Archive for February, 2010

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Ron Paul Wins

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Ron Paul won the presidential straw poll of the Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend, with 31 percent of the vote. Paul beat Mitt Romney (22 percent) and Sarah Palin (7 percent), as well as Tim Pawlenty (6 percent) and Newt Gingrich (4 percent) and Mike Huckabee (4 percent).

I don’t know what this means for the conservative movement.The conference consists largely of conservative activists who may not represent the views of conservative voters.

Paul has a disturbing racist past (see the linked article for the details) and he advocates policies that will be rejected by mainstream voters. He has zero chance of winning the Republican nomination for President.

But votes like this will make it hard for Republicans to shake their image as a party that is unwelcoming to non-whites.

Sarah Palin’s lack of support is a surprise as well.

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Posted in Politics, Watching the Conservatives | No Comments »

The Revolution Is Late

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

Unemployment is high, stubbornly high, and many economists, including Administration economists, think the employment situation will not improve quickly.

The New York Times on Sunday had a story about this chronic unemployment, which contains the following quote by Allen Sinai:

“American business is about maximizing shareholder value,” said Allen Sinai, chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics. “You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”

Allen Sinai is no left wing academic—he has been for many years a prominent forecaster of economic trends for major corporations and governments.

As Brian Leiter asks:

“One wonders if Mr. Sinai knows the pedigree for this insight about capitalism?  Or if he understands the consequence of this logic?”

The idea that capitalism will destroy itself by seeking efficiencies that will ultimately throw the people who buy its products out of work was one of Karl Marx’s main ideas.

Now it is being confirmed by the capitalists themselves.

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Posted in Economics, Political Theory | No Comments »

Caring about Fairness

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

New research in neuroscience continues to have important implications for philosophical debates in ethics and political philosophy.

Via Colin Farrelly:

Political philosophers interested in abstract debates about equality vs priority and sufficiency should find this recent study in Nature Neuroscience of interest (as well as this News piece).

It is commonly assumed that the impulse to maximize one’s own self-interest is automatic and can be contrasted with the deliberative, reflective sentiments of prosocial actors who care about equality. But it seems that the decision-making of the latter is also automatic emotional processing. Here is the abstract of the paper:

‘Social value orientation’ characterizes individual differences in anchoring attitudes toward the division of resources. Here, by contrasting people with prosocial and individualistic orientations using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrate that degree of inequity aversion in prosocials is predictable from amygdala activity and unaffected by cognitive load. This result suggests that automatic emotional processing in the amygdala lies at the core of prosocial value orientation.

This is important research in support of an ethic of care and its political implications. It suggests that our concern for fairness and equality is rooted in the emotions, not in our capacity to reason impartially.

It supports my main argument in Reviving the Left.

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Posted in Political Theory, ethics of care | No Comments »

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