(or you need to assume both a one-dimensional issue space AND precisely two parties for the logic to hold. otherwise the party that captures the median can be a minority party, which might win a plurality or not.)
the average american and the median american just hate each other.
“anti-fascists should be attentive not merely to civil society as a general category, but to different kinds of civil society. The Internet and mass media are a form of civil society, but…they are not a substitute for in-person association. (The same applies to professionally managed nonprofits.)”
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and makes the case for including universal pediatric dental care in the, um, basket!
it's amazing we all still have hands, rather than vague remnants of fingers twisted into vaguely cylindrical stumps.
also worth keeping in mind that "people who feel like they were 'canceled'" is a category largely orthogonal to "progressive" or "moderate". (perhaps not so orthogonal to the contemporary version of "right", for straightforward reasons.)
self-criticism as much as anything: we're very aware of how plutocrats use race, nationality, etc to divide us, but how about faction? when we devote time to countering searchlight etc and the pugnacious internet personalities who promote them, are we really countering or falling into a trap?
boo, y'all!
isn't he doing to grok what they did to HAL 9000?
makes me nostalgic, but not in a great way…
it’s always the 80s with dear leader.
image of the “peacekeeper missile”
i’m not sure which of the categories i am.
i am so grateful one of the Millers changed her name to become one of the Millers.
i’m scared!
i mean, both claims are accurate, no? without air resistance they'd land the same way, whether you want to characterize that as just as gently or just as violently. i agree violently would be the more informative characterization! but in terms of "same" degree of, both are accurate? 1/
in this analogy, the state stands in for the parachute. 2/
in a transaction-cost-free world (as @t0nyyates.bsky.social accurately points out, with transaction costs interpreted broadly, including the costs of overcoming information asymmetries, enforcement problems, etc) you'd have no use of a parachute, it could only get in the way. 3/
I agree for the analogy to work I have to posit the Coase stand-in as making the point in a particularly unhelpful way (just as gentle rather than just as violent), which is maybe a bit mean… 4/
but if your point was to emphasize that AIR RESISTANCE MATTERS, you might make the claim that way, expecting your audience to understand the irony in it. /fin
To kind of summarize Coase's tragic arc, he was made famous for an idealized account under which negotiations among private actors *would* lead to outcomes respecting social costs and benefits, but to Coase the whole point was that the idealization was unrealistic. 1/
The "transaction costs" you have to assume away are literally what Coase made his career as describing as fully the basis of real-world institutions. 2/
The very shape of the social world, the fact that it does not reduce to atoms transacting horizontally in a market, is to Coase down to transaction costs. 3/
Transaction costs may sound like constraints, but they become the bricks by which all the institutions of society are formed, just like bones constrain the blubber our bodies otherwise would be, but also give us their functional forms. 4/
An ancient trick of neoliberals, slyly made into a kind of philosophy of science by Milton Friedman, is to find ways of suggesting the unreality of assumptions don't matter, you can treat the model as evidence its assumptions are approximately true if the model seems to work in practice. 5/
The neoliberals basically inverted Coase's whole framework this way, suggesting it was approximately enough true that transaction costs don't matter, so Coase's suggestion social optimality could be achieved by markets alone under unrealistic circumstances was actually realistic. 6/
It's like a physicist pointing out that if it weren't for air resistance, a person without a parachute would land just as gently as a person with, then a group of "engineers" whipping their arms around and saying, "there's very little resistance, screw the chute, go ahead and jump!" 7/
Coase was made a kind of ironic celebrity on the back of this misuse of his work, which has only been dialed back since 2008 chastened the neoliberals. But as you can see from the piece you quoted, the idea we can eliminate air resistance and so jump without chutes is still with us. /fin
In my early onset senility I've just posted a whole thread getting its principal subject's name wrong. I'm an idiot. I'll repost it, though. Live dangerously if deludedly.
you know the thing about the two bodies of the king? "his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government…utterly void of Infancy, and old Age" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kin... it is becoming reified, materialized, technologically, god help us.
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Poor Coase. If you haven't seen this by @xntl.info it's a good read: mchugh-russell.ca/2018/06/07/o... 1/
I'm sure that essay is in earnest. The free-market technoutopians are always earnest. But they are also also participating in Galbraith's "one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." 2/
They let goods like "freedom" and "dynamic efficiency" become a euphemism for their selfishness. /fin
your non-use of “heck” here seems particularly appropriate.