StephenKMackSD's Blog

Headline: The US needs a little nudge theory to boost its jab campaign

Sub-headline: Biden’s administration wants not medical, management or data science, but social science instead

Cass Sunstein, a leading behavioural scientist who helped to popularise the concept of the “nudge”, a policy technique that steers people towards certain actions, has written that Biden’s plan to embrace evidence-based policymaking incorporates “an explicit endorsement of behavioural science — and it calls for much more of it”. Sunstein himself has been hired by the Department of Homeland Security.

https://www.ft.com/content/7d3cac49-6d2a-4770-86f2-3e80797c528c

Because Mr. Sunstein is the founder of the ‘Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School, this does not confer the honorific of ‘a leading behavioral scientist’ upon him.

Here is the web site of ‘Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy‘

https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty-research/research-programs-and-centers/program-on-behavioral-economics-and-public-policy/

Sunstein is part of a faculty that are listed as lawyers, not behavioral scientist! I checked, all were lawyers, except for the designation of ‘Clinical Professor of Law’? 138 faculty of this Program, not one behavioral scientist! Ms. Tett is usually a more careful reporter! All this to comment upon ‘to boost its jab campaign’ !

Here are Mr. Sunstein areas of academic responsibilities at Harvard , he is now on leave:

Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He serves as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.

https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10871/Sunstein

On his book ‘Nudge’ :

‘It’s All for Your Own Good’ by Jeremy Waldron of October 9, 2014 issue:

Mr. Waldron reviews two books:

Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism by Cass R. Sunstein & Richard Thaler

Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas by Cass R. Sunstein

These two paragraphs, of the review, help the reader to understand the Sunstein/Thaler Soft-Core Authoritarianism:

…

Nudging is about the self-conscious design of choice architecture. Put a certain choice architecture together with a certain heuristic and you will get a certain outcome. That’s the basic equation. So, if you want a person to reach a desirable outcome and you can’t change the heuristic she’s following, then you have to meddle with the choice architecture, setting up one that when matched with the given heuristic delivers the desirable outcome. That’s what we do when we nudge.

All of this sounds like a marketer’s dream, and I will say something about its abusive possibilities later. But Sunstein and Thaler have in mind that governments might do this in a way that promotes the interests of their citizens. Governments might also encourage businesses and employers to use it in the interests of their customers and employees. The result would be a sort of soft paternalism: paternalism without the constraint; a nudge rather than a shove; doing for people what they would do for themselves if they had more time or greater ability to pick out the better choice.

…

Political Skeptic

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 In reply to critical mass

Let me say that Ms. Tett’s ‘A debt to history?’ is one of the most important examples of journalism to appear in this newspaper! Read it again. I used it many times during the Greek Crisis to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the Germans.   
https://www.ft.com/content/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0
 Regards.
StephenKMackSD 

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In reply to everyday paper

I read Mr. Harford’s essay and found it awash in the manufactured Russophobia allied to Putin hysterical paranoia. The ‘as if’ is that the American National Security State hasn’t been busy, since the First Cold War, with ‘Radio Free Europe’ and ‘Radio Liberty‘ , NATO and the ubiquitous, and a unceasing war against any manifestation of ‘The Left’, or even ‘Moderate Reform’. An example, the Iranian Coup of 1953! And its ‘blowback’ in the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Sunstein & Thaler are Soft-Core Authoritarians! ‘We’ need to be Managed by benevolent Masters? Kant offered, in the 18th Century, his self-emancipation from tutelage. Yet the ‘experts’, favored by Walter Lippmann, now morphed into Think Tank Technocrats, in there propaganda guise, pioneered by Edward Bernays: offer not a faith in the American Experiment, and its expressions of faith in the good will, of committed civic actors, who view each other as equal partners in the flourishing of ‘our’ shared endeavor!

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

Some selective quotation from Mr. Rachman’s essay, with my comments. This paragraph makes clear that The New Cold War is the business of America. Lets include in The Enemies List Iran, North Korea, not forgetting Political Islam in all its iterations/permutations. Nor the burgeoning Left Wing governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba etc. The Global South is the perpetual enemy of ‘Uncle Sam’ ! Recall ‘Pentagonism: A Substitute for Imperialism’ by Juan Bosch of 1969?      

For Joe Biden, on his first trip overseas as US president, it is an opportunity to demonstrate that America is back. Biden has made it clear that he intends to rally the world’s democracies in pushing back against Russia and China.

The political sloganeering of ‘America is back’ is about that ‘New Cold War’. The ‘Biden Team’:  Harris ,Blinken, Nuland, Rice, and Power represent the return of the Neo-Cons and R2P Zealot Power.     

The ‘rallying cry’ of the Biden Foreign Policy is reiterated as ‘pushing back against Russia and China’. That New Cold War takes shape as a defensive maneuver against Global Bad Actors.   

For Joe Biden, on his first trip overseas as US president, it is an opportunity to demonstrate that America is back. Biden has made it clear that he intends to rally the world’s democracies in pushing back against Russia and China.

This reader has to wonder were Mr. Rachman has been, concerning the vexing question of America’s ‘inexorable decline’. Two American, and one British writer on the decadence question!

December 8, 2013 : 

Headline: The Decay of American Political Institutions

Sub-headline: We have a problem, but we can’t see it clearly because our focus too often discounts history.

The Decay of American Political Institutions

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June 24, 2014

Niall Ferguson

The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/313194/the-great-degeneration-by-niall-ferguson/

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February 25, 2020

The Decadent Society: America Before and After the Pandemic

Ross Douthat 

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Decadent-Society/Ross-Douthat/9781476785257

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The G7 summit will also send an indirect message to China. The propaganda line pumped out from Beijing is that the west is in inexorable decline. 

…

The success of the G20 in organising international action to avert a global depression seemed to confirm that the G7’s moment had passed. 

…

It is the Biden administration’s renewed determination to push back against Moscow and Beijing that has provided the G7 with a renewed reason to exist.

…

File this under the rubric of ‘understatement’ :

But the fact that the G7 no longer represents most of the global economy — and is skewed towards the Euro-Atlantic region — remains a problem.

On the question Chatham House, these two paragraphs begins answering vital questions, unexplored by Mr. Rachman’s reference this Think Tank, and its historical/political ideologies.

It never really achieved its stated goals, remaining wedded to imperial-internationalism, elitist in character in ‘educating’ newly-awakened ‘public opinion’, and supportive of a racialised world view wedded to Anglo-Saxonism. At the core of the Chatham House project lay the aim of an alliance with the United States as Britain’s imperial power declined. Such attitudes were on full display at the Paris Peace Conferences in 1919-20, where Chatham House was conceived as the British branch of an Anglo-American institute of international affairs.

Saturated with a haughty attitude to inferior colonials considered incapable of self-government, Chatham House elites looked down on an increasingly assertive organised working class, galvanised by the experience of bloody trench warfare, and inspired by the dramatic effects of the Russian revolution, and Lenin’s calls for workers to get out of the war and overthrow ‘their’ governments.

https://thewire.in/world/chatham-house-100-years

…

As Renata Dwan of Chatham House, a UK think-tank, points out, in the 1970s the G7 nations accounted for some 80 per cent of world gross domestic product. That is now down to about 40 per cent.

The G7 are political actors who now seek , from within their decline, to build bridges to Asia:

To compensate, the group have invited four guests to the summit: Australia, India, South Africa and South Korea. The fact that three of these guests are Asian countries underlines the group’s role in pushing back against Beijing.

The ‘West’s Last Chance to Lead‘ is steeped in the shared arrogance, of American and European Technocrats: who still think its 1843, to borrow the date, when The Economist began its life as the voice of a ‘Liberalism’, based on racial superiority, and the notions of social class as the predictor of moral/political worth.

Political Skeptic

https://www.ft.com/content/5cdd1ad4-d7ed-4a91-acef-8ae7ff8873cc

How long do ‘we’ console ‘ourselves’ with some portion of the toxic Kennedy Myth? His opposition to Vietnam War was always one critical comment, followed by an ignominious retreat, in the guise of ‘clarification’!
Mort Sahl had a great routine, using his blackboard, describing Bobby’s mercurial Politics: from Right-Wing Social Democrat to a Left-Wing version, to the Right-Wing version, or just his ‘hover’ over the whole, that disguised his political opportunism. Or should it be characterized as an ambition, unrelated to an actual ability to govern, if such exists?
In ’68 Wallace got 9 million votes, some of these voters were former Bobby supporters : does that astound?
I say this with all due respect, to what you have stood for over the years!

RFK was assassinated and died 53 years ago. He reflected some of our best aspirations. https://t.co/ZuazIM4DhC

— Katrina vandenHeuvel (@KatrinaNation) June 7, 2021

Regards,
StephenKMackSD

The reader just has to read this first sentence of Luce’s latest Biden apologetic, as not just comic, but resembling a Jerry Lewis comedy, post Dean, tinctured in The Marx Bros. ? Another choice might be a Corporate Political Melodrama, that rehabilitates the black and white screen of 1952, featuring a carefully edited version of ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’?      

Unsurprisingly , the reader notes that Luce continues to trade in clichés, the next sentences:

Conflict was always destined between Joe Biden the healer and Joe Biden the agent of change.

To govern is to choose. 

In the coming days, Biden will have to decide which of his two personas matters more. 

It is a measure of the tension between the two Bidens that we still cannot be sure which way he will turn.

The sense of emotional release after Donald Trump left office produced many overwrought — and premature — verdicts on the nature of Biden’s presidency. 

 

To break the monotony, Luce then appeals to authorities: Francis Fukuyama being one of a number. Note that Fukuyama is an acolyte of Leo Strauss, author of a mendacious re-write of vast portions of Western Philosophy. Fukuyama wrote a tract declaiming:

The Decay of American Political Institutions

We have a problem, but we can’t see it clearly because our focus too often discounts history.

The Decay of American Political Institutions

In his essay Fukuyama attacks the whole of the meliorist politics of the American 20th Century. What possible interest can Fukuyama have, in or about, American Democracy? The possibility of being considered an historian of the caliber of Henry Adams ?

After some some current Political History Made to Measure, Luce returns to the more serviceable cliché:

Biden’s second barrier is himself. Great presidents of both parties — from Roosevelt to Reagan — personify the country’s change of era.

Half of Biden is stuck in romantic attachment to a bipartisan era that no longer exists.

There are no deals to be struck on preserving US democracy. 

For things to remain the same — Biden’s dearest wish — everything must change.

https://www.ft.com/content/0f67e08f-92bb-4e24-b390-55f3f09a1ada

The reader marvels at the ‘fact’ that Luce enjoys access to the inner-self of Joe Biden.

I heard on the news today, that the Corporate Tax increase, in the Biden legislation is now ‘off the table’!

Political Skeptic

Title this: Larry Summers finds an ally in Wolfgang Schäuble?

…

A promising approach for Brussels to take would be a eurozone debt redemption pact, similar to the sinking funds devised by Robert Walpole and Alexander Hamilton. As the first Treasury secretary, Hamilton obliged the new US states in 1792 to deposit good collateral, practise budgetary discipline and reduce their debts.  That was the crux of the oft-cited “Hamilton moment”, not the mutualisation of debts sometimes recommended for the EU.

The debt redemption plan worked and could work again today. It provides a mixed strategy of “carrots and sticks” like that pursued by the IMF — another legacy of Keynes. I am confident that Europe will be wise enough to also follow the British economist in this aspect of his doctrine.

https://www.ft.com/content/640d084b-7b13-4555-ba00-734f6daed078

Robert Walpole , Alexander Hamilton and just a ‘soupçon of Keynes’. Who could cavil at such a stellar casting for Mr. Schäuble’s political/economic melodrama. This reader is reminded of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s ‘The Critic: or, a Tragedy Rehearsed is a satire’.

Political Observer

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My reply to FDDB:

The apologetics for the ‘Free Market’, that inconveniently Crashed in 2008 from Greed exercised exponentially: should that be placed under the rubric of ‘doing no wrong’. Or does my comment fall under ‘public vitriol’ ? 
What is interesting about the Cult of Smith is that his intention with his ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’ and ‘Wealth’ was to construct a ‘Science of Man’ with the aid of Hume. And that Marx, no matter his ‘failed project’ , not to speak of his writing for Capitalist Newspapers that employed him, all this a mere sketch. That eventuated in  Keynes and his project to save Capitalism, while he played ‘The Market’ from his bed. And published The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The utter complexity of Economics, from its Political Economy to the Science, held afloat by data and models, that simply acts as reinforcement of that Political Economy. And its particular metaphysical constructs like ‘The Free Market’ which has proven to be based on acts of faith of Hayek/Mises/Friedman and its College of Cardinals, The Mont Pelerin Society.

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/640d084b-7b13-4555-ba00-734f6daed078?commentID=368d6955-7cf4-4013-bd77-015ce84aa73b

Like most Americans of certain generations ‘we’ received our inoculations in Public Schools. In a time when Public Health was a prime consideration. That in a time that sees ‘our’ infant mortality rate, that now ranks 33 out of 36 countries.

According to this year’s America’s Health Ranking Annual Report, the U.S. infant mortality rate is 5.9 deaths per 1,000 live infant births, while the average rate of infant mortality among the OECD countries is 3.9 deaths per 1,000 live births. Compared with other OECD countries, the U.S. ranks No. 33 out of 36 countries

https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2018-annual-report/findings-international-comparison

The American Infant Mortality Rate is not a scandal, it is a crime!

https://everymothercounts.org/

The direct result of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, that places Profit and the worship of the Market above the imperative of Public Health!  ‘Governability’ is the straw, that this commentator reaches for, out of desperation, to make a connection between politics and the actual trust that American’s place in their Public Institutions.

Not everyone is a Rand Paul nor Janan Ganesh! His essays, of late,  seem more out of touch with the Political Present. Regrettably, even his epigrams are absent, that were the rhetorical gems, that the reader could once depend upon to break the monotony of his misbegotten political chatter.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/dcd44dbf-925a-4575-9840-e0be7a41383c

Headline: How the Mideast Conflict Is Blowing Up the Region, the Democratic Party and Every Synagogue in America

Here are the first two paragraphs, of Mr. Friedman’s hysterically framed comment, on the Zionist Faschist State’s blitzkrieg against the Palestinians:

Lord knows, I sympathize with President Biden’s desire to avoid getting dragged into mediating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the 11 days of fighting between Israel and Hamas made something crystal clear to me: Unless we preserve at least the potential of a two-state solution, the one-state reality that would emerge in its place won’t just blow up Israel, the West Bank and Gaza; it could very well blow up the Democratic Party and every Jewish organization and synagogue in America.

Yes, that’s what I learned last week.

Note the ‘the 11 days of fighting‘! As Friedman frames the Israeli blitzkrieg! But the prediction of a ‘blow up’ that reaches the very cogs of The American Empire: the Democratic Party, ,every Jewish Organization and synagogue in America. Hysteria mongering ,to give it it’s rightful name! It’s as if Friedman asks the reader to accept the political fiction that he not a loyal partisan of Zionism! Or that the Settler Movement has not rendered ‘The Two State Solution’ a dead letter.

None the less Friedman treats the ‘Two State Fiction’ as viable. And describes the potential battles between ‘Centrist Democrats, in sum Neo-Liberals, and the Progressives, certainly not the Elizabeth Warren wing of the party? More like the Bernie Sanders wing?

Next comes the bruising battles in the synagogues of America, that ends in ‘And anti-Semitism will flourish under the guise of anti-Zionism.’ In sum, BDS is by definition Anti-Semitism!

As the past two weeks demonstrated, every Jewish organization and synagogue in America will be heatedly divided over this question: Are you willing to defend a one-state Israel that is not even pretending to be a democracy anymore, a one-state Israel whose leaders prefer to rely on the uncritical support of evangelicals than the critical support of Jews?

Finally, Jewish and non-Jewish students on every college campus also will be forced to wrestle with this question or run as far away as possible from the debate. More and more will abandon Israel. You can already see it happening. And anti-Semitism will flourish under the guise of anti-Zionism.

Should it surprise the reader, that Friedman writes a History Made to Measure, based upon some actual information, of two weeks duration? Carefully embroidered with the speculation of a Zionist Partisan, about the toxic motives of the BDS organization. Is sum, BDS is, in the reductivism of Mr. Friedman, Anti-Semitic prima facie. The reader is then presented by the prescriptive Friedman, in just 620 more words!

Old Socialist

The first two paragraphs of Mr. Ganesh’s exercise in History Made to Measure utterly disappoints: where are those arresting aperçus, that at times make his essays resonate with an intensity, that directs the readers attention away from its political content. The reader is swayed by mere stylistic embellishment. Not so in this essay, that is not just a undeveloped Polaroid of FDR’s New Deal, but of a possible ‘Jazz Age meanness’ , and an actual Hollywood prudery.

Even the greatest democratic leader of the past century chose his battles. As Franklin Roosevelt shaped a New Deal in economics, he preserved much of the old deal in culture. The cause of civil rights was deferred for another generation. Tight immigration laws were retained, even as Europe’s huddled masses petitioned for entry. If there was a post-Jazz Age meanness in the air, it did not confine itself to Washington. Hollywood, the other capital, began to enforce its code against risqué themes.

It is hard to account for the blend of material reform and cultural retrenchment in those years. But one theory suggests itself. There is only so much change a society will bear at one time. If the rules of economic life are in flux, people crave stability and even regression in other areas. Seen from this angle, the strife of the 1960s might be read as the spasms of a nation attempting too much change on too many fronts in too little time.

The proffered choice between cultural and economic radicalism is self serving. Mr. Ganesh cites ‘evidence’ for his claim, roughly described by this collection. Note that ‘French philosophes took a postmodern turn in the 1960s’ are not just the precursors, but, indeed, gestators of American Identity Politics. The Rainbow Coalition was born of Post-Modernism?

Violent crimes have been going up in US cities… At the same time, the country’s southern border has been the site of anguish and disarray for much of the year. …a third source of cultural insecurity … there is the inchoate set of issues that come under the neologism of the day, “woke”, with all its implications for the first amendment right to free speech. Even taken together, these social rumbles hardly constitute a revolution. … Identity politics has been gestating inside the western left since French philosophes took a postmodern turn in the 1960s.

There is a blurring of the lines of argument, he presents his economic/cultural :

Americans are being asked to absorb a break in economic doctrine at the same time as the social context changes.

Mr. Ganesh continues to construct his essay about the politically unpalatable ‘too much radicalism’. Not, of course, mentioning the utter collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle’s in 2008, whose point of fracture began with the Clinton/Summers/Biden final straw of Gramm-Leach-Bliley ?

Even a quote from Gustave Flaubert can’t save Mr. Ganesh’s essay from its weak duel radicalisms premise, via his self-serving History Made To Measure.

Gustave Flaubert’s rule that a person can only take so much radicalism (“be regular and orderly in your life”, said the writer, “so that you may be violent and original in your work”) applies as much to the body politic. Had Biden won one of those landslides, such as 1932 or 1980, when the public audibly demands a new course, he might have the license for all-round change.

https://www.ft.com/content/74cb6ac2-69f4-443c-8483-262ec3560f65

The Landslides of 1932 and 1980: FDR, transformative reform, in response to the Depression vs. Reagan, political/cultural reaction against the Civil Rights Era. It’s compelling, that Mr. Ganesh can’t quite exercise the political imagination, to consider that this is Joe Biden’s last act: what he offers is a pastiche of reform/radicalism. The reader need only consider that Biden’s Radicalism, as argued by Mr. Ganesh, will not include Medicare For All, a $15.00 minimum wage, Debt Forgiveness, a Corporate Tax rate of 90%, an end to Foreign Wars, and a slash of 50% to the Pentagon budget, or Police Reform at a Federal level. These imperatives would define an actual political radicalism in America!

Old Socialist

Headline: Belarus kidnapping sets a dangerous global precedent

Sub-headline: Europe and the US must arrest the slide into international lawlessness

Where was Mr. Rachman when America invaded Afghanistan, decaled ‘War’: Blitzkrieg on Iraq: the demonstrably incompetent Paul Bremer disbanded the vital political infrastructures of the Iraqi military and Baath Party. Abu Ghraib, ‘CIA Black Sites’, ‘Guantanamo’, the bribery program of ‘The Surge’ etc., etc.?  Mr. Rachman lampoons, in his maladroit way, the cliché “rules-based international order” the ‘ready made’ that excuses/ frames The American Empire’s bloody, unapologetic Imperialism.

The villians in this political melodrama are predictable, a troika of bad actors in The New Cold War, identified as the patient reader, makes her way through this essay ,for want of a better term, ‘Bill of attainder’ , in sum Mr. Rachman’s acting as a one man legislator!

Nobody reasonable should accept the Belarusian (or Chinese or Russian) equation of peaceful dissent with terrorism. But America has encouraged the idea that powerful countries can reach out beyond their borders and grab people.

That this is succeed by this call to action? should not surprise!

The action taken by Belarus represents a flagrant escalation of this trend. But this dangerous moment also represents an opportunity to arrest the slide into international lawlessness.    

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/02c0004a-7dfa-46b9-80ef-a88e4ef35d9a

I read the first two chapters of ‘The Metaphysical Club’ that features Oliver Wendell Holmes. And because I had purchased ‘Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law And The Inner Self’ from an Oxford University Press book sale: also because I found in Menand’s chapters, an heroic figure in Holmes, three time wounded in The Civil War, I read with interest Prof. White’s biography.
White’s book followed the bourgeoise party line on Holmes. He even wrote ‘Oliver Wendell Holmes: Sage of the Supreme Court’, more of the same bourgeoise hagiography. But ‘Buck v. Bell’ was a negative revelation. Women identified as ‘imbeciles’ that were institutionalised were sterilized. ‘Establishing the constitutionality of a law permitting the sterilization of of imbeciles … gave me pleasure’, a Holmes  quote from page 408 of White’s biography.
I followed that book with ‘Law Without Values: The Life, Work and Legacy of Justice Holmes’ by Albert W. Alschuler. Another negative revelation. This book managed to garner a good review from The Economist, titled ‘Flawed Hero’ of the February 24, 2001 edition of the magazine. I saved the page from the magazine, and use it as a bookmark, for Alschuler’s book.   

George Scialabba’s praise for the ‘masterpiece’ of ‘The Metaphysical Club’: from my limited reading of it’s Holmes chapters, was steeped in the unearned reverence for the toxic, not to speak of the cruel misogyny of Holmes. Should this give pause to the readers of Mr. Scialabba’s judgement, on a book lauded as a ‘masterpiece’, or any other book under his review? What about any book, by the same author, whose writings reflect the values of History and Biography Made To Measure?    

Would-Be Critic 

Free and Worldly