WHAT CAN I SAY?

The situation in Puerto Rico is appalling and Trump's response is despicable.  All  the things that have been said by progressive commentators are true.  What more is there to say?  It will be a miracle if Puerto Rico recovers sufficiently to sustain a genuine economy and community.  My "vagrant thought" of September 21st may well prove true.  Once again I am reminded how little difference it makes that I [and countless others] express opinions.

As for ex-Secretary Price, what matters is not his luxury trips but his successful efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act.  Across this nation, ugliness and racism and wanton cruelty reign.  Our only hope is to somehow persaude millions of slackards to take the trouble to vote in the next round of elecions, so that we can regain some measure of political power and begin to reverese the damage.

Yesterday, our across the hall neighbor, Addie Posner, had a birthday.  She is a friendly lady with macular degeneration that interferes with her sight.  It seems she has just turned ninety-five!  It gives me hope that I can live long enough to see a somewhat better world before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING

In 1990, I founded University Scholarships for South African Students, or USSAS, a one-man effort to raise money for bursaries for poor Black young men and women in South Africa who been admitted to historically Black universities but could not afford to matriculate.  Over the next twenty-five years, during almost forty trips to South Africa, I met a wide assortment of South Africans.  Quite the most unforgettable character was Renfrew Christie, a White English-speaking political scientist with an Oxford degree who spent a number of years in jail for his part in the effort to blow up a nuclear power reactor.  For many years, Renfrew served as the Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of the Western Cape, one of the best historically Black universities in the country.

Since his retirement, Renfrew has been circulating interesting material to a circle of friends, among whom I am privileged to count myself as one.  Yesterday, he sent me a link to a fascinating document, prepared by a firm called CapGemini, which I recommend to you.  It details the growth world-wide in the numbers and affluence of HNWI, which is to say High Net Worth Individuals.  Its concern is not, as you might expect, to highlight the appalling wealth inequality in the world, but rather to warn wealth managers that BigTech, which is to say data driven advice about investing, is cutting into the market share and profits of traditional money mnanagers.

I cannot create a link, but if you Google World Wealth report 2017 and go to Capgemini, you can find it.

Take a look at some of the tables and charts and such.  The amount of money floating around the world looking for a home is staggering.  CapGemini predicts that it will soon reach one hundred trillion dollars.  

ANSWER TO THE POP QUIZ

Kyla Lafleur writes "Oh Bob, your arrogance squeals like nails on a chalkboard between and within the lines of almost everything you write on this blog. But we think you are great anyway.”  This very much reassured me that my readers understand me.

The answer to the Pop Quiz is this:  Each of us has a public face, a front, as we say, which means not only our official persona but the front of our bodies [as opposed to the back or the behind, which is private, covered up, dirty, but secretly enticing and exciting].  We try very hard to communicate the lie that this front is the real person.  But we are always fascinated, when we look at other people, by what lies behind that public face, that front.  Most often, the discovery of what lies behind a person’s front causes us to lower our opinion of the person, to say, disapprovingly or dismissively, “Oh, that front is not what he or she is really like.”  However,  with some people, to whom we accord a special or elevated status, this process of re-assessment is reversed.  When we discover the secret weaknesses or foibles of someone we admire, those imperfections make him or her more human, more accessible, without lowering our opinion at all.

When I speak openly about aspects of my personality or behavior that would ordinarily be kept private so as not to incur disapproval, I am implicitly asserting that I am one of those special people whose private failings amuse us or make the person seem human.  In short, my confession of envy of Rawls’ reputation is an expression of arrogance.

Well, enough about me.  Let’s talk about you.  What do you think of me?

POP QUIZ

I am curious about my readership.  This business of blogging is very hard for me, because I cannot see you, see how you respond, hear you as you comment.  It is all really odd.

So here is my pop quiz.  In my last post, I confessed that I am envious of Rawls' fame.  Is there  anyone among my readers who understands that this confession [not the envy, the confession of it] is an expression of my arrogance?

I WAS THINKING

I should like to take a few moments to respond to several comments and also to explain my approach to Rawls’ work. I talk a good deal about Rawls’ A Theory of Justice for four reasons:  First, because he is by common agreement the most influential social and political theorist in the Anglo-American philosophical world during the last one hundred years and as a political philosopher, I feel a certain obligation to engage with his theories in whatever way I think is appropriate; Second, because Rawls’ theoretical efforts bear an interesting relationship to Kant’s moral theory, which I have of course been very engaged with for sixty years, and I find it rewarding to think through the structure of his argument in that regard;  Third, because Rawls claims, and really never deep down gives up the claim, that he is proving a theorem in Bargaining Theory, a subject about which I know a good deal, and I enjoyed writing a book showing that the theorem was invalid [this, pace Jerry Fresia’s comment about puzzles];  and Finally because I am secretly envious of Rawls for achieving the reputation that I never did in the field of political philosophy [O.K., so now it is not so secret.]

I am actually not at all taken by Rawls’ interminable, endlessly revised elaborations of the fretwork and detail of his bloated theory.  A Theory of Justice is, as I have several times remarked, a slender monograph in Game Theory wearing the philosophical equivalent of a cinematic fat suit.  Since I am not particularly sympathetic to Rawls’ view of modern society, his opinions about all manner of things do not arouse my interest.  But his original idea, to overcome the standoff between utilitarianism and intuitionism by invoking the social contract tradition modernized by Game Theory, was brilliant, in my judgment, and that is worth discussing.

So, whether Rawls did or did not endorse the Welfare State or Democratic Socialism at some point in his career is of no importance to me.  If I seek inspiration of a socio-political sort, I read Marx rather than Rawls, or even Mannheim and Weber [neither of whom Rawls gives any evidence of having read seriously.]

With regard to my little thought experiment about what U. S. Gross Domestic Income would amount to if divided equally among all 330 million Americans, the point was not to suggest that as a realistic political platform, but to raise doubts about the unquestioned assumption that big league inequality in income is somehow required to get the right people into the right jobs.  My point was that because America is so phenomenally productive [as is every other modern post-industrial national economy], relatively small variations in wage levels could probably do the job rather well.  Certainly nothing remotely resembling the present income pyramid is required

WORLD FAMOUS IN POLAND [COURTESY OF MEL BROOKS]

I have just received a request from a professor of philosophy teaching in Qom, Iran, for permission to translate my book on Kant's First Critique into Persian!  He notes that Iran does not recognize copyright laws but feels that it would be "moralic" to ask for my permission.  Needless to say, I agreed.

HELP!!!

I clicked on the wrong thing and deleted a long comment about my last post.  Would the person who posted it please re-post it.  My apologies.  I am such a klutz!