Month: April 2013

Petraeus is Coming to CUNY. Just “like the invasion of Iraq.”

In case you were wondering about this… David H. Petraeus, who resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency last November after having an extramarital affair with his biographer, will serve as a visiting professor at the City University of New York next academic year, the university announced on Tuesday. Mr. Petraeus, who will be the next visiting professor of public policy at the university’s Macaulay Honors College, had been approached by many universities, but settled on CUNY because he admires its diversity of students, locations and offerings, his lawyer, Robert Barnett, said in an interview. …Buzzfeed reports this (h/t Michael Busch): There is a quiet and conventional path from shame to redemption for American political figures brought down by […]

Would It Not Be Easier for Matt Yglesias to Dissolve the Bangladeshi People and Elect Another?

Yesterday, after a building housing garment factories collapsed in Bangladesh, killing almost 200more than 250 workers nearly 350 workers at least 377 workers over 650 workers, Matt Yglesias wrote: Bangladesh may o r may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States. The reason is that while having a safe job is good, money is also good. Jobs that are unusually dangerous—in the contemporary United States that’s primarily fishing, logging, and trucking—pay a premium over other working-class occupations precisely because people are reluctant to risk death or maiming at work. And in a free society it’s good that different people are able to make different choices […]

How Two Can Make One: Nietzsche on Truth, Mises on Value, and Arendt on Judgment

Nietzsche, The Gay Science: Multiplication table. —One is always wrong, but with two, truth begins. —One cannot prove his case, but two are irrefutable. (§260) Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: Computation demands units. And there can be no unit of the subjective use-value of commodities. Marginal utility provides no unit of value…. In an exchange economy, the objective exchange value of commodities becomes the unit of calculation….We are able to take as the basis of calculation the valuation of all individuals participating in trade. The subjective valuation of one individual is not directly comparable with the subjective valuation of others. It only becomes so as an exchange value arising from the interplay of the subjective valuations of all who take part […]

God Bless Benno Schmidt

I love Benno Schmidt. He’s the chair of the Board of Trustees of CUNY, where I teach, and a former president of Yale. More important, he’s a man who’s spent so much time in the business world that he’s no longer capable of leaving anything to the imagination. So you get from him a refreshingly crude form of honesty that you ordinarily don’t find in academia. Certainly not in university leaders, who are so adept at making themselves misunderstood that you’d think they were trained by apparatchiks in the former Soviet Union. Or Straussians. Anyway, Benno was interviewed by the New York Post about his plans for CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, who’ll be retiring at the end of the year.  […]

The Idle Rich and the Working Stiff: Nietzche von Hayek on Capital v. Labor

Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: Culture and caste.—A higher culture can come into existence only when there are two different castes in society: that of the workers and that of the idle, of those capable of true leisure; or, expressed more vigorously: the caste compelled to work and the caste that works if it wants to….the caste of the idle is the more capable of suffering and suffers more, its enjoyment of existence is less, its task heavier. (§439) … My utopia.—In a better ordering of society the heavy work and exigencies of life will be apportioned to him who suffers least as a consequence of them, that is to say to the most insensible, and thus step by step […]

Nietzsche von Hayek on Merit

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow: The value of work.—If we wanted to determine the value of work by how much time, effort, good or ill will, compulsion, inventiveness or laziness, honesty or deception has been expended on it, then the valuation can never be just; for we would have to be able to place the entire person on the scales, and that is impossible. Here the rule must be “judge not!” But it is precisely to justice that they appeal who nowadays are dissatisfied with the evaluation of work. If we reflect further we find that no personality can be held accountable for what it produces, that is to say its work: so that no merit can be derived […]

From the Annals of Imperial Assymetry: Greg Grandin on the Venezuelan Election

Latin American historian Greg Grandin is a longtime friend of the blog. He’s been one of the main voices of wisdom and sanity on Venezuela over the years, whether in The Nation, or on Charlie Rose or Up With Chris Hayes (transcript here). This morning on FB he made a quick comment on the Venezuelan election, which I’m reproducing here with his permission. • • • • • On November 2, 2004, George W. Bush beat John Kerry 50.7 percent to 48.3 percent. Venezuela’s foreign minister immediately (either that night or the day after) recognized the results: “we will hope that in this second mandate we can improve our relations.” Fast forward nine years, and Nicolás Maduro beats Henrique Capriles […]

The Price of Labor: Burke, Nietzsche, and Menger

Edmund Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity: When any commodity is carried to market, it is not the necessity of the vendor, but the necessity of the purchaser that raises the price….If the goods at market are beyond the demand, they fall in their value; if below it, they rise. The impossibility of the subsistence of a man, who carries his labour to a market, is totally beside the question in this way of viewing it. The only question is, what is it worth to the buyer? (pp. 68-69) Carl Menger, Principles of Economics: Neither the means of subsistence nor the minimum of subsistence of a laborer, therefore, can be the direct cause or determining principle of the price of […]

One Newspaper, Two Elections: The New York Times on America 2004, Venezuela 2013

In November 2004, 50.7% of the American population voted for George W. Bush; 48.3% voted for John Kerry. The headline in the New York Times read: “After a Tense Night, Bush Spends the Day Basking in Victory.” The piece began as follows: After a long night of tension that gave way to a morning of jubilation, President Bush claimed his victory on Wednesday afternoon, praising Senator John Kerry for waging a spirited campaign and pledging to reach out to his opponent’s supporters in an effort to heal the bitter partisan divide. “America has spoken, and I’m humbled by the trust and the confidence of my fellow citizens,” Mr. Bush told a victory party that was reconstituted 10 hours after it […]

Nietzsche and the Marginals, again

Menger, Principles of Economics: Utility is the capacity of a thing to serve for the satisfaction of human needs…Our needs, at any rate in part, at least as concerns their origins, depend upon our wills or on our habits. (119) Nietzsche, The Gay Science: Need.—Need is considered the cause why something came to be; but in truth it is often merely an effect of what has come to be. (§205, p. 207) For earlier posts on the connections between Nietzsche and marginalism, and the philosophical dimensions of economic things more generally, see this, this, this, this, this, this, and this.

Shulamith Firestone and the Private Life of Power

In The Reactionary Mind, I wrote: One of the reasons the subordinate’s exercise of agency so agitates the conservative imagination is that it takes place in an intimate setting. Every great blast—the storming of the Bastille, the taking of the Winter Palace, the March on Washington—is set off by a private fuse: the contest for rights and standing in the family, the factory, and the field. Politicians and parties talk of constitution and amendment, natural rights and inherited privileges. But the real subject of their deliberations is the private life of power: “Here is the opposition to woman’s equality in the state,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote. “Men are not ready to recognize it in the home.” Behind the riot in […]

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mr. Jon Lee Anderson

Last month, New Yorker reporter Jon Lee Anderson turned twelve shades of red when he was challenged on Twitter about his claim in The New Yorker that Venezuela was “one of the world’s most oil-rich but socially unequal countries.” A lowly rube named Mitch Lake had tweeted, “Venezuela is 2nd least unequal country in the Americas, I don’t know wtf @jonleeanderson is talking about.” Anderson tweeted back: “You, little twerp, are someone who has sent 25,700 Tweets for a grand total of 169 followers. Get a life.” Gawker was all over it. What got lost in the story though is just how wrong  Anderson’s claim is. In fact, just how wrong many of his claims about Venezuela are. Luckily, Keane Bhatt, an […]

The Lady’s Not for Turning

If you want to get a sense of why conservatives in Britain revere Margaret Thatcher, check out this clip of her famous “You turn if you want to, the lady’s not for turning” speech at the Conservative Party Conference in October 1980. The context: in the early 1970s, Tory MP Edward Heath was facing high unemployment and massive trade union unrest. Having come into office on a promise to break with the Keynesian consensus of the postwar era, he was forced to reverse course. Instead of austerity, he pumped money into the economy via increases in pensions and benefits and tax cuts. That shift in policy came to be called the “U-Turn.” Fast forward to 1980: Thatcher had been in […]

Market Morals: Nietzsche on the Media, Adam Smith and the Blacklist

On self-censorship in the media: Making use of petty dishonesty.—The power of the press resides in the fact that the individual who works for it feels very little sense of duty or obligation. Usually he expresses his opinion, but sometimes, in the service of his party or the policy of his country or in the service of himself, he does not express it. Such little lapses into dishonesty, or perhaps merely a dishonest reticence, are not hard for the individual to bear, but their consequences are extraordinary because these little lapses on the part of many are perpetrated simultaneously. Each of them says to himself: ‘In exchange for such slight services I shall have a better time of it; if […]