❄️ A bit of a thaw yesterday, and various artifacts of bygone eras encased in ice for decades begin to emerge.
“The pessimist and the prophet” is the current title of the online version but only if you read the article itself — everywhere else on the website it is the more verbose and I presume SEO-friendly “The Harvard professor who foresaw our age of anger – and what happens next”. Neither is what is used in the print edition, the more poetic “Meditations in an emergency”. Common to all three is that they are nowhere to be found on the FT’s home page, though to be fair it is referenced in the top right corner of the front page in print, above a Mad Men-esque illustration and with an altogether different teaser title: “The limits of liberalism; Philosopher Michael Sandel”.
I have never heard of Sandel before, of his 12-part lecture series about Justice (available on Youtube free of charge) or of his 1996 book Democracy’s Discontent which seems to have predicted the perils of globalization and neoliberalism without having to reference lizard people or secret cabals. In this it reminded me of False Dawn which came two years later, though of course I will have to read Sandel’s book first to confirm. In the article, FT commentator Martin Sandbu, who is also a former student of Sandel’s, retells their recent conversations about, well, the current goings on and what happens when you take morals out of politics and rely on “free” markets for guidance:
Sandel’s j’accuse is that this kind of liberalism took what should have been the most political questions out of politics, leaving them to be settled by market mechanisms. I proposed that this was similar to the appeal of “effective altruism”, the neo-utilitarian moral theory popular among students and tech bros, which reduces moral questions to basic calculations of effectiveness. “Exactly,” he said.
In an updated edition of Democracy’s Discontent, Sandel gives the example of Barack Obama’s approach to the 2008 financial crisis. “By standing between the bankers and ‘the pitchforks’,” as the public demanded legal limits on bonuses and no bailouts for banks, “Obama sought to mollify the public outrage, rather than give it voice. [He] treated the financial crisis as a technical problem for experts to solve, not a civic question about the role of finance in democratic life.”
On America’s fake meritocracy:
One derivation of market-friendly liberalism Sandel has long questioned is meritocracy, the idea that society should be organised to give the most able the advancement they deserve. I remember how he would warn us teaching fellows that in the classes debating distributive justice, undergraduates would all preach meritocracy. They were adamant they had earned their Harvard places through hard work alone. In the lecture hall, Sandel would then ask the 800 or so assembled undergraduates to raise their hand if they were their parents’ first (or only) child. He still does this today, and when he does, “75 to 80 per cent of the students raise their hands and there’s an audible gasp when they look around and notice that”. The over-representation (more than half of US children are second born or later), combined with plausible reasons why birth order matters for parental attention and other advantages, is a powerful prompt for Sandel’s students to rethink whether they can really claim meritocratic achievement.
On the class divide: But of course as more and more people attain the right to the skybox, those who do not want to mix with the rif-raf build skybox on top of skybox on top of skybox to form an ever-growing hedonistic mountain.
Then there was what Sandel calls “the skyboxification of public life”, a reference to corporate boxes in sports stadiums. Sports events were once a class-mixing experience. Ticket price differences were modest. “Everyone had to stand in the same long queues to use the bathroom, everybody had to drink the same stale beer and eat the same hot dogs. When it rained, everyone got wet. But with the advent of luxury skyboxes, that no longer was the case.” It’s a specific example of what he calls one of the most corrosive effects of growing inequality: that winners and losers increasingly “live separate lives”. This is not just a matter of distributive justice, of unequal incomes, but that we lose the “chance encounters” [that] remind us of our common citizenship, “of what it is we share”. How many of us at the winning end of these developments have given much thought to what we have collectively lost in the process?
Unlike the cadre of neoliberali journalists across the pond — e.g., the editorial board of The Atlantic — Sandbu owes up to his generation’s failure to make the world better and can at least contemplate the possibility that our current predicament is the direct consequence of their hubris. And surprisingly considering FT’s target audience, the comments to the article are uniformly positive. There may be hope yet.
From American Economic Journal: Economic Policy about the effects of ransomware on patients: ↬Tyler Cowen
Ransomware attacks decrease hospital volume by 17–24 percent during the initial attack week, with recovery occurring within 3 weeks. Among patients already admitted to the hospital when a ransomware attack begins, in-hospital mortality increases by 34–38 percent.
The implication is that the computer systems being down has a huge detrimental effect on patient outcomes. What the abstract doesn’t get into — and I don’t have access to the full article — is how they calculated the in-hospital mortality among the already admitted patients. Many of them will have been discharged early or transferred to other hospitals if stable enough, decreasing the denominator and overestimating mortality. At least I hope that’s the case!
The numbered items are from Kelley’s recent post, comments below are mine after a bit more than a decade of experience.
Provided you have values to disseminate, know what they are, and especially know the difference between values and opinions because while your values may be identical your opinions will often clash.
Absolutely true. My wife and I have a running list of every brilliantly stupid and stupidly brilliant thing our progeny has said. It is long and growing ever longer.
Experiencing this right now while having both an infant and a teenager at home. You tend to forget how large that gap actually is since you cross it in daily — nay, hourly — increments, but it is complete helplessness on one end and taking the metro from school by yourself and going on a field trip to China on the other.
For being loved alone you could also get a pet, but there is also a need to love that — and please fellow cat lovers do not kill me for writing this — no pet can completely fulfill.
Well put. Though of course you also take a piece of your heart and put it into someone else, and then things may happen to them or they may be the thing that happens to other people, with strong feelings either way.
Amen.
Last month I linked to two things that are now worth following up on:
And on the abandoning Apple front:
❄️ A bit of a thaw yesterday, and various artifacts of bygone eras encased in ice for decades begin to emerge.
OK, these two are included more for saliency than positivity, but they are also good!
Update: Adam Mastroianni’s latest post fits here like a glove.
❄️ And so comes February, the worst month of the year for those of us in the northern hemisphere. This one will be particularly horrendous for residents of DC and the surrounding suburbs as we deal with snowcrete — DCPS schools are still on a 2-hour delay, but hey at least they’re open!
🏒 After being 3 goals behind, the Capitals win with an overtime tie-breaker from Sourdiff. The last time we were there he had a hat trick. Glad do witness both of his big days.
Today I learned that I paid $200 for audio editing software I can only use while online, which is tough to do when 37,000 feet up in the air. I don’t think this was an issue prior to the latest round of enshittification.
