Launching our COVID-19 visualization

Kevin Kallmes Current Events, Liberty, Links , , , , , , ,

I know everyone is buried in COVID-19 news, updates, and theories. To me, that makes it difficult to cut through the opinions and see the evidence that should actually guide physicians, policymakers, and the public.

To me, the most important thing is the ability to find the answer to my research question easily and to know that this answer is reasonably complete and evidence-driven. That means getting organized access to the scientific literature. Many sources (including a National Library of Medicine database) present thousands of articles, but the organization is the piece that is missing.

That is why I launched StudyViz, a new product that enables physicians to build an updatable visualization of all studies related to a topic of interest. Then, my physician collaborators built just such a visual for COVID-19 research, presenting a sunburst diagram that users can select to identify their research question of interest.

Studyviz sunburst

For instance, if you are interested in the impact of COVID-19 on pregnant patients, just go to “Subpopulations” and find “Pregnancy” (or neonates, if that is your concern). We nested the tags so that you can “drill down” on your question, and so that related concepts are close to each other. Then, to view the studies themselves, just click on them to see an abstract with the key info (patients, interventions, and outcomes) highlighted:

Abstract

This is based on a complex concept hierarchy built by our collaborators and that is constantly evolving as the literature does:

Hierarchy

Even beyond that, we opened up our software to let any researchers who are interested build similar visuals on any disease state, as COVID-19 is not the only disease for which organizing and accessing the scientific literature is important!

We are seeking medical coinvestigators–any physician interested in working with us, simply email contact@nested-knowledge.com or contact us on our website!

Pathologies in higher education: a book, a review, and a comment

Lucas G. Freire Books, Culture, Philosophy , , , ,

Cracks in the Ivory Tower, by Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness, brings a much needed discussion of the pathologies of US higher education to the table. Brennan and Magness are two well-known classical liberals with a strong record of thoughtful interaction with Public Choice political economy.

Public Choice is an application of mainstream economic concepts to political situations. One of the key points of Public Choice is that people are self-interested and rational. This drives the choices they make. But people also act within formal and informal institutional environments. This constrains and enables some of their choices to a large degree. In other words, people react to incentives.

The Public Choice approach is not so much a normative handbook, but rather an attempt to explain how politics operate. The application of this theory to understand higher education in the US is a welcome addition to a growing literature on the economics of higher education.

It is perhaps surprising how the subtitle of the book stresses an aspect that tends to be extraneous to Public Choice scholarship: “The Moral Mess of Higher Education”. Of course we all draw on moral reasoning and assumptions in order to pass judgment on economic and political phenomena, but normally the descriptive side is kept separate – at least by economists – from explicit value judgment.

John Staddon, from Duke University, has reviewed Brennan’s and Magness’ book. In his review, he focuses on three main key issues. First, colleges and universities act on distorted incentives created, for example, by college rankings, to recruit students in ways that are not necessarily related to maintaining or expanding the academic prestige of the institution.

Second, teaching in higher education, at least in the US, is poorly evaluated. Historically, it has shifted from student evaluation to administrative assessment.

So why the shift from student-run to administration-enforced?  And why did faculty agree to give these mandated evaluations to their students? Faculty acquiescence — naiveté — is relatively easy to understand. Who can object to more information? Who can object to a new, formal system that is bound to be more accurate than any informal student-run one? And besides, for most faculty at elite schools, research, not teaching, is the driver. Faculty often just care less about teaching; some may even regard it as a chore.

The incentives for college administrations are much clearer. Informal, student-run evaluations are assumed to be unreliable, hence cannot be used to evaluate faculty for tenure and promotion. But once the process is formalized, mandatory, and supposedly valid, it becomes a useful disciplinary tool, a way for administrators to control faculty, especially junior and untenured faculty.

This is not necessarily conducive to improvement in the quality of teaching. Perhaps colleges fare better than universities here, given that their faculty is not expected to allocate a large amount of hours per week to research and writing.

Third, Brennan and Magness offer a critique of what is known in the US system as “general education” courses. In their view, it is clear that those courses are unhelpful in a world where academic disciplines are increasingly more specialized. However, offering those courses is a good excuse for universities to grab more money from the students.

This is where Staddon begs to differ:

Cracks in the Ivory Tower usefully emphasizes the economic costs and benefits of university practices. But absent from the book is any consideration of the intrinsic value of the academic endeavor. Remaining is a vacuum that is filled by two things: the university as a business; and the university as a social activist.  Both are destructive of the proper purpose of a university.

I tend to agree with this point, and I do not think it is a minor point. We can do colleges and universities without football, without gigantic administrative bureaucracies, and without the gimmicks to game the college ranking system. I could even go further and argue that we should do colleges and universities without dorms and an artificial second and worse version of teenage years right when students are supposed and expected to behave like adults. Getting rid of those tangential features of US higher education should help refocus on knowledge and reduce the cost.

Colleges and universities in the US are also expensive and unnecessarily inflated because of the structure of the student loans system, which also generates perverse incentives. But this point has been explained and described to exhaustion in the economic literature. This also has to change.

However, I am not convinced that making universities focus on professionalizing their students would be the best way to go. Brennan and Magness raise some important issues and concerns, some of which also apply outside the US, but the Staddon highlights in his review an important counterpoint: higher education, at least on the undergraduate level, shouldn’t be seen 100% as an investment good, but also as a consumer good:

Higher education does not exist for economic reasons. It exists (in the famous words of Matthew Arnold) to transmit “the best that has been thought and said,” in other words the ‘high culture’ of our civilization. Job-related, practical training is not unimportant. Universities, and much else of society, could not exist without a functioning economy. But — and this point is increasingly ignored on the modern campus and by the authors of CIT — these things are not the purpose, the telos if you like, of a university.

Undergraduate education is there to hand over knowledge to the next generation. It can be small and cheap. You need an adequate building, a small library with the best classic books, electronic access to journals, and faculty that excels at teaching. Courses would be general, comprehensive, and interdisciplinary by definition. The program could last only three years. An optional additional year could be offered to those with an academic profile, where they could pursue more specialization as a bridge to graduate education.

This is more or less the mediaeval model. I am not sure we need to reinvent the wheel in order to deal with the crisis of higher education. What we need is to get back on track – back to the bread and butter of college education. This is a reflection that both sides of the story – those who demand education and those that offer it – need to make.

Read more:

In a recent contribution to Notes on Liberty, Mary Lucia Darst has recently commented on the status of higher education during the 2020 pandemic and prospects for the future.

I also wrote about the college trap in the US a few years ago.

Nightcap (again)

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , , , , ,

(Ooops, lol. I hope all of NOL‘s American readers had a good Memorial Day, and that everybody else had a good Monday. The Glasner piece is an excellent discussion of the Austrian School of Economics.)

  1. An Austrian (School) tragedy David Glasner, Uneasy Money

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , , , , ,
  1. An Austrian (School) tragedy David Glasner, Uneasy Money

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. The surprising lexical history of infectious disease Charles McNamara, Commonweal
  2. Immigration and virologic hysteria Michael Agovino, Not Even Past
  3. Against scarcity Marilynne Robinson, NYRB
  4. Can we escape from information overload? Tom Lamont, 1843

Be Our Guest (Sunday Poetry): “Food & Drinks to Rats & Finks”

Brandon Christensen Culture, Current Events , , , ,

Our latest Be Our Guest post comes from poet N.D.Y. Romanfort, and it’s another poem. Once again I’m taking liberties in regards to Alex’s “Sunday Poetry” series and sharing Romanfort’s poem today. An excerpt:

Two-legg’d rodents have seized
the cherished eateries.
For these rats of great size
Mere food scraps aren’t the prize.

Please, read the rest. Enjoy. And if you’ve got something to say and no place to say it, Be Our Guest.

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Is Turkey moderating its foreign policy? Fehim Tastekin, Al-Monitor
  2. On Rudyard Kipling’s World War I-era book Lance Morrow, City Journal
  3. Habsburgs: The rise and fall of a world power John Adamson, Literary Review
  4. The end of the New World Order Ross Douthat, New York Times

Foundering in academia

Mary Lucia Darst Culture , , , , , , ,

For the last couple of weeks, I have been reading and re-reading Gerard Klickstein’s book The Musician’s Way: A Guide to Practice, Performance, and Wellness. Klickstein is a musician and professor who has spent much of his teaching career helping other musicians recover from physical injury or overcome psychological issues, such as performance anxiety. Klickstein argues that the vast majority of musicians’ problems, physical and psychological, are a result of poor formation at critical stages of development. Reversing problems engendered by “unqualified,” i.e. incompetent, teachers is an overarching theme in the book. Reading Klickstein’s anecdotes in which many of his students are recent college graduates, one becomes alarmed at the sheer number of incompetent teachers present in “higher education.”    

Several summers ago, at a music festival, I sat with an opera singer friend and we assembled her audition book. An audition book is a selection of opera arias which a singer provides to producers during the audition process. My friend and I were deep into research and consideration, when another musician, also a singer, joined us. His contribution was to question us as to why we bothered with the book at all.

He went on to reveal that he wasn’t planning on attempting the opera house and festival audition cycle, nor was he considering trying for a choral ensemble. Instead, he was applying for faculty positions at small colleges. He was a recent doctoral graduate from a university which is overall relatively famous but not particularly well-regarded for its music school. At that time, the three of us were roughly at the same level. His experience and education were slightly above average for the types of small, regional institutions he was targeting.  

Behind his dismissive behavior lay a mentality of minimal effort. Why should he go to the trouble of researching roles, evaluating musical suitability, and learning parts when his résumé would satisfy the expectations of small, provincial colleges? He lacked the vocabulary to explain his vision, but what he described was a sinecure. Before the festival ended, he had secured a full-time position at an institution in a backwater of the American southwest.

One side of the proverbial coin says that the institution was lucky to have him – his background certainly was above anything the college could expect on the basis of its own reputation and musical standing; the other side of the coin says that it is concerning that someone like him could see academia as a safety net. 

Now American colleges have begun to furlough staff. As you can imagine, many of my Facebook friends are people who attended and are now staff at small liberal arts colleges and small state universities throughout the country. In the atmosphere of uncertainty, my own FB feed has filled up with people lashing out against a society, which, they insist, doesn’t value them. There is an underlying financial element; few can afford to be furloughed. But there is a deeper issue present: a professional inactivity that has pervaded American small liberal arts academia for the last few decades.  

In truth, financial concerns are more a symptom of professional inactivity than they are representative of some overarching truth about poor pay for teachers. I recall how one of my Columbia professors told my class never to rely on a single income stream. He would talk about how all breaks are opportunities to be productive. He told us about how when he was starting his career in the 1960s, he deliberately accepted a part-time position, rather than a full-time one, so that he could finish writing his first book. In terms of his career, the book was more important than his job at a small city college because the book paved the way for the big opportunities. To tell the truth, it didn’t matter that he taught at a small city college, outside of gaining some official teaching experience which he could have obtained through teaching just one class. There’s a difference between being professionally active and simply being busy or being employed.

There is a species of person who follows the same MO as the singer from the music festival. Academia is a safety net, and the goal is to rush into a full-time position and sit there for a lifetime. Their attitude is that of a career teacher, not a professor. They lecture and grade, however there is no professional contribution or creativity on their part. Such people tend to be barren of original thought and to react with hostility to new ideas or concepts. A quick search of academic databases shows that they don’t write articles, they haven’t written books (their theses don’t count), and they don’t write for think tanks or journals. An egregious example is a college professor who writes movie reviews for popular art enthusiast magazines; he’s been passing this activity off as “publishing” and “being published” for years. 

There is, I know, a perception of a double standard on some level. For example, Kingsley Amis taught English Literature at Oxford for the majority of his career. He published comparatively little on the academic side in contrast to some of his peers, and much of his lighter work took the form of reviews, essays, and opinion pieces for newspapers and magazines, such as the London Times or The New Yorker. But he averaged a novel a year. Recognized in his own lifetime as a giant of twentieth century English literature, no one questioned his publication record or his ability to teach the field.

The subtle stagnation at the liberal arts college level has contributed to a culture of belief in talent and luck, rather than good decision making and hard – by which I mean calculated and carefully weighed – work. There are many people today who would classify my Columbia professor’s story as one of privilege and make assumptions about a background of wealth that allowed part-time work. In actual fact, he did not come from a particularly “privileged” background: he simply settled on his priorities, thought ahead, and made his decisions accordingly.

One thing one learns very quickly in the arts is that one must create without expectation of immediate payment. Singers learn arias, instrumentalists study concerti, filmmakers shoot reels all so that when the moment is right, they can produce a piece that demonstrates ability and wins a commission. One tidbit my professor included was that he had to write several critically acclaimed books before he began to receive advances for his work. The principle is the same: create first then receive a reward. A person who works according to the parameters of payment is a drone, and it is unsurprising that such people do not create new works, make discoveries, or have groundbreaking insights. If one considers that American small colleges have populated themselves largely with professional drones, one must reevaluate their worth to education.    

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Oliver Williamson (RIP) and the Austrians Peter Klein, Mises Daily
  2. On the pioneer of Indian nationalism Soni Wadhwa, Asian Review of Books
  3. The politics of Star Trek Timothy Sandefur, Claremont Review of Books
  4. The psychology of entrenched privilege Côté et al., PSPB

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Tea and capitalism and China too Andrew Liu, Aeon
  2. America’s immigration paradox David Nasaw, New York Times
  3. Covid-19 and the power transition from the US to China Meisel & Moyer, Duck of Minerva
  4. “The Jakarta Method” (American foreign policy) Branko Milanovic, globalinequality

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. Keen insights into American Higher Ed Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth
  2. About a possibly divine boy William Deresiewicz, Atlantic
  3. Warlike democracies Michael Federici, Modern Age
  4. In praise of grand strategy Ehrhardt & Ryan, War on the Rocks

Nightcap

Brandon Christensen Links , , ,
  1. The seen and the unseen Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
  2. Donald Trump doesn’t want authority Ross Douthat, New York Times
  3. Richard Rorty as a post-Straussian David Kretz, JHIblog
  4. Ancient and modern liberty Daniel Mahoney, Claremont Review of Books

The Private Production of Defense

Edwin van de Haar Current Events , , , , , , ,

Lucas’ post reminded me of a piece that I wrote for his website ThinkIR, in 2013. Most of it I re-used in my book Degrees of Freedom (2015). Of course it is also a piece on its own, that readers of NoL may find of interest. Thanks Lucas!

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It is fun to think about the almost unthinkable. Therefore this contribution is about the idea that no state is needed to provide military security against foreign attack. In modern times the idea goes back to at least the French-Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari and his 1849 pamphlet The Production of Security. The most prominent current defender of this idea is the German economist Hans-Herman Hoppe, a leading anarcho-capitalist thinker, in his essay The Private Production of Defense (also see The Myth of National Defense, which was edited by Hoppe).

Hoppe rightly notices (p.1) that the legitimacy of the modern state is strongly related to the belief in collective security. Following Rothbard in The Ethics of Liberty, he argues that states will always expand, due to the governmental monopoly to tax its inhabitants. This also applies to governments that only have the limited task of protection against aggression and administrating and justice. The only proper solution is therefore to abolish the state altogether, in order to ensure true liberty and individual justice. Consequently, this also means that the provision of security needs to be privatized, as Hoppe does not expect the world to turn into a peaceful utopia (pp. 1- 5).

So how would this work? Basically, to regard the production of security as an insurance, where the expenditures for defense are to be paid by premiums paid by individuals (pp.5-8). The insured people can choose from competing insurance firms, just like in other parts of the insurance market. This is not as improbable at it may seem at first sight. Importantly, insurance companies are already used to deal with risk and other real world dangers. There are already many private security companies in existence, also at the battlefield. The cost of defense in relation to other parts of the insurance market appears large, but do not discount the idea beforehand. For example: Dutch defense expenditure in 2013 is around 7 billion Euro, less than 1% of GDP, while annual turnover of the two largest insurers is around 20 billion. Of course Hoppe would point out that the 7 billion in current defense expenditures needs to be returned to the taxpayers, hence widening the premium base. Presumably, this would work the same in other countries with smaller economies and/or smaller financial sectors (but see the remarks below).

A world without states, but with private security insurance is less war prone, Hoppe argues (p.11-12). Insurers will have an interest in keeping costs down, and will therefore only make unprovoked attacks insurable. People who provoke, or have known to provoke violence in the past, will be excluded from the insurance. After a while, the number of uninsured people will be small. They will face big defense insurance companies if they violate somebody’s property, making this unlikely to happen often, in contrast to interstate war. Yet in my view here Hoppe relies too much on his stated view on human nature: man as rational animal.

A related main defect of the essay is its focus on the role of insurers and their (economic) incentives. This is fine, but the argument quickly loses any of the convincing power it has when Hoppe turns to an analysis of international war. Or more precise, a violent conflict between a free territory, defended by one or more insurance companies, and a state, financed by compulsory taxation. He simply asserts (p. 14) that the state would be in a disadvantage because it is less efficient and that its leaders would lose their legitimacy, because they necessarily fail to convince the population of the justification of an attack on the inherently peaceful free territory.

Yet if an attack would still happen, Hoppe continues, the state-led army of specialists would not only face the defense force of the insurance company (or several insurers and re-insurers cooperating), but also an armed population (p.15). Without much analysis he simply asserts the companies will always be more efficient and also capable to counter all attacks by any state, perform counter-operations in the state territory and be able to kill its leaders, while making sure to minimize any collateral damage. All because they have to justify their insurance fees.

That is as far as Hoppe goes in his argument. He offers no further analysis or other scenario’s, no additional arguments, does not provide any international political analysis, none whatsoever. Only the fact that the insurance companies are private suffices for Hoppe as they must be more efficient and thus able to overcome all possible attack. That is too simplistic, as just three examples illuminate.

Hoppe overlooks some important geopolitical aspects. Take size of territory and population for instance. How likely is it really that a small free territory, say the size of Luxembourg, or The Netherlands for that matter, would be able to raise enough insurance premiums to enable a good defense structure to counter attacks by much larger states? There is a difference between collecting enough money to match current defense expenditures and ensuring defense against all possible attacks, especially given the anarcho-capitalist dislike of international alliances such as NATO.

Apparently Hoppe thinks all necessary technology is either invented by the research and development people of the insurance company, or freely available at the market. This is improbable as far as the state-side of the argument concerns, given today’s relative secrecy in military procurement. Also, the cooperation between insurance companies may fail in this respect. If one company has a superior weapon system, it will be a ground for competition with the other insurer(s). The superiority of one company may quickly make it a monopolist. It may become a threat to its insured, just like states may be threats to their taxpayers. Once the armed forces of the private insurer are in full operation it only takes a powerful CEO with his or her own agenda to turn things sour. Just the fact of private financing does not make much difference.

Also, does economic efficiency always trump state inefficiency? The history of warfare is full of examples where the supposedly superior army loses unexpectedly. So if the state deals a decisive blow it effectively robs the remains of the insurance company, and it’s successors, of its premium paying clients.

To conclude, for liberty loving people the prospect of stateless private security may be tantalizing. However, the quality of the argument as presented by Hoppe thus far is poor and unconvincing. His theoretical arguments largely stem from economics and overlook other relevant facts and arguments, including those from IR. Hoppe’s private production of defense remains a fairy tale.

Links:
Molinari:
http://mises.org/document/2716/The-Production-of-Security

Hoppe:
http://mises.org/document/1221/The-Private-Production-of-Defense

http://mises.org/document/1092/Myth-of-National-Defense-The-Essays-on-the-Theory-and-History-of-Security-Production

Rothbard:
http://mises.org/document/1179/The-Ethics-of-Liberty

Advice to Libertarian IR Theorists

Lucas G. Freire Politics ,

LGF: This short article was published in the now extinct ThinkIR website on 11 October 2012. I decided not to make any corrections to the original text.

How can you be a Libertarian and theorise IR at the same time? We may tackle this question from a normative or descriptive point of view, but I don’t think you could separate one from another.

On the normative side, let’s face it: most political scientists believe in big government and some who claim that don’t, believe in it anyway. The Libertarian IR theorist will be less than sanguine about the status of normative assumptions in IR, to say the least.

On the descriptive side, IR was born statecentric and remains a statecentric discipline. Adding “new actors” will not do if we keep presupposing they don’t have their own character and are merely “parts” of a “whole” – Leviathan, of course. Starting from the descriptive side, therefore, is also a bit of a problem for the Libertarian IR theorist.

How to begin? I suggest an agenda that does a bit of both and, for the time being, doesn’t get “quite there” yet. There’s preliminary work to be done. More importantly, there’s a lot of “real world” nonsense to be stopped or prevented, and this is equally pressing.

On the one hand, the Libertarian IR theorist has to dispel the normative and descriptive Leviathanic myths bought and reinforced by the discipline of IR since its incipience. For all its attractiveness, though, myth-bursting doesn’t necessarily precede “real world” engagement. “All these theories yet the bodies keep piling up”. That kind of thing.

Back to the question: how to begin? Do a bit of normative, a bit of descriptive and a bit of engagement. One day, Libertarian IR theorists will get there. Meanwhile, merely shifting the conversation with this threefold strategy will open doors – even gates.

Fellow Libertarian IR theorist, there are essentially two ways of doing normative, descriptive and engaging thinking. The first is the way of dialogue. The second is the way of antithesis. Out of these two, a whole new school of thought may emerge. New to IR, that is.

When in dialogue, speak the language of the conversation. Understand it first. Master the key IR theories and arguments in every branch. Security studies, foreign policy analysis, world history, IR theory, IOs and, of course, international political economy.

A good starting point would be deconstructing this unhelpful term, “Liberalism”, which can mean “Wilsonian imperialism” as much as “Kantian federalism”. In the hands of current pundits, it often means “bomb anyone outside the West who refuses to bow to our big government institutions and policies”.

From clarification of the many uses of the term and how anti-liberal the most frequently employed meanings are, proceed to an analysis of possible dialogue with Classical Liberalism. The powerful tradition of Hume and Hayek, of Mises and the Manchester School.

Don’t stop at economics or political philosophy. Do the hard cases. What (if anything) would they say, for example, against realists? IR “liberals”? Constructivists? And, of course, Marxists.

Here the point is to “mine” for “international thought” (even in the Wightian fashion) bearing in mind the “family resemblance” between the rich tradition of Classical Liberalism and the Libertarian approach.

But go a bit further. Is there anything we can learn from realists or constructivists? Feminists, poststructuralists, postcolonialists and, why not, Marxists? If there is, please mine it as early as possible and preserve whatever spark of truth we may find in the established approaches in our discipline.

You may, of course, be even sneakier, wear the camouflage and employ the vocabulary of the mainstream. Why not talk “securitisation” but add to it a Libertarian twist? Why not, for example, challenge both “securitising moves” and “desecuritisation” on the same grounds that either way there’s a statist assumption that public policy is the “appropriate” sphere of security?

Wearing camouflage, depending on the situation, can be a good way of getting heard. If you manage to get attention and smuggle a bit of Libertarian principles behind the mask of the mainstream, well, congratulations: you’ve just shifted the conversation.

This is the way of dialogue. Let’s look now at the way of antithesis. It is a worthwhile endeavour, but we run the risk of sectarianism. Antithesis is important to draw the line, but potentially damaging if employed to police thought within the movement.

Care more about drawing the line between Libertarian and Liberal than Randian and Rothbardian. If you achieve considerable dialogue with realism, constructivism and liberalism – or with critical theory, feminism, whatever – antithesis will be important to teach us where to stop.

Is Libertarian IR critical? Yes, but for exactly the opposite reason that Marxists would consider themselves critical theorists. Is Libertarian IR liberal? In a sense, but this has to be defined by contrast.

Notice I haven’t shown anything of the substance of a potential Libertarian IR theory. I don’t mean to say little about such an important subject for mere “industrial secrecy”. The truth is that it’s hard to know the final result.

Don’t Libertarians often refer to “spontaneous order“? So, then: it’s hard to predict, let alone know what a Libertarian IR theory will look like in detail, before obtaining space for it in the discipline.

The ground-clearing exercise of dialogue and antithesis helps open up space for Libertarian IR, but it operates as a constraining and enabling mechanism. When we try to be understood by both statists and state-centrists, when we speak their language, we’ll see that we’re adding originality to the formulation.

It’s not a matter of transposing Hoppe or Spooner, Nozick or Murphy into IR. It’s not a matter of merely developing a “world politics” argument out of the initial approaches. It is, rather, a presentation to the IR audience.

After gaining space, Libertarianism will be speaking to IR, and not anymore to those who listened to it in a past age. Libertarian IR will be similar, but not quite the same.

In dialogue with the IR establishment, or even critical theories, it will be similar to them, but will also smuggle a bit more of liberty into the conversation. In antithesis, it will of course draw a line. In transposition from the initial context to our own discipline, it will be original.

Remember intellectual exercise isn’t enough. Even now, as you read, Leviathan plots against human life, liberty and property. We need scholars, entrepreneurs of theorising, as much as we need second-hand trade in ideas.

Be visible. Be active. Be in the conversation out there. The conversation goes beyond the microcosmos of the university campus. If asked about policy, talk policy. Go to the media. Blog. Talk to people. Influence by example.

Do normative argument, do descriptive theory and by all means make it engage with the general public. Do journalism, punditry, policy advice. Pursue the way of dialogue or the path of antithesis.

Shift the conversation. Give it a new direction.

Skin in the Game or Senility?

Aside Rick Weber Current Events

This morning I learned that Trump has been taking Hydroxycloroquine for the last week.

Good for him for actually (apparently) taking on the risk he’s so enthusiastic to encourage others to take. I’m surprised Fox News hasn’t picked this up as a chance to build up some good press. Still, as a devoted never-Trumper, I hope this turns into evidence that Trump is not legally competent to hold office.

No word yet if he’s been huffing bleach fumes.