Surface of a pond in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

In the 1990’s Andrei Shleifer was only one among many in the proselytizing army of reformers who went out to the transition economies, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe but also in developing countries, to make them ready for capitalism. They were in a hurry to implement reforms of liberalization and privatization according to some general, often one-size-fits-all, formula. The purse strings of emergency financial help by international organizations like the IMF and the World Bank and US agencies like USAID were also controlled by stern macro-economic ideologues of ‘structural adjustment’. The reformers were in possession of the canonical gospels which it was their sacred duty to spread among the heathens as quickly as possible, given the golden opportunity after the fall of the godless communists and socialists.

I went to some of the international conferences on the Economics of Transition in this period, held usually in cities like Budapest or Prague or Riga. Soon I gave up going to such conferences as I felt I did not know enough of those countries to really say anything that’d make sense to the local audience. But I did go to one organized in Kolkata by the eminent political economist Mancur Olson. (Mancur grew up in a Norwegian-American family in North Dakota. When he came to know that the name Mancur, a traditional name in such Scandinavian families, was a variation of the Arabic name Mansoor, he speculated: “In fanciful moments, I imagine a Viking raid on the Levant.”)  I had admired his past work on collective action and I thought he deserved a Nobel Prize for that work, which he did not get. When he asked me to contribute to a collection of essays on institutional economics he coedited, I gladly did. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

“Thus the concept of a cause is nothing other than a synthesis (of that which follows in the temporal series with other appearances) in accordance with concepts; and without that sort of unity, which has its rule a priori, and which subjects the appearances to itself, thoroughgoing and universal, hence necessary unity of consciousness would not be encountered in the manifold perceptions. But these would then belong to no experience, and would consequently be without an object, and would be nothing but a blind play of representations, i.e., less than a dream.” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 112(A))

[IN OTHER WORDS: Without concepts, experience is unthinkably weird.]

Back in the 17th century, some philosophers tried to place all knowers on a level playing field. John Locke claimed the human mind begins like a blank tablet, devoid of any characters, and it is experience, raw and unfiltered, that gives the mind something to think about. Since everybody has experience, this would mean everybody could develop knowledge of the world, and no one would be inherently better at it than anybody else.

It’s a valuable idea, and in the neighborhood of a great truth, but not very plausible as a model of how we manufacture knowledge. Later philosophers argued that, if this is how we do it, then we really don’t know much. For example, David Hume could not see how anyone could ever develop the idea of causality: you can watch the events in a workshop all the livelong day, and though you might see patterns in what happens, you will never see the necessity that is supposed to connect a cause with an effect. (Philosophers writing about this stuff have a hard time avoiding italics.) 

But clearly we do end up with causal knowledge, as Hume himself never doubted, and we manage to navigate our ways through a steady world of enduring objects. We somehow end up with knowledge of an objective world. And we don’t remember that arriving at such knowledge was all that difficult. We just sort of grew into it, and now it seems so natural that it’s really hard to imagine not having it, and it’s even difficult not to find such knowledge perfectly obvious. But in fact it is anything but obvious (as Jochen Szangolies recently explored).  Read more »

“This guided Theseus thro’ the Maze;
And sent Him home with Life . . . “
………………… —Matthew Prior

Love is a Cord, a Chord, Accord

a boy at his labyrinth’s door
grasped the end of the string of a spool
proffered in the hands of a woman
who knew that once within, if
without tether, if no more than
a floating mote, if bound to nothing,
disoriented, he would, at each
critical turn, run the risk
of being zero or fool

once you step in, she sang,

— and a chorus swelled behind
— and a drummer struck a chime
— and a cornet blew a mind
— and an artist drew a line
— and a poet spoke divine:

do not release this thread, she sang,
even as you reach the core

it’s the one way true,
your only means to find again
this door

Jim Culleny
6/2/22

by David J. Lobina

It was no accident that it was an immigrant who revived the debate. While Marxist thought provided (…) a lens through which to observe the nation from the outside, the experience of living as an “alien” (…) proved an almost indispensable condition for (…) more advanced tools of observation.

—Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People.

Who he? Exactly.

An “anarchist rabbi” nowadays mostly known for a book on Anarcho-Syndicalism as well as for his involvement with the Jewish anarchist movement in East London at the turn of the 20^th century, the life and work of the German thinker Rudolf Rocker has much to teach us in these most modern of times, if only we were to read him more often. Of particular interest to me is his magnum opus, Nationalism and Culture, a work now basically forgotten but which was regarded as a genuine contribution to the study of nationalism (and other topics) when it was published in 1937 by people as diverse as Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and Herbert Read. The book, and Rocker himself, are now due a revisit.[i]

The first thing one notes when approaching Nationalism and Culture is its impressive combination of breadth and depth. The book covers multiple time periods, thinkers, and artistic developments, and in doing so Rocker chronicles how the state and the nationalist worldview have combined to shape the contemporary world, influencing life and manners, thought and culture, and much else – and for this alone it should be more widely known.[ii]

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As is often the case, Rocker’s outlook was partly a product of the times he lived, so let’s start with that first and I will come back to the book next month. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mark Harvey

I’m not a schoolteacher so I don’t know the exact routine that teachers have every morning before they leave their house, but I’m certain it shouldn’t involve checking the magazine of a 9mm Glock and perhaps even chambering a round before their commute to school. I have known several teachers and in general, they are idealistic, hard-working, and underpaid. The challenges of teaching 30 hyper 10-year-olds how to write a clear sentence or conquer fractions has to be consuming enough without also having a counter-assault plan in the back of your mind.

The ideal of school as a safe, wholesome place for learning has been part of American culture since the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. Obviously that ideal isn’t always achieved and failures in our educational systems abound. But the notion of arming teachers—a notion that always comes up after mass killings in schools—suggests a societal failure at nearly every level. Teachers should be armed with things like chalk, markers, and pencil sharpeners, not 9mm pistols. And there was a time when our society was safe enough for schools to be open, breezy places, not “soft targets” that needed to be “hardened.”

What has to have been the worst day of their lives for the surviving children, teachers, and parents of Cobb School in Uvalde, Texas, is, I’m sorry to say, so routine in American life that one can predict the ensuing national dialogue, almost word for word, without any effort. It’s predictable, repetitive, and only punctuates the short spans between mass shootings. And it isn’t doing any good. Read more »

Two Versions after Iqbal

Withered Rose

With what words shall I call you
desire of the nightingale’s heart?

In a Country of Roses
you were named Laughing Rose,

the morning breeze was your cradle,
a garden a tray of perfumes.

My tears rain like dew
and in my barren heart your ruin

is an emblem of mine.
A reed plucked from its native soil

I sing sweet songs of souls in exile.
My life is a dream of roses

Bright Rose

You cannot loosen the heart’s knot,
perhaps you have no heart,

no share in the turmoil
of this garden, where I yearn

but gather no roses.
Of what use to me is wisdom?

Once out of the garden,
you are at peace.

I am anxious,
scorched as I search.

Even *Jamshid’s empty cup
foretold the future: may wine

always satisfy my mouth
that open circle in the mirror.

***

* The mythical Persian king Jamshid saw the reflection of all events in a wine cup.

By Rafiq Kathwari

Just a spider web I noticed in a parking lot in Brixen, South Tyrol.

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

Even though I have attended most of the meetings of the September group over the last 40 years, my own participation in the group has really been more like that of an interested outsider looking in. This is for mainly two reasons. One is that my research primarily being on developing countries, it had very little overlap with research areas of almost everybody else in the group. I often hesitated presenting my research because I thought the specialized details of my work might bore the rest of the members, even though I knew they’d politely listen to me. So I often participated more actively in the session in each meeting reserved for some topical global issue for general discussion rather than for presentation of original research.

The second reason was a matter of my personal inclination. Even though over the years I have been a lucky beneficiary of the high-quality of the discussion in a diverse array of disciplines (and wished some of the more narrowly-specialized, even tunnel-visioned, economists in my profession were exposed to such richness and diversity of concepts and approaches), I’d sometimes lose patience with the intricacies of ethical-conceptual debates among the high-powered moral philosophers in the group. While they sharpened my understanding of many conceptual issues of social justice in ways which I had not thought about before, I sometimes found that the attention lavished in some of the discussion to ethical purity and depth was out of proportion with the practical political difficulties of even remotely reaching anywhere near the outer, coarser, periphery. As primarily a political economist I am more interested in the political feasibility of many general ideas of justice and egalitarianism and the nature of the concrete obstacles than in the ever-finer conceptual refinement of the desirable normative goals. With the possible exceptions of Adam Przeworski and Robert Brenner, most members in the group at least in the early years, have been more interested in moral-philosophical issues of justice than I have been, after a point. Read more »

by Martin Butler

A UK politician recently suggested that people could combat the cost-of-living crisis by working more hours or getting a better job. This is one more in a long line of instances where societal problems have been framed as being solvable by individual actions. One of the earliest I can remember was when Tory minister Norman Tebbit, following a claim that the riots of 1981 were caused by high unemployment, cited his own father as a salutary example of self-responsibility. ‘I grew up in the 30s with an unemployed father,’ he said. ‘He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it.’ More recently British TV personality Kirsty Alsop recommended that young people start saving earlier and cut out the fancy coffees, gym membership and Netflix subscriptions as a way of combatting unaffordable house prices.

These ‘solutions’ have a homespun attraction and are indeed the kinds of advice you might give to an individual. Lurking behind this approach however is the assumption that societal problems can be reduced to the particular problems of individuals, that getting individuals to make the right decisions is a viable solution. Those who don’t make the right decisions, it is implied, only have themselves to blame, and must also take responsibility for the wider problems of society.

Let’s look at some of the forms this argument takes. Read more »

by Michael Abraham

My mom always told me if I didn’t separate my lights from my darks, I would ding my white laundry. I always thought this was nonsense. And, in fact, in the fancy washing machine in the apartment I shared with my husband, this was nonsense. Oh, I was absolutely reckless! I would toss bright red shirts in with white sheets and black jeans in with cream-colored t’s. And it was always alright in the end. The whites stayed white, and the colors did not fade. I was confident in my millennial assessment that separating the lights from the darks was simply Gen X anxiety, old wisdom, no longer applicable, démodé even. 

Divorce means many things, and, well, one of the things that mine means is that I no longer have a fancy, in-unit washing machine. So, I am at the laundromat as I write this. And I have just finished the wash cycle. I pull my clothes out one by one to put them into the wheeled hand cart that will transport them to the dryer. I pull out a few pink shirts and a few blue shirts, and these look fine, smell fresh. And then I pull out the first white one, and it is gray. And then the next white one: gray. And so on and so forth. They are all dinged, ruined, good only for sleeping in. (My mother tells me on a phone call that I can bleach out this mistake, and this time I trust her Gen X wisdom.) I hold in my frustration. I try to chuckle about it. I load the dryer, and I go for a drink at the bar down the street (it is Sunday after all), where—after a rousing conversation with the bartender, Pedro—I continue to write this. I pray that, if someone steals my laundry, they only steal the once-white, gray t-shirts. At this point, I don’t much care.

The laundromat is an apt metaphor for where I’m at in my life right now. Read more »

Book-banning is just one more tool
used by demagogs to murder truth
and hollow out God’s gift of intellect.
………………………. —St. Lingo

Politics/Religion

my brain’s a pouch in which
I stash my loot

if I keep its purse strings loose
I might add to its load
when new coin comes to town

but if I tighten down
the purse strings of my mind
and garrote its capaciousness
all that I might be
will be hopelessly consigned
to dangle from its noose
.

Jim Culleny
3/16/14

by Mike O’Brien

“Would that I did not have to speak!” —Confucius, Analects 17:19

Some writers are cursed with the belief that they have something uniquely important to share with the world, and that they must toil in order to make this special gift known to the world. I am free of such a terrible burden. But I know that if I didn’t write, I would simply degenerate and revolve around my own private mental drain-holes, so I hitch myself to writing obligations such as this one. It seems to be working out. I do, however, get the occasional twinge to write about the things that most bedevil my mind, whether or not I believe that anything good will come of it. These are, chiefly, the inevitable and hastening collapse of “normal” climate patterns (and the ecosystems dependent on them), and the perhaps not inevitable but certainly hastening march of lawless fascism in the United States. These two issues grip me like no others, because I live on Earth and, more precisely, above the United States. I don’t think that I have the power to ameliorate either situation by concatenation of the right sequence of letters. But I do feel an itch to see my feelings about these catastrophes put into words outside of my own head. Maybe as an affirmation of my own internal experience, maybe out of some duty to witness and to testify.

I shy away from indulging this impulse because I don’t want to bore people, or to further depress myself. I suppose this is a failure to believe in the entertaining power of my own writing, because when I read other writers’ work on these subjects I am not bored (and only a little more depressed), but rather absorbed and incensed. Some months ago I found a writer whose concerns and attitudes almost completely echoed my own in the bleak realms of empire, environment and global existential hurtling. Read more »

by Allen Hornblum

Fifty years ago this July, newspaper headlines shocked the conscience of the nation with a disturbing story of racial bias and medical mistreatment in one of America’s most honored institutions. The alarming Associated Press story first appeared on July 25, 1972 in the Washington Star. The front page headline, “Syphilis Patients Died Untreated,” caught readers attention. They’d go on to read that the goal of a strange, non-therapeutic experiment conducted by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) was not to treat the sick or save lives, but “determine from autopsies what the disease does to the human body.”

The next day every newspaper in the country covered the story. The New York Times front-page headline “Syphilis Victims in U.S. Study Went Untreated For 40 Years,” informed readers that hundreds of illiterate Black sharecroppers with syphilis in Alabama were denied treatment due to their participation in a scientific study. The alarming revelation not only provoked outrage and embarrassment, but caused Americans to look with a more discerning eye at what was occurring in the hospitals, orphanages, and prisons in their communities. It would also spark a long-overdue re-evaluation of the medical community’s cavalier practice of using vulnerable populations as raw material for experimentation.

How could such a thing happen in America people wanted to know, especially under the auspices of the government and scientific community? In the following days and months, academics, lawmakers, ethicists, and op-ed writers would ponder what the repugnant, four-decade long study of “Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” said about science, race, and the soul of America? Now, a half-century on and over two decades into the 21st century – and the 90th anniversary of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study’s inception – we are still reflecting on those same questions. Read more »