Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Chicagoan exceptionalism

Yet more library posts, one from Will, one from Nick, and two from Phoebe. From Harvard Law, Nate flatters our "crazy-intense" egos. Finally, Andrew tries to round it all up and mosey off to the bar. This thing has gotten a bit out of hand.

For the record, we do like you. Andrew and I have said so repeatedly. U of C undergrads are the best kind of undergrad: they are nerdy and eccentric, plenty jaded, and they fetishize their books as much as the next grad. Ten years back, most of us who ended up as Chicago grad students (and most grad students at the most prestigious universities, I'm sure) were a lot like Chicago undergrads are now. Æsthetically and intellectually, in our heart-of-hearts, we were always 55 years old and just waiting for our chronology to catch up with our ontology.

It's not just me who says it. Both academically and financially U of C undergrads are a lot like their grad peers. While I can't find the data, I know from word-of-mouth that they're far morelikely than undegrads at other institutions to go on to careers in academia. And they're not as well off as students of other, less "intense" institutions. Remember this article from the University of Chicago Magazine a few months back?

Still, "we've never been known as a rich kids' school," Behnke says, noting Chicago's reputation for favoring intellectualism over wealth. Indeed, Chicago families earned less than the dozen-plus highly selective private universities in the 2002 survey as a whole. Among all the schools, 56 percent of freshmen's families garnered more than $100,000, including 17.5 percent over $250,000. "The really rich kids," Behnke jokes, "don't want to work this hard."

In any case, as Sina pointed out, all that anybody's asking for is to "please wear clothes and keep it down".

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Dementia Bibliothecalis

Its is odd (and yet delightful) that the first comments that I receive on the pilcrow press have nothing to do with academics but rather with academia.

Will Baude takes [Andrew and] me to task, albeit quite sympathetically, for not recognizing the value of libraries as gathering places, and not realizing that "there are also plenty of disorderly students there with advanced degrees." Still he shows some solidarity with those of us afflicted with dementia bibliothecalis, and confesses to suffering from early signs of the juridical strain of the ailment.

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Phoebe Maltz was filled with awe upon reading my comment that "[t]he library is ours more than it is theirs."

She says it was awful. I'm well within my semantic rights. Just barely.

She counters my assertion by insisting that it's the [parents of the] undergrads who subsidize the grad students and their book-lined hallowed halls. I should, by all accounts of my ideological migration since I arrived at Chicago, be sympathetic to her argument. After all, my melancholy pæan to faded call-numbers, cavernous stair cases, and dusty reading rooms had a tinge of (gasp!) communitarianism. Her rebuke stood squarely on good-old property rights. But as a certain public figure once said, "[m]y logic fails me when it comes to my son." In my case, it fails me when it comes to Academia.

So it's time for a few clarifications:

You mean mea culpas? Don't put words in my mouth.

I know Will, I've been in class with him, I read his blog every day, and I can honestly say that I never saw him in pajamas at the Regenstein. I'm sure that he respects it. In fact, I don't think that such respect is incompatible with having a lively conversation down in Ex Libris, or meeting a group of friends over at the OED. But don't turn the whole building floor into a bazaar, for Dewey's sake. Sure, human chatter can be stimulating background noise; that's why I went to a coffeehouse to write many a paper when I was in college. But a library needs a quiet space—indeed, a lot of it—for those who are not so stimulated. Library patrons who don't respect the silence, who don't recognize the difference between the cafeteria and the reading room, don't have the proper attitude towards the place.

Now, I don't know Phoebe, but I've read her column in the Chicago Maroon and enjoy her blog. I trust that her proprietary claims were not too serious. Then again, there was more than a drop of irony in my own post, and the hoity-toity prose should have suggested.

What?! Come on, you always write like that! I've read your papers, you know.

So I'll stick to her other assertions, some of which are quite right. Indeed "The dippy undergrads in pajamas who speak at full volume at the library are [...] less dominant at the U of C than at other schools." It's one of the reasons why I like this place. I've been highly impressed by the quality and dedication of the undergraduates here. I've been told that it has to do with self-selection: the school's reputation attracts only the most devoted scholars. But this makes U of C undergrads much like grad students, who have also decided to devote themselves to this long and arduous novitiate, and are thus assumed to be devoted to the principles of their institution. Indeed, Phoebe herself has noted elsewhere that "undergrads at Chicago seem more like the school's grad students, or like grad students in general, than is the case at other universities, sharing cross-listed classes and eccentricities, not to mention a tendency to wear far too much tweed".

I also tend to regard the library-work that undergrads (and some grads) do in extremely high regard. It is a priestly function, tending to the temple. And in my experience the students who do such work have a much greater appreciation for the library than those who see it as a place to make a photocopy, grab a tax-form, chug down a Mountain Dew and be on their way. Those types, Phoebe points out, "tend to stick mainly to the A-level and are thus easily avoidable." At Cornell they ended up in a brightly-lit place called "The Fishbowl" getting "facetime". We serious students looked at them and sneered; they, on the other hand, got all the cute dates.

Which brings me to my final point: I'm old. Both older than I was when in college (almost ten years older) and old fashioned enough to have given my soul to a conservative medieval institution (all of Academia, not just the U of C). I think that universities are the greatest achievement of human society, and that libraries are monuments to and temples of civilization. And it irks me when folks enter those halls as merchants in the temple. There are no distinctions of discipline or standing at work here, only of devotion, reverence, and respect. I am certain that Will and Phoebe entertain those same values, and because of this the library is theirs as much as mine. But there are others who couldn't care less. They have no claim of ownership, of belonging to this congregation.


UPDATE: Andrew responds to Will and Phoebe here, and Will continues the conversation there.

UPDATE: A trans-atlantic take on the whole mess.

UPDATE: Deva gets in on the action, complaining about "the level of fetishism that accompanies the academic profession". She asks:

our navels are no prettier than other people's why should they bear so much gazing?

It's the tweed. Tweed-lint in one's navel is so much prettier than ordinary lint.

Monday, January 24, 2005

Rawls and the family

Cross posted on Political Arguments.

In a little over an hour I'll be presenting a paper on John Rawls and the family at the University of Chicago's Political Theory Workshop. I've been working on this topic on and off for several yers now, and my convictions on the matter have changed quite a bit in that time. By the end of law school, influenced by Susan Okin's reading of the "early Rawls", I believed in the state's active role in shaping families that were liberal through-and-through. Now, after internalizing the "later Rawls" I have asummed a more pluralistic stance, all the while hoping that most families will eventually converge on sove version of the liberal model.

The paper is a very rough draft, intended, first, for submission to a seminar, and later for publication. All of your comments are appreciated. Note that there are substantial references to the French Civil Code—both the current version and the Napoleonic original—which I have not had the time to translate. The English versions of the Napoleonic Code and the current Civil Code a available online.

The last hand

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

I've enjoyed William Saffire's On Language reports more than his better known Op-Ed fare, but today's farewell columns are an enjoyable read. I especially liked Saffire's telltale on "How to Read a Column", and was surprised by my agreement with many of his "journalistic crusades".

But the reasons he gives for his adherence to many of causes does not appeal to me as much as the cause itself. And in a political climate obsessed with "results", justification is often underrated.


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Take Saffire's opposition to state-sponsored gambling:

Loser: State-sponsored gambling. For years I railed against the deceptive and regressive taxation and something-for-nothing morality perpetrated by state lotteries, as well as the state deals with sometimes phony Indian tribal leaders to victimize the gullible in glitzy casinos. But gambling, euphemized as "gaming," is booming, enriching the sleazy while preying on the addicted and corrupting slots-happy governors.

I have no moral opposition to many practices that I consider pointless and stupid, and doubt that prohibition will do much to quell compulsive or addicted gamblers. I also endorse the legalization—and subsequent taxation—of most, and perhaps all, controlled substances, and the decriminalization of prostitution.

But there are reasons to oppose state-sponsored gambling that don't rely on sanctimonious paternalism. Take, for instance, the "curse of oil" effect that state sponsored gambling can have on local government. Simply put, lotteries and casinos are too easy a source of revenue for the state, one that bears down too lightly on the shoulders of most taxpayers to have them demand oversight or accountability. I suppose that's what Saffire's reference to "corrupting slots-happy governors" means. But the problem of fiscal unaccountability applies even to "enlightened despots" of the best kind. If politicians don't need to convince constituents of the need for a new tax or the advisability of a state-financed project, they won't. And that is one more mark of sovereignty that they may exercise with impunity.

But private casinos are just a business, one to be zoned and taxed like all the others. Are many of them corrupt? Sure, but that's as much due to current regulations that inflate the worth of a gambling license and allow cartels to control the industry. As for state lotteries, has anyone bothered to ask if projected tax revenues from private lotteries would fall short of current state-lottery revenues?

As for those folks who want to get away from all the sin, there's always Boulder City.

Locals

I could not let Andrew's latest post on the intimate knowledge of call-numbers and demise of propriety in libraries go unremarked. I've also reached the point when I don't have to look up the library floor plan to find a book—HM is on the second floor, B's on the third, JC down on the B-level. It's a feeling of familiarity much like the one you have when you get to know your neighborhood or city well-enough to feel entitled to call yourself a local.

And, as locals, we begin to notice the upstarts and the young'uns. We resent their nonchalance, their casualness, their lack of reverence for the place.

The library is ours more than it is theirs. We've come to know its language. We've climbed down every staircase and know how far each leads us—all floors... floors two through five... basement... sub-basement. We've taken in the skyline from the fifth floor. We've learned to tell the difference between the second and third floor reading rooms by the way that the light falls through the windows and bends over the roof of the Palevsky dorm.

We're library locals. And we're getting old.

Friday, January 21, 2005

Breed right or free-ride

Cross posted on Political Arguments.

I'm not a big fan of the current system of public pensions. My reasons are moral, not economic, since I don't know enough economics to decide whather or not there is a crisis a-brewing. But on my moral qualms I'm not alone.

Now, I think that the elderly and the infirm should have a decent standard of living, and that if they are themselves unable to secure it during their working years, they are entitled to public support. I have no illusions about private charity and find the idea of depending on a church, ethnic association, or fraternal order for my sustenance when I fall prey to illness or old age restrictive and oppressive. What if I run afoul of the church's doctrine? What if I fall in love with someone from a rival ethnic group? What if I just get can't stand my fellow Water Buffalos any more? What happens to my house, my health plan, and my savings?

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A state that doesn't much care what I think—or for that matter, a private financial institution that "give[s] the name of infidel to none but bankrupts"—seems a necessary alternative, at least to regulate private investment and subsidize a reasonable safety net. Otherwise many of the elderly would become hostages of a thousand petty prisons.

But there is one question that the current system cannot avoid. What if I want no children? Take this "Quick Fact" from the Social Security Board of Trustees (via Cato?s Project on Social Security Choice):
In 1950, there were 16 workers paying Social Security taxes for every retired person receiving benefits. Today there are 3.3. By 2030, there will be only 2.

The solvency of the Social Security syatem depends on the continuous replenishment of the labor force in order to compensate for elderly or retired workers. Under such a system, those citizens who decide to have few or no children effectively free-ride on others who have more children than are necessary to replenish the population. What do we do about them, then?

If the solvency of the pension fund depends on keeping a high ratio of workers to retirees, then the failure to produce a good litter of strapping young lads and lassies for the Nation is a burden for the rest of the community. If those who under-reproduce are to be made equally responsible for the public pension system—a system from which they benefit not by virtue of their progeny but of their past labor and their future need—they would have to be compelled, or at least aggressively encouraged, to procreate.

Social Security, then, endangers reproductive freedom! At least it opens the door to claims that childless parents (especially mothers) are "selfish" for not breeding at a satisfactory rate. But the Catch-22 in which fertile citizens are placed—breed right or free-ride—is solely the product of the structure of the system. The ones who get are not the ones who pay, and the externalities run wild.

For a Rawlsian, especially, such a system runs afoul of the priority of liberty, the idea that a person?s civil and political liberties cannot be abridged in order to improve the social and economic condition of another. The choice of whether to have children and how many children to have is part of a person's special conception of her good, and it is entirely reasonable to give one's career or leisure priority over procreation, or to decide that one can give better care to one or two children rather than to six or seven.

A reasonable alternative is to increase immigration and thus import a young working population. But new immigrants are typically near the bottom of the earning scale; those at the top, meanwhile, are precisely the ones who are procreating the least. Unless there are dramatic shifts in the patterns of social mobility in the U.S., there will not be enough money coming into the coffers of Social Security to keep the fund in the black.

And of course I haven't forgotten that Blue States, and especially the bluer areas and demographic groups in those states, have the lowest birthrates. Whether there is a causal connection between money, babies, and ideology I leave for eager researchers yet to come.

The other option is to turn to individualized accounts with some form of redistribution. There are moral hazards involved, but those will be incurred in any case unless society denies all support for retirees, no matter what their circumstances, beyound what they were able to save during their working years.

Saturday, January 15, 2005

Paperblogging One

The white wasteland that is a new Microsoft Word document is daunting enough to send me straight to drown my fear in marzipan. I think it's the sort of thing that was called sublime by the likes of Burke and Kant. So I realized that it was time to put this blogging thing to work. One of the reasons why I told myself that starting a blog was a good idea was to get into the habit of writing regularly, under conditions less intellectually demanding, and thus less intimidating, than the aforesaid MS Word page. I am currently revising a paper on the family in John Rawls's theory of justice, and things are going slow. So we'll call this "paperblogging" and go to town with it...

The paperblogging served its purpose and is now incorporated in the introduction of an actual paper. It has thus been deleted from this post.

Friday, January 14, 2005

Of bitter cold immoderate

Two days ago, the temperature in Chicago was 62° F (16° C). Today it's 12° F (-11° C) and dropping.

"Of this cold we must be wary—he thought—and not fare out at night, for surely some great evil is afoot. But let us turn our minds to the earliest of days and take comfort in the Music, even as all that is light and warm fades from the world." Then a deep voice called out, in words that mortal ears had not heard since the Downfall of the West.
And Ilúvatar spoke to Ulmo, and said: ‘Seest thou not how here in this little realm in the Deeps of Time Melkor hath made war upon thy province? He hath bethought him of bitter cold immoderate, and yet hath not destroyed the beauty of thy fountains, nor of thy clear pools. Behold the snow, and the cunning work of frost! Melkor hath devised heats and fire without restraint, and hath not dried up thy desire nor utterly quelled the music of the sea. Behold rather the height and glory of the clouds, and the everchanging mists; and listen to the fall of rain upon the Earth! And in these clouds thou art drawn nearer to Manwë, thy friend, whom thou lovest.’

Then Ulmo answered: ‘Truly, Water is become now fairer than my heart imagined, neither had my secret thought conceived the snowflake, nor in all my music was contained the falling of the rain. I will seek Manwë, that he and I may make melodies for ever to thy delight!’ And Manwë and Ulmo have from the beginning been allied, and in all things have served most faithfully the purpose of Ilúvatar.

From the "Ainulindalë", J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (New York: Ballantine, 1979) 8-9.

Given Will Baude's recent reference to Heidi Bond's "Sauron: Offer and Acceptance", I thought it proper to release the Elf-f(r)iend.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Publicity

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Axel Gosseries, whose book on intergenerational justice I reviewed for the January issue of Ethics, has just published an entry on "Publicity" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Gosseries's work is very good; I urge you to go read the piece.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

¡Feliz año nuevo!


Happy New Year! I thought I'd take this chance to get back into the orbit of the blogosphere, and figure out once and for all how the photoblogging thing works.

Conclusion? It's far more complicated than it ought to be, but it's free (for now) and the pictures don't take up any of my allotted server space.

Here's a picture of Michelle and me dangling dangerous sparking things far too close to highly flamable materials. Needless to say, I was scared out of my mind and put out the Flaming Stick of Death as soon as the picture was taken.