by Pranab Bardhan

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

There was another well-known economist who later claimed that he was my student at MIT, but for some reason I cannot remember him from those days: this was Larry Summers, later Treasury Secretary and Harvard President. Once I was invited to give a keynote lecture at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics at Islamabad, and on the day of my lecture they told me that Summers (then Vice President at the World Bank) was in town, and so they had invited him to be a discussant at my lecture. After my lecture, when Larry rose to speak he said, “I am going to be critical of Professor Bardhan for several reasons, one of them being personal: he may not remember, when I was a student in his class at MIT, he gave me the only B+ grade I have ever received in my life”. When it came to my turn to reply to his criticisms of my talk, I said, “I don’t remember giving him a B+ at MIT, but today after listening to him I can tell you that he has improved a little, his grade now is A-“, and then proceeded to explain why it was not an A. The Pakistani audience seemed to lap it up, particularly because until then everybody there was deferential to Larry.

Later when I asked Stan Fischer if Larry was my student, he told me that he might have taken my undergraduate class. The undergraduate classes were larger than graduate classes, and I do not remember many of those students (one very bright MIT undergraduate I do remember teaching was Hal Varian, who later became my colleague at Berkeley, and has been the Chief Economist at Google for some years). Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

“The poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he” (Thomas Rainsborough, spokesman for the Levellers at the Putnam Debates)

What does it mean to say that everyone is equal? It does not mean that everyone has (or should have) the same amount of nice things, money, or happiness. Nor does it mean that everyone’s abilities or opinions are equally valuable. Rather, it means that everyone has the same – equal – moral status as everyone else. It means, for example, that the happiness of any one of us is just as important as the happiness of anyone else; that a promise made to one person is as important as that made to anyone else; that a rule should count the same for all. No one deserves more than others – more chances, more trust, more empathy, more rewards – merely because of who or what they are.

This ideal of equality is a point on which pretty much all moral philosophers agree, and it is also the ideological foundation for liberal states. In the last centuries, much progress has been made in realising it in institutions like universal suffrage, the rule of law (where justice is portrayed wearing a blindfold), and impersonally (bureaucratically) administered social insurance systems. But this equality revolution remains an incomplete and fragile achievement. It is in perpetual conflict with our all too human moral psychology, which evolved to manage the micro-politics of small groups and is highly focused on personal relationships and social status; with assigning privileges rather than recognising rights.

Who you are known to know still counts for far too much in how we get treated. Within the state and between the state and those it governs, personal relationships are much less significant than they used to be after a centuries long effort to redescribe them as ‘corruption’. But they are merely down; not out. Read more »

Drinking It All In

a long way up Bray Road
past the point where the first of two small brooks cross beneath
it came to me in a new way that you and I are still breathing
four decades after we met at the threshold of the unknown,
the part that comes after now,
and here we are, still there, poised together
even though we were strangers when we met,
but now you’re my most intimate love

no one knows me better

the sun’s slant was perfect on our walk,
every particle or wave, not a thing wrong with it,
perfect the way it shone, the way it distended the shadows of things that stop light,
creating dark corollas, opaque space, the wild grid of leafless trees
spread across the road, or shadow patterns of lush foliage of a juniper blanket
on a bank fronting a long porch and the slope of Robert’s field heaving up behind
lifting stone walls on its back without a hint of sweat

but there were no cows today ambling down to lap the brook,
just us . .drinking it all in

Jim Culleny
11/9/21

by Derek Neal

I’m a bit surprised to see that all my previous columns for this website are about language in some way. I didn’t set out for this to be the case, but a clear pattern has emerged, although through no design of my own. When planning this Monday’s column, I decided that I should give into the impulse to explore language in more detail by thinking about my own job as an ESL teacher. One of the interesting things about being a language teacher, especially for an American, is that you finally become aware of the rules governing the language you use. In American school, much to the surprise of students from other countries, we don’t study grammar. In terms of my own public-school experience, I can’t recall ever discussing things such as verb tenses, relative pronouns, clauses, or phrases.

There may be some logic to this. When you start teaching ESL, you might think that to help students learn to speak it is useful to explain what, say, the simple past and the present perfect are, going through their definitions and the various rules when each tense is used. In other words, you might think it’s useful to start with theory and then move into practice. Attempting this method will quickly teach you that this is not, in fact, a good idea. I still think back and shudder about the time I attempted to draw a timeline on the whiteboard to explain the past tenses used in English, with the result being that I’d not only confused the students, but also myself. In addition, I displayed my terrible drawing skills. Read more »

by N. Gabriel Martin

It had become harder to ignore the spectre of a decision looming on the horizon. After four years of temporary and part-time lectureships I couldn’t ignore the fact that the day that I would have to decide when to stop chasing a career with few rewards and fewer prospects was coming. Still, I always found it possible to put that decision off just a little longer.

That was fine with me, because I didn’t have any notion of how to face it. I knew that the time to decide was coming, but I couldn’t exactly tell what the decision was.

You would assume that it was the decision of whether to leave academia. But that’s only half a decision. What was missing was the other half – the “or …”

In the end I never came to a decision. Instead, the pandemic hit and the job market—already dismal—declined by three quarters. I never had to decide to let go, because the frayed ties that I still maintained to that career dissolved in my hands.

Fate nullified the choice I thought I would have to face.

When I was younger, and more driven by the need to master my own destiny, that might have been unbearable. I looked to the achievement of my own ambition to measure my life’s meaning.

I don’t think I’m unusual in that. The individualism of our age teaches us to treasure the satisfaction of our will. We tend to see ourselves as William Ernest Henley’s Invictus:

“I am the master of my fate,

            I am the captain of my soul.”

Today, fate is a deprecated value. We seldom find it possible to believe that the notion of fate has any meaning at all, and when we do give any thought to fate it is as nothing more than a thing to master.

But Henley is wrong: fate is not something to master. The indomitability of fate is something nearly every age has understood better than our own. Read more »

Elmgreen and Dragset. The Painter Fig 1, 2021.

More here and here.

Thanks to Jaffer Kolb and Ingar Dragset.

by Joseph Shieber

I first became aware of the historian Allen Guelzo’s work due to a mention in a recent newspaper column — just not the mention that, if you’re active on Twitter (and particularly philosophy Twitter), you might be expecting.

In a glowing review in the Washington Post, George Will praised Guelzo’s new biography of Robert E. Lee for Guelzo’s unwillingness to buy in to the hagiography associated with the reverence for Lee that characterized so many 20th century assessments.

Here’s a sample:

Lee, Guelzo writes, “raised his hand” against the nation that, as an Army officer, he had sworn to defend. He did so for an agenda that a much greater man, Ulysses S. Grant, called one of “the worst for which a people ever fought.” Lee thought slavery was a “greater evil” to White people than to Black people. He enveloped himself in what Guelzo calls a “cloud of pious wishes” and decided, as Guelzo tartly says, “it was up to the whites to decide when enough was enough.” Guelzo writes that to Lee, slavery’s victims were “invisible, despite their presence all around.” His indifference was “cruelty in self-disguised velvet.” Not well disguised, when he presided at the whipping of three recaptured runaways, ordering a constable to “lay it on well.”

Given the care that Guelzo obviously devotes to getting the details right in his widely praised historical works, it was surprising for me to see that he was being roasted on Twitter for some glaringly inaccurate pronouncements on Kant.

The impetus for the derision being heaped on Guelzo was a column — again in the Washington Post — in which Marc Thiessen attempted “to explain CRT [Critical Race Theory] and why it is so dangerous”. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Omar Baig

Chris Green is the Executive Director of Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Program; the former Chair of the American Bar Association’s Animal Law Committee; and previously was the Director of Legislative Affairs for the Animal Legal Defense Fund. In those capacities, Green persuaded the top three US airlines to stop transporting endangered animal hunting trophies, helped defeat Ag-Gag legislation in several states, and passed two ABA resolutions that recommended 1) outlawing the possession of dangerous wild animals, and 2) providing non-lethal animal encounter training to officers. He recently served on a National Academies of Sciences committee, which recommended that the Dept. of Veterans Affairs substantially reduce its use of dogs in biomedical research. Green is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Illinois: where he created the college’s first Environmental Science degree. He also works in the fine arts, film, and music industries, producing several documentaries, including the film Of Dogs and Men about police shooting people’s pets.  

Congratulations on the news of a $10 million endowment for the Animal Law & Policy Program by the Brooks Institute. Could you discuss the Harvard Law School’s previous and ongoing collaboration with the Brooks Institute, like the Brooks Animal Law Digest? 

Four years ago, Professor Kristen Stilt, the Animal Law & Policy Program’s Faculty Director, and I met with the Brooks Institute’s Executive Director, Tim Midura. The two of us offered our knowledge and experience to help strategize how the greatest impact could be made. Kristen then became one of the Brooks Institute’s advisers––serving on its Executive Committee, Scholars Committee, and the Leadership Committee of both the Brooks Animal Studies Academic Network and the Brooks Animal Sentience and Cognition Initiative. 

We could not be prouder to have our work recognized in this manner and are honored that our Program will now bear the name of Brooks McCormick Jr.––who cared so deeply about the treatment of nonhuman animals. Read more »

Last week, my wife and I were in Amsterdam for a couple of days. The historic house we were staying in, called Castrum Peregrini, belonged to the artist Gisèle d’Ailly van Waterschoot van der Gracht who hid two Jewish people in it from the Nazis during WWII. This is one of her paintings that the head of the foundation which takes care of the house showed us as part of a tour of the house. The painting is quite compact when folded but unfolds like this to reveal three additional panels, as its size triples. More about the artist here.

by Alexander C. Kafka

Tick, Tick . . . Boom! is a lively, lovely tribute by one singular Broadway talent, Lin-Manuel Miranda, to another, Jonathan Larson. It also marks Miranda’s impressive debut as a film director. 

Not to get all sappy or anything, but beyond its superb casting and production standards, the movie brims with love. Love for Larson, who died tragically and prematurely from an aortic aneurysm at age 35 the day before the opening of his magnum opus, Rent. But love too for the creative impulse and the artistic life. Folks who hate musicals, who find too many characters nauseatingly self-involved, will not find counterevidence here. But that self-involvement is a plot-driver in Boom!, a trait analyzed and criticized but clearly necessary to the pursuit of a poetic project against all odds and societal pressures.

The film is based on a 1990 solo show — a “rock monologue” — that Larson performed about his experiences with a previous, unproduced musical called Superbia. After Larson’s death, playwright David Auburn revamped Boom! as a three-actor script. In this film version, Steven Levenson frames the story using Larson’s future Rent success. That’s a smart move. It casts Boom! as an origin story of sorts, with the poignant, bittersweet light of laurels to come, but also of fate’s cruel hand. The Tick, Tick … Boom! of a career as the Larson character approaches his 30th birthday is also the emptying of the hourglass of life, and the bomb countdown of a brave, delicate heart on a short biological fuse. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Of the senior professors at MIT other than Samuelson and Solow, I had a somewhat close relationship with Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, a pioneer in development economics. He had grown up in Vienna and taught in England before reaching MIT. He had advised governments in many countries, and was full of stories. In India he knew Nehru and Sachin Chaudhuri well. He had an excited, omniscient way of talking about various things. At the beginning of our many long conversations he asked me what my politics was like. I said “Left of center, though many Americans may consider it too far left while several of my Marxist friends in India do not consider it left enough”. As someone from ‘old Europe’ he understood, and immediately put his hand on his heart and said “My heart too is located slightly left of center”.

One of his many stories involved his trip to rural Egypt. He was traveling in the countryside in a car in the early evening. He saw a big field in one village where people were gathering for a cinema show; he stopped there, and as he walked closer to the place he saw that the large screen was made of rather thin paper. So he asked his Egyptian companion why it was paper, not the usual cloth screen; the latter asked him to wait, he’d soon know why. Then the film started, and sure enough it was a Bombay film, where at the beginning the villain was winning both in the fight scenes with the hero and also in the love scenes with the heroine. As this went on for some time the viewers were getting angrier and angrier, at one point they couldn’t take it anymore, they all stood up and with great fury started throwing their little knives at the screen, which soon got badly perforated. The projector was then stopped, and another paper screen was installed before the film could continue to its ultimate crowd-satisfying end. Read more »

by Michael Abraham-Fiallos

[This essay closes a loose trilogy of essays, which I did not quite comprehend as a trilogy until I finished it. The first can be read here, and the second can be read here. In closing the trilogy, which is focused on love and the queer, this essay acts a kind of coda, a lyrical “testing out” of the ideas that I proffer in the earlier essays’ readings of literature.]

Nighttime, and we’re on the bridge, my head leaning against the cab window, my head a swim of beer and love for you, for this life which I feel very distinctly just now, which I feel like heat on the skin. Skyline’s a huddle of gods, and you say, This is the only home we’ll ever know; and I say, Maybe we should move to L.A., to the beach; but I don’t mean it. I could not. I came out of the West with pine in my blood and luck in my pocket. I came out of the woods to live deliberately. I was mad with thirst, thirst for wind down wide avenues and the crush of serious people, serious people with their dollars for the homeless, with their failures and their triumphs and their magazines. I was going to see for myself the way the sun kisses the water towers in the evening. I was going to waste time in the Village and become a writer, that thing one is always going to be here. I was going to wear laurels on my head. I was going to know the places where the mad ones dwelt and bled out their mad novels, where the drugs and the liquor and the hard beat of the bass have flown for seemingly forever. And I have known these. I have known them well. 

O—there is nothing in me but skyline, but long sprawl and tight crunch and a glint of vertigo off the rooftops. There is nothing left for me anywhere else anymore. I am a thorough current of electricity. I have been taken in by harsh talk and cheap pizza, by trash and chance and summer thunder. There is rushing here and rushing there in my days. The trundle of trains below the earth and on long jumbles of beams through the sky. Takeout food and the endlessness of other languages, their snatches like snatches of birdsong. The birds in the sickly trees, the parks starving against the concrete. The sluggish rivers unfit for swimming and the lust that washes into them like runoff at dawn, when the sun chases the revelers and the drunks off to bed.  All this, and more too, leeches the pine from my blood. All this, and more too, makes a home in me.  Read more »

Walking

overlooking a river rife with history that
runs along the bottom of an ancient gorge
between two mountains autumn rusts.
in yellows, russets, remnant greens,
drapes of leaves cascade down their opposing slopes
liquid as runoff, colors sluiced into the wide wet rush
of that streaming source of being
boiling white over rocks tumbling while
along its banks caught, serenely eddying in time cycles
intent …. dead set ….  falling … moving … somewhere

Jim Culleny, 11/7/21
Photo by S. Abbas Raza

by Usha Alexander

[This is the fourteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

Our human story has never been simple or monotonous. In fact, it has been nothing less than epic. Beginning from relatively small populations in Africa, our ancestors traveled across the globe. As they went, they mastered new environments, even while those environments were continuously changing—sometimes in predictable cycles, sometimes unpredictably, as the planet wobbled in its orbit, the sun flared, a volcano blew, or other geophysical events transpired. Born during the ever-fluctuating conditions of the ice age, early humans soon mastered a great variety of adaptive living strategies. They combined cycles of nomadism and settlement. They fished, trapped, followed game herds, ambushed seasonal mass-kills, or even forbade the consumption of particular species at various times and places. They tended forests and grasslands with controlled fire, spread seeds, shifted cultivation, pruned and grafted trees, fallowed lands, and followed seasonal produce, among other techniques, managing their local environments and recognizing that their own wellbeing was intimately tied up with the health of local ecosystems. Through these practices, each community relied upon diets that included hundreds of species of edible plants and animals, from palm piths to pine needles, sea slugs to centipedes, mosses to mongooses—far beyond the foods we ordinarily think of today—and developed material cultures and pharmacopeias that might have included hundreds more. Such flexibility and breadth of environmental understanding promoted resiliency among what grew into a great diversity of peoples over hundreds of millennia, many of whom managed to steadily inhabit a particular region, maintaining an unbroken cultural continuity over hundreds of generations.

Alongside their diverse subsistence strategies, human societies also practiced an astonishing array of social and political institutions and arrangements—none of them ever amounting to a utopia—many of them difficult for us even to imagine today, with our impoverished templates of human possibility. They included fluid forms of power sharing that shifted ritually, seasonally, or otherwise, between generations, genders, lineages. Sometimes social power was more centralized; other times more distributed or opportunistic; sometimes more closely tied with wealth, but not usually. Read more »

by R. Passov

When I was in the fourth grade I was held in a class through recess, most likely because letting me on the black top usually resulted in a fight. I was particularly thin-skinned and couldn’t cope with being in perhaps the only place in late-1960’s Los Angeles where children had a sense of their permanence, or at least of a place above everyone else.

I had landed in that place – Beverly Hills – from the Los Felix section of LA, now trendy, then where hookers rested after walking Hollywood Boulevard, or at least that’s what my mother once said of her counterparts who lived in rooms above the garages of a small apartment building on a busy street. While waiting for my father to return from prison, we lived in one of the garages, converted into a shelter.

In hindsight, it’s not surprising that I couldn’t master a narrative that to those carefree, cruel Beverly Hills kids, made any sense. And so, day-after-day, at the slightest provocation, I lashed out.

Sitting in that room, in my detention, I vaguely remember doodling through a division problem, using a long-since forgotten technique. At some point, what then seemed an ancient person stood over my shoulder, hands behind her back, wearing a frock from head to toe. 

“Here,” she said, “let me show you something.” She took what I had been working on and re-wrote it, straightening it into a column, keeping the smaller number to the left, housing the bigger number under a hand-drawn awning. When the picture was finished she patiently entered into a game of subtraction, finally ending in two smaller numbers that had much to do with where she had started.

There was a little magic in what she did. I was excited at how easily I was able to reproduce her game; tingling with a sense of playful power over what I could do simply for the nonsense of it. But the magic, I came to learn, was not in the math. Rather it was in her sympathetic eyes which, for a moment, tamed me. Read more »