Corey Robin's Blog, page 101

Petraeus may not be quite all in at CUNY

General David Petraeus has been hired to teach at CUNY at the University of Southern California (h/t Anna Law):

David H. Petraeus, the former four-star U.S. Army general who resigned as head of the Central Intelligence Agency last year after confessing to an extramarital affair, will teach part-time at USC and help mentor students who are veterans, officials are announcing Thursday.

Petraeus, who commanded coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, will teach and participate in seminars on such issues as international relations, government, leadership, information technology and energy, according to USC…

…

Petraeus, 60, is supposed to start his faculty position at USC July 1 for an open-ended period, officials said.

“I am very grateful to have an opportunity to be part of a great university that prizes academic excellence, that is doing cutting-edge research in areas of enormous importance to our country, and that is known for steadfast support of its veterans and ROTC programs,” Petraeus stated in a statement released Thursday.

Someone better tell the CUNY administration: Petraeus may not be quite all in.

In a statement, Mr. Petraeus said he looked forward to leading a seminar “that examines the developments that could position the United States — and our North American partners — to lead the world out of the current global economic slowdown.”

The idea, Ann Kirschner, dean of Macaulay, said in an interview, “is an interdisciplinary seminar in keeping with his research interest in energy, advanced manufacturing, life sciences and information technology.”

In addition, she said, he will give talks and meet with students about their research projects. “We’re still figuring out how much time he’ll be available to us and how to get him as involved as possible in the life of the college,” she said. His compensation for the one-year position, which begins in August, is “still in discussion,” she said.

Matthew Goldstein, chancellor of the CUNY system, said in a statement that “with his appointment, our students will have a unique opportunity to learn about public policy firsthand from a distinguished leader with extraordinary experience and expertise in international security issues, intelligence matters and nation-building.

Anyone who teaches at CUNY has to fill out and sign a Multiple Position Form, which attests to the fact that he is not doing more than eight hours of work per week outside the university. I’ll be curious to see what our newest hire writes on his.

Oh well, time for a new sign: Guess Who’s Not Teaching at CUNY!

Look Who’s Teaching at CUNY!

It was only a matter of time…

h/t Liza Featherstone

Petraeus is Coming to CUNY. Just “like the invasion of Iraq.”

In case you were wondering about this…

David H. Petraeus, who resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency last November after having an extramarital affair with his biographer, will serve as a visiting professor at the City University of New York next academic year, the university announced on Tuesday.

Mr. Petraeus, who will be the next visiting professor of public policy at the university’s Macaulay Honors College, had been approached by many universities, but settled on CUNY because he admires its diversity of students, locations and offerings, his lawyer, Robert Barnett, said in an interview.

…Buzzfeed reports this (h/t Michael Busch):

There is a quiet and conventional path from shame to redemption for American political figures brought down by personal sins, and David Petraeus has, just six months after resigning as director of the CIA, followed it with his signature focus on strategy and on his own image.

…

“The rollout is devised like the invasion of Iraq,” said one person who spoke recently to Petraeus.

…

But people around Petraeus say he’s been thinking hard about how to manage his comeback, his image, and his new role outside the national security apparatus in which he’s been a key player for a decade, and in which he’s spent his entire adult life. Petraeus has always been famous both for his intelligence and for his ability to manage the press, and he has signaled that he has thought hard about his predicament.

Would It Not Be Easier for Matt Yglesias to Dissolve the Bangladeshi People and Elect Another?

Yesterday, after a building housing garment factories collapsed in Bangladesh, killing almost 200 more than 250 workers, Matt Yglesias wrote:

Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.

The reason is that while having a safe job is good, money is also good. Jobs that are unusually dangerous—in the contemporary United States that’s primarily fishing, logging, and trucking—pay a premium over other working-class occupations precisely because people are reluctant to risk death or maiming at work. And in a free society it’s good that different people are able to make different choices on the risk–reward spectrum….

Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans….The current system of letting different countries have different rules is working fine.

Today, after Matt Yglesias wrote these words, Agence France-Presse reported this:

Hundreds of thousands of garment workers walked out of their factories in Bangladesh Thursday, police said, to protest the deaths of 200 people in a building collapse, in the latest tragedy to hit the sector.

Grief turned to anger as the workers, some carrying sticks, blockaded key highways in at least three industrial areas just outside the capital Dhaka, forcing factory owners to declare a day’s holiday.

“There were hundreds of thousands of them,” said Abdul Baten, police chief of Gazipur district, where hundreds of large garment factories are based. “They occupied roads for a while and then dispersed.”

Police inspector Kamrul Islam said the workers had attacked several factories whose bosses had refused to give employees the day off.

…

Managers had allegedly ignored workers’ warnings that the building had become unstable.

Survivors say the building developed cracks on Tuesday evening, triggering an evacuation of the roughly 3,000 garment workers employed there, but that they had been ordered back to production lines.

Would it not be easier for Matt Yglesias to dissolve the Bangladeshi people and elect another?

Among Friends

At last, someone put my book—WHICH IS NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK—on the right table at the Strand.

How Two Can Make One: Nietzsche on Truth, Mises on Value, and Arendt on Judgment

Nietzsche, The Gay Science:

Multiplication table. —One is always wrong, but with two, truth begins. —One cannot prove his case, but two are irrefutable. (§260)

Ludwig von Mises, Socialism:

Computation demands units. And there can be no unit of the subjective use-value of commodities. Marginal utility provides no unit of value….

In an exchange economy, the objective exchange value of commodities becomes the unit of calculation….We are able to take as the basis of calculation the valuation of all individuals participating in trade. The subjective valuation of one individual is not directly comparable with the subjective valuation of others. It only becomes so as an exchange value arising from the interplay of the subjective valuations of all who take part in buying and selling….Calculations based upon exchange values enable us to reduce values to a common unit. (98-99)

Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future:

The power of judgment rests on a potential agreement with others, and the thinking process which is active in judging…finds itself always and primarily…in an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement. From this potential agreement judgment derives its specific validity. This means, on the one hand, that such judgment liberate itself from the “subjective private conditions,” that is, from the idiosyncrasies which naturally determine the outlook of each individual in his privacy and are legitimate as long as they are only privately held opinions, but which are not fit to enter the market place, and lack all validity in the public realm. And this enlarged way of thinking, which as judgment knows how to transcend its own individual limitations, on the other hand, cannot function in strict isolation or solitude; it needs the presence of others “in whose place” it must think, whose perspectives it must take into consideration, and without whom it never has the opportunity to/operate at all….

…Common sense…discloses to us the nature of the world insofar as it is a common world; we owe to it the fact that our strictly private and “subjective” five senses and their sensory data can adjust themselves to a nonsubjective and “objective” world which we have in common and share with others. Judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass.

…In aesthetic no less than in political judgments, a decision is made, and although this decision is always determined by a certain subjectivity, by the simple fact that each person occupies a place of his own from which he looks upon and judges the world, it also derives from the fact that the world itself is an objective datum, something common to all its inhabitants. The activity of taste decides how this world, independent of its utility and our vital interests in it, is to look and sound, what men will see and what they will hear in it.  (220-222)

Arendt, “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy,” in Responsibility and Judgment:

The validity of common sense grows out of the intercourse with people…The validity of such judgments would be neither objective and universal nor subjective, depending on personal whim, but intersubjective or representative. (141)

God Bless Benno Schmidt

I love Benno Schmidt. He’s the chair of the Board of Trustees of CUNY, where I teach, and a former president of Yale. More important, he’s a man who’s spent so much time in the business world that he’s no longer capable of leaving anything to the imagination. So you get from him a refreshingly crude form of honesty that you ordinarily don’t find in academia. Certainly not in university leaders, who are so adept at making themselves misunderstood that you’d think they were trained by apparatchiks in the former Soviet Union. Or Straussians.

Anyway, Benno was interviewed by the New York Post about his plans for CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, who’ll be retiring at the end of the year.  Long story short: Schmidt wants to make things nice for Goldstein. Even though CUNY’s faculty are badly paid, even though most of the teaching is done by adjuncts who are really badly paid—like, horribly paid (they’re treated even worse)—Benno’s got his eyes on the prize: making sure Matt has a nice sendoff and a sweet retirement.

Our union at Brooklyn College has a blog, which you should be checking out regularly, and they reproduced the Post article.  Here are some highlights:

CUNY is planning a golden parachute for Chancellor Matthew Goldstein.

…

“We’ll craft a special package for Matt,” Schmidt told The Post….

…

Goldstein, a former math professor and president of Baruch College, currently gets $490,000 a year in salary, plus a $90,000 housing allowance.

Schmidt said the post-retirement salary would be less, but the board is “going to want to be on the generous side.”

“I think he’s been underpaid as chancellor…

…

But Goldstein has other income. While chancellor, he has served since 2003 as a funds trustee at JPMorgan Chase & Co., which paid him $325,000 in 2011. Last December, the board overseeing mutual funds elected Goldstein its new chairman, a post that paid his predecessor $500,000 in 2011.

He is also entitled to a New York state pension.

Schmidt acknowledged that Goldstein’s post-retirement pay is likely to stir controversy among students and faculty members amid tuition hikes and budget cuts, but said private funds may subsidize the salary.

See what I mean? As crude as the day is long.

Update (8:20 pm)

Karl Steel directed me to this hilarious exchange on Twitter about Goldstein’s employment situation.

 

Update (April 22, 11 am)

In the comments section, Tim Shortell makes this astute observation:

One of the lessons when I teach stratification is how members of the elite are socialized into believing that they deserve extraordinary privilege. So the chair of the CUNY Board can say without irony that the Chancellor is underpaid and needs to be taken care of. Benno acknowledges that this might be “controversial” but what is left unsaid is he thinks it is because faculty, staff, and students just don’t see how deserving Goldstein is. That kind of class solidarity doesn’t happen by accident; you need a lot of people telling you how great you are, over and over, so that you start to believe it yourself.

The Idle Rich and the Working Stiff: Nietzche von Hayek on Capital v. Labor

Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human:

Culture and caste.—A higher culture can come into existence only when there are two different castes in society: that of the workers and that of the idle, of those capable of true leisure; or, expressed more vigorously: the caste compelled to work and the caste that works if it wants to….the caste of the idle is the more capable of suffering and suffers more, its enjoyment of existence is less, its task heavier. (§439)

…

My utopia.—In a better ordering of society the heavy work and exigencies of life will be apportioned to him who suffers least as a consequence of them, that is to say to the most insensible, and thus step by step up to him who is most sensitive to the most highly substantiated species of suffering and who therefore suffers even when life is alleviated to the greatest degree possible. (§462)

…

…the better, outwardly more favoured caste of society whose real task, the production of supreme cultural values, makes their inner life so much harder and more painful. (§480)

Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty:

Whoever desires the regular income for which he sells his labor must devote his working hours to the immediate tasks which are determined for him by others. To do the bidding of others is for the employed the condition of achieving his purpose. (186)

…

[The worker] has little knowledge of the responsibilities of those who control resources and who must concern themselves constantly with new arrangements and combinations; he is little acquainted with the attitudes and modes of life which the need for decisions concerning the use of property and income produces….While, for the employed, work is largely a matter of fitting himself into a given framework during a certain number of hours, for the independent it is a question of shaping and reshaping a plan of life, of finding solutions for ever new problems.  (188)

…

There can be little doubt, at any rate, that employment has become not only the actual but the preferred position of the majority of the population, who find that it gives them what they mainly want: an assured fixed income available for current expenditure, more or less automatic raises, and provision for old age. They are thus relieved of some of the responsibilities of economic life… (189)

…

The man of independent means is an even more important figure in a free society when he is not occupied with using his capital in the pursuit of material gain but uses it in the service of aims which bring no material return. It is more in the support of aims which the mechanism of the market cannot adequately take care of than in preserving that market that the man of independent means has his indispensable role to play in any civilized society. (190)

…

There must be, in other words, a tolerance for the existence of a group of idle rich—idle not in the sense that they do nothing useful but in the sense that their aims are not entirely governed by considerations of material gain.  (193)

…

However important the independent owner of property may be for the economic order of a free society, his importance is perhaps even greater in the fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs. There is something seriously lacking in a society in which all the intellectual, moral, and artistic leaders belong to the employed class. (193)

For earlier iterations of Nietzsche von Hayek, Nietzsche and the Marginals, and my ongoing effort to see the world of neoclassical and Austrian economics through the lens of philosophy and political theory, see…

Nietzsche von Hayek on Merit

The Price of Labor: Burke, Nietzsche, Menger

Nietzsche and the Marginals, again (on the construction of utility)

Nietzsche and the Marginals (on the foundation of value)

Even More Nietzsche von Hayek (on the higher types and the determination of value)

Nietzsche von Hayek (on reward and happiness, power and force)

The Entrepreneur as Medieval Lord (Schumpeter, all too Schumpeter)

The Ding an Sich of Economics (Jevons on the inscrutability of hearts and minds)

Nietzsche and Neoliberalism: When Commercial Actions Become Acts of Great Noblesse

Nietzsche on the Labor Question

And for some clarification, however imperfect and incomplete, of what I’m up to, see this comment here.

Nietzsche von Hayek on Merit

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow:

The value of work.—If we wanted to determine the value of work by how much time, effort, good or ill will, compulsion, inventiveness or laziness, honesty or deception has been expended on it, then the valuation can never be just; for we would have to be able to place the entire person on the scales, and that is impossible. Here the rule must be “judge not!” But it is precisely to justice that they appeal who nowadays are dissatisfied with the evaluation of work. If we reflect further we find that no personality can be held accountable for what it produces, that is to say its work: so that no merit can be derived from it; all work is as good or bad as it must be given this or that constellation of strengths and weaknesses, knowledge and desires. The worker is not free to choose whether he works, nor how he works. It is only from the standpoint of utility, narrower and wider, that work can be evaluated. (§286)

Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty:

In a free system it is neither desirable nor practicable that material rewards should be made generally to correspond to what men recognize as merit…

The value that the performance or capacity of a person has to his fellows has no necessary connection with its ascertainable merit….

The possibility of a true judgment of merit thus depends on the presence of precisely those conditions whose general absence is the main argument for liberty. It is because we want people to use knowledge which we do not possess that we let them decide for themselves. But insofar as we want them to be free to use capacities and knowledge of facts which we do not have, we are not in a position to judge the merit of their achievements. To decide on merit presupposes that we can judge whether people have made such use of their opportunities as they ought to have made and how much effort of will or self-denial this has cost them; it presupposes also that we can distinguish between that part of their achievement which is due to circumstances within their control and that part which is not.” (157-159)

From the Annals of Imperial Assymetry: Greg Grandin on the Venezuelan Election

Latin American historian Greg Grandin is a longtime friend of the blog. He’s been one of the main voices of wisdom and sanity on Venezuela over the years, whether in The Nation , or on Charlie Rose or Up With Chris Hayes (transcript here). This morning on FB he made a quick comment on the Venezuelan election, which I’m reproducing here with his permission.

• • • • •

On November 2, 2004, George W. Bush beat John Kerry 50.7 percent to 48.3 percent. Venezuela’s foreign minister immediately (either that night or the day after) recognized the results: “we will hope that in this second mandate we can improve our relations.”

Fast forward nine years, and Nicolás Maduro beats Henrique Capriles with 50.7% of the vote and the US refuses to recognize the result. “Look, we’re just not there yet,” said a State Department spokesman (who now works for—wait for it— John Kerry). “Obviously, we have nearly half the country that had a different view. And so we’ll continue to consult, but we’re not there yet.” [Leading Nathan Newman to quip on FB: "Maybe Kerry thought Venezuela jumped the gun back then, and this is pay back."]

Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and other Latin American countries have recognized the results, but Washington’s refusal gooses the opposition, who have ransacked and burned government buildings. There have been up to seven deaths. If anyone has any doubts about the flimsiness of Capriles’ claim that he was robbed, read this post by Francisco Toro, who is as antichavista as they come.