Gold Rush ducks (rushed in Monday)

06/27/202206/27/2022 Michalis Trepas Culture, Liberty academia, comics, gold rush, morality, Scrooge McDuck

2s rhyme nicely with 7s

Academic papers are a tough nut to crack. Apart from the prerequisite of expertise in the field (acquired or ongoing, real or imaginary), there is some ritualistic, innuendo stuff, like the author list. I always keep in mind this strip from PHD Comics:

It came handy when MR suggested this paper, A Golden Opportunity: The Gold Rush, Entrepreneurship and Culture.

Now, I cannot even pretend I read the thing. But eight listed authors popped-up to my eyes. And the subject is catchy enough in cementing the hard way what may seem as a pretty evident proposition

The term “Argonauts” (used for the gold rushers of 1849) irked me somewhat at first, since the crew of legendary, talking ship Argo was an all-star Fellowship of Justice Avengers team, featuring the baddest champions around (warfare, navigation, pugilism, wrestling, horse riding, music, to note the most renown, some of them later fathered other heroes), human or demi-god. But there is a sad story behind it, and also the Greek myth can be understood as a parable for ancient gold hunting, so I indeed learned something (on-top of quit charging to the void without good reason).

Argonautica notwithstanding, there is an even more telling reference for the theme of the paper. That would be no other than Scrooge McDuck, the creation of Carl Barks, the richest duck in the world. Per his biography, a gravely underappreciated ~~graphic nov~~ comic book (originally a series of twelve stories, published thirty years ago, other stories were added as a Companion edition later) that frustratingly keeps falling off best-of lists (I mean, apparently there is So MucH DePtH in costumed clowns, but not in anthropomorphic animals without pants) he was a gold rusher AND and an entrepreneur extraordinaire. The book, The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa, tells Scrooge’s life before his first official appearance as a depressed old recluse who meets his estranged nephews in Christmas 1947. The duck adventures we all are familiar with followed that meeting. Rosa collected all the smatterings of Scrooge’s past from these endeavors, memories, quotes, thoughts, and reconstructed a working timeline (with the inevitable and necessary artist’s liberty, of course). The resulting prequel is all the more impressive given the sheer volume of detail, the breezy rhythm and the context it gives to a deserving character.

According to the Life and Times, Scrooge struggled from child’s age. The Number One Dime was not “Lucky”, it was earned by polishing boots. It deliberately was a lowly US coin (instead of the expected Scottish one), by a well-meaning ploy to inform young Scrooge that there are cheaters about. It was this underwhelming payment for tough work that lead him to drop this signature line and decide on how to conduct his business:

Well, I’ll be tougher than the toughies and sharper than the sharpies — and I’ll make my money square!
Scrooge McDuck, The Last of the Clan McDuck

This fist “fail” was followed by a series of entrepreneurial tries, each failing and each teaching our hero a lesson. Scrooge moved to the US to join as a deckhand, and then as a captain, a steamboat just as railroads were picking up. His cowboy and gun slinging chops went down the drain when the expansion to the West ended. He rose, fell, and still kept coming back. He became rich in the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897, 20 years after the Number One Dime affair (and a little late for the California Gold Rush, my bad).

Scrooge finding a gold nugget the size of a goose egg, thus “making” it after 20 years (the cover of the Greek version – source)

As the paper technically puts it, the personality traits of those involved in gold prospecting associated with openness (resourceful, innovative, curious), conscientiousness (hardworking, persistent, cautious) and emotional stability (even-tempered, steady, confident), underpinned by low risk aversion, low fear of failure and self-efficacy. This constellation of traits, the authors note, is consistently associated with entrepreneurial activity. Indeed, from that point Scrooge demonstrated considerable acumen and expanded his business across industries and countries. A trait that serves him in building and maintaining his wealth (and seems lacking in his peers) is prudence (perceived as stinginess) and a very laconic lifestyle.

He casually brawled and stood his ground against scum. His undisputable morals lapsed only once, when ruthlessness briefly overtook decency. Though he made amends and corrected course, this failing, coupled with a hard demeanor, made his family distance themselves from him, adding a tragic – and very humane – edge to the duck mogul.

The hero, “born” 155 years ago (8 Jul 1867), stands as an underrated icon of individual effort and ethics.

New Book! Markets with Limits: How the commodification of academia derails debate

03/12/202203/12/2022 Brandon Christensen Books academia, James Stacey Tylor, Markets with Limits, morality, myths, scientific method, woozles

James Stacey Taylor writes:

In brief, I argue that the increasing pressure on academics to publish has led to a decrease in the accuracy of academic work, and suggest ways to rectify this.
I begin Markets with Limits by outlining how Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski (both of Georgetown University) have inadvertently misrepresented the views of the “anti-commodification theorists” they criticize in their influential book Markets Without Limits.
I then expand my discussion to identify “woozles” (claims that are widely repeated but false) in other disciplines–such as the claim that Eskimos have many different words for snow, that Victorian physicians “cured” their female patients of hysteria by using vibrators, and that Popeye ate spinach because it had high levels of Vitamin D. (This part of the book was a lot of fun to write!)
Along the way I also provide a taxonomy of different types of expressivist arguments, of which semiotic arguments are only one, and a taxonomy of the different ways in which one might understand the debate over the moral limits of markets. And I insert Easter Eggs–hidden academic jokes–throughout the text, Index, and Bibliography!

The link to his new book is here. Check it out! And check out his excellent essays on colonialism here.

Julian Simon’s life against the grain

04/10/2021 Edwin van de Haar Books, Culture, Economics, History, Liberty, Philosophy, Politics academia, classical liberalism, environmentalism, James Buchanan, Julian Simon, liberty

I did not meet many of the postwar great thinkers of classical liberalism. There are two exceptions. In 2005 I had a chat with James Buchanan to ask him if I could translate the talk he gave to an audience of graduate students at the IHS summer seminar at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. He agreed and I translated and published his ideas on ‘the soul of classical liberalism’ in a Dutch liberal periodical.

The other exception is Julian Simon. Perhaps not in the same league as Buchanan, he was certainly a maverick thinker and a classical liberal great. A navy officer, business man, and advertising expert who turned to academia, he is known, to name just a few, for his arguments in the field of population growth, immigration studies and of course the book The Ultimate Resource. In it he argues that all raw materials become cheaper, while humans are the ultimate resource, among many other issues. He also won a famous wager with his critic Paul Ehrlich, stating that the prices of the raw materials Ehrlich could choose (in fact copper, chromium, nickel, tin, tungsten) would decrease (inflation adjusted) over the period of a decade they agreed upon. But that is just the tip of iceberg of this most interesting man. You should really read his autobiography A Life Against the Grain, whenever you have the chance.

In 1995 a friend of mine and I founded the Dutch Benedictus de Spinoza Foundation, meant to group young people educated in (classical) liberalism. In our first public Spinoza-lecture in 1996 Simon agreed to be the speaker. If memory serves right he was on his way to or from a Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Vienna, and was willing to make a small detour. We spent two full days with him, touring The Hague, arranging an interview in a national paper, have a formal dinner with Simon as gues of honor and speaker, and so forth. He was the most congenial guest one can wish. He clearly did not want to be among the hot shots only. In fact he insisted that we should visit ‘the worst neighborhood of the city’. So we went to one of the poorest parts in town, which he found delightful, not because of the (relative) poverty, but because of the multicultural experience and multicultural food at the market. An other remarkable feature was that in the half hour before we opened the lecture hall, he wished to take a nap on the floor right there!

In his autobiography he is open about his many rejected papers throughout his career, and the way he described how difficult it is to convince academic colleagues of a point that goes against conventional wisdom. No matter how strong the counter-evidence, people will choose to ignore the new facts or insights and keep the author out of the inner circle for as long as possible. I must say it sounds familiar to me, as an author who has attempted to change the views of (classical) liberals and IR theorists on international relations and (classical) liberalism. Even the obvious fact that trade cannot possibly foster peace seems impossible to establish. Alas, reading Simon one also learns to never give up, the truth shall be told, although there is no guarantee of success!

Nightcap

02/15/202102/15/2021 Brandon Christensen Links academia, common sense, Dutch culture, free speech

Who wants common sense? Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias
Theory versus common sense: the Dutch Notes On Liberty
Scotland’s new blasphemy law Madeleine Kearns, L&L
Academic corruption: government money Arnold Kling, askblog

Nightcap

07/21/202007/21/2020 Brandon Christensen Links academia, blogging, civil liberty, exile

Ron Paul on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (2002)
The chilling effect of an attack on a scholar Conor Friedersdorf, Atlantic
The childhood, schooldays, and death of Jesus Siddhartha Deb, Nation
Andrew Sullivan is going back to the blog New York‘s “Intelligencer”

How much more progressive is the corporate world than academia?

06/02/202006/01/2020 Brandon Christensen Culture, Current Events academia, civil society, creative destruction, higher education, spontaneous order

Academia is a hotbed of leftism and has been for centuries. At the same time, it’s also one of the most conservative institutions in the Western world. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Leftists are conservative.

The recent writings of Lucas, Mary, and Rick have highlighted well not only academia’s shortcomings but also some great alternatives, but what about stuff like this? The link is an in-depth story on how senior professors use their seniority to procure sexual favors from their junior colleagues. There is, apparently, not much universities can do about it either.

If a manager within a corporation tried any of the stuff listed in the report, he or she would be fired immediately. Sexual harassment is still an issue in the corporate world, but it is much, much easier to confront than it is in academia. The same goes for government work. The President of the United States couldn’t even get away with a blow job from a teenage intern without dire consequences in the 1990s.

What makes academia so different from corporate and government work? Is it tenure? Is it incentives? In the corporate world profits matter most. In government, “the public” matters most. In academia, it’s publish or perish. I don’t think this has always been the case. I think the publish-or-perish model has only been around since the end of World War II. Something is horribly wrong in academia.

In the mean time: corporations, churches, governments (it pains me to say this, but it’s true, especially when compared with academia), and all sorts of other organizations continue to experiment with social arrangements that attempt to make life better and better.

Nightcap

02/22/202002/22/2020 Brandon Christensen Links academia, alliances, automation, federalism

Serfs of academe (but Cracks… is missing) Charles Petersen, NYRB
Leaving NATO, nicely Ivan Eland, American Conservative
Federalism and individual sovereignty James Buchanan, Cato Journal
Lessons of the first automation crisis Steve Lagerfeld, American Interest

Scholars and Public Intellectuals: The Bad Old Days Before Blogging

12/12/201912/13/2019 Jacques Delacroix Culture academia, blogging, gatekeeping, public intellectuals

I am flattered to be in the company Brandon places me in. When I was still growing up, I wanted to be Tyler Cowen then, I figured he moved way too fast for me. I have the utmost respect for Robert Higgs but I wouldn’t dream of mimicking his nearly super-human determination. I suspect Brandon put me on purpose in that flattering company and that he will soon ask me to stay after the meeting to sweep the room in return. Brandon also implicitly gave me permission to do what old dudes love to do (and often do well): reminisce.

I had a mostly but not exclusively academic career. It began so long ago that the hardest part of my doctoral dissertation was getting it typed from its long-hand last draft (yes, “typed,” with a typewriter; do you even know what this is?) Few graduates students knew how to type. Those who did were all females who had taken the trouble to learn in high school,. Below are two things that have changed for the better since those days, changed specifically in connection with blogging.

When I was a young scholar, I quickly discovered that having good co-authors was extraordinarily important. Myself, with one exception I won’t name, I always had co-authors, that is, co-investigators, I did not deserve. The difference in quality, in reach, in scope, between what I could produce by myself and what I did with others was so great that I seldom even tried to go it alone once I had discovered the force multiplier of well chosen others.* But finding potential research partners was costly, haphazard and often disappointing.

Apart from the necessarily limited local offering at your own university, you had to wait for your first high-powered publication, hoping it would draw admirers who would then take the trouble to contact you. Of course, you could do the same with others. To some extent, it involved the same sort of hesitancy one experiences trying to pick up a good-looking person in a public place. And, in some disciplines, publishing an admirable article in a well esteemed periodical may take years, of course. The poor traditional remedy was attending academic conferences, listening to others at formal presentations sessions and then, making advances. This worked to some extent but it was an inefficient system with a piteous yield.

The contemporary blog with a theme, such as Notes on Liberty, offers the young scholar the immense advantage of being able to present in a stress-free fashion samples of his work to many strangers of a similar cast of mind who are also hanging out around the blog in a relaxed frame of mind. Some of these will turn out to be potential coauthors. The blog will give them a social context for reaching out that is less intimidating than most.

Needless to say, the same features of the blog may facilitate being noticed by useful senior scholars. (I said “may” because I have no certainty about the extent to which such august persons go slumming on blogs. I have my suspicions though.)

Next: many people who become academics begin a with a general interest in ideas. Soon, they discover that the organizations that are willing to put bread on their table while they indulge their tastes are mostly universities. This is certainly true in the English speaking world. It seems to me that this is also largely the case in the French speaking world, and in the Spanish speaking world as well.

Once involved in a university career, the same people soon figure out that to progress in that career, or simply to remain in the career, they must publish in scholarly journals at a good clip. Unfortunately, in most disciplines, journals require a much narrower enterprise than the typical aspiring public intellectuals dreams of. This is intentional: Specialization encourages attention to detail in reasoning and it punishes sloppy logic. It also promotes respect for facts. (I mean outside of the post-modern English discipline, of course). Scholarly formats often leave authors unsatisfied in one particular respect, the formal limits they imposes on their discourse. I have often myself been in a situation, – and likewise observed others to be – with an eighteen page empirical paper that seemed to me honestly to authorize fifty pages of innovative narrative. The journal format usually allowed only one to three pages, four, if you played your cards right, or if the editor dated your sister.

Some will comment that a person can pursue a two-track career with scholarly publications on one side, and more general narratives in other media, on the other. That’s true enough but if you consider the large number of America academics in general compared to the two handfuls nationwide who have a public voice, you will guess that the dual career path must present formidable obstacles.

The one I encountered personally – which I think is quite common – is that the gates of outlets for general well-informed but non-technical narratives were as narrow of those of the most respected academic journals, and also vastly more capriciously opened. And in case, you are wondering no, I am not thinking only of the New York Review of Books. It will take me a long time to recover from the contemptuous rejection I received from the newspaper of my local community college. (That was twenty years ago. I was a well respected scholar by then.)

A good blog with an open editorial policy such as Notes on Liberty will give many a chance to circulate opinion pieces and other narratives not fitting a normal scholarly format. Those may spring, by the way, from the same source as their scholarly production narrowly defined. When I was churning out statistical empirical papers in the sociology of economic development, I felt I had lots of things to say to the general intelligent public, springing from the endeavor of producing those papers, things that never got said.

I am not sure how many of those who read these words are academics, or aspiring academics, or frustrated academics who long to be also public intellectuals. I hope I reached a few of you, all the same. What I can tell you is that my life would have been more satisfying (even more satisfying) if blogs such Notes on Liberty had been available when I was just sharpening my pencils.

* Nonetheless, I wrote alone and off the top of my head a little paper that keeps cropping up in the class syllabi of several military schools forty years later: “The distributive state in the world system.” Studies in Comparative International Economic Development, 15-3: 3-21. 1980. (A little harmless bragging!)

Nightcap

12/10/201912/10/2019 Brandon Christensen Links academia, imperialism, political economy, state sovereignty

Charles de Gaulle’s alternative model for Europe Samuel Gregg, Law & Liberty
Distance from Khe Sanh to Kandahar: 0 Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth
Fear of the Ivory Tower Jonathon Catlin, JHIBlog
Anarchy and public goods Pierre Lemieux, EconLog

Psychedelics versus modern philosophy

12/07/201907/30/2020 Bill Rein Culture, Philosophy academia, drugs, Eastern philosophy, philosophy, psychedelics

Anyone who studies philosophy has run into the assumption that psychoactive drugs and philosophy go hand-in-hand. Really, after analytic and continental, and whatever other traditions people come up with, there could be another sect, that of “stoner philosophy,” which is something like Mister Rogers, Alan Watts and Bob Ross thrown into a peaceful blender. This is when you’re sitting around getting high, wondering if aliens exist, instead of sitting in a classroom, wondering if other people’s minds exist.

A historical study of this connection, from East to West, would probably scandalize a lot of “serious” philosophers, and show some regular inebriation, but in general, I think the two are opposed (tragically or not). Particularly, the institutionalization of philosophy, when “natural philosophy” and “moral philosophy” etc all became separated some time after Hobbes, is opposed to what it sees as a lay way of thinking about the world. As my philosophy of science professor told me – you become a philosopher when you have your doctorate.

Professional philosophers and “psychonauts” are in opposition to each other. The analytics and continentals have spent centuries building elaborate systems – developing monstrous levels of specificity, so as to make their work completely incomprehensible to the rest of the world – and earning credentials to close the gates of access. Meanwhile, the casual or professional tripper is able to buy a tab for less than $10 and experience, or imagine they experience, market-price existentialism without reading a page of Camus.

The professional philosopher sneers in bad faith at psychedelic profundity because it makes them seem irrelevant.

On the other hand, the inarticulate tripper is not in such a great place. The psychonaut rests on intuition, and is probably not equipt with the critical thinking and logical itinerary to make sense of the journey on the comedown. A trip promises insight but also promises that neither your epistemic priors nor a rational reconstruction will be enough to establish its validity – by its very nature. (Psychedelic knowledge is “revealed,” not “discovered,” right?) You might get an insight that looks good, but is bad, without you knowing it. (I wrote about this in college. Holy shit my writing was bad.)

What happens when you irrationally, psychonautically attach to an idea that’s immune to logical tinkering? If you believe something for irrational reasons you’ll hang on to it for even longer than something that you believed for rational reasons, because new rational reasons can talk you out of a logogenetic idea, but not an irrationally-formed one. Depending on the centrality of the belief, of course.

The psychonaut claims easy knowledge, but could have trouble organizing it in the other, orderly web of belief of his coldly-discovered priors. However, this kind of knowledge has taken a high prestige today, with help from accredited social figures like Steve Jobs dosing LSD. In a way, the win of casual inebriated profundity is a “people’s victory” over the esoteric, pretentious toils of the professional philosophers. If you can figure out Truth by serotonin-fucking yourself on any day of the week then there’s no need to study Heidegger… and there’s even less reason to get a PhD in phenomenology, making institutional philosophy obsolete.

So, philosophers will be opposed to the psychonauts because it trivializes their hard-earned degrees (bad faith), and trivializes all their carefully crafted logic (slightly less bad faith). Psychonauts will be opposed to the philosophers for their specialized field which must explicitly reject such spontaneous routes to knowledge. The people taking psychedelics find themselves fighting some sort of anti-scientific elitism war, doing Feyerabend’s work. The tension is worse with the professional, modern philosophical class, but still exists in general.

A survey of history would show a lot of intertwining, but ultimately, I think the newer age of philosophy has a lot more overlap with other drugs than psychedelics (specifically Epicurean as opposed to elucidatory drugs, e.g. Adderall, analgesics, cocaine) — which is its own interesting question.

More Arabs in the US? Yes, please!

10/31/201910/30/2019 Brandon Christensen Culture, History academia, Arab culture, cosmopolitanism, immigration, Middle East, Ottoman Empire

I hope y’all had a chance to check out Ussama Makdisi’s essay on Ottoman cosmopolitanism from one of the nightcaps a few days back. It was excellent, and serves as good complement to Barry’s work on the Ottoman Empire here at NOL.

It’s especially good for a few reasons. First, it has a useful explanation of the mandate system that London and Paris experimented with. Second, it’s comparative and brings in lots of different modes of governance. Third, there is an interesting discussing about citizenship (consult NOL for more on citizenship, too). Lastly, it explains well why the Arab world continues to wallow in extreme inequality and authoritarianism.

Makdisi represents a shift in thinking in Arab circles away from victimization and towards self-determination and responsibility: no longer are the French and British (and Jews) to be reviled and blamed for everything that’s wrong with the Middle East. There is a shift towards internationalist thinking. The Americans now play a positive role in what could have been (and still might be) a freer Middle East. The British and French have factions now and some of them were supportive of Arab voices, some of them not. Arab scholars are finally benefiting from the American university educational system, probably because there are so many Arabs studying in the US now.

Makdisi’s piece is not a libertarian interpretation, but it’s a start.

Learning Academic English Through Leftist Propaganda

06/19/201906/19/2019 Andre Van Doren Culture academia, Estonia, language, Sociology

Yesterday, in a large bookstore Apollo (part of the major shopping mall) in Tartu, Estonia, in a section “English books,” I stumbled upon a bunch of leftist literature. It is offered as the mainstream political and social issues books to those Estonians who learn English and those English-speaking people who live in the country. Among this literature is virulently biased Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward (Trump as a “Russian asset,” “fascist,” and so on), then a diary of the leftist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (progressive profs usually force their sociology students to love this “classic”), and a primer of the identitarian left Racism: A Critical Analysis by Mike Cole. The “crown jewel” of the shelf was Crowds and Party by Jodi Dean, a rising star of current aggressive college leftism. In this book, she seeks to exonerate communism and class warfare, and to rekindle the Leninist concept of the vanguard communist party as the alternative to “evil” “neoliberal” capitalism. Of course, one could not see any conservative or libertarian literature on those Apollo bookshelves to serve as an alternative.

To me, this choice of social and political issues literature, which I frequently observe during my travels at airports, shopping malls, and major bookstores around the world, serves as an inspiration to fight on to change this “mainstream.” I also hope that the young YouTube generation does not pay attention to this paper garbage. What worries me is that some well-rounded Estonians who might purchase this propaganda in hope to learn non-fiction and academic English might internalize the leftist jargon and receive distorted picture about what is going on in US.