehsud consolidated a number of small but ruthless militant and sectarian groups into close-knit fighting units that seemed able to strike anywhere at will. He ordered attacks on Pakistan’s military bases, organized a couple of spectacular jailbreaks, and sent an endless stream of suicide bombers after politicians and religious scholars who didn’t meet his exacting standards. After his men kidnapped an Army colonel, Mehsud delivered a short speech, and then shot him in front of a video camera.

Yet the state seems to have lost the will to fight its old foe, Fazlullah, and his followers. When Mehsud was killed, instead of celebrating or letting out quiet sighs of relief, politicians and journalists reacted as if they had lost a favorite son. He had killed many of us, but we weren’t craving vengeance; we were ready to make up and cuddle.

Why does Pakistan’s political and military élite celebrate the very people it is fighting?

More here.

From Sam Harris's blog:

Harris: What are the greatest misconceptions people have about the origins of morality?

Bloom: The most common misconception is that morality is a human invention. It’s like agriculture and writing, something that humans invented at some point in history. From this perspective, babies start off as entirely self-interested beings—little psychopaths—and only gradually come to appreciate, through exposure to parents and schools and church and television, moral notions such as the wrongness of harming another person.

Now, this perspective is not entirely wrong. Certainly some morality is learned; this has to be the case because moral ideals differ across societies. Nobody is born with the belief that sexism is wrong (a moral belief that you and I share) or that blasphemy should be punished by death (a moral belief that you and I reject). Such views are the product of culture and society. They aren’t in the genes.

But the argument I make in Just Babies is that there also exist hardwired moral universals—moral principles that we all possess. And even those aspects of morality—such as the evils of sexism—that vary across cultures are ultimately grounded in these moral foundations.

A very different misconception sometimes arises, often stemming from a religious or spiritual outlook. It’s that we start off as Noble Savages, as fundamentally good and moral beings. From this perspective, society and government and culture are corrupting influences, blotting out and overriding our natural and innate kindness.

This, too, is mistaken. We do have a moral core, but it is limited—Hobbes was closer to the truth than Rousseau. Relative to an adult, your typical toddler is selfish, parochial, and bigoted. I like the way Kingsley Amis once put it: “It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.” Morality begins with the genes, but it doesn’t end there.

More here.

Tim Maudlin in Aeon:

Can it be mere chance that there are galaxies at all, or that the nuclear reactions inside stars eventually produce the chemical building blocks of life from hydrogen and helium? According to some theories, the processes behind these phenomena depend on finely calibrated initial conditions or unlikely coincidences involving the constants of nature. One could always write them off to fortuitous accident, but many cosmologists have found that unsatisfying, and have tried to find physical mechanisms that could produce life under a wide range of circumstances.

Ever since the 1920s when Edwin Hubble discovered that all visible galaxies are receding from one another, cosmologists have embraced a general theory of the history of the visible universe. In this view, the visible universe originated from an unimaginably compact and hot state. Prior to 1980, the standard Big Bang models had the universe expanding in size and cooling at a steady pace from the beginning of time until now. These models were adjusted to fit observed data by selecting initial conditions, but some began to worry about how precise and special those initial conditions had to be.

More here.

Robert Zaretsky at the LA Review of Books:

To gaze at Camus’ own modest gravestone in the southern French village of Lourmarin, the inscription “1913–1960” delivers a similar shock. When he left us, Camus was younger than many of us are now; what his father left his son, his son has left us: a profound silence that surges through his remarkable writings and life.

This silence is neither poetic nor mere rhetoric: it was a brute fact of Camus’s life. Not just the absent father, but also the present, yet mute mother. An illiterate cleaning woman, Catherine Camus spoke with difficulty — a handicap perhaps due to the shock of her husband’s death. The young Camus would sometimes find his mother “huddled in a chair, gazing in front of her” in the small apartment they shared with his illiterate grandmother and partly mute uncle in a working class neighborhood of Algiers. Her muteness, he recalled, seemed “irredeemably desolate.”

The silent mother haunts Camus’s writings: it is the dark matter toward which everything else is pulled. In The Stranger, it is the death of Meursault’s mother that begins the unmaking of his life; it is the mostly wordless presence of Dr. Rieux’s mother in The Plague that prevents the unmaking of a world swept by disease.

more here.

Danieal Swift at The New Statesman:

Mailer lived his life in order to gather material. He was 19 when the US entered the Second World War and he wondered whether a better novel could be written about the Pacific campaigns or the war in Europe; he started planning his war novel before he was called up in March 1944. During basic training, he took notes “on the sex lives of the other soldiers”. He fought in the Philippines and listed the names of the soldiers he met; they turn up in The Naked and the Dead.

This hunger – to get life into literature –was a constant. He followed The Naked and the Dead with two more novels but soon became frustrated with the restrictions of fiction. In the late 1950s, after an unhappy period in Hollywood trying to write screenplays, he turned to journalism and non-fiction. The so-called New Journalists of the 1960s –Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion –made their pursuit of the story part of the story and wrote themselves into their reports. Mailer’s innovation was an extreme version of this.

more here.

Anna Della Subin at The Millions:

Fasten a mast to the bed, let the sheets catch the wind. It is possible that, if you drift long enough on the waves of sleep, you will awaken into a world that has changed — though who can say for the better? The Greeks told of the boy Epimenides, who was searching for his father’s stray sheep when he stopped for a noonday nap in a cave. When he awoke, fifty-seven years later, everything that he once knew had vanished. Across Crete, news spread that Epimenides must be particularly loved by the gods to have slept so long. For Aristotle, he was proof of the impossibility of the passage of time without the occurrence of change.

Christian martyrs have dozed longer still. The eighteenth chapter of the Quran — and an earlier Syriac legend — tells of a group of young Christian men who, fleeing the persecution of a Roman Emperor, escaped into a cave, where they slumbered for three hundred and nine years. Rising from their long sleep, they found their beards had grown long, Christ’s name was openly spoken, and all of their loved ones were dead. In 1933, the Egyptian playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim dramatized their swim through the oceanic night in The People of the Cave. Awakening into a world where they are hailed as saints, the stiff-limbed sleepers find they cannot live in this strange, undreamt future. “We are like fish, whose water has changed from sweet to salty,” the saints protest, as they retreat into their cave.

Languishing in a French prison in 1883, Paul Lafargue observed that a strange mania had lately gripped mankind.

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From Orion Magazine:

What is wild? What is cultivated? And what can these ideas teach us about our relationship to landscape? Questions like these have been a lifelong passion for William Cronon and Michael Pollan, both of whom have written deeply on the blurry boundary between nature and culture. Michael’s first book on the subject was Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education; he has gone on to write about food in all its forms in books such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the recent Cooked. Bill’s exploration of the wild and the cultivated has emerged from a historical perspective; his first book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, traced the history of human alteration to landscape and pioneered an argument against the idea of pristine wilderness. Recognizing the interplay between their ideas, Orion asked Bill and Michael if they would have a conversation that could be shared with Orion’s readers. They met in Berkeley, California, where they talked about ecology and storytelling, nature and artifice, and the promise and challenge of finding meaning in the natural world.

Bill: The chapter “Nature Abhors a Garden” in Second Nature is still one of the best things anybody’s ever written on the boundary between wild and cultivated. Part of what’s brilliant about that piece, I think, is your deployment of humor. What is it about humor that you find so compelling in terms of writing about nature

Michael:“Nature Abhors a Garden” is a comic piece about my war with a woodchuck, and there’s a lot of Bill Murray from Caddyshack in there. There’s a point in the essay at which I describe pouring gasoline down a woodchuck burrow and lighting it on fire, and when I tell that story, especially to young people today, they’re amazed and often upset with me—there’s an assumption that an environmentalist would never do something like that. But working out that conflict between the cultural baggage that we carry into nature and the practical necessity of getting ourselves something to eat—I think that’s a pretty good microcosm of many of the issues we face.

More here.