Perfectionist Liberalism & Social(ist) Democracy

Against the idea of force, the force of ideas.
—Austro-Marxist aphorism

In dark times, that is, with the evisceration of a public culture suitable for establishing and encouraging the necessary conditions of personal autonomy, it might help to remind ourselves of the following basic premises of “perfectionist liberalism:”

“The life of the autonomous person is distinctive not by what it is, but by how it came to be what it is. It is marked by the fact that it could have been otherwise and became what it is through the choices of that person. It is marked by the fact that the autonomous agent had many options which he rejected. To show that a person had an autonomous life, we have to look not only at him but also his environment. One is autonomous only if one lives in an environment rich with possibilities. Concern with autonomy is concern with the environment.

The environment determines whether one has the conditions of autonomy and it is the conditions of autonomy which are, up to a point, the charge of political institutions. Governments cannot make people have a flourishing autonomous life. That is up to each one to see to himself. But governments can help put people in conditions where they are able to have that kind of life by protecting and promoting the creation of the environment which makes such a life a possibility. Toleration as respect for individual freedom not only is consistent with, it in fact requires concern for and involvement with others. [….]

The availability of options depends in part on private goods…. But options also depend on public goods, which are available to all and serve all. Public goods lie at the foundation of most options. Options are to a considerable degree socially defined. [….] The conditions of autonomy require an environment rich in possibilities. In that they require an appropriate public culture, for it is the public culture which to a considerable degree determines the nature and quality of the opportunities available to a society. But to the extent that the conditions of autonomy require a suitable public culture, they depend on the common good, that is, on a good which if available to one is available to all and whose benefits can be had by all without competition or conflict.”—Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics (1994): 121-122.

Indeed, this is why I stubbornly retain a perhaps inordinate but unashamedly wistful fondness for “Red Vienna.” The Viennese Social Democrats assiduously, and in large measure successfully, cultivated a public culture and common good as necessary conditions for personal autonomy. As Helmut Gruber concludes in Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934 (1991),

“…[D]espite serious practical failings, red Vienna succeeded as no other metropolis had in improvising and innovating social reforms and cultural activities for its working class within the political limits of a polity hostile to such efforts. The SDAP [Austrian Socialist party or Austro-Marxist Party, also known as the Viennese Social Democratic Workers’ Party] cultural preparation for a socialist future in the present was unique. It went beyond traditional social democratic reform legislation in seeking to encompass the Viennese working class through an intricate network of party cultural organizations and activities that had both an educational content and symbolic force. While critical of the conception and execution of this program, one still marvels at the daring vision, for instance, of the public housing palaces as total worker environments containing laundries, bathhouses, kindergartens, libraries, meeting rooms, swimming pools, cooperative stores, youth and mothers’ consultation clinics, and much more. The purpose of these enclaves was to provide the workers with a setting for the ‘political culture’—the Austromarxist special formula leading to the maturation of the working class—through which the consciousness necessary for the creation of the ‘neue Menschen’ could be instilled.”

Criminal Procedure in a Constitutional Democracy

§ 94. The person charged is entitled to have the assistance of a defence counsel of his own choice at every stage of the case. He shall be so informed. The court may allow the person charged to have his defence conducted by more than one counsel.—From Norway’s Criminal Procedure Act of 1981.

At The Faculty Lounge, Bridget Crawford has a post on the lawyer who has agreed to represent Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian suspect who apparently has confessed to the bombing in downtown Oslo and the shooting spree that soon followed at the island summer camp, terrorist acts that claimed the lives of 76 individuals. Crawford transcribed a portion of the interview with the defense counsel, Geir Lippestad, part of which follows:

“For several hours he hesitated and discussed with friends and family whether to defend a man who only hours early had massacred 68 young people on a summer holiday island. But in the end his civic instincts trumped his initial horror. ‘I believe that the legal system is very important in a democracy and someone has to do this job,’ he told reporters this afternoon.”

Herewith my comment to her post:

Indeed, and let’s hope people do not draw any inferences about the lawyer based on the charges against his client (as happened in the case of lawyers who did pro bono work for accused terrorists detained at Guantanamo). Contrary to what some prominent legal ethicists believe, I don’t think lawyers should be praised or blamed for exercising their professional discretion with regard to whom they decide to represent. As Brad Wendel has argued, “the lawyer should be seen as endorsing more general political values embodied in the legal system,” and Geir Lippestad’s rationale for agreeing to represent Breivik is evidence of his more-than-verbal appreciation of the value of that endorsement [Crawford views this decision in term of ‘moral mettle.’] All defendants are entitled to due process and unqualifiedly deserving to be treated with dignity. As Joseph Raz explains in Ethics in the Public Domain (1994), “When people are called upon to make substantial sacrifices in the name of one of the fundamental civil and political rights of an individual, this is not because in some matters the interest of the individual or the respect due to the individual prevails over the interest of the collectivity or the majority. It is because by protecting the right of that individual one protects the common good and is thus serving the interest of the majority.”

The “common good” in this instance are the rules of criminal procedure in the legal system of a constitutional democracy which, by definition, is committed to democratic law-making (be it constitutional, statutory, common, administrative or regulatory) and the “rule of law” generally.

Please note: Strictly speaking, Norway is a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system of government, while its constitution is correctly characterized as “democratic,” hence the title of the post.

Time again to waste incumbents with wasted votes?

Partisan bickering over the federal debt ceiling makes me nostalgic for this moment in American political history, which I witnessed as a resident of Minnesota and helped effect in 1998 as a voter disgusted with both major political parties:



Has the time come for a truly durable third party? Thomas Friedman speaks longingly of the prospect that we might yet witness the rise of the radical center. Nate Silver speculates that popular frustration with the two-party system may have reached a historically significant high-water mark:

A credible independent bid for the presidency is always a long-shot, but might be more viable under these conditions. Or we may simply see a genuine anti-incumbent wave — a much-discussed phenomenon that has rarely occurred in practice — with significant numbers of elected officials in both parties losing office. It is not out of the question that Democrats could lose the White House but take back control of the House of Representatives.

I have long wished that the United States could find a way to break free of its suffocating political duopoly. It's high time to get past first past the bloody post. There's no time like the present, or the 2012 elections, to waste incumbents with wasted votes.

The Economics of Unhappiness: A Syllabus

I want to thank, first, John Quiggin, whose original post at Crooked Timber (April 12, 2011): “Towards an economics of unhappiness,” provide the inspiration for the following compilation. Second, thanks to Chris Bertram (another CT blogger) for suggesting some titles. As to the reason for assembling a list of readings on the “economics of unhappiness” instead of its converse, see Quiggin’s article below, although I’ve included works on the “economics of happiness” as well, the former necessarily implying some sense or understanding of the meaning of the latter (or, at minimum, a sense of what happiness simpliciter is or might be).

Introduction
The selections from Amartya Sen, Robert E. Lane, and Daniel M. Haybron below this introduction are by a way of a “groundwork” to the readings, perhaps exposing several presuppositions in the course of outlining fundamental (arguable if not controversial) economic, moral, and psychological (prima facie, not perfectly consistent) assumptions central to the motivation for composing this list. “Social democratic” and neo-Keynesian approach to our current economic woes strikes me as clearly preferable to both elitist economic proposals of neo-liberal pedigree and wildly implausible—because naïve and fantastic—yet vaguely populist libertarian yearnings. And yet I take to heart the following remarks from Ian Shapiro:

“The ambiguous moral status of Keynesianism and welfare economics has always inhered in the fact that they appeal to the short-term interests of the disadvantaged (such as unemployed workers and firms on the verge of bankruptcy during recessions) by ensuring subsistence, creating employment, and expanding credit, yet these policies are geared in the medium term to sustaining the system which generates those very disadvantages—hence the ironic force of Joan Robinson’s quip that the one thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited at all.” (Ian Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory, 1986: 152-153)

In other words, we need to ask if Keynesian and welfare economics is capable of accomplishing what the New Deal and World War II did in the last century, namely, saving capitalism from itself. The manias, crashes, and panics endemic to capitalist cycles (Meghnad Desai) have heretofore been subject to (i.e., tempered or tamed by) Keynesian and conventional or neo-classical economic discipline, but one wonders if the combined effects of global economic consolidation and environmental degradation are creating conditions that render obsolete calcified models of neo-classical economic growth and capital accumulation. To be sure, in several important yet under-appreciated ways, the World Trade Organization (WTO), as an institution of global economic governance, represents economic and political progress (as Desai points out, its ‘structure is the most egalitarian of any of the international institutions—one country one vote’). Are the IMF and the World Bank amenable to truly social democratic-like economic reform? Can existing global institutions become susceptible to democratic transformation while a significant number of member states in the world system remain internally authoritarian? In short, is it possible to achieve a globally egalitarian (neo-) Keynesian Golden Age? Poverty remains recalcitrant in several regions of the world while regional and global inequality is increasing, economic facts we might grant without in any way diminishing the historic significance of capitalism for wealth creation (and thus betterment of standards of living if not quality of life indices). Are we, at last, reaching the structural limits of capitalist economic logic? Have we exhausted the economic—and, yes, moral—virtues of the neo-classical economic worldview? Or, are we merely at the lowest ebb of an economic cycle that will be cured by some fortuitous combination of conventional and creative politico-economic policies crafted by prudent democratic leaders of countries North and South? Is this a propitious time for seriously contemplating the imminent dissolution of the “aristocracy of capital” and the “economization of social relations?” Is the time ripe for (re)articulation of the authority of the Good by way of abandoning the capitalist criteria for market success? Are we prepared to break, once and for all, the structural socio-economic and political constraints of “capitalist democracy?” Must the welfare of the many and their generalizable interests remain subordinate to the welfare of capitalists and their particular or special interests? Are the interests of working people fated to be canalized into the exclusive pursuit of economic advantage? Must labor markets remain plagued by the material uncertainties and insecurities intrinsic to the private control of investment within the terms of finance capitalism?

The distorted and artificial needs and the individually and socially harmful desires generated by hyper-industrialized casino capitalism finds the masses in a state in which they feel an overwhelming need to be psychologically indemnified by the possession and consumption of as many goods and services as possible, in a socio-economic world in which conspicuous consumption exists side-by-side with absolute and relative poverty. In such a system capitalists are thus, at least psychologically speaking, every much victims as are the workers and the unemployed. Capitalist democracy remains committed to the aristocracy of Capital, meaning that, in the end, the special interests of capitalists trump generalizable interests tied to the common good, while economic insecurity compels workers to canalize their interests in the struggle for higher wages or short-term material gain. The aristocracy of Capital finds workers dehumanized insofar as they’re indemnified by the false promises of conspicuous consumption and irresponsible affluence, utterly distorting the pursuit of happiness and the potential of individuals for uniquely realizing values and manifesting virtues.

Can we, instead, accord socio-economic primacy to creating the necessary (and thus not necessarily sufficient) conditions for generalizing psychological and moral individuation or self-realization? Assuming the capacity to meet basic material human needs, can we resort to criteria associated with the recognition and fulfillment of our moral and spiritual needs by way of the regulation of economic life and therefore the subordination of economic life to the goals of establishing the conditions necessary for generalizing the pursuit of self-actualization or self-realization in a psychological, moral and spiritual sense, for generalizing the innate incentive toward worthy living, for generalizing, within the constraints of dignity and self-respect (as Dworkin says), the capacity for realization of what it means to live worthy lives? As John Dewey said, “Democracy has many meanings, but if it has a moral meaning, it is found in resolving that the supreme test of all political institutions and industrial arrangements shall be the contribution they make to the all-around growth of every member of society.”

Economic, Moral, and Psychological Groundwork
“It is useful to distinguish between two different criticisms that can be made of welfarism, and in particular of taking utility to be the only source of value. First, it can be argued that utility is, at best, a reflection of a person’s well-being, but the person’s success cannot be judged exclusively in terms of his or her well-being (even if social success is judged entirely by the constituent individual successes). A person may value the promotion of certain causes and the occurrence of certain things, even thought the importance that is attached to these developments are not reflected by the advancement of his or her well-being, if any, that they respectively cause. Second, it can be disputed that personal well-being is best seen as utility rather than in some other terms.

We can see the person, in terms of agency, recognizing and respecting his or her ability to form goals, commitments, values, etc., and we can also see the person in terms of well-being, which too calls for attention. This dichotomy is lost in a model of exclusively self-interested motivation, in which a person’s agency must be entirely geared to his own well-being. [….]

Respecting the agency aspect points to the appropriateness of going beyond a person’s well-being into his or her valuations, commitments, etc., but the necessity of assessing these valuations, commitments, etc. is not eliminated by the mere acceptance of that appropriateness. [….] [E]ven though ‘the use of ones agency is, in an important sense,’ a matter for oneself to judge,’ ‘the need for careful assessment of aims, objectives, allegiances, etc., and of the conception of the good, may be important and exacting’ [Sen here quotes from his previous works]. [….]

To judge the well-being of a person exclusively in the metric of happiness or desire-fulfilment has some obvious limitations. These limitations are particularly damaging in the context of interpersonal comparisons of well-being, since the extent of happiness reflects what one can expect and how the social ‘deal’ seems in comparison with that. A person who has had a life of misfortune, with very little opportunities, and rather little hope, may be more easily reconciled to deprivations than others reared in more fortunate and affluent circumstances. The metric of happiness may, therefore, distort the extent of deprivation, in a specific and biased way. The hopeless beggar, the precarious landless labourer, the dominated housewife, the hardened unemployed or the over-exhausted coolie may all take pleasures in small mercies, and manage to suppress intense suffering for the necessity of continuing survival, but it would be ethically deeply mistaken to attach a correspondingly small value to the loss of their well-being because of this survival strategy. The same problem arises with the other interpretation of utility, namely, desire-fulfilment, since the hopelessly deprived lack the courage to desire much, and their deprivations are muted and deadened in the scale of desire-fulfilment. [….]

Well-being is ultimately a matter of valuation, and while happiness and the fulfillment of desire may well be valuable for the person’s well-being, they cannot—on their own or even together—adequately reflect the value of well-being. [….] It is, therefore, arguable that since the claim of utility to be the only source of value rests allegedly on identifying utility with well-being, it can be criticized both:
1. on the ground that well-being is not only the only thing that is valuable;
2. on the ground that utility does not adequately represent well-being.
In so far as we are concerned with people’s achievements, in making ethical judgment, utility achievement may well be partial, inadequate and misleading.”—Amartya Sen
* * *
“…[L]et me state at the outset that I do not think that hedonic criteria are enough for evaluating the good society. For one thing, pursuit of happiness without pursuit of another goal is impossible or at least self-defeating. The very logic of happiness, then, implies that there is something else worth pursuing whose pursuit or attainment is itself a source of happiness. [….] Others may have different candidates, but I find it convenient and fruitful to think of the following coordinate, ultimate goods as a trinity: subjective well-being, human development (including virtue), and justice, no one of which may be resolved into or subordinated under another. [….]

Amidst the satisfaction people feel with their material progress, there is a spirit of unhappiness and depression haunting advanced market democracies throughout the world, a spirit that mocks the idea that markets maximize well-being and the eighteenth-century promise of a right to the pursuit of happiness under benign government’s of people’s own choosing. The haunting spirit is manifold: a postwar decline in the United States in people who report themselves as happy, a rising tide in all advanced societies of clinical depression and dysphoria (especially among the young), increasing distrust of each other and of political and other institutions, declining belief that the lot of the average man is getting better, a tragic erosion of family solidarity and community integration together with an apparent decline in warm, intimate relations among friends.”

“How account for this combination of growing unhappiness and depression, interpersonal and institutional distrust, and weakened companionship in advanced market democracies, in which people are, with important exceptions, reasonably well-off? The populations of these countries do not press against their resources; they can expect to live longer than their parents, and their old age is reasonably protected; there is (still) a safety net to catch them if they lose their jobs or become ill; their children are not likely to die in childhood, and these children have available to them more educational facilities than were available to their parents; they do not live in police states but rather have some assurance of due process of law; and they are offered reasonably adequate opportunities to participate in political decisions affecting their own fates.”

“…[P]eople are not very good judges of how, even within the private sphere of their own lives, to increase, let alone maximize, their happiness. It is not just that they are embedded in an economistic culture that misleads them, or even that they are governed by misleading ideologies; rather, the problem is that people often choose of their own accord paths that do not lead to their well-being: they escalate their standards in proportion to their improved circumstances, choose short-run benefits that incur greater long-term costs, fear and avoid the means to their preferred ends, infer from early failures an unwarranted and disabling incompetence.”—Robert E. Lane
* * *
“The United States is by a wide margin, among the most affluent nations in human history, and many Americans enjoy unprecedented freedom to shape their lives—for those individuals, a great success in moral and economic terms. Yet no one ever accused us of ‘knowing how to live.’ This is perhaps because, arguably, we don’t. Surveys find an overwhelming majority of Americans reporting that Americans have badly placed priorities. And there is no evidence that Americans grew any happier over the recent decades that witnessed astonishing growth in material standards of living. Self-reported happiness has remained essentially flat, while rates of suicide, depression, and other pathologies have soared.

Concurrently with these developments, and not coincidentally, we have entered what biologist E.O. Wilson calls, for obvious reasons, the Century of the Environment. In coming to grips with that problem, we may have to make significant adjustments in how we live. Surely one part of the equation is coming to a better understanding of human well-being and what we need to flourish. For we need to figure out how to get the most benefit from the least amount of resources, and knowing only the economic side of the equation is not likely to cut it. The daily energy requirements for has historically—well, for ninety-plus percent of human history—been under 5,000 calories. Today’s American lifestyle requires the resources of a large community at around 260,000 calories, leaving an ecological footprint nearly twice that of our European counterparts, and several times the global average. Our consumption habits resemble those of a French monarch more than anything our relations a couple of generations back would have recognized. Some two billion people in China and India are striving mightily to achieve the same. Technological innovation can do a lot to reduce the number and impact of those calories, but we are not likely to get very far if we persist in the notion that our goal is to liberate ourselves from constraint as much as our morality allows, commanding as many resources as possible. If the massively resourced life is not quite as beneficial as we thought, or even proves sometimes to be counterproductive, that would be useful to know. Maybe we could adjust our goals to yield a good quality of life without leaving our descendants a thermally reconstituted planet of weeds and dust.”

“For we cannot assume that people’s choices, even when self-interested, will track their interests. It is perfectly possible that people seeking fulfilling lives will freely choose, en masse, to live in distinctly unfulfilling ways. And even if they do end up better off on the whole than they were before, the price of those gains may be far higher than they realize. Second, and most importantly: a people armed with nothing better than a smiley-face psychology doesn’t stand a chance of answering these sorts of questions.”

“The modern era’s overriding preoccupation, arguably, has been the betterment of the human condition, inarguably, a noble aim. Yet the real focus has been on our material conditions, with far less attention paid to the question of how we are living and what our way of life does for us, or to us. Once it has well enough satisfied the basic constraints of morality, the chief question facing any civilization is: do its members enjoy a reasonable level of well-being? We probably won’t get much of an answer to this question if we simply ask what they have got. For human well-being mostly depends not on what people have but, among other things, on what they do with what they’ve got. A better question, arguably, is this: do they live in a sensible manner? A decent response to this question will require us to understand whether their way of life suits their natures. And central to that project, surely, will be seeing whether their way of life conduces to their flourishing psychologically. If a civilization cannot muster a reasonably affirmative answer to this question, then we might reconsider whether it is properly called ‘civilized.’ For if people do not flourish psychologically, they do not flourish. Period. It is with the psychology, I would suggest, that the really interesting story about the flourishing of these creatures lies.”

“…[I]ndividuals’ evaluations of their own lives, at least insofar as they take the form of life satisfaction attitudes, do not carry the kind of authority they are widely believed to have. On the one hand, it is doubtful how well grounded the typical person’s assessments of her life will normally be. Even given a few minutes’ reflection, most of us are unlikely to bring all our important priorities to mind, as well as all the important facts about our lives. We forget things or, being caught up in our current pursuits, lose perspective. At such times—which is to say, most of the time—our assessments of our lives will not have the kind of authority we imagine they possess in those rare moments of clarity, where we can review our lives in broad perspective and with full awareness of what we really care about, such as on the deathbed. Well-being, even for the subjectivist, is hardly transparent to the individual whose welfare is in question. On the other hand, even the best-grounded evaluations of our lives will offer problematic information about how well our lives are going for us, since they are not simply announcements about well-being. Since the act of evaluating one’s life itself has ethical dimensions, and since we enjoy wide latitude to assess our lives in various ways relative to what we care about, our attitudes toward our lives will not straightforwardly express how well our lives in fact are going for us.

We ignore these points at our peril. It is commonly thought that someone’s being satisfied with her life creates a presumption that her life is, in fact, going well for her. But most people, in most places, are satisfied with their lives. In some places satisfaction may be near universal. This may lead most people to conclude that they are in fact doing pretty well, yielding perhaps a remarkably contented race. Maybe the conclusion is true; but what if it is not? As Wittgenstein shows us, life has to be pretty grim for a person not to have good reasons for being satisfied with it. (It sure beats the alternative.) Many people may reasonably be satisfied with lives that are not, by anyone’s standards, going well at all. If so, it would be a grave mistake to take their assessments—or our own—as final in matters of personal welfare.”

“The pursuit of happiness is not easy. Given that the basic conditions of our lives, and the way we live, are so heavily dependent on our social environment, we may want to look more closely at the societal dimensions of the question. [….] Even if we are suspicious of using policy instruments to promote happiness, we might at least consider the limits of individual effort, and the importance of context, in shaping how happy we are. Take, for example, recent initiatives to develop and teach methods by which people can make themselves happier. Such efforts can produce very real benefits, and in fact many of the ancients were in a version of same business. While there are legitimate worries about such techniques sometimes reducing to cheap spiritual analgesics, I see no reason why this cannot be avoided. A more interesting question, it seems to me, is how far individual efforts like this are likely to improve human well-being on a broad scale. If the problem lies chiefly in the way you live, and this in turn depends heavily on the kind of society you inhabit, then positive thinking techniques and the like are only going to get you so far.”

“…[H]uman flourishing depends substantially on the verdicts of our emotional natures, to a significant extent independently of what we think about our lives. There is a large part of well-being, in short, that hinges on matters of sentiment, needing no stamp of approval from reason. Of course I have not denied an important role for reason in a fuller account of well-being, so that a complete view would likely have both sentimentalist and rationalist elements (in contrast, say, to hedonism, which in its canonical forms is a wholly sentimentalist approach). Nor have I suggested that reason and sentiment can be wholly separated; perhaps sentiment always has some rational element and vice versa. But it does appear that our reflective judgments do not bear the sort of authority regarding our welfare that many of us take them to. [….]

While moderns have been right to place psychological states like happiness at the center of well-being, the character and value of these states is surprisingly elusive. We should not assume that matters of personal welfare are at all transparent to the individual. The potential for error is great. Indeed, it should by now be easy at least to imagine people settling, en masse, for unfulfilling lives. The question now is whether, given the facts of human nature, such a result is anything more than a bare possibility.”

“…[The spirit of the modern age appear to be] a spirit of optimism about the individual pursuit of well-being, founded in Enlightenment trust of the individual and her powers of reason. Since ‘Enlightenment optimism’ is vague, additionally encompassing epistemological and historical views, and since the optimism in question concerns the effects of certain freedoms associated with liberalism on well-being, I [earlier] called it liberal optimism. Liberals need not be optimists in the present sense; besides weakened forms of liberal optimism there is room for liberal pessimism as well as, in between, what we might call liberal sobriety. Yet one does not often hear it suggested that the ideal of empowered and unfettered living is, from a prudential standpoint, a bad thing, or merely the least bad option of a sorry lot. You certainly won’t hear it from many economists.

Liberal optimism is clearly appealing, but it rests on some non-trivial assumptions. Here I want to consider the plausibility of liberal optimism’s chief psychological doctrine, which I will the Aptitude assumption. Roughly, Aptitude maintains that human psychology is well-adapted to environments offering individuals a high degree of freedom to shape their lives as they wish. We have the psychological endowments needed to do well, indeed best, in such environments by choosing lives for ourselves that meet our needs.

[….] [R]ecent work in empirical psychology…raises significant doubts about Aptitude. This research challenges Aptitude via a Systematic Imprudence thesis:
Human beings are systematically prone to make a wide range of serious errors in matters of personal welfare. These errors are weighty enough to substantially compromise the expected lifetime well-being for individuals possessing a high degree of freedom to shape their lives as they wish, even under reasonably favorable conditions (education, etc.). [….]

…[T]he individualized pursuit of well-being is probably substantially undercut by systematic tendencies toward imprudence: the Systematic Imprudence thesis is very likely true. This in turns suggests that a key assumption of liberal optimism, Aptitude, may well prove to be false. I will not be claiming that the Aptitude assumption is in fact false or unwarranted. The point is rather that we should take this possibility seriously. The truth of Aptitude should be considered an open question. A secondary aim is to sharpen our grasp of the remarkably bold psychological assumptions underlying much modern thought about human nature, the good life, and the good society. [….]

Perhaps liberal optimism’s psychological assumptions will turn out not only to be wrong, but really wrong. We may, in the fullness of time, conclude that our civilization is founded on a fundamentally mistaken view of human nature and what we need to flourish. As if a misguided zoo established a habitat for tigers with the idea that they were dealing with dingoes. The correct response to such a discovery would not, in the first instance, be to pore over our tax and regulatory schemes in the hopes of correcting for this or that cognitive bias. We should want, rather, to rethink how it makes sense for creatures like us to live.”

“Perhaps it would help to clarify the state’s moral purposes were we to emphasize, among our basic entitlements, our right to the pursuit of unhappiness.”—Daniel M. Haybron

The Syllabus:
· Bartolini, Stefano. “Beyond Accumulation and Technical Progress: Negative Externalities as an Engine of Economic Growth.” Available: http://www.econpol.unisi.it/bartolini/papers/pub2/WP%20SIENA.pdf
· Bartolini, Stefano. Manifesto for Happiness: Shifting Society from Money to Well-Being. This is the partial English translation of an Italian book: Manifesto per la Felicità: Come Passare dalla Società del Ben-Avere a quella del Ben-Essere. Donzelli: Roma, 2010.
· Bruni, Luigino and Pier Luigi Porta, eds. Economics of Happiness. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2007.
· Cohen, G.A. “Use-value, Exchange-value, and Contemporary Capitalism,” in his Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000 ed.: 297-325.
· Dasgupta, Partha. An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
· Elster, Jon. “Self-realisation in work and politics: the Marxist conception of the good life,” in Jon Elster and Moene, eds., Alternatives to Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
· Frey. Bruno S. Happiness: A Revolution in Economics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
· Frey, Bruno S. and Alois Stutzer. Happiness and Economics: How the Economy and Institutions Affect Human Well-Being. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
· Gorz, André (Gillian Handyside and Chris Turner, tr.). Critique of Economic Reason. London: Verso, 1989.
· Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
· Hirsch, Fred. Social Limits to Growth. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977.
· Kahneman, Daniel, Ed Diener, and Norbert Schwarz, eds. Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003.
· Lane, Robert E. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
· Mishan, E.J. The Costs of Economic Growth. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993.
· Parijs, Philippe van. “In defence of abundance,” in Marxism Recycled. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993: 211-232.
· Parijs, Philippe van. Real Freedom for All: What (if anything) Can Justify Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
· Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2nd ed., 2001.
· Quiggin, John. “The Economics of Unhappiness,” The Chronicle Review, May 22, 2011. Available: http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/127580/
· Satz, Debra. Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
· Schor, Juliet B. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
· Schor, Juliet B. The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
· Schor, Juliet B. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: The Penguin Press, 2010.
· Scitovsky, Tibor. The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of Human Satisfaction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 ed. (1976).
· Sedlacek, Tomas. Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
· Sen, Amartya. Ethics and Economics. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1987.
· Sen, Amartya. “Conceptualizing and Measuring Poverty,” in David B. Grusky and Ravi Kanbur, eds. Poverty and Inequality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006: 30-46.
· Sombart, Werner. “The Sociology of Capitalism,” in Hendrik M. Ruitenbeck, ed., Varieties of Classic Social Theory. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1963.
· Xenos, Nicholas. Scarcity and Modernity. London: Routledge, 1989.

I welcome suggestions for additional titles.

Akbar

One often hears crude—because grandiose and stereotypical—generalizations about Islam and civilization, Islam and women, Muslims and politics, Muslims and violence, Islam and other religions, Islam and democracy or Islam and secularization. Such generalizations are common but counterfeit currency in the public realm, often circulated and cashed in by professors, pundits, and public intellectuals who should know better. As stated, these generalizations are typically false, betraying a disturbingly facile if not unhistorical understanding of Muslims and the Islamic world. By way of a very modest contribution to combating such nonsense, I thought I’d provide a bare bones introduction to the most impressive of the “talented line of Great Mughal rulers.”

Jalāl-ud-dīn Muhammad Akbar (1542-1605) was a remarkable ruler of the Mughal Empire on the Indian subcontinent from 1556-1605. Akbar is clearly deserving of the honorific appellation, “Great Mughal,” his reign exemplifying the general qualities of good government and governance in a manner far ahead of his time and place. Indeed, along with the Buddhist emperor Aśoka (ca. 304–232 BCE), Akbar “is remembered as the greatest ruler India has seen.” Stanley Wolpert provides us with a succinct summary of his reign:

“Akbar’s unique achievement was based on his recognition of the pluralistic character of Indian society and his acceptance of the imperative of winning Hindu cooperation if he hoped to rule this elephantine empire for any length of time. [….] [In 1562], Akbar showed his capacity for wise as well as generous rule by abolishing the practice of enslaving prisoners of war and their families, no longer even forcibly converting them to Islam. The following year (1563), he abolished the tax that from time immemorial had been exacted by kings from Hindu pilgrims traveling to worship at sacred spots throughout India. [….] In 1564 he remitted the hated jizya (non-Muslim poll tax), which was not reimposed for more than a century, and with that single stroke of royal generosity won more support from the majority of India’s population than all other Mughal emperors combined managed to muster by their conquests. [….] By pacifying Afghanistan for the remaining quarter century of his rule, Akbar managed to achieve more than that of either the Mauryas or the British, and after conquering those regions he established stable administration within them, creating a pattern followed by his Mughal descendants as well as by early British administrators. [….] [His] efficient administrative system help stimulate and expand India’s economic development and trade, foreign as well as domestic. [….] [Finally], the average inhabitant of Akbar’s India was economically better off than his peasant heirs have subsequently been.” (Wolpert 1977: 127-131)

Akbar held a variety of other historically progressive views: on the treatment of women, he opposed the long entrenched custom of child marriage, arguing that “the object that is intended” in such a marriage “is still remote, and there is immediate possibility of injury.” In fact, Akbar disapproved of slavery, sati and polygamy. His vigorous support of religious pluralism and toleration did not preclude a critical and comparative assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of various worldviews: “in a religion [Hinduism] that forbids the remarriage of the widow, the hardship is much greater.” With regard to the division of property, however, however, he lamented the fact that “in the Muslim religion, a smaller share of inheritance is allowed to the daughter,” proposing instead that, “owing to her weakness, she deserves to be given a larger share” (Sen 2005: 290-291). With regard to religious pluralism and toleration, Amartya Sen writes of the Great Mughal’s

“sponsorship and support for dialogues between adherents of different faiths, nearly two thousand years [after the Buddhist ruler Aśoka’s championing of same]. Akbar’s overarching thesis that ‘the pursuit of reason’ rather than ‘reliance on tradition’ is the way to address difficult problems of social harmony included a robust celebration of reasoned dialogues. [….] Akbar not only made unequivocal pronouncements on the priority of tolerance, but also laid the formal foundations of a secular legal structure and of religious neutrality of the state, which included the duty to ensure that ‘no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.’ [….] While the historical background of Indian secularism can be traced to the trend of thinking that had begun to take root well before Akbar, the politics of secularism received a tremendous boost from Akbar’s championing of pluralist ideals, along with his insistence that the state should be completely impartial between different religions.” (Sen 2005: 16-19)

Finally, patronage of all the arts was, but in particular painting and architecture, flourished as well during his reign, made possible by the vast reserves of treasure held by a fiscally sound state (the imperial finances said to be ‘managed by brilliant administrators’). Sen notes that Akbar’s “political decisions also reflected his pluralist commitments, well exemplified even by his insistence on filling his court with non-Muslim intellectuals and artists (including the great Hindu musician Tansen) in addition to Muslim ones, and, rather remarkably, by his trusting a Hindu former king (Raja Man Singh), who had been defeated earlier by Akbar, to serve as the general commander of his armed forces.”

References & Further Reading:
· Habib, Irfan, ed. Akbar and His India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
· Moosvi, Shireen. Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminiscences. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1994.
· Robinson, Francis. The Mughal Emperors and the Islamic Dynasties of India, Iran, and Central Asia. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
· Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
· Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

The New York Times & The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Anthony Alessandrini, “Palestine in Scare Quotes: From the NYT Grammar Book,” at Jadaliyya (July 12, 2011):

When I feel the need for my blood pressure to go up, I read the New York Times’ coverage of Israel-Palestine.

The extent to which the Times’ reporting (or misreporting) is deeply slanted, selective, and misleading has been thoroughly documented in Richard Falk’s and Howard Friel’s Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss provide excellent ongoing critiques of the Times’ day to day coverage (see, for example, this recent piece by Ali Abunimah), and both were quick to report the seemingly obvious conflict of interest in the fact that Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner’s son is currently serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. The Times’ editor-in-chief responded to the revelation of this fact by dismissing its effect upon Bronner’s reporting, even going so far to suggest that his “personal ties in the region” help to “supply a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that someone with no connections would lack” (‘connections’ in this case seem to stand in for, say, ‘expertise’ or ‘knowledge’ — as though critics might suggest replacing Bronner with a journalist who knew nothing about the region). As’ad AbuKhalil has noted that Bronner and the Times, in covering the Goldstone Report, have “devoted more space to Israeli and Zionist criticisms of the Goldstone report than to the report itself,” while Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has produced a number of exemplary media critiques of the Times, for example a blistering criticism of the paper’s coverage of Operation Cast Lead and its horrifying effect in Gaza, noting that when it comes to addressing the facts on the ground in Gaza, the Times’ fetish for “balance” and “equivalence” leaves readers with “the sense that the truth is too one-sided.”

Is it worth our while to give so much time and attention to the Times’ coverage? Of course, the Gray Lady is the object of criticism from both left and right, and a glance at the comments section for any Times article on Israel-Palestine reveals that there are as many readers who consider the paper to be a seething hotbed of Hamas apologists as there are those who see a pro-Zionist bias. There’s almost a jeering reflection here of the Times’ own ideology of “balance.” So don’t we face the danger of simply falling into this endless echo chamber of criticism? Furthermore, is it perhaps absurd to expect anything better from mainstream media in the U.S. when it comes to Israel-Palestine.

If I continue to think that it’s worth engaging with the Times’ coverage of Israel-Palestine, this may have something to do with my own work teaching at a public two-year college in the CUNY system. Many of my colleagues use the New York Times as a text in their classes; I don’t, but I certainly would like my students to become readers of the Times — skeptical, disturbed, deeply critical readers, but readers nonetheless. For better or worse, the paper continues to act as a sort of cultural and political touchstone for U.S. society (whether this will still be true in five or ten years, given the evolution of electronic media, is a different question), of the sort that I would like my students to have access to — at least in part because the stories of their lives, too, can be found refracted and distorted in the pages of the Times. [….]

The remainder of the article is here.

Further Reading:

· Dunsky, Marda. Pens and Swords: How the American Media Report the Israeli Palestinian Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
· Falk, Richard and Howard Friel. Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East. London: Verso, 2007.
· Hafez, Kai, ed. Islam and the West in Mass Media: Fragmented Images in a Globalizing World. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000.
· Hafez, Kai, ed. Arab Media: Power and Weakness. New York: Continuum, 2008.
· Hafez, Kai and David L. Paletz, eds. Mass Media, Politics, and Society in the Middle East. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001.
· Karim, Karim H. Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2000.
· Lynch, Marc. Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera and Middle East Politics Today. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
· Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
· Sakr, Naomi. Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East. London: I.B. Tauris, 2002.
· Sakr, Naomi. Arab Television Today. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007.
· Sakr, Naomi, ed. Arab Media and Political Renewal: Community, Legitimacy and Public Life. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2007.
· Shaheen, Jack G. Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs After 9/11. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press/Interlink, 2008.
· Shaheen, Jack G. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2001.

Worldviews, Comprehensive Doctrines, and Public Reason

I want to recommend to readers Paul Horwitz’s book, The Agnostic Age: Law, Religion and the Constitution (2011). A succinct review by Marc O. DeGirolami in The New Republic is here. I especially like this, Rawlsian-like (and Habermasian) conclusion (at least so it seems to me) from the book:

“[A]lthough there is no constitutional rule disabling individuals from making religious arguments in public debate, as a practical matter we can still think about the best ways for people to engage in public debate. Citizens and public officials should not argue that particular kinds of reasons, such as religious reasons, are simply and absolutely out of bounds in public discourse. But they remain free to argue that particular kinds of reason are likely to be less persuasive in public discussion. One may even hope that citizens and public officials who have adopted the agnostic habit will, without abandoning their own conclusions on questions of religious truth, attempt to inhabit and appreciate the views of others [this could be said to represent the Smithian view of sympathy in happy conjunction with his notion of the ‘impartial spectator’]. If they do, their respect for this diversity of views will encourage them to offer a variety of arguments, some of which will appeal to citizens from diverse religious and non-religious backgrounds.” (p. 270)

As Amartya Sen points out in The Idea of Justice (2009), “Despite the differences between the distinct types of arguments presented by [Adam] Smith, Habermas and Rawls, there is an essential similarity in their respective approaches to objectivity to the extent that objectivity is linked, directly or indirectly, by each of them to the ability to survive challenges from informed scrutiny coming from diverse quarters.”

And both citizens and public officials need not, generally, worry about threats to their particular formulations of well-considered religious truth provided they keep in mind the following (Or something similar, say, Michael Lynch’s argument that metaphysical pluralism is in fact compatible with realism of a kind, as we need not be anti-realists in claiming that propositions and facts concerning the nature of reality are relative to conceptual schemes of worldviews, or Kurt Gödel’s demonstration that one cannot definitively prove the formal consistency of an axiomatic system from within the principles of that system.):

“To affirm that there can be several different systems all giving us, at the same time, varying and yet legitimate ‘true’ metaphysical descriptions of the world does not…necessarily entail that there are many realities, that nothing is absolutely real, or, put less dramatically, that there is no such thing as a single, context neutral description or account of the world, that is, as the world really is. It only means that no metaphysical description of it can be outside every possible conceptual framework, but Reality itself is. Nor does it follow that any assertions about this ‘real’ or ‘true’ world beyond all conceptual frameworks, are nonsense. [….] Serious examination of, reflection on, these explanatory and interpretive schemes, their differences and overlaps, are crucial to expanding and deepening our understanding of reality, even if these conceptual frameworks (any or all possible combinations and collections of them) cannot bring us the Absolute Truth. If nothing else, they enable us to understand the relativity of conceptual truths and structures, and make us see what Pascal meant when he said that the highest function of reason is to show us the limitations of reason.” (Nandini Iyer, “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” in Knut A. Jacobsen, ed., Theory and Practice of Yoga: Essays in Honour of Gerald James Larson, 2005: 123)

I think human rights discourse has become entrenched because arguments in support of same have done just that, namely, proffered a variety of arguments (originating from motley worldviews or ‘comprehensive doctrines’) from which diverse individuals and groups have been able to reason from their “own” values and premises (or their normative conceptions of ‘the good’) to shared conclusions (about the fundamental importance of human ‘dignity’ and inherent worth for example). In Rawlsian terms, we could say—with Gerald Gaus—that “[given the fact] that a comprehensive view is a system of thought that is wide in scope and rich in content, ranging over many areas of life, a simple prohibition on appeal to comprehensive views is unable to exclude moral, religious or philosophical beliefs—as opposed to comprehensive views or general theories—from serving as the basis for an exercise of political power that meets the criterion of Liberal Legitimacy.”

The “political,” being those matters upon which human reason converges, can originate from a variety of worldviews or comprehensive doctrines but not qua doctrines or worldviews (as Hilary Putnam and my late teacher Ninian Smart argued, it makes no sense to judge or assess the truth of worldviews or ‘ways of life’ in toto). Hence, too, the appeal of Rawls’s notion of an “overlapping consensus,” which represents the emergence of a convergent public justification. As Nicholas Rescher reminds us, “For all practical purposes—and for all implementable theoretical purposes as well—a plurality of beliefs about the truth (a plurality of visions) is a plurality of formulations of the true (a plurality of versions). And this fact is something we must somehow come to terms with.” The likelihood of an “overlapping consensus” is perhaps enhanced by the fact that most of us, “when it comes to the crunch,” or if we are honest with ourselves, do not possess systematic (or even ‘coherentist’) comprehensive doctrines or worldviews, however much we find individual and group psychological solace in privately and publicly identifying with “official” descriptions of such doctrines and worldviews:

“We have an amalgam of beliefs, which we may publicly characterize in a certain way. I may say that I am an Episcopalian, but how much of my real worldview [or what may be called a ‘lifeworld’ insofar as it is an individual expression of a worldview] corresponds to the more or less ‘official’ worldview which tells me nothing directly about cricket, being Scottish, having a certain scepticism about nationalism, thinking there is life on other worlds, shelving the problem of evil, or other matters. Our values and beliefs are more like a collage than a Canaletto [cf. Lévi-Strauss’s use of the term ‘bricolage’]. They do not even have consistency of perspective.” (Ninian Smart)

Pelican Bay Prisoners on Hunger Strike

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that last week, “inmates in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison stopped eating meals in protest of conditions that they contend are cruel and inhumane.” News of the strike, which began July 1, has spread, and inmates in prisons throughout California are said to have joined in solidarity: “There are inmates in at least a third of our prisons who are refusing state-issued meals,” said Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Prisoners engaged in “extra-legal” nonviolent protest have of course a short menu of means from which to select from, and a hunger strike is one of the more prominent and time-honored such means. A hunger strike is similar to “fasting,” but the two are not identical, as the latter is often motivated by medical or religious reasons, while the former is more frequently undertaken in a largely socio-economic or political context of some sort. In India, for example, a hunger strike (dhurna), has long been a weapon of “passive resistance,” employed by entire communities to shame a ruler into granting their just demands, for example, or even by creditors sitting “at the door of debtors who ignored legitimate claims on them.” In more intimate spheres like the family, a fast has frequently been used as “a means of arousing the conscience of a loved one,” a practice that serves to blur the boundaries between a hunger strike and a fast. Moreover, a “fast” can take on political dimensions,* as was the case with Mahatma Gandhi (who happened to set quite stringent standards for employing this ‘fiery weapon’ of last resort from the armory of satyāgraha) and, in our country, César Chávez who, with Dolores Huerta, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, better known later as the United Farm Workers (UFW). While Chávez fasted under the justificatory rubric of “spiritual personal transformation” and thus for Catholic penitential reasons, there was an ineluctable political aspect involving nonviolent protest and preparation for civil disobedience campaigns.

Incidentally, my interest in this topic is not attributable solely to the fact that “[h]unger strikes have deep roots in Irish society and in the Irish psyche,” with the 1981 hunger strike coming quickest to mind owing in part to the fact that its leader, Bobby Sands, was elected to the United Kingdom Parliament during its course, although he soon died as a result of the hunger strike at HM Prison Maze in Northern Ireland (ten prisoners starved themselves to death before the strike was called off).

See too this post by Sara Mayeux (of Prison Law Blog fame) at The Informant, the crime-and-punishment blog of NPR affiliate, KALW. And I have a post from last year titled “Cruel and Unusual Punishments” that may be of interest.

*A fairly recent exemplary instance of this took place among the revolutionary and reformist democratic opposition in Poland from 1976-1981. In particular, members of KOR, the Workers’ Defense Committee (later: Komitet Samoobrony Społecznej KOR/Social Self-Defense Committee, KSS-‘KOR’) engaged in several fasts believed to clearly reflect a “Christian ethos” even among majority of its non-religious member: hence, for example, the title of Jacek Kurón’s essay (published in Znak under the pen name Elzbieta Borucka), “A Christian Without God.” In this case, such an ethos meant refusing to make a distinction between “private” and “public” ethics, a refusal perversely reinforced within an authoritarian society when ostensibly private or intimate behavior often has, for better and worse, political reverberations. Recall that it was KOR that played a direct “service” role in the emergence of Solidarity (or Solidarność, the first non-Communist party-controlled trade union in the Warsaw Pact countries) in 1980. Fasts in which KOR and other opposition members participated took place in the first instance at Catholic churches (which provided some measure of political ‘protection’), although sympathizers unable for one reason or another to frequent the churches fasted in support of these collective nonviolent protests. Fasts were undertaken on behalf of the release of imprisoned workers and in solidarity with Czechs fasting in defense of political prisoners. The “spillover” or “by-product” effects of one such fast is intriguing, as it was said to

“create an atmosphere of seriousness and deep concentration, which was achieved not at the price of isolation, but in relation to others, to the human ties and feelings among friends. In addition, the fast united both believers and non-believers around common values and the goals ensuing from them, and therefore it became a great event of what might be called ethical ecumenical significance.” Please see the book from which this quote was taken for further discussion of this and other methods of nonviolent action employed by KOR: Jan Jósef Lipski (Olga Amsterdamska and Gene M. Moore, tr.). KOR: Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland, 1976-1981. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985.

For a list of ”further reading” please see the cross-post.

The Palestinian Struggle & Nonviolence

Please see this post at ReligiousLeftLaw. (I tried to cross-post here but I couldn’t format it properly.)

Barack Obama's BBQ, 2011

Barack Obama's BBQ, 2011, a College Humor video by way of The Huffington Post. Enjoy.

The Availability Heuristic & The Homeless

“Search your memory for the homeless people you saw most recently. What were they like? The unobtrusive homeless person is easily forgotten. We tend to remember the person who sings on the bus, who intrudes on passersby, who is drunk, or is obviously high on some drug. Moreover, we prepare ourselves to behave in certain ways if such a person approaches us, such preparation being exactly the type of ancillary event…that enhances recall of the event leading to it. Hence our view of ‘the homeless’ is based on the memorable homeless, people whose emotional and physical debilitation is so severe that it suggests that poverty alone cannot be the cause of their problems.” [Yet the fact remains that the ‘vast majority of the homeless are poor, just plain poor.’]—Reid Hastie and Robyn M. Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making (2001): 87.