If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists. – F.A. Hayek pic.twitter.com/GFAgy8dJkN
— Learn Liberty (@LearnLiberty) December 5, 2014
The wisdom of Homer Simpson: peak oil, oil pollution and the price at the pump
09 Dec 2014 1 Comment
Ways of Poking Fun at Libertarians | International Liberty
09 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in liberalism Tags: libertarianism
Super-Economy: The class struggle in one picture again
09 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, liberalism, poverty and inequality Tags: Class war, inherent inequality of bargaining power between it, Leftover Left, poverty and inequality
How Sociologists Made Themselves Irrelevant – Part 2
07 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, liberalism Tags: sociology
I would like to suggest two “smell tests” for all sociologists, but especially those engaged with the public sphere, when assessing their work.
The first is the Garfinkel rule: Never treat your subjects as cultural dopes.
If you find yourself struggling to explain away your subjects’ own reasoned and widely held account of what they consider important in explaining their condition, you are up to something intellectually fishy.
The second is this: If you end up with findings that have policy implications that you would never dream of advocating for yourself or your loved ones, be wary of them.
A case in point: If you find that neighborhoods have no effects, you should be prepared to do the rational thing and go live in an inner-city neighborhood with its much cheaper real estate, or at least advise your struggling son or daughter searching for an apartment to save by renting there. If the thought offends you, then something stinks.
Horoscopes, horoscopes and horoscopes
07 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in liberalism Tags: horoscopes, Quacks
Anti-prohibition demonstrators were in-your-face about what they wanted
07 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, economics of regulation, law and economics, liberalism Tags: drug decriminalisation, expressive voting, marijuana decriminalisation, prohibition
Afghanistan, 1960
07 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in liberalism, war and peace Tags: Afghanistan, The Age of Enlightenment
The Guardian review of “Devils’ Alliance” – a response
06 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in liberalism Tags: Leftover Left, Nazi-Soviet Pact, World War II
The uncomfortable fact for Professor Evans and others on the left is that in those opening two years of World War Two, the Soviet Union was much more practiced than Germany in the sifting, persecution and deportation of subject populations.
We forget perhaps, but at this point the Holocaust had not yet begun.
Hitler may have been an eager student of such matters, but Stalin was very definitely the master.
If there is an “imbalance” in the book therefore, it reflects a historical imbalance, and one with which many on the left are uncomfortable.
via historian at large: The Guardian review of my “Devils’ Alliance” – a response.
How Sociologists Made Themselves Irrelevant – Part 1
06 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, liberalism
Sociologists have shied from such cultural work, fearful of critiques similar to those that greeted 1960s culture-of-poverty scholarship by Oscar Lewis, the policy studies of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the Parsonian overdetermining emphasis on values.
In focusing on ways that impoverished communities perpetuated poverty, such scholarship was criticized for blaming the victim, and for several decades, sociologists have taken pains to distance themselves not only from that approach but from studies of the cultural dimensions of poverty, particularly black poverty.
The great irony in that overreaction is that throughout that 40-year period of self-imposed censorship within the discipline, the vast majority of blacks, and especially black youth and those working on the front lines of poverty mitigation, have been firmly convinced that culture does matter—a lot.
Black youth in particular have insisted that their habits, attitudes, beliefs, and values are what mainly explain their plight, even after fully taking account of racism and their disadvantaged neighborhood conditions.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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