Topic: Culture War

Quotes

Professional Culture and Market Power
Tl;dr: A great deal of market power is created and exercised, not by monopolistic companies, but by professional monocultures on the labor side, even in very competitive product markets. I. The Puzzle of Market Power Arbitrage is the main motive force in economic theory: if there’s a profit opportunity out there, we . . .
The Linguistics of Corrupted Language: Why Orwell Doesn't Need Whorf
The political corruption of language is often called Orwellian, and indeed Orwell was deeply concerned with it, both his essay “Politics and the English Language”, and the role of Newspeak in his novel 1984. He has in mind a bidirectional process: The decline of a language must ultimately have political and . . .
Play, The Antidote to Populism
A common complaint in our era of global populism is that certain politicians are making a mockery of our institutions. Don’t they realize politics is more than just a game? They should take politics seriously and stop playing. Any observer of politics can sympathize with this complaint. But what if it . . .
On "Feels-Based" Policy
Right-wingers often claim that Leftists, especially the campus left, decide political questions based mainly on feelings, as opposed to their own supposedly hard-nosed evaluation of the facts. The charge isn’t entirely unfair, but it’s not quite accurate either. Facts and Feelings First, the charge imagines some sort of two-mode decision module in . . .