You can download the first issue for free here. You can buy the rest somewhere like Comixology (I’m going to!) or get it from Amazon (although they appear to be out of stock). [click to continue…]

In the New York Times today you can read about the newly available transcripts from the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, as edited by Kurt Schuler and Andrew Rosenberg. I have a few things to say about them in the NYT - and why not a few more here?

Historians of Bretton Woods might well have said, eh, a transcript – no big deal; what happened at the conference was largely theater, and the real business was done before and afterward. There is some truth in this – and the transcript amusingly shows that – but it also shows some of the ways in which it is not true. [click to continue…]

I was reading a postgraduate dissertation on decision theory today (a field where I’m very far from expert) and it suddenly occurred to me that Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic has exactly the structure of a Newcomb problem.

Consider: in the classic Newcomb problem a being, which always guesses right, offers you a choice involving either taking a box (A) containing $1,000,000 or nothing OR taking that box plus another one (B) which certainly contains $1000. The being guesses what you will do and, if you are disposed to take both boxes (A+B) always puts nothing in A, but if you are disposed to leave B alone and just open A, puts the million dollars in A. But by the time you make the choice, the money is there or it is not.

One apparently compelling argument says you should open both boxes (since A+B > A), another persuasive argument says that you want to be in a state of the world such that the being has put the million in box A. A sign that you are in that state of the world is that you are disposed to open just the one box, so this is what you should in fact do. You thereby maximize the expected payoff. [click to continue...]

My first post got some good comments and some angry responses that seem to me somewhat to miss the point, but that is probably the fault of my questionable Club Med analogy, and also the fact that I wasn’t upfront enough about how I am thinking very much in second best terms, on the assumption that first best isn’t in the table. Let me try to clarify. [click to continue…]

This one is always good for an argument.

Suppose you wanted to go live at a luxury resort for four years. You’d expect that to cost, wouldn’t you? (No one is going to write an editorial raging about how if you wanted to live at Club Med it would cost you at least $50,000 a year – probably more.) So why are people surprised that it costs a lot – really a lot – to send a kid to college for four years? College is the sort of thing that seems like it should cost a lot: beautiful buildings on nice land, nice gym, nice green spaces, expensive equipment, large staff that have to be well-paid because they provide expert services. If you want to be puzzled about something, figure out how and why it was ever cheap, not why it costs now.

But this thought that colleges and universities are like luxury resorts, so of course it costs, is not very comforting to apologists for the cost of higher ed. Four years of resort living does not sound like a model that can, in fact, be available to everyone. If the democratic dream is that every kid can go to college, and if the dream of college is that every college kid can live for four years in the equivalent of an expensive resort, then the dream dies.

[UPDATE: It seems my Club Med analogy has been misunderstand, and that is understandable. I’m not suggesting that colleges are literally like Club Med any more than I am suggesting that Club Med has a university library, just because it costs as much as college. I am just suggesting that we should see it as normal and to be expected that if you go and live somewhere that provides you with a lot of stuff, much of which you would expect to be costly, you should expect it to cost you.] [click to continue…]

Undeterred by the ferocity of recent naval warfare, I had something to say about US Middle East policy in The National Interest recently. It’s essentially an elaboration of this post, in which I presented a comprehensive policy program which will, at least, never be beaten for succinctness.

Given that I was publishing in The National Interest, I didn’t raise any questions about the assumptions implicit in the term “national interest”. But, for the CT audience, I’ll spell out that nothing in my argument changes if you replace it with “US ruling class interest” or similar. The Middle East policy views and objectives of the US ruling class (however defined) are just as incoherent and unachievable as those of the US polity as a whole.

Opening para gives the flavor

The foreign-policy debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is expected to spend a lot of time on the attacks on embassies in Libya and Egypt, which were either sparked by an absurdly bigoted anti-Islamic film or used this film as cover for a pre-planned terror attack. Whatever its value as a debating point, this episode has laid bare the bipartisan incoherence of U.S. policy toward the Middle East.

The George Osborne micro-scandal (apparently, he doesn’t like mixing with the plebs on the train, but doesn’t like paying the first class fare either) is reminiscent of the C.E.M. Joad train ticket scandal of 1948. Joad was the Julian Baggini of his day

best remembered for his appearances on “The Brains Trust”, a B.B.C programme in which a panel of well-known people were invited to give unprepared answers to questions from the audience. He appeared on almost every edition of this from the very first programme, on New Year’s Day 1941, until April 1948

His career as a public ethicist ended abruptly, when he was caught in the first class railway carriage with a third class ticket.

Joad pleaded guilty at Tower Bridge Magistrates Court to fare evasion on the railways, and was fined two pounds plus costs of 25 guineas. It emerged that … Joad had an obsession about trying to defraud the railways, and he used to carry pocketfuls of penny tickets, lie about which station he had boarded the train, and even scramble over hedges and fields to avoid ticket collectors. He was replaced on the next edition of the programme and never appeared on it again. Possibly as a result of this, in his last years he changed from atheism to religion, as detailed in his final book, “Recovery of Belief” (1952).

I doubt that Osborne travels with pocketfuls of cheap tickets, and while the image of him and his entourage scrambling over hedges with enraged ticket collectors in hot pursuit is delightful, it’s also rather improbable. Even so, it appears as if Osborne, like Joad, is a repeat offender. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next (the pleb-belaboring Chief Whip has just done the sacrificial-lamb thing and resigned, but I suspect this will whet the public appetite rather than damping it down).

Greetings all, and thanks for welcoming me back on a longer-term basis.

Recently a few high-profile commenters have rediscovered Franklin Roosevelt’s relevance. First The Daily Show and then The New Yorker marveled at the aptness of Roosevelt’s cheerful scorn for those who say they will preserve Social Security (and Medicare, one might now add) while simultaneously promising to cut taxes.

It was a position Roosevelt was accustomed to ridiculing, as in this 1944 campaign film (directed by Chuck Jones!) depicting the Republican provision for Social Security:

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Eric Rauchway, historian at UC Davis, and co-founder of The Edge of the American West is joining Crooked Timber as a blogger. He’s been a guest blogger for us in the past, and is, I suspect, pretty well known to most CT readers. We’re very happy to have him as part of the group.

I’ve been reading and writing all morning about Hayek, Mises, and Menger. And it occurs to me: the moral secret of capitalism, its existential fundament, is not that we are free to choose but that we are forced to choose. Only when we are confronted with the reality of scarcity, says the Austrian economist, only when we have to reckon with the finite resources at our disposal, are we brought face to face with ourselves.

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I’m increasingly concerned that a critical concern troll gap is opening up between liberals and conservatives. Liberals, due to our honorable tradition of not being able to take our own side in an argument, have a healthy aptitude for it. We love to talk up, in a ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ sort of way, the good sort of conservatism we’d like to have, if only we could. But conservatives don’t really have a go-to fantasy of the ‘good’ liberal who needs to be rescued from the ‘bad’ liberal. This may be because conservative rhetoric – the rhetoric of reaction – is so dominated by slippery slope arguments. The bad thing about liberalism is its bad spirit, causing it to be the case that apparently moderate policies are, in effect, creeping Jacobinism, due to soul-destroying nihilism or resentment, what have you, that lurks behind. If the spirit of liberalism – as opposed to its letter – is the essential problem, per the slippery slope style, you can’t switch gears smoothly, suddenly coming over all concerned that the spirit of liberalism is in danger of slipping. After all, how much worse could it get than communism and fascism? Where is there for liberalism to slip to but up? [click to continue…]

Daniel Rodgers’ Age of Fracture hasn’t received a lot—really, any—attention around here. That’s a pity because it’s a terrific book. Easily the most comprehensive account of social thought in postwar America, it narrates how our notion of the “social” got steadily broken down across a wide array of disciplines. It’s also a flawed book. My review of it has finally appeared in the London Review of Books. Unfortunately, it’s behind the paywall, but I’ve liberated some of it for your consideration here. Some people might feel uncomfortable commenting on the review without having read all of it—here’s my pitch for you to subscribe to the LRB—but I doubt that’ll ultimately prove to be much of an impediment.

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The US presidential debates are on TV at very unsocial hours for Europeans, but I gather the general view is that Obama ‘won’ last night’s.

Reading the coverage this morning, Romney seems to have hit a nerve with his ‘binders full of women’ - I can’t help laughing at Tumblr responses such as this:

Kevin Drum noticed the same bit of this Ezra Klein piece that I did:

At this point, Romney and Obama are running almost perfectly opposite campaigns. Romney can tell you exactly what he wants to do, but barely a word about how he’ll do it. Obama can’t describe what he wants to achieve, but he can tell you everything about how he’ll get it done. It’s a campaign without real policies against a campaign lacking a clear vision.

Klein asks: when did Obama lose ‘the vision thing’? He thinks Obama had it in 2008, but it’s worth considering the counter-hypothesis that it was lost long before. Free and Cantril documented loss of liberal mojo in their 1967 book, based on survey data from the 1964 election. ‘Americans are philosophical conservatives but operational liberals.’ If that’s how it goes in 2012, that just goes to show how it goes, for the past half century. [click to continue…]