1. A new theory of embarassment.
2. Micropatronage, using the web.
3. It seems placebo responses are becoming stronger.
4. Ecclesiastical insurance and hot lead.
5. The history of law and economics.
Assorted links
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I am not a Marxist, I don’t think Marxism is compelling, but I think Wilkinson’s point is sort of silly. The amount of people killed by holders of a particular set of ideas is influenced mostly by how many people share the idea and how powerful they are rather than the merits of the ideas themselves. People that believe in democracy kill more people than scientologists. Which is the more embarassing ideology?
I’d answer your question, but my answer would embarrass me.
You are right. It’s about numbers. I’m not embarrassed by Ayn Rand. She wrote some books. I read them. They were good. She constitues about 5% of my philosophy at this point. The objectivists really dropped the ball on the Iraq war. Libs don’t even know that.
They are proud Marxists because “they care about poor saps.” They think I should be embarrassed because I think poor people are just about worth every penny. Libs hear what people say about the people who read her books, and since there are a lot of popular libs, it’s easy to pretend people should be embarrassed about Rand.
RE: Micropatronage– I really like Jenna Wortham’s work these days even if I can’t stomach the paper as a whole. I love the phrase “mini-Medici.”
Also, to sort of defend Rand, most moral philosophy is terrible. If Rawls wasn’t telling people what the want to hear and was subject to the same level of intellectual vitriol (not that his work hasn’t been scrutinized, but I’m talking about mean-spirited/treated as the enemy/one mistake makes you a joke type scrutiny), you think he couldn’t be a source of embarrassment on his question-begging alone?
im still struggling to understand how chris wickham, the author of the inheretence of rome, the book im reading now and subject of a recent post, is a marxist historian. can anyone explain this?
Ejan Mackaay’s HISTORY OF LAW AND ECONOMICS omits reference to Barbara Fried’s “The Progressive Assault On Laissez Faire: Robert Hale and the First Law and Economics Movement”. Perhaps because her book was published in 1998, while his article is copyrighted shortly after in 1999. Curiously, he makes no mention of Robert Hale at all in his article.
I highly recommend “The Progressive Assault On Laissez Faire”.
That history of law and economics says Hume “understands the paradox of collective action, in his example of the draining of the meadow and uses it to justify the provision of some collective goods by
the State.”
But Richard Tuck argued in *Free Riding* that the meadow-draining passage is not really about an Olson-style collection actions problem (the kind that’s a “paradox”, in some sense). And if you read it, Hume really does seem to have believed that helping drain a meadow was in fact prudent for the individual; Hume was only pointing out that individuals were often too shortsighted and stupid to realize it.
The Micropatronage article discusses the recent startup, Kickstarter. Note that the site uses assurance contracts (a.k.a. provision point mechanisms), which should be well known to MR readers.
Why is the money given called a “pledge”?
They’re pledges because money is collected only if a project reaches or exceeds its funding goal before time expires. If a project’s funding goal is $5,000 and only $4,999 is pledged when time expires, no money is collected. Zip, zero. Also, no rewards will be delivered. No funding, no rewards. Everyone walks away as if nothing happened.
The problem with Ayn Rand’s writings is not her ideas themselves, but the hordes of people who, despite not being John Galt, insist on (a) acting as if they were, and (b) supporting societal systems that only work in a society where he is present and identified.
Objectivists are the Goths of political/moral theory: They have some pretty good stuff, but far too many of them are posers, and their posers are worse than the posers of other movements/subcultures.
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