Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
GREAT talk by Deirdre McCloskey at the Illinois Policy Institute last night.
She was promoting her book Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World
This essay, entitled The Great Enrichment Came and Comes from Ethics and Rhetoric gives some insight into her ideas.
Nice Work
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What happens when an expert on 19th-century British industrial novels—who is a professor, a feminist, and a deconstructionist–finds herself in an actual factory?
This not being a time-travel novel, the factory is a contemporary one for the book’s setting in mid-1980s Britain. It is a metalworking plant called Pringle’s, run by managing director Vic Wilcox. Vic is not thrilled when his boss (Pringle’s is owned by a conglomerate) suggests that he participate in something called the “shadow” program, designed to make academics and businesspeople better-acquainted with one another, but he goes along with the request.
Robyn Penrose, literature professor at a nearby university, is also not thrilled about her nomination to participate in the program, but she is concerned about her job in an era of reduced university funding, and also thinks she had better do as asked. The way the program works is that Robyn will be Vic’s “shadow,” joining him at the plant every Wednesday, sitting in on his regular activities, and learning just a bit about what is involved in managing a business.
Vic is a self-made man, not well-educated and with few interests outside work. He is acutely aware of the danger that faces Pringle’s under the current economic climate, and is resolved that his factory will not join the long list of those that have been tossed on the scrapheap.
There is nothing quite so forlorn as a closed factory–Vic Wilcox knows, having supervised a shutdown himself in his time. A factory is sustained by the energy of its own functioning, the throb and whine of machinery, the unceasing motion of assembly lines, the ebb and flow of workers changing shifts, the hiss of airbrakes and the growl of diesel engines from wagons delivering raw materials at one gate, taking away finished goods at the other. When you put a stop to all that, when the place is silent and empty, all that is left is a large, ramshackle shed–cold, filthy and depressing. Well, that won’t happen at Pringle’s, hopefully, as they say. Hopefully.
Robyn and Vic dislike each other on first meeting: Vic sees Robyn’s profession as useless, which Robyn sees Vic’s managerial role as brutal and greedy. She is appalled by what she sees in her first tour of the factory..especially the foundry:
They crossed another yard, where hulks of obsolete machinery crouched, bleeding rust into their blankets of snow, and entered a large building with a high vaulted roof hidden in gloom. This space rang with the most barbaric noise Robyn had ever experienced…The floor was covered with a black substance that looked like soot, but grated under the soles of her boots like sand. The air reeked with a sulphurous, resinous smell, and a fine drizzle of black dust fell on their heads from the roof. Here and there the open doors of furnaces glowed a dangerous red, and in the far corner of the building what looked like a stream of molten lave trickled down a curved channel from roof to floor…It was the most terrible place she had ever been in her life. To say that to herself restored the original meaning of the word “terrible”: it provoked terror, even a kind of awe. To think of being that man, wrestling with the heavy awkward lumps of metal in that maelstrom of heat, dust and stench, deafened by the unspeakable noise of the vibrating grid, working like that for hour after hour, day after day….That he was black seemed the final indignity: her heart swelled with the recognition of the spectacle’s powerful symbolism.
But still:
The situation was so bizarre, so totally unlike her usual environment, that there was a kind of exhilaration to be found in it…She thought of what her colleagues and students might be doing this Wednesday morning–earnestly discussing the poetry of John Donne or the novels of Jane usten or the nature of modernism, in centrally heated, carpeted rooms…Penny Black would be feeding more statistics on wife-beating in the West Midlands into her data-based, and Robyn’s mother would be giving a coffee morning for some charitable cause…What would they all think if they could see her now?
The London Times has refused to run an ad featuring Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust surviver Elie Wiesel. The ad, which has already run in several US newspapers, is headlined “Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it’s Hamas’ turn.”
(via Pam Geller. The whole ad can be seen here.)
The London Times said it refused the ad because “the opinion being expressed is too strong and too forcefully made and will cause concern amongst a significant number of Times readers.”
Hmm…reminds me of something. Yes…
In 1939, photos of dispossessed Czech Jews wandering the roads of Eastern Europe were made available to the Times. Geoffrey Dawson, then the editor of this publication, refused to publish them: it wouldn’t help the victims, he told his staff, and if they were published, Hitler would be offended. (Source: William Manchester, The Last Lion: Alone, cited in my 2006 post here and with an extended excerpt from the book at this interesting post on appeasement.)
…remind me of a few things.
There are a lot of people who can’t understand why Israel can’t just achieve a compromise settlement with the Palestinian leadership, in Gaza and elsewhere. In response to this kind of thinking, here’s a comment by the writer and former Army intelligence officer Ralph Peters, written circa 2006:
One of the most consistently disheartening experiences an adult can have today is to listen to the endless attempts by our intellectuals and intelligence professionals to explain religious terrorism in clinical terms, assigning rational motives to men who have moved irrevocably beyond reason. We suffer under layers of intellectual asymmetries that hinder us from an intuititive recognition of our enemies.
And in 1940, the French politician Paul Reynaud, who became Prime Minister of France just two months before the German invasion, incisively explained what was at stake at that point in time, and why it was so much greater than what had been at stake in 1914:
People think Hitler is like Kaiser Wilhelm. The old gentleman only wanted to take Alsace-Lorraine from us. But Hitler is Genghis Khan.(approximate quote)
Today’s radical Islamists, including leaders of Hamas, often assert: “We love death like you love life.” This expression is very close to that of the Spanish Fascists of the 1930s: “Long live death!” The Fascist motto was taken from that of the Spanish Foreign legion….it is pretty strange even as the motto of an elite military force, and, when adopted as the motto of a society-wide movement, is a pretty good indicator of people who have moved “irrevocably beyond reason,” as Peters puts it.
The excuse-making for Palestinian terrorism, and romanticization of same, continues. It is especially strong today in Europe, but also exists on a considerable scale in the U.S., and indeed, even some Jews and Jewish organizations seem to be bending over backwards to find some moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas. I believe the psychological mechanisms behind these attitudes are significantly explained in a 1940 essay by C S Lewis on the “Dangers of National Repentance.” When Lewis wrote (March 1940), there was evidently a movement among Christian youth to “repent” England’s sins (which evidently were thought to include the treaty of Versailles) and to “forgive” England’s enemies.
“Young Christians especially..are turning to it in large numbers,” Lewis wrote. “They are ready to believe that England bears part of the guilt for the present war, and ready to admit their own share in the guilt of England…Most of these young men were children…when England made many of those decisions to which the present disorders could plausibly be traced. Are they, perhaps, repenting what they have in no sense done?”
“If they are, it might be supposed that their error is very harmless: men fail so often to repent their real sins that the occasional repentance of an imaginary sin might appear almost desirable. But what actually happens (I have watched it happen) to the youthful national penitent is a little more complicated than that. England is not a natural agent, but a civil society…The young man who is called upon to repent of England’s foreign policy is really being called upon to repent the acts of his neighbor; for a foreign secretary or a cabinet minister is certainly a neighbor…A group of such young penitents will say, “Let us repent our national sins”; what they mean is, “Let us attribute to our neighbor (even our Christian neighbor) in the cabinet, whenever we disagree with him, every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy.” (Emphasis added.)
It is my strong suspicion that the last big reshuffle before next year’s General Election in Britain has gone largely unnoticed in the rest of the world, though it is the biggest political story here. Nevertheless, it is possible that people might like to see what is behind the headlines about the promoting of women, the supposedly eurosceptic Cabinet (no, it is not) and the reshuffle that has been described by no less a person than Charles Moore, as the worst in twenty-five years (can’t remember the others but doubt it). So I have written my own analysis on the subject and present it to CBz herewith.
The one thing I am very pleased about is the replacement of William Hague by Philip Hammond who seems to have a better understanding of reality.