What is PPE here? (checking Wikipedia) The Oxford-based interdisciplinary program?
1: yes, exactly. Seen (perhaps unfairly*) as a process for producing glib, shallow politicians who are more interested in sounding bracingly counterintuitive than displaying any actual knowledge or strategic ability.
(*There are to my certain knowledge PPE graduates who are highly knowledgeable strategic thinkers. None of them went into politics though.)
Personal protective equipment. I gather that in certain circles, people read life vest manuals for fun.
Serious question: how is it the Conservatives* came to be led by such utter Dunning-Kruger cases? Britain was a serious country not long ago, for a long time the most serious of all countries, and for long stretches of that under Tory government.
*Or is it all the parties?
re: 2
I used to teach it. I don't recall students doing it being worse or lazier or more glib than any others. I don't think it's the program itself, which is, ultimately, just a name for a more or less self-service mix of the three courses.
I think it's more that it's the program of choice for a certain kind of wanker, who was a wanker before they went in, and remains a wanker after.
I suppose it hones a certain kind of quickness -- it's a lot of reading and a lot of writing -- that can be easily mistaken by the gullible for smartness. But that's more a general feature of the Oxford tutorial system, rather than anything to do with PPE itself.
re: 4
I think no party is immune, but the Tories are particularly guilty of it. There's been no 'there' there for a long time. It's glib lazy wankers all the way down.
Agree with 5, hence my (perhaps unfairly).
I suppose it reinforces certain bad habits. If you are writing 3 essays a week, you are necessarily going to have to get better at producing quick, economical (in terms of your own effort), probably fairly shallow, written work. It's a big difference from, say, writing an essay every 2 to 3 weeks, which would be more the norm at a typical UK university.
Brexit is a fucking disaster.
Even on a personal level, I wouldn't be at all surprised if I lost my job, and my wife lost her right to live in the UK.
4: This is ex recto, but... the same way the US did? The Brexit vote in Britain was a lot like the 2016 election in America. Most if not all differences in outcome can be explained by the fact that one was a referendum on course of action and the other was a candidate for office, and parliamentary system vs. FPTP presidential. In America the sane and vaguely honorable right-wingers were "nevertrumpers" who ultimately didn't hold elected office and didn't hurt the party too much when they left. In Britain they were leaders of Parliament who stepped down or declined a leadership position right after the vote.
Yeah, I've become increasingly sure that no-deal followed by mild catastrophe is now the most likely outcome. The firm I work for was bought by an EU firm shortly after the vote (taking advantage of the fact that the pound dropped, making us seem 20% cheaper) and we might actually do well out of the chaos because helping people deal with chaos is what we do, but it is just generally going to be a complete cake and arse party.
10: Trump isn't establishment; the Brexit leaders are as establishment as you get. That said, there do seem to be some parallels.
Prompted by my initial Wikipedia search: there's a Trinity College in both Oxford and Cambridge? Do they have slapfights (or the U equivalent) over which is the proper one, or is there an accepted distinguishing shorthand?
re: 11
Funding for the sort of work I do has been drying up now for a while. I think that's partly the never ending austerity finally reaching the end state for the sorts of cultural institutions that hire me/us, and partly it's Brexit, for sure.
We are already being asked by EU people we work with to set up an EU branch/subsidiary so they can continue to write us into grant proposals and the like.
I'm sure I've said versions of this before, but it really has been a surprise to me since moving to the UK to find out that the conservatives running the country here are just as irresponsible, cynical, and feckless* as the ones running the country in the US. I really did always give them credit for being better than the US right.
I will very likely have to relocate again if Brexit really does go through. (ugh)
*or at least they're competitive with US wingnuts on these counts. I guess some points are due for being less openly racist, god-bothering, and gun-crazy, so I supposed that's worth something.
Institute of Economic Affairs, I presume.
there's a Trinity College in both Oxford and Cambridge? Do they have slapfights (or the U equivalent) over which is the proper one, or is there an accepted distinguishing shorthand?
"Trinity Oxford" and "Trinity Cambridge" are generally accepted shorthand. There's also a St John's College at each, but they are named after different saints (Baptist in Oxford, Evangelist in Cambridge). Both also have a Corpus Christi College and a Jesus College (same Jesus in each case), a Pembroke College (different Pembrokes) a St Catherine's College (possibly the same Catherine though it's unclear), a St Edmund's (same Edmund but it's a College at one and a Hall at the other) a Queen's College (well, Oxford has a Queen's College and Cambridge a Queens' College) and a Wolfson College (same Wolfson).
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Whatever the virtues of Mr. Rogers, "post" is not interchangeable with "after" and I seriously would like to murder him for pretending it is.
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There's also a Trinity in Dublin?
22: There must be quite a few people on your kill list.
24: You have no idea. Also, email me? I want to talk Melrose.
Prompted by my initial Wikipedia search: there's a Trinity College in both Oxford and Cambridge?
And Dublin. Not Durham though. Durham does have a St. John's (like Oxford and Cambridge) and a University (like Oxford) .
Oxford and Cambridge also share: Corpus Christi, Jesus, Magdalene, Pembroke, Queen's St Catha/erine's, St Edmund
26 adds value because I forgot Magdalen(e).
4: Lead poisoning.
4: Carbon Dioxide.
4: Neoliberalism.
In a twisted sort way, you almost have to admire the DUP for the absoluteness of their determination to die in this ditch. They aren't Paisley's successors for nothing.
[O]ne senior DUP figure told The Sun that [...] "We won't be bounced into anything. We're going to slow it all down. This is a battle of who blinks first, and we've cut off our eyelids."
I like how that's even stupider than the usual metaphor of playing chicken after removing the steering wheel.
there's a Trinity College in both Oxford and Cambridge?
And Dublin.
And San Antonio!
And a Corpus Christi in Texas!
I'll bet it even has a college!
It does! There's a Texas A&M branch there.
i remember the discussion here right after the referendum, it's a bit amazing that the weird delusions of the tories have taken so long to be thoroughly plumbed and i thought that bit in the ivan rogers speech was the most elucidating as well - along the lines of what i said here just after the vote: http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_15491.html#1895410
stephen bush put 32 more politely when he pointed out-i think earlier today?-that among the dup, the gov't of the republic of ireland, and the tory party only two of them have a mandate to achieve their goals via economic self harm.
the kid's uk passport seems quaintly pointless now, although he just got his first uk univ acceptance last week.
Technocratic overreach and thin democratic accountability is not just a problem at the EU level either, as Paul Tucker, in his recent work focussing primarily on central banks, has illustrated.Tooze's latest is all about this. The point he repeatedly makes though is that, however much the technocrats overreached, they did so while elected leaders were utterly failing to deal with anything.
There is, of course, much more to be said on the extent to which monetary union, especially one with, in my view, serious design flaws from the start, changed the Union very fundamentally, and marked, and required, a completely different type of decision-making from a Single Market and Customs Union.
In longer and more answer to (4), have a nicely written, informative and searching review of a not-good-sounding* book attempting same: http://review31.co.uk/article/view/587/centrist-sensibility
*One of the book's authors is a known danger on twitter (if by danger you mean nincompoop): but if the book is probably bad the review is worth reading I think
s/b longer and more serious answer, sorry -- though it's quite funny as well as being serious
There's a Trinity at U of Toronto too. "The Cat That Went To Trinity" was the first Robertson Davies story I read and the "Trinity" in the title confused me so much that I took me several novels to realize he was Canadian.
This is pretty spicy:
Danton, of course, famously supposedly said, as he passed Robespierre's house on the way to his execution: "you will follow us shortly. Your house will be beaten down and sowed with salt". I obviously now cannot vouch for what now passes between Brexit supporting leadership candidates...
(ellipsis in original)
I forget, do we not name the former UK PM who took office in 1979? That was as 'adult' as Reaganism.
41: Thanks. From that link:
The problem with the Goves, Johnsons and Davises isn't that they're bluffers or liars or frauds, although it would certainly be nice if they weren't these things. No, the problem with these people is that they're shits.The problem clearly is both. The piece is right that ideology matters, but the sheer incompetence seems to be worth examining in itself.
I read through some of the old thread in 39, and one thing that surprises me (other than the fact that the Tories insisted on doing something so stupid) is how easy they have made it for the EU to pursue the "punish the UK without getting blamed for it" strategy. The Tories have self-inflected a painful Brexit.
I think this Trinity College in CT is one of the several colleges my dad applied to and found unbearably preppy and buttoned-down in the late 60s. He arrived at UW-Madison just in time for the Sterling Hall bombing, more or less. The golden age!
Roll call: how many haters of the word "neoliberalism" are still present? I vaguely recall that it was Walt and Halford; anyone else?
That old Brexit thread is a welcome and delightful reminder that the quick one-off writing project I started that summer is still nowhere near done. It feels like about 12 years have passed since then. That's a long time to hold your breath in the UK, even in metric years.
12: Trump may not be establishment Republican, but many of his enablers in Congress are establishment as all hell. They may know that the guy at the top is incompetent, but they have sold their birthrights for a mess of judges, and are fully complicit in the deal.
And important. Never Trump is the biggest American political lie since the Lost Cause.
From the quote in 40: "monetary union, especially one with, in my view, serious design flaws from the start, "
And this different from every other actually existing monetary union how?
50: Count me in on hating the word "neoliberalism." Once upon a time, it had meaning, and possibly even explanatory power. Now it just means "thing I disagree with."
50: FWIW I still think the word no longer means anything.
"Waiter. This chicken is neoliberal."
50.2. As I said in the Brexit thread, neoliberalism describes a real thing. There needs to be a word to describe an unreasoning confidence in poorly regulated markets that includes all the ostensible liberals who share that belief.
When I was in graduate school, "neoliberal" meant somebody who supported international institutions.
57: Take it up with everyone who uses it to mean "thing I disagree with". I didn't make it mean nothing -- the internet did.
It wasn't the internet. "Liberal" meant about a dozen different things before Hamsterdance existed.
The problem is that Unicode didn't standardize a "neoliberal" emoji. The meaning of actual text is too unstable for human communication.
59: Yeah, I get this. I still think we need a word. "Dumbasses" lacks precision.
I finally finished the link in the OP. I'm not sufficiently steeped in Brexit to understand it all, but Rogers puzzled me at the end with this prediction for a couple of years hence:
Third, the Irish backstop, enshrined in the Withdrawal Treaty will still be in place, and no other prospective Agreement being yet in sight which obviates the need for it
Has the Irish backstop really been "enshrined." My understanding is that key terms of any such backstop are still being negotiated.
Does the UK default to a position laid out in the Withdrawal Treaty if some other arrangement can't be contrived? In that event, where will the customs border be?
I do appreciate the choice Rogers made to frame the lecture in terms of revolution, and this cracked me up:
Though the Revolution has not yet got round to rebasing the calendar and renaming the months. The 18th Brumaire of Jacob Rees Mogg has a ring to it...
50: I hate the word "neoliberal" enough that when I just wrote "hate the word" my phone predicted it. I like it well enough in its proper usage, but it's rarely seen that way.
54: And this different from every other actually existing monetary union how?
Krugman's take is that the flaw of the EU is that it created a monetary union without a corresponding fiscal union, unlike the US, which has both. Here's an article by Tim Worstall that discusses Krugman's point, in the context of changes that Macron was proposing as a candidate prior to the French election:
Think back to how Paul Krugman describes the US monetary and fiscal union. So, for example, Louisiana gets hit by some horrible economic calamity. The bottom drops out of the global crawfish and gumbo market perhaps. There's going to be very tough times indeed there until the economy works out what it should be doing instead. Very tough times indeed in the absence of fiscal transfers to the area. Without monetary or fiscal union it's pretty easy: the Louisiana dollar depreciates against the other 49 state dollars, this makes labour in New Orleans cheaper, tourists flood in, exports flood out of the newly cheaper source and while things are bad they're not terrible. With monetary union there's no way to do this. So, instead, the state has to do what Greece is doing. Screw down wages by having high unemployment and excessive economic pain to gain the same end result perhaps a decade later. And with fiscal union what happens is that economic resources flow from the other 49 states to the one in trouble. Again as Krugman has pointed out, this doesn't have to be actual grants and special payments.
For we've got what are known as "automatic stabilisers". Profits in the area will be down, unemployment rises. So there's less taken out of the local economy in the form of profit and income taxes. Yet there's social security and welfare benefits and so on which will rise in volume and are paid from the Federal Treasury. Meaning that there's more money coming into the local economy too. The effect of the two together can be as much as two or three percent of local GDP and that's enough to shelter that local economy from those economic storms.
54, 67: The ECB originally lacked the authorities to act as lender of last resort or even to buy sovereign bonds. The eurozone was a monetary union without a central bank.
I'm a bit sorry my joke restarted this conversation, but "neoliberal" is a fine if often misused word, and most* of the pushback against using it came from neoliberals and moderate Democrats trying to shut down leftist criticism of their policies.
*Present company excepted, sincerely.
67: I hate having to disagree with Paul Krugman (though I think what I am more likely to be doing is disagreeing with the idiot Worstall's misunderstanding of Krugman), but you just can't say that the EU doesn't have significant fiscal transfers just because it's not officially a fiscal union. Poland, to pick one, will get €106 billion from the EU over the 2014-2020 period. That is equivalent to 5% of Polish GDP over the same period. FIVE PER CENT. Greece got €61 billion in the last three years, plus a shitload of loans at highly preferential rates, plus a shitload of debt forgiveness.
And it's worth doing the comparison between richest and poorest EU members, and richest and poorest US members, to see just how well this terrific fiscal union is actually doing.
Massachusetts has $65,000 per capita. American Samoa has $7874 per capita.
Luxembourg has $105,000 per capita. Bulgaria has $8,064 per capita.
Given that Bulgaria hasn't actually been in the EU very long... it's not looking like an obvious win for fiscal union.
Has the Irish backstop really been "enshrined." My understanding is that key terms of any such backstop are still being negotiated.
An Irish backstop is enshrined at a high level in the December 2017 agreement. The premise of his three predictions is that a WA has been signed, presumably implementing a legally binding version of that backstop.
It's worth also noting that American Samoa and Bulgaria have the same representation in the U.S. government. Use Mississippi like everybody else.
What *is* this Irish backstop?
67 et seq.: The larger point is that there isn't an ideal monetary union out in the existing world. Saying "The euro zone is not an ideal monetary union" or, as the bit quoted in 40 puts it "monetary union, especially one with, in my view, serious design flaws from the start," is to say that the euro zone shares characteristics with practically all currency areas.
I think the EU is stuck with the euro now, but it would have been better not have it than have it. I will not read a single word of Worstall's to find out if that was his point, however. I suffered with that motherfucker for years at the CT comment section.
68 to 75. AFAIK that's actually a pretty unique flaw.
As I take it, the relevant currency/fiscal union problem for the EU (in addition to those in 68, AIUI only partially remedied) isn't about long-term structural development transfers, it's about short-term economic cycle management transfers. In joining a currency union a state gives up monetary tools, like devaluation, which can be used to counter recessions. A fiscal union can offset the loss of monetary tools by the addition of fiscal tools, the automatic stabilizers mentioned in 67: the economic down cycle can be countered by state spending, rather than by monetary manipulation. The eurozone, AFAIK, has no such automatic stabilizers at the zone level. The eurozone (more accurately, Germany) has in fact insisted on austerity policies, ie. pro-cyclical policy rather than countercyclical. The eurozone therefore denies its members monetary tools without providing compensating fiscal tools.
76: Also not reading Worstall. Anyway, the choice for the non-German members of the euro zone is (and also was in the 1990s when monetary union was being negotiated) between a central bank in Frankfurt where they have a seat a the table and a central bank in Frankfurt where they don't have a seat at the table.
An important difference between British English and American English: in British English "to table a motion" means to formally introduce a topic for debate and/or for a vote, whereas in American English, by contrast, it means to climb onto the furniture and take a shit.
81: Moby is right. Very schlicht and modern.
80: The last serious attempt of a major European economy to pursue a monetary policy at odds with Germany's, as I understand it, was undertaken by Miterrand in the early 1980s (1981 says my memory, but I am not going to look things up just now to double-check) and he quickly abandoned it.
By the time the treaty of Maastricht was being negotiated, and certainly by the time the finer details of monetary union were being worked out -- who would be in, who would be out, what the parity rates would be, etc. -- interest rate movements in Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands (at least) were effectively simultaneous. The Bundesbank made a move, and everyone else followed.
So the Bundesbank effectively set monetary policy for the EU, with even fewer formal mechanisms for consultation and less international responsibility than the EMI or the ECB as it was first set up. Other continental economies could follow the Bundesbank line without a seat at the table, or they could be part of the euro zone's European system of central banks, with a seat at the governing table.
68: The US between the demise of the Bank of the United States and the set-up of the Federal Reserve lacked a central bank as well. I don't know the history of the Bank of England well enough off the top of my head to say which tools it had when, but it's instructive that UK pounds are still issued by banks that are not the Bank of England.
The ones from the Bank of Scotland are real, but don't accept the ones that are clearly photocopies.
Issuing banknotes is somewhat different from currency creation.
86: Only accept translucent photocopies.
Danske Bank--literally "Danish Bank", headquartered in Copenhagen--banknotes are legal tender in the UK. What an absurd country.
Yeah but that can only be true because DB has been laundering the money of the people who own half London now
OWNED ALL OF IT BACK IN MY DAY. KIDS TODAY, FUCKING USELESS.
Trying to get anybody south of Newcastle to accept Scottish banknotes, or anybody in Great Britain to accept NornIrish ones is a quick course in the distinction between legal tender and currency.
Danegeld would be a good name for a vasectomy clinic
84: Thanks.
85: The 19th century US wasn't a paragon of financial stability, as I recall.
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Did I just hallucinate a FPP that yelled BOOBS?
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94.2: Indeed, it was not. Again illustrating that a currency zone need not be ideal to function.
haha. Yes it did! It's not time-sensitive though, and no one had yet commented on it, so I decided to save it for a day or two. It feels like there's lots of arguments to be had over Elizabeth Warren that we'll all regret, and need a nice palate-cleanser, like BOOBS.