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Continuing on Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (2017) and “What Is the Point of Equality?” (1999).
Should the amount of respect that a worker gets be proportional to his or her market value? Our guest tells us more about how all citizens have the right to have their interests considered and what this means for how the relationship between employers and employees might change. We talk health care, income inequality, Tyler Cowen, libertarianism, and more.
Start with part one. We'll do some post-guest discussion to more thoroughly cover the text in part 3, but you needn't wait: Get the unbroken, ad-free Citizen Edition now.
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Luke T says
September 28, 2018 at 5:13 pmI remember now what I wanted to say about this interview, even though I listened to it on the first day of release (Monday, 17 September) and have not consulted it since. I recall being struck by how – both on the author’s own accounting, and as reflected by PEL hosts’ commentary – the philosophical ambitions of her project ultimately have to marry up (either implicitly or explicitly) with the public’s general disposition / ideological affiliation, for them to have any purchase on policy or real, practical outcomes (which presumably is motivating the work, at least in part).
To do so otherwise would be to render your life’s scholarly work so much a giant lead paperweight, for it not having enough traction or intuitive uptake outside of the cloistered confines of the academy. This is what I take from the mature intellectual compromises involved, at least. and so that’s to be commended.
it seems like the author is just trying to correct for some of the most egregious and most obvious distortions of original, classic liberal economic philosophy. Those, especially as she recommends in the preview of her current/future work (http://philosophy247.org/podcasts/neo), might tug even at the hard-core libertarian’s conscience and sense of fairness.
Considering her to be more libertarian than the orthodox libertarian, as Mark suggested, is a really interesting thought experiment that I hope the PEL crew will return to at some point.
Matthew says
September 29, 2018 at 2:21 pmI feel like Wendy Brown needs to be on this one. Libertarianism and it’s recent iterations seem fine when it comes to people being more involved in their schools and the Feds being less involved. However the tangled web of pensions being tide to retirement really makes Libertarianism seem like another facade of Neo Liberal and it’s technocratic analysism sneaking into a political gap caused by the absence of the Demos caused by its nature.
Matthew says
September 29, 2018 at 2:24 pmI kind of missed my point. What I am saying is as a matter of respect shouldn’t we try to keep the Institutions like Academia around but Purge the Neoliberalism and it’s instruments first.