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The Liberalism of Classical Liberalism
I want to thank Matt for the invitation to blog through the semester at BHL. And contrary to Steve Horwitz's depiction I don't roll my eyes at the phase "bleeding heart libertarianism" but at the state of intellectual play in academia, and our broader intellectual culture, that makes the introduction of such an adjective necessary. As Steve highlights in his post on Jeff Sachs's understanding of libertarianism, there should be no doubt that folks misrepresent the classical liberal and libertarian position. Why would Sachs believe that "Compassion, justice, civic responsibility, honesty, decency, humility, respect, and even survival of the poor, weak, and vulnerable – are all to take a back seat." Did he read that in Adam Smith, in J. B. Say, in J. S. Mill, in F. A. Hayek, in Milton Friedman, in James Buchanan, or in Vernon Smith? Deirdre McCloskey's perhaps more than another other contemporary scholar is really trying hard to set the record straight. She has already published 2 weighty volumes, which I have written review essays on — Bourgeois Virtues and Bourgeois Dignity — and is currently finishing up Vol. 3, of a projected 6 volumes, and her work is so weighty because the argument requires that much elaboration in our current intellectual culture.
Our modern understanding of the technical economics, the structural political economy, and deeper moral philosophy of Adam Smith is so flawed that such a basic common concern of the Scottish Philosophers as that of creating the institutional conditions for a civil and compassionate society is lost in the rendering. Hume's focus on private property, the transference of property by consent, and the keeping of promises through contract are not rules that only benefit one segment of society at the expense of others, but instead form the general foundation for civil society and peaceful social cooperation. Smith's analysis of the wealth of nations is not ultimately measured in trinkets and gluttonous acts of consumption, but by a rising standard of living that is shared by more and more of the general population. It is an empirical matter as to which set of institutions best achieves that task. But the concern with raising the living standards of the least advantaged in society is never far from view. Sachs, in other words, I am arguing should know better. And so should others in philosophy, politics and economics. The atomistic neoclassical model has nothing whatsoever to do with liberalism as understood by classical political economist or the modern descendants of the mainline of political and economic thought.
The classical liberal political economists treat the individual not as atomistic, but as embedded within social settings – in families, in communities, in history. Yes there is both the self-interest postulate and the invisible-hand postulate, but these are not understood as the conventional critic wants to present them. The mainline of economic thought from Smith to Hayek has a rational choice analytical structure to the questions of the logic of choice, but it is rational choice for mortals, not robots. And there are invisible hand processes, but they depend on an institutional context to provide the filter processes which dictates the equilibrating tendencies exhibited. In short, the mainline of political economy from Smith to Hayek is one that does rational choice as if the choosers are human, and institutional analysis as if history mattered. No atomistic, ego-centric, prudence only analysis is to be found in this work properly read.
Furthermore, this mainline of political economy approach while rejecting the claims to resource egalitarianism, is firmly grounded in analytical egalitarianism. Anyone, who challenges the analytical egalitarian perspective is subject to scorn by Smith – e.g., his proposition that the only difference between the philosopher and the street porter is in the eyes of the philosopher, or his warning that the statesman who attempts to out guess the market would not only assume of level of responsibility he is incapable of judiciously exercising, but also would be nowhere as dangerous as in the hands of a man who thought himself up to the task. Hume and Smith presented a structural argument in political economy; an argument intended to discover a set of institutions where bad men could do least harm if they were to assume positions of power. As Hume put it, when we design institutions of governance we must presume that all men are knaves. And in a move that anticipated the modern political economy of both Hayek and Buchanan, Smith basically argued that our knavish behavior manifests itself in either arrogance or opportunism.
But the emphasis I have provided so far is on the restraints that classical liberals hoped to establish on the abuse of power by political elites. However, it is just as important to stress the emancipatory aspect of the doctrine as well. As Hayek writes in his essay "Individualism: True and False", Smith and other classical liberal political economists were concerned "not so much with what man might occasionally achieve when he was at his best but that he should have as little opportunity as possible to do harm when he was at his worst." Hayek continues: "It would scarcely be too much to claim that the main merit of the individualism which he and his contemporaries advocated is that it is a system under which bad men can do least harm. It is a social system which does not depend for its functioning on our finding good men for running it, or on all men becoming better than they now are, but which makes use of men in all their given variety and complexity, sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes intelligent and more often stupid." And Hayek concludes, "Their aim was a system under which it should be possible to grant freedom to all, instead of restricting it, as their French contemporaries wished, to 'the good and the wise'." (emphasis added)
The difference in judgment between Hayek and Sachs is not one of philosophical concern with the least advantage, but an empirical assessment of what system best provides "Compassion, justice, civic responsibility, honesty, decency, humility, respect, and even survival of the poor, weak, and vulnerable." The liberal vision has been throughout its history that sought to find a set of institutions that would produce a society of free and responsible individuals, who have the opportunity to participate and prosper in a market economy based on profit and loss, and who live in, and are activity engaged in, caring communities.
As Deirdre McCloskey put this point in her Bourgeois Virtues, one cannot answer empirical questions philosophically — they must be answered empirically. And that means that we must push the conversation about compassion, justice, civic responsibility, honesty, decency, humility, respect, and a concern for the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable, beyond romantic poetry and to hard-headed institutional analysis. Check out this recent discussion with Bob Lawson on the relationship between Economic Freedom and Income Inequality.
No doubt the liberalism in the classical liberal tradition reflects a bleeding heart libertarianism, but that compassionate concern for the least advantaged is always disciplined by the hard noised analysis of how the institutional environment within which we live together structures the incentives actors face in making decisions, and mobilizes the dispersed information throughout the social system that must be utilized in making decisions and learning from social interaction.
Matt linked to my course syllabus for Econ 828 – Constitutional Economics. This class is one I inherited from Professor James Buchanan and it is largely inspired by his work in political economy and social philosophy. The course ultimately is an invitation to inquiry into the rules of governance that enable us as fallible but capable human beings to live better together; to realize the gains from social cooperation under the division of labor.
Kevin Vallier
Thanks for these careful reflections. A great post. Let me add a small but important point.
You say:"The difference in judgment between Hayek and Sachs is not one of philosophical concern with the least advantaged, but an empirical assessment of what system best provides 'Compassion, justice, civic responsibility, honesty, decency, humility, respect, and even survival of the poor, weak and vulnerable."Yes, both Hayek and Sachs are concerned about what system best provides for Sachs' list of goods. But I believe they also differ about the means that may be permissibly used to bring them about. From reading Hayek and Sachs, Hayek seems considerably more concerned about the use of coercion to bring about social goods than Sachs and not merely because Hayek thinks coercion is less effective but because "coercion occurs when one man's actions are made to serve another man's will" and so faces a high standard of justification (Constitution of Liberty, p. 133). I'd guess that Sachs, while surely concerned with the use of coercion, would reject the high bar that Hayek and the majority of the liberal tradition set for justifying it. One defining characteristic of social democratic liberalism which Sachs defends is that it is considerably less concerned about the justification of coercion than contemporary classical liberals and their historical forebears (including new liberals like Green and Bosanquet). Once a democratic order has been justified and established, most social democrats think that the legislatures have extraordinary moral authority to coerce so long as they do not violate the standard list of liberal liberties (minus most economic liberties embraced by classical liberals). I'm consistently impressed by contemporary liberal democratic theorists' comfort with legislative coercion.I don't think you disagree with this, but its worth adding. You can share a concern for the least well-off with social democratic liberals and still affirm a stricter set of means for meeting that concern.
I was present at the last eye roll, and I must say that Steve's interpretation of it isn't unreasonable. Still, I believe Pete when he says why he actually did it. 🙂
I agree that bleeding-heart libertarian is a bit of a redundancy — particularly insofar as libertarian means classical liberal. I'm a libertarian because of my concern for the poor. I am increasingly convinced that the poor are best helped by and through free markets.
Now, as for romantic poetry, don't discount it so quickly. Some of us poets argue the markets are what help the poor. 🙂
>I am increasingly convinced that the poor are best helped by and through free markets.
But how do you justify this considering what's going on now. Sure we could free up the movement of capital now, but that wouldn't necessarily make the poor more free and better off, now would it?
Actually, it would. Freeing up capital would mean that it would be directed toward productive uses, meaning wealth and jobs will be created, meaning the unemployed will start working again, meaning wages will go up, meaning the working poor will be better off. And one is much freer in a real sense if you attain a certain level of financial freedom. Freeing up capital would most definitely necessarily make the poor more free and better off.
Damien S.
"Aspirin cures my headache, so taking even more aspirin will be even better!"
Freeing up capital was a good thing in 1776, and is a good thing for India with its layers of corrupt government. It doesn't follow that maximal liberty for capital is a good thing.
So are you some sort of Rawlsian? I don't disagree with anything Pete said in this post and I think it's spot on, but since when was libertarianism solely about doing about how the "poor" are doing? We're defending a social system in which "all men are knaves," a system in which in can best deal with the problems of knowledge, interest, and power (channeling Barnett here), and let's not forget, the moral foundation private property. Indeed, what is libertarianism if it's not about protecting private property? What differentiates our political philosophy from all others if not for private property?
I'm not sure what your objection is? That I said one of my own reasons for supporting the free market is that it makes the poor better off? How does that make me a Rawlsian? I think there are many reasons for supporting a liberal civil society — from the fact that people will be freer in it, to the fact that people will be more moral in it and the fact that the poor will be better off. I support having a more liberal civil society because I think people should be treated equally under the law, that it is the most natural system for a large, dense human population, and because property is an evolved trait that goes back to our lobe-finned fish ancestry, meaning we cannot do away with property rights without severe consequences. There are plenty of political ideologies that support property rights protections — they just differ (as libertarians and classical liberals themselves differ) on how those rights should be defined. Property rights is but one — vital — element of a complex network of social rules we ought to support if we want to realize a classical liberal civil society. It so happens (not coincidentally) that the same system that can turn someone's selfish pursuits to the common good makes the poor better off. Why not support liberalism on the basis that it best helps the poor? Why outright reject it, as you seem to do?
I'm a libertarian because of my concern for the poor. "
That statement implies some kind of difference principle a la Rawls. Either way, Libertarianism isn't a political philosophy whose moral foundations rest on solely helping "the poor." That principle wouldn't make libertarianism a coherent political philosophy because other political philosophies also share that concern. I'm not trying to say that libertarianism, free markets, private property, etc. don't help the poor (I believe that they tremendously do), but that's not what makes libertarianism, well, libertarianism.
Again, this is what attracted me to it, the fact that it would in fact help the poor. If it specifically harmed the poor, I would be against it. There are reasons it helps the poor that make sense to me, and match the way I understand how the world works. For example, I was attracted to Austrian economics because it most closely matches how I understand the world to work.
If the world is a zero sum game, then libertarianism would harm the poor. But if the world is a positive sum game, then libertarianism helps the poor. More, if the world is a positive sum game, and you treat it like it's a zero sum game, your policies will harm the poor.
Thus, I am a libertarian because it is the political ideology that most resembles the way the world works, as a set of self-organizing network processes with emergent properties, needing external orderer to keep things going well and right. This is a world in which value is created, complexity emerges, and bond-creation enriches. It is because of the fact that the economy is properly understood as a self-organizing network in which, yes, the right get richer, but the poor also get richer, and that libertarianism itself understand the economy this way, and thus recommends we allow the economy to so self-organize without interference, that I am a libertarian.
All of which is a fancy way of saying, I recognized that libertarianism helps the poor far more than does any other ideology. I don't see that as even remotely Rawlsian in nature, but only an explanation of why I came to accept libertarianism. I was concerned with the least well off having better lives; free markets provide the conditions for their having better lives. I suspect we will have a much better time of it convincing people to support the free market if we can help them understand this fact.
I share your enthusiasm for Austrian economics, libertarianism, and so forth and I'm glad to see that you also think that not only is libertariansim only moral grounded, but also that it is probably the most utilitarian, however, I just wanted to make a distinction as to what libertarianism really is.
Pete, Sachs was not attacking classical liberals. He was attacking libertarians.
Libertarians append, to all the important reasons for thinking that *capitalism* is beneficial for all, and that *capitalism* works to the benefit of the least advantaged, two things that are not true of classical liberals you mention. (1) A commitment to total laissez faire, even anarcho-capitalism in some cases, due to (2) variants of what are loosely called "moral arguments for capitalism." According to these (deontoloigcal) arguments, capitalism is just, because private property embodies "freedom" or "self-ownership," *regardless* of its consequences.
That is what makes libertarianism Sachs's target, and rightfully so.
Pete, Sachs was not attacking classical liberals. He was attacking libertarians.
Libertarians append, to all the important reasons for thinking that *capitalism* is beneficial for all, and that *capitalism* works to the benefit of the least advantaged, two things that are not generally true of classical liberals you mention. (1) A commitment to total laissez faire, even anarcho-capitalism in some cases, due to (2) variants of what are loosely called "moral arguments for capitalism." According to these (deontoloigcal) arguments, capitalism is inherently just, *regardless* of its consequences, because private property embodies "freedom" or "self-ownership."
If one were to read your post and know nothing else about libertarians, one would think: OK, so libertarians must believe that any arguments for laissez faire, as opposed to just capitalism, will have to be empirically based claims about which institutions tend to serve the interests of the least advantaged, or the interests of everyone, or something like that (some version of utilitarianism). And if the empirical analysis says we need to have Social Security, government health-care provision, public education, redistributive taxation, stimulus spending, drug prohibition, military conscription, or a war, then libertarians will support these things.
Obviously, that is not true. Libertarians will not support these things, *regardless* of their possibly beneficial consequences. (Not that classical liberals would support those things either; it's too big a portmanteau for my tastes; but we aren't talking about intellectual history right now, we're talking about Jeff Sachs responding to contemporary libertarianism.)
Libertarians' "moral arguments" do, in their effect, say, as those adorable Ron Paul supporters shouted in a presidential debate: If people don't have health insurance and they can't find charitable support, "Let 'em die."
To combat this ugly reality, I don't think just adding an adjective denying it will do the trick. One must also strip the deontology from libertarianism. Then you will achieve true BHL.
Judging by your comment, I'm afraid you don't know a great deal about libertarianism. Depending on the facts and circumstances that result in people not having health insurance (did they voluntarily decide not to purchase it on the expectation that they wouldn't need it?), there are certainly libertarian philosophers, Loren Lomasky and Jan Narveson come to mind, who would not let people do without medical care. I think the best known academic libertarian, Robert Nozick, would also fall into this category, but this is a somewhat complicated story, and I won't attempt to explain it to you here.
If, as you suggest, we strip deontology from libertarianism we might clear a wider path to the healthcare you desire for the uninsured (and similar worst-case scearios), but at the same time we open the door to other horrors that might be justified by a purely consequentialist approach to moral reasoning. What if forced organ donations prodeuced the greatest good for the greatest number, or for that matter, the enslavement of the most talented for the benefit of the masses. Of course, you may think that such cases are entirely fanciful. Fine, because libertarians can then adopt a similar absolutist stance: a society governed entirely by libertarian principles would be so rich and productive that all material needs–includng healthcare–would be available to all.
How can you possibly find any equivalence between capital and human organs?
I don't quite understand why we need to strip the deontology from libertarianism. Most deontologists accept that consequences matter. But they deny that consequences are the only thing that matter. It seems that libertarians can coherently believe that deontic concerns relating to rights and personal autonomy necessarily support respect for private property and markets. But they can also believe that consequentialist considerations also, on balance, support free market capitalism. Both deontic and consequentialist reasons point in broadly the same direction. In fact, something like this strikes me as the most plausible version of libertarianism (of course, this position might still be false).
It is worth considering that an unwavering support for capitalism must not necessarily come as a result of a deontological approach to libertarianism. I, for instance, do not think that there is an objective moral standard that we can weigh certain actions against and decide whether they are OK or not (whatever the consequences of these actions may be). However, I am inclined to a priori (I use this term loosely) discard solutions –wrong or rightly — to problems that involve state intervention. I'm not defending myself here, but I am bringing to surface the point that many libertarians (such as myself) believe that "the market" is really the best way to solve problems that people hold in high value. Now, I cannot produce an exhaustive report on how "the market" does this in every single case, nor am I interested in putting the time and effort into mapping the world, all of its problems, and the market solutions out. So, for instance, when we talk about healthcare I really do not know what a free market in healthcare would look like; this does not mean, though, that I cannot hold a free market in healthcare as a tenable solution to our country's healthcare problems.
Also, it's not a dichotomy between beneficial and non-beneficial; a government program can be beneficial, but is the outcome as desirable as that which would have been produced as a result of a capitalist distribution of resources (that is, economizing between means and ends, versus government rationing of means and ends). There is an opportunity cost in government spending, even if government spending can be seen as productive in some sense of the word.
Permit me to suggest that if one wants an example of a consequentialist example in support of a free market in healthcare, one could use veterinary medicine (where the price of the various services are both available in advance and negotiable, and the services rendered tend to be of high quality and reasonable (okay, that's a term of art, and preference being heterogeneous one's mileage may certainly vary) price.
"If people don't have health insurance and they can't find charitable support, "Let 'em die."
To combat this ugly reality […]"
From what underlying moral principle do you deduce that this is something that *must* be combated?
You seem to imply that all other principles and utilitarian assessments are overtrumped by the principle that "we" (i.e. "society") must not let anyone die if it is technically possible to avoid his death.
I don't believe that's a tenable principle, neither morally nor practically.
Here's an interesting video in which Milton Friedman responds to this principle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD0dmRJ0oWg
Damien S.
Not letting people die IS the moral principle. Especially when they're members of our own society.
"Not letting people die IS the moral principle."
"Especially when they're members of our own society."
Disagree. (1) if this statement is based on a theory of a natural duty of justice, I agree with A.J. Simmons and the particularity objection. (2) if this claim is based on a theory of associative moral obligations, I agree with the common objection that currently-existing "societies" are based on (i) morally arbitrary and historically contingent boundary drawing (usually the result of morally pernicious violence, empire building, ethnic clensing, etc.), (ii) morally suspect propaganda (thus undermining any claim to spontaneously arising moral obligations), and (iii) in modern pluralistic states, law-subjects tend to have *resentment* towards rather than close personal ties to their "fellow citizens" (cultural diversity, economic class, and ethnic differences often produce conflic rather than compassion among citizens–a problem exacerbated by the recognition of culturally-motivated cognition).
"Not letting people die IS the moral principle."
And how far are you willing to take this, in terms of political policies?
If I go into the desert (where I'm not interfering with anyone or anyone's property) and start to practice rock climbing without ropes for kicks, should the government send a team to follow me and put up safety nets under every rock I climb in order to prevent my death? Or simply arrest me maybe?
Everyone dies, eventually.
Many different things can increase the probability of it happening in a given time frame.
Many of them could technically be prevented, given enough resource.
But should it be the government's job to do so, no matter the cost, and no matter how those resources could otherwise be spent? Don't get me wrong , I do believe that prolonging a person's life (or increasing the probability of that outcome) is a noble cause. I just don't think that it automatically (i.e. irrespective of the circumstances) trumps all other causes, or that it trumps the non-aggression principle without limit.
I believe that self-ownership, even in the narrowest sense, implies the right (and responsibility) for every individual to decide him- or herself how much to "invest" in prolonging his or her own life.
Now, I'm not saying that the government shouldn't ensure that even the poorest members of society can get access to health care.
But is it the government's moral responsibility to get into the business of actively decreasing the chance of death of people, by and (coercive) means necessary? I don't think so. Nor do I think it's practically doable without accumulating debt, this kind of active government interference is always very inefficient (i.e. costly to the taxpayer).
Instead, I'd much prefer if the government restrict itself to making sure that people have the financial *means* to support a dignified and moderately safe life (including at least basic health insurance).
Now I don't have a perfect political solution to do that, but I believe that various ideas proposed in the past such as negative income tax, etc. would at least be less damaging than government bureaucracy meddling with the various worthy causes (employment, health care, etc.) directly.
And if someone who *could* afford health insurance chooses not to, and uses it on luxury goods and services instead, because he makes the personal choice that a fun/fulfilled/etc. life is more important than a hight probabilirty of a *long* life, that that is a perfectly valid choice.
It's not the government's job to overturn the consequences of the personal choices which individuals make for their lives.
Your points 1 and 2 are strawmen — no one is suggesting that "all other principles and utilitarian assessments are overtrumped by the principle that "we" (i.e. "society") must not let anyone die" and no one is suggesting that "should it be the government's job to do so, no matter the cost, and no matter how those resources could otherwise be spent" to prevent deaths. And I think most people would agree with your third point, that we should have a society such "that even the poorest members of society can get access to health care." How we get there is the interesting debate. But polemics and false analogies about rock climbing in the desert are beside the point.
Strip deontology from libertarianism, and what remains is "The end justifies the means."
I had some thoughts similar to Jeff Friedman's. Everything you say sounds exactly right regarding the people you say it about:
Adam Smith, J. B. Say, J. S. Mill, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, Vernon Smith, Deirdre McCloskey. But there are some names conspicuously absent from that list. You do not mention the three figures who, I would argue, both the general public and most academics associate with libertarianism: Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Nozick.
Like Jeff, I think that there's something different about these figures. Unlike Jeff, though, I don't think it's that they base their political views on deontological/moral arguments as opposed to consequentialist ones. There are strong deontological elements in people who I would classify as classical liberals, rather than libertarians. You see it in Hayek. And, of course, you see it in the father of deontology himself – Immanuel Kant.
So, what is it that separates off Rand/Rothbard/Nozick from the classical liberals? I would argue, and I take it that this is John Tomasi's view too, that it is the absolutism with which they hold their deontological libertarian principles to hold. One can think that property rights are morally important, and even that they are morally important in a roughly deontological way, without thinking that they always and everywhere trump all other moral concerns. And I think that's basically the view you find in the earlier classical liberal tradition. What seems problematic with the post-war libertarians, from this perspective, is that they seem to have latched on to an important part of the the moral considerations that go into thinking about the nature of a just government, and proceeded as though that part was the entirety.
Hi Matt,
Although I will grant that it is a somewhat complicated issue, I question whether it is correct to lump Nozick in with Rand and Rothbard in holding that "[property rights] always and everywhere trump all other moral concerns." As you know, Nozick expressly held open the possibility that side constraints might have to be violated "in order to avoid catastrophic moral horror." This qualification at least leaves the door open for the sort of moral pluralism you describe. Moreover, his understanding of Lockean appropriation as taking place subject to a "historical shadow" that precludes a party from accumulating "all the water in the desert," leaves some room for the redistribution of property in a wide range of circumstances, even under the express terms of his own theory of justice.
Finally, and I don't think you will disagree with this, it is not just property rights that might have to be sacrificed in the name of moral pluralism. If we knew for certain that allowing a politician to give a certain speech that would fall squarely within the protections of the First Amendment would through some causal chain lead to a nuclear exchange killing a billion people, we would (if we could) suppress the speech, right? So, moral pluralism would govern all rights.
Hi Mark, just want to say I think it would be great if bloggers would describe and expand upon what they think "Lockean appropriation" means.
From a legal perspective, I believe Locke's appropriation theory is why Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and others gave a fully public corporate entity (which we now call the federal gov't) the right to issue Treasury-Direct currencies.
In other words, the U.S. Constitution appears to have created the world's first fully public money-issuer, which is important if, as Locke stated, we are trying to give legal effect to the notion that "the earth and all inferior creatures [are] common to all men." (And this is not to mention that Locke's theory that "every man has a property in his own person" was a very likely the primary cause of the Civil War.)
I am interested in the philosophical aspects of Lockean appropriation, and not especially in whatever legal connections you may think exist between the philosophical concept and our current laws/institutions. From the philosophical perspective, I use the term to refer to Locke's theory of how unowned property may be reduced to private ownership, essentially through the process of farming/homesteading. Locke held that for originally appropriation to be just,it must not violate the rights of non-appropriators. There is MUCH, MUCH more to say about this, but I am just giving you here what you asked for, i.e. how I am using this term.
That's what I'm curious about because I understand Locke as providing for a primary right in a person's mind, body and labor, particularly when s/he "mixes" that labor with land and natural resources.
However, while I can see Locke providing some exclusionary rights for farming/homesteading purposes, I don't see how Locke (and Henry George) could stand for private ownership of land (though owing buildings and land improvements is possible).
I'm just suggesting that our legal system may be putting the emphasis in the wrong places.
I think it's clear Locke did stand for the appropriation of land from nature as a private property. (You can say his Proviso make the position/conclusion invalid if you want.)
You might find Buchanan's monograph "Property as the Guarantor of Liberty" of some interest.
"… bearing only scant resemblance to Locke's own ideas."
While searching for the Buchanan article, I came across this footnote in another article about Lockean conceptions of property, which I think is relevant to the point I'm trying to make about the overemphasis U.S. lawyers are putting on some forms of property, such as real estate and intellectual property, while neglecting Locke's primary goal of explaining a natural person's right to self-ownership, including ownership rights in the actions or energy we sell to employers, which are almost entirely ignored by U.S. lawyers.
"For a leading analysis of John Locke's theory of property, see JEREMY WALDRON, THE RIGHT TO PRIVATE PROPERTY 137-252 (1988). I deliberately use the term "Lockean" rather than simply referring to Locke because of the unique way in which "Lockean" viewpoints of counter- government strong rights to private property have developed and intensified in legal and popular thought in the Anglo-American world, often bearing only scant resemblance to Locke's own ideas. See Lior Zemer, The Making of a New Copyright Lockean, 29 HARV. J. L. & POL'Y 892 (2006)."
So, what is it that separates off Rand/Rothbard/Nozick from the classical liberals? I would argue, and I take it that this is John Tomasi's view too, that it is the absolutism with which they hold their deontological libertarian principles to hold. … What seems problematic with the post-war libertarians, from this perspective, is that they seem to have latched on to an important part of the the moral considerations that go into thinking about the nature of a just government, and proceeded as though that part was the entirety.
This. The best way to understand the nonaggression principle is not as some absolute axiom, but as a defeasible presumption in favor of liberty. Rothbardians want it to be near indefeasible, but how do they justify such a strong presumption?
Rawls of course proposed a deontological theory as well.
"My challenge to you libertarians is to show me your productive discussions with liberals."
"Libertarians" and "classical liberals" have spent the better part of the last 40+ years engaging in "productive discussions with liberals." Nozick, Lomasky, Gaus, Narveson, Schmidtz, Simmons, etc. etc. You cannot but find yourself in a discussion with liberals if you attempt to live a life as a classical liberal academic philosopher or law professor. This "challenge" is perhaps the silliest thing I have read in a long long time. My time as a student of philosophy found me devouring the pages of Rawls, Dworkin, Scheffler, Raz, Nagel, Cohen (both Joshua and Jerry), Christiano, Henry Richardson, Parfit, Scanlon, Gutman & Thompson, as well as the left non-liberals such as Marx, Althusser, Collins, Habermas and his followers, Foucault, etc etc.. My time as a law student found me saturated with evern more Raz, Rawls, Dworkin, Marmor, Hart, Leiter, Habermas, Foucault, Marx, Althusser, Gramsci, Selznick, MacCormick, Geertz, etc. etc.
These are not libertarians / classical liberals. These are, however, the philosophers and legal theorists that libertarians are constantly in discussions with. Most academic libertarians spend most of their academic careers in internal and external dialogue with these more mainstreem "high liberal" and leftist thinkers. In fact, I am utterly shocked when I come across someone with views anywhere close to my own (I think this is probably why libertarians are over-represented in the blogosphere–we are so damned tired of feeling alone in our beliefs).
I think you should read Gaus on public reason. Your experience with libertarian/classical liberalism seems to be a bit under-developed.
"My challenge was for you to SHOW me YOUR productive discussion with a liberal."
It seems like you have very little experience with humanities departments. Nevertheless, and against better judgment (I blog under a pseudonym with a few colleagues, more of *our* space), here are some blog posts of mine (I will not link to my papers, I have reasons for remaining anonymous at this time):
-on equality and libertarianism-
-on originalism and freedom (playing devil's advocate against my "liberal" co-blogger claim that originalist interpretive methodology is necessarily ant-freedom)
Is Gaus insisting on total consensus for the creation of Social Morality? If so, is that even practical?
Kevin Vallier is the resident Gaus expert here. I expect he'll be posting on this soon!
Ah. The wonders of the social division of labor. Thanks.
Kevin Vallier
No, in fact he is more explicit and serious about dealing with reasonable disagreement about the nature of social morality than probably anyone else working on this topic. But indeed, as Matt says below, we'll get there. If you want to learn more at the moment, go over to the Public Reason blog and search for the reading group on Gaus's The Order of Public Reason.
Ok. Got it. I hope they speak English for the synaptically mundane.
In case you are concerned that classical liberalism / libertarianism cannot have room for a robust theory of democracy, here are some thoughts:
-"Property requirements for voting and other misguided ideas"-
-follow up-
-follow up-
Well, you can decide if I make the cut "libertarian" but you can go search the UseNet group alt.polotics.libertarian or talk.politics.libertarian for posts from jmh back in the 90s and maybe early 00s. Particularly exchanges with Mike Lepore or Stavros (hopefully I got that correct!) or even (in the earlier stages) someone with the last name Allen.
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*Officially Licensed *Latex 3/4 Adult Costume Hands Only *Hands are BLACK (not brown as in picture) *Brand New In Manufacturer Packaging Howl at the moon this Halloween! The Wolfman is from the classic horror film from 1941 and was recently remade in 2010.
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You wanted to sell your stove, you sold it.
ClassifiedAds El Commercio
Advertising Agency: Leo Burnett, Lima, Peru
Creative Directors: Alvaro Ramos
Art Directors: Alvaro Ramos, Christian Sánchez
Copywriter: Flavio Pantigoso
14 comments
Doesn't work in print at all in my opinion. It shows the exact weakness the tvc had but style won over substance, here it doesn't. Point being, who would sell a bookshelf, or an old stove. You sell the stuff you don't need and people would actually buy. They at least could've made it relevant in print.
That's a poor comment! The idea of the ad is you can sell what you want. Quickly. Maybe YOU wouldn't sell a bookshelf or an old stove, but maybe plenty of people would. And if you can sell such undesirable items so quickly, imagine how quickly you can sell more desirable items. So, you're not talking about the message/proposition of this ad, you're talking about how irrelevant it is to you/your lifestyle... which defeats the point of this website. I think the ad is ok, personally. But, it delivers what is required and in an interesting enough manner.
Haughty Kris, this ad is for Peru, where old bookshelves and kitchens are surely sold via Classified ads, so the ads are irrelevant for you but relevant to the target they are meant for. And that is called "advertising".
Ok, fine. I might've been a little stuborn on this because I really don't like direct translations from tvc to print. From a consumer's standpoint I simply don't like it, as an adperson I guess it shows the proposition well. But don't forget there's always a subjective element to it.
Copy given a chance to understand. anyway can advertising counts.


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Even though we ARE Nikon lovers,we are NOT affiliated with Nikon Corp. in any way.
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4 posts
"RE: Getting to know my D3200... questions"
get the 35mm f/1.8g for low light indoor shots if u dont have the room for the 50mm ] ok as for shooting this just my suggestion go to iso set it auto iso ok the starting point for your iso is 400 and the limit is 1600 u can try 3200 in my shooting 1600 works fine go to focus mode set it to auto-servo AF .....AF-area mode i set it to auto-area AF.... metering i set it to matrix metering or if i am taking a picture of a person i ether try the center wighted or spot metering i try both and see what happens u can raise the exposure comp by +1 or +2 but if itdont work back it back down and make sure u have a top of the line card the expeed 3 works so much better i go with a sandisk extream pro or lexar 600x speed card


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"How many students does a section need to have to run?"
August 30, 2016
Recognizing graduate students as employees is good for the whole university, argues Mary Grace B. Hébert.
August 29, 2016
Students deserve safe spaces on a campus because the absence of such spaces is counter to the very mission of higher education, argues Matthew Pratt Guterl.
Recent Articles
August 30, 2016 - 9:04pm
August 30, 2016 - 9:00pm
The paradox of growth being good for the platform, but bad for its users.
August 30, 2016 - 8:02pm
A review of Ingrid Burrington's new book, Networks of New York.
January 7, 2009
Just before heading to San Francisco for the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, I had a brilliant idea, or so it seemed. Between scholarly panels and face-to-face meetings, I would blog here at Inside Higher Ed. Instead of scribbling notes on a pad and then synthesizing out some kind of continuous text after the fact, this would mean recording the MLA in all its paratactic glory -- perhaps including links to YouTube videos of people saying interesting things in casual discussion after the panels.
January 6, 2009
Budget woes, 'killer ap' fatigue, and security-related disruptions top Lev Gonick's list of the 10 IT issues facing colleges in 2009.
January 5, 2009
The recent reports on academic labor by the American Federation of Teachers and Modern Language Association are great news. The great news is not the information the reports present. They offer little that is new or heartening. Instead, they echo what most adjuncts and many academic labor activists already know: Exploitation of contingent academic laborers is growing in scale.
January 2, 2009
Admissions officers should be careful about assuming they have any control, write Doug Usher and Barry Reicherter.
January 2, 2009
Wrapped in high-minded rhetoric, public colleges' plea for federal stimulus funds is purely pork barrel politics, argues Jane S. Shaw.
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Students and President Angel participate in focus groups about campus safety
By Gwen Walsh
Alumni Editor
Last week students met with President Angel to share perspectives on and experiences with campus safety, and discuss possible measures to improve Clark's security.
The meetings came in the wake of several alarming campus crime incidents, including the sexual assault at Clark in February. Since these focus groups, UP issued a "safety notification" about Clark police pursuing and confiscating the property of three minors after a strictly verbal, non-physical altercation initiated by Clark students, which gave rise to questions about UP policy and jurisdiction.
The safety forum was organized by former CUSC Vice President and Project Playground Community Outreach Coordinator Ali Canino, and consisted of three one-hour-long sessions with three to six students each. Angel and Canino attended all three sessions.
"Safety is something that we need to be constantly improving on," Canino said. "And students are the ones that are going to have to wave the red flag."
The purpose of the forum was to create an open, non-judgmental environment for students to talk candidly about their opinions, so most respondents will remain anonymous throughout this article. Continue reading


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Greatest HitsStunning data visualization examples from across the web created with Tableau Public.
Pablo looks at domestic violence in Spain between Jan. 2003 and Nov. 2015. (Created for the 25N: International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.)
A visualization of the lowest ticket price per section in Kauffman Stadium and Citi Field during the 2015 MLB World Series.
In this data story, French author Jonathan Trajkovic uses aggregated Twitter data to depict the reaction to the recent Paris attacks.
Where do people take cabsto in NYC? What is the peak travel time? Find out in this viz.
How much did each individual Beatle contribute to the writing of each album? Check this viz out to find out!
This eye-catching viz was created in just 20 minutes to win the 2015 Iron Viz Championship . In this Shine uses the GDELT dataset to look at mentions of events in the news since January 2014.
This viz created by Brit Cava looks at Airbnb prices in the San Francisco area. Brit attended the "Every Data Rockstar Needs a Stage" blogger panel at Tableau Conference 2015 and was inspired to send this in.
Andy Kriebel of the Information Lab uses two new Tableau 10 features, Device Designer and Google Sheets connector, in this visualization on the US Presidential Election polling numbers between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
This year the National Park Service celebrates its centennial, and Headwaters Economics created this sweet mobile-friendly viz to explore jobs and labor income for the National Parks.
Luke Stanke created this beautiful mobile viz showing each NBA team's shooting stats. With it, he won Round 4 of the Torch Viz Contest.
Pint of Science is a annual festival where scientists talk with you about their amazing research - in a pub. See what events happened around the UK during the 2016 festival.
Is Africa winning the fight against malaria? See which countries are most affected in the viz.
Inga Ting of the Sydney Morning Herald uses the new Device Designer feature to showcase how Australia is currently doing in the Rio medal count. She embeds several different responsive vizzes in the article, so click the article link to see all the ways she has analyzed the data.
Rachael Gleason's mobile-designed dashboard maps vaccine exemptions for Houston Independent School District.


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Ramada L.A. Downtown: "Los Angeles" Top 5 Page for this destination California Hotel Tip by bugalugs
California Hotels: 188 reviews and 173 photos
We stayed here for 5 nights as we wanted somewhere central. It was convenient for everywhere we wished to see.
The staff were excellent. Our son was 11 years old at the time, and you know what kids are, we would get back after a long day sightseeing, when Joe would say he was hungry. As there was no restaurant on site at the time, the staff gave him breakfast!!!! Well the buffet was ready for breakfast, cereal boxes, jams etc. So the staff would give him a jug of milk, and bread rolls and even heated milk for him to have hot chocolate. They really went out of there way.
Unique Qualities: At night you could stand on the verandah at the end of the hallway staring at the skyscrapers all lit up. I was fascinated by them.
There is a Sauna.
Some of the suites have jacuzzi's.
Under construction, so obviously built now was an onsite full service restaurant.
Address: 611S Westlake Avenue, Los Angeles
Price Comparison: about average
Directions: Right off Wiltshire Blvd
othercontact: Fax 213 483 0088
Phone: 213 483 6363
Theme: Hotel
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Live coverage of the Steubenville rape trial here via local TV. Latest wrap-up here. My summary here, as defense (surprise) blames victim. Also streaming below. Victim in case has now said she will testify. Apparently witnesses will be given option of not appeared in the TV feed. UPDATE: Opening statements here. Prosecutors accuse footballers of treating girl "like a toy," and repeatedly "degrading" her. UPDATE #2: Local reporter with dozens of tweets re: testimony this afternoon.
UPDATE #3 Full roundup on testimony from several teens today, establishing how impaired the victim was that fateful night. All chose to not be covered by the live stream. Also: New DNA evidence presented.


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Tuesday, May 21, 2013
AIKEN, S.C. (WRDW) -- A man is facing charges after allegedly causing a disturbance at Friday's Relay for Life at South Aiken High School.
Witnesses say 18-year-old Mikal Sturdivant was swearing loudly during the moment of silence for cancer victims.
Officers say Sturdivant had to be escorted out and that's when he became unruly and was taken to the ground and handcuffed.
Sturdivant was charged with disorderly conduct.
The incident was one of many that officers say happened on the track and in the nearby parking lot that night.


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Officials at a local volunteer fire department say they are having financial trouble.
West Knox Volunteer Fire Department serves about 8,000 households in knox and Laurel Counties, but officials say they are not taking in enough money to continue operating.
They are proposing a $50 tax.
"They're not crazy about adding it to a tax bill, but they're for giving us that money, because they're making an investment," Firefighter Darryl Baker.
The fire department lowers homeowners' insurance rates.
Officials say if the community doesn't want the tax, they will try to find other ways to raise money.


text: Males intraspecifically territorial on breeding grounds, but will tolerate other closely related warblers. Females territorial around nest. Territories often, but not always, bordered by natural edges such as canyon walls or thick forest (Martin and Olson, in press). In Arizona, territories ranged between 0.83 to 2.26 hectares and were elongate (Fischer 1978, cited in Martin and Olson in press).


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- Report: #574415
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Complaint Review: Grantfinder.com
Grantfinder.com?? Internet United States of America
Grantfinder.com They leave no nunber they block them and I am on he do no call registry it's a endless intenet and phone nightmare .4 times in Feb 2010 a supervisor said they ended it but they just lie and torture yo they try to tell you about grant info at $4 only for a grant list and the $59 monthley if you dont cancell in 14 days ,but the never stop calling Internet
*Consumer Comment: Report them.
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This report was posted on Ripoff Report on 02/24/2010 03:04 PM and is a permanent record located here: http://www.ripoffreport.com/r/Grantfindercom/internet/Grantfindercom-They-leave-no-nunber-they-block-them-and-I-am-on-he-do-no-call-registry-it-574415. The posting time indicated is Arizona local time. Arizona does not observe daylight savings so the post time may be Mountain or Pacific depending on the time of year.
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24-14757 - 6' High Speed HDMI Cable with Ethernet
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You are a fan of navara vronk ? Come to discover the best forums navara vronk on the internet and share your experience with a community fan of navara vronk . You can also build a forum navara vronk and create your online discussion.
This is a forum for Europe MapleStory guilds: HellBound & Euphoria
hellbound, maplestory, europe, omen, maple, euphoria, burnedfury, notishu, #vronk, mrfuzzums, ghoulscout, prit, raskler, zakum, chaos, bang


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The blog of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Above: Inside the ProPublica newsroom. Photo credit Flickr user propublica.
The News Outlet, a two-time winner of Knight's Community Information Challenge based at Youngstown State University, has attracted an important partnership with ProPublica, a leading national investigative reporting organization.
Stephen Engelberg, managing editor of ProPublica, will help lead an Advanced Reporting course at Youngstown State University in the fall, working with students to report and produce investigative stories.
Engelberg said ProPublica is interested in sharing its expertise, and that the university's open-access mission and heavy emphasis on investigative reporting make it a strong fit for the project, according to a press release about the partnership.
"With regional publications under financial strain, the question of how to train the next generation of investigative journalists is now a critical one. We are delighted to participate in this approach, which shows real promise,'' he said.
Engelberg will join Youngstown State University Journalism Professors Tim Francisco and Alyssa Lenhoff in leading the class. Francisco and Lenhoff are co-directors of The News Outlet, which won the Knight Community Information Challenge in 2010 and 2011 with support from the Raymond John Wean Foundation and the Youngstown Foundation.
The News Outlet was launched at Youngstown State University and has grown to become a joint venture among several other universities and professional media organizations in Ohio. The News Outlet's student journalists produce enterprise and investigative stories that are shared on different platforms with news organizations, including local newspapers and public radio stations.
The Lens, a two-time winner of the Knight Community Information Challenge, won big at this year's local Excellence in Journalism Awards.
The site, supported by the Greater New Orleans Foundation, received three first-place awards, including Best Local News Website. Nola.com, the site of the local Times-Picayune newspaper, came in second.
The Lens also received first place for Best Investigative Story in Print as well as third place in this category and first for Best News Affiliated Blog in the annual contest, sponsored by the Press Club of New Orleans.
The awards came at the start of a busy week for the news media scene in New Orleans, which learned recently that its daily newspaper would publish only three days a week, starting in the fall.
The week ended with the announcement of formation of a new nonprofit news organization, NewOrleansReporter.org, a collaboration of NPR, the University of New Orleans.
Detroiters gathered at Crank Up the Cause to learn more about Citizen Effect's Detroit4Detroit initiative. Photo Credit: Khaaliq Thomas for Citizen Effect.
Growing up, Clarence Wardell cultivated a love of learning and technology at the Detroit Area Pre College Engineering Program. So when he came across Citizen Effect's Detroit4Detroit, a platform that helps people find projects that meet their interests and raise funds to support them, he immediately joined to help send one student from the Detroit area to spend a summer learning about engineering at the University of Michigan.
Through the platform, which is supported by Knight's Technology for Engagement Initiative, Wardell was able to leverage his existing social networks to raise $2,000 for the program. He was the first of 150 people participating in Detroit4Detroit to meet his fundraising goal.
Citizen Effect, part of a growing citizen philanthropy movement that seeks to democratize giving, is expanding to Philadelphia with the Philly4Philly campaign. Knight caught up Citizen Effect's Founder and CEO Dan Morrison to find out what excites people about being engaged in local philanthropy efforts, how he defines success and more.
What do you mean by the term citizen philanthropist?
D.M: When you hear the word "philanthropists," you think of Gates, Rockefeller, MacArthur, Ford and other titans of industry. But that's a vastly incomplete definition. A citizen philanthropist may not have a lot of money to give, but they have the passion to lead a critical community project and raise the money from their friends, family and social networks.
What excites people about being engaged with Citizen Effect?
D.M.: Results. When a citizen philanthropist holds an event or sends an email that results in donations, they get excited because their fundraising strategy is working. And when they receive photos of and a report on their completed project, they feel like they can change the world, because they in fact have.
What are some examples of what people in each city are up to?
D.M.: Michele Whitehead, a Detroit native, is raising money for a reading program for low income youth with Wellspring. She's raised $1,250 of $1,500 via a walk-a-thon and received in-kind food and water donations from local businesses. Gerard Smith, a rising senior at Gross Point High School, heard about Detroit4Detroit's Crank Up the Cause on WDET and asked his dad to take him. He signed up to raise money for a music therapy program for homeless kids and has raised $785 of $1,000. Eli Kahn, a fellow at LIFT Philly (a Philly4Philly nonprofit partner) is one of the first Philly4Philly citizen philanthropists. As a child, he beat cancer and since has raised over $100,000 for cancer research at John's Hopkins University by having people donate used printer cartridges and recycling them.
As ProPublica's newest news app developer, Lena Groeger is helping the investigative news organization expand its field-leading efforts in data driven news.
Developers on the app team create software that lets readers interact with news stories, making them more relevant to people's lives. Think of projects like the Dollars for Docs database, where people can find out if their doctors have received payments from drug companies.
Groeger was hired recently as part of a Knight-funded expansion that will not only allow the team to develop more apps across a variety of subject areas, but build the field by providing a job shadowing program for journalists nationwide.
In a conversation with Knight, Groeger shares what helped prepare for her role, some of her recent projects and what she thinks about the future of data, design and journalism.
What's an example of a recent project you worked on?
L.G.: I worked with reporters Paul Kiel and Cora Currier, who were researching where money from the mortgage settlement was going in each state. Once we had the precise data (the five biggest banks agreed to pay over $2.5 billion to 49 states and the District of Columbia), we ultimately decided an interactive map would be a good way to visualize the information. It was a group effort where the process was just as interesting as the outcome. I wrote more about it in a blog post "How a Map That Wasn't a Map Became a Map."
Another story looked at how different claims about drone deaths compared over time. Drone death estimates vary widely in the media, but one would think the government would keep at least a nominally "official" count. Apparently, they don't. The challenge in this graphic was to link together different aspects of the story in a coherent and understandable interface. After we laid out the claims, we decided that it would be helpful to "highlight" certain contradictory claims, so people could easily see what we were describing. We added the right-hand column, which also linked to Justin Elliot's story.
How do you decide what kinds of projects to take on? What interests you?
L.G.: Sometimes I will pitch an idea I think would work best, or suggest a specific format for a project, whether it's a map, a timeline, an interactive graphic or something else. Other times I have gotten paired up with a reporter already working on a data story. It's been flexible and there have been a range of projects, that's very characteristic of what goes on at ProPublica. Your role is less important than the way you can tell a story.
What's your background? How have some of your existing skills been helpful in your new role?
Excited about civic data? Don't miss an opportunity to win prizes and money for your ideas to make it understandable and useful.
The Civic Data Challenge, sponsored by Knight Foundation and presented by the National Conference on Citizenship, is looking to turn existing civic health and community attachment data into beautiful, useful applications and visualizations to help build stronger communities. The deadline to apply to the challenge is 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday July 29. Designers, data scientists, researchers and app developers are especially encouraged to apply.
Participants who analyze and visualize data on health, safety, education and the economy will be eligible for various prizes.
To enter The Civic Data Challenge, you must first join its Google group. After joining, participants will be provided with existing civic health and community attachment data sets to analyze. After identifying connections and correlations, participants are encouraged to create visual representations and interactive products to showcase their findings. These may include infographics, apps, animations, videos, or other content.
For each category, cash prizes of up to $10,000 will be available for Best Visual Representation and Best Interactive Product. Best in Show and Wildcard Winners will be eligible to receive $5,000. An individual can submit as many entries as they like and can submit one entry in multiple categories.
At Knight Foundation, we believe clear writing makes our work more effective. If you have ever seen a sentence promising that one of our grantees will "leverage the stakeholder infrastructure" you know exactly what I mean. If no one can understand us, if we can't even understand ourselves, how are we going to help communities become more informed and engaged? On our website is a guide for press release writing, an explanation of the readability standard we use, the Flesch score, and, below, an opinion piece I wrote on the subject for the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Clear writing doesn't have to be a chore. It can be fun: the picture in this blog is of me leading a "game show" seminar for the staff called Jargon Jeopardy.
For Foundations, Clearer Writing Means Wiser Grant Making
by Eric Newton
Clarity matters. That seems obvious. Yet in our nation's capital, when the Sunlight Foundation this spring released a study measuring how well lawmakers communicate, we learned even clarity can be controversial.
Sunlight found that members of Congress have made a big leap these past seven years in their ability to talk clearly. You would think all would jump for joy. We want open government: Clear talk is more accessible than jargon. But no. Sunlight's news release—and most of the news-media coverage—took a different tack. They asked: "Is Congress getting dumber or just more plainspoken?"
That's just wrong, and it brings into focus a big issue for foundations.
Too often, we fall into the trap of believing complex communication equals intelligence. Fancy words mean you're smart; simple words mean you're dumb. Because my foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, was founded by two of America's leading newspapermen, we think about this topic a lot and we believe the opposite is true. You have to be smart to convey difficult subjects in clear, understandable prose. If you can do it, your work will be more effective.
To measure Congress, Sunlight used something called the Flesch score. Rudolf Flesch, author of Why Johnnie Can't Read—and What You Can Do About It, created this measure of readability. The higher your Flesh score, the more understandable you are. The clearer you are, the more people you can reach. Let's test the Flesch score of a classic children's song:
Three blind mice
Three blind mice
See how they run
See how they run
They all ran after the farmer's wife
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife
Have you ever see such a sight in your life
As three blind mice?
Today in Boston, Knight is sponsoring Awesome Summit: Connect, an Awesome Foundation conference focused on rethinking and democratizing philanthropy. (You can follow the conversation via the Center for Civic Media's blog and on Twitter via #awesummit.)
We became a part of the Awesome Foundation community last year, when we funded the creation of the Awesome Foundation News Taskforce, starting with a project to support media innovation in Detroit.
Today, we announced five new projects with the same theme of media innovation:
SuperPAC App, Jennifer Hollett and Dan Siegel
SuperPAC App, a project that grew from the MIT Media Lab, is building an app that allows users to quickly capture audio from an ad that's playing on TV or online and fingerprint it. The app then delivers the user information about the ad, including what organization paid for it, where the ad is running and information about the organization funding it. Users can share, comment on and interact with news about the ad.
TheLi.st, Rachel Sklar (pictured left) & Glynnis MacNicol
Rachel Sklar, creator of Change the Ratio (a project aimed at increasing the presence and success of women in technology and entrepreneurship), is taking her community of leading women to the next level. Sklar and MacNicol are launching TheLi.st, a hub for women in technology that includes a subscription listserve and discussion community, free content and resources for women in the field, and events and convenings on the topic. Knight Foundation is supporting TheLi.st's work to engage more women in innovation and technology, and to support their rise and success in the space.
These three projects will receive support through our new prototype fund, which offers $50,000 or less to test promising media innovation projects:
Funders working to safeguard human rights have a wealth of opportunity in new mobile media tools. They got a glimpse of several of them recently in New York at the Paley Center during the annual meeting of the International Human Rights Funders Group.
Andrew Puddephatt, of Global Partners & Associates set the stage for why the digital age has made mobile media integral – both through opportunities and risks – to the human rights field.
Three hands-on demonstrations provided participants with an opportunity to see how mobile technology is currently being used to advance accountability and advocacy for human rights:
Knight Foundation supports CareerEdge, a site of the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, to strengthen and expand high-impact workforce development initiatives. It efforts are aimed at helping move low-wage workers into higher-paying jobs in Florida's Manatee-Sarasota region. Jennifer Carp, senior program director at CareerEdge, writes about the impact of the project's first year. Above from (l) to (r) Cynetra Freeman, Felicia Hammonds, participants of the Bridges to Careers program, and Sandy Bond, a mentor from the Sarasota RSVP Program with the Senior Friendship Center of Sarasota. Photo Credit: Jessica Ruter.
CareerEdge, a public-private entity that seeks to diminish skill gaps through a localized approached to decrease unemployment, has made significant strides in its first 14 months of operations.
More than 1,400 people received training that resulted in an economic impact of $8.5 million dollars in wages for the Sarasota and Bradenton region. Our significant gains in workforce development were recently covered in Florida Trend magazine. The article notes:
"On the demand side, [CareerEdge] — funded by local businesses, foundation grants and charitable support — is playing an economic development role. When it appeared, for example, that Sarasota County's offer of $400,000 in incentives might not be enough to keep a Health Management Associates central business office in Venice, CareerEdge sweetened the pot with an offer of $100,000 worth of job training for Health Management employees. The package ultimately helped preserve 148 jobs in the county with the company promising to add 217 more over the next two years."
Over 120 people came together this week in Akron to engage in a discussion about how residents and politicians can best address critical issues that are polarizing the nation.
The conversation also featured a new Knight grantee, The Civility Project, whose goal is "to return civility to public discourse." It plans to use its $33,000 support from Knight to increase the community's ability to respectfully and safely discuss issues that divide people, by engaging citizens, organizations and political campaigns to live by a specific community civility code of conduct. The code of conduct is currently being developed.
The discussion featured panelists from the Akron Beacon Journal, the University of Akron and various faith based leaders, who collectively asked the community's input at they create a civility index that could help change behavior. The full conversation is available in the video above.
The Civic Commons, another Knight grantee, has started an ongoing conversation about The Civility Project via its online platform which it hopes will engage community members in understanding the basic pillars of civility, how to improve it and how to best apply standards.
As evident by their participation in the conversation, the community is energized around the conversation. It is also looking forward to shaping a model that can be used in other communities.
In just a few weeks, reporters from the Macon Telegraph and Georgia Public Broadcasting will move into a new newsroom, bringing the medical school model of journalism to Central Georgia. And shortly after that, the first students from Mercer University will join them at the university's Center for Collaborative Journalism, reporting alongside and learning the latest in digital storytelling from professional journalists from the two organizations.
Their newsroom will be named for Peyton Anderson, the former owner of the Telegraph, whose foundation today announced a $1 million gift to the effort. The new support means the center has met its funding goal.
The center launched in December with more than $4 million in support from Knight Foundation, which was founded by Jack and Jim Knight, also one-time Telegraph owners.
As the Telegraph reported today, the combined support ''sends an incredibly powerful message about how vitally important it is that our community continues to receive the same high level of public service journalism that we have delivered for 185 years," Telegraph Publisher George McCanless said.
Based on the comments from our team of advisers who helped review the apps and our internal own review, we've selected and are in the process of contacting 16 finalists in the Knight News Challenge: Data. Over the next two weeks, we'll be doing in-person interviews or video chats with each of them them. We'll announce that list of finalists, and the winners of the contest, in September.
This morning, we've also sent an email to the remaining 765 letting them know that they will not be receiving funding via the the News Challenge. One of the great things about the News Challenge is that it exposes us (and everyone else who reads the entries) to ideas and people. While we can fund only a fraction of the ideas that come through the News Challenge, we have other means for funding promising initiatives. For example, last month, we announced a grant to the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America to fund an idea that originally came to us through the News Challenge on Networks. And our new prototype fund allows us to test ideas quickly - we announced some that will receive funding last month. We've begun to reach out to some News Challenge applicants to explore whether their ideas might fit this program, and we plan to announce some prototype grants soon.
Here are a few of the insights we took from last week's review session:
Come code with us! The ProPublica Pair Programming Project -- or P5 -- opens the ProPublica News Apps desk to newsroom coders who want to work on a ProPublica project, or to finish a project of their own, from the ProPublica offices in New York. P5 is made possible by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Maybe you're the only coder in your newsroom, or you're the best coder on your graphics desk. Maybe you're a javascript hacker who's been trying to finish a crime map for your local site and sitting with other news coders will help you finish it. Maybe you're a coder who's never worked in news but has entered an Open Data contest or two and is looking to see what newsroom coding is all about.
A news app is a web-based interactive database that tells a journalistic story using software instead of words and pictures. It's code and it's journalism — both at once, and by the same people. News apps are an exciting, emerging discipline within journalism.
Each P5 participant will work in the New York offices of ProPublica for 2-4 days, depending on the scope of the project they're working on.
Goal: Growing the Field
P5 will provide mentorship, advice, and an environment where good work can actually happen.
The mission of this project is to increase the number of people doing this kind of work, and to encourage newsrooms to see this as work to be fostered. We hope to establish that this is a basic journalistic function and not a faddish, high-tech gizmo, by exposing talented journalists to a fully functioning department.
This is a brand new idea for ProPublica. We admit we don't have all the answers so if you're awesome but some of this doesn't quite describe you, apply anyway. However, this really isn't and can't be a program that will teach non-developers how to code. You'll need the skills to hack with us and to go back to your newsroom ready to take it the rest of the way to the finish line.
More Details
Above: ProPublica celebrates its second Pulitzer Prize
We're very pleased to announce that the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has made a grant to support ProPublica's news applications desk. The grant will support and enhance our ongoing efforts in what we call "news applications," which we believe are an emerging discipline within journalism.
A news application is a large web-based interactive database that tells a journalistic story using software instead of words and pictures. It's software and it's journalism — both at once, and done by the same people. From Dollars for Docs, which lets readers find out if their healthcare provider is taking payments from pharmaceutical companies, to Opportunity Gap, which helps readers understand the sometimes-unequal distribution of educational opportunites to high poverty schools, ProPublica's news applications strives toward the same goal as the traditional journalists in our newsroom do: To spur reform through a sustained spotlight on problems.
News applications afford readers the opportunity to see a broad national problem but also to understand how that problem affects them personally. It's one thing to understand abstractly how, say, educational opporutnities are distributed. But it's quite another to see your own high school and how it compares to the poorest and wealthiest in the state. If the best way to learn is to apply new knowledge to what you already know, then the ability of a news application to contextualize data has limitless possibilities to do great journalism.
Ari Merretazon and members of the Pointman Soldiers Heart Ministry gather at Philadelphia's City Hall
A group of Vietnam and Gulf War veterans, awarded a $25,000 grant through the BME Challenge last winter, recently announced a series of veteran outreach activities and seminars taking place in Philadelphia.
Pointman Soldiers Heart Ministry provides spiritual, peer and benefit support, behavior health referrals and family services to veterans of past and current wars. It is led by Ari Merretazon, a Vietnam veteran who has shared his life story in an anthology on black veterans and has since worked to help those returning from war.
The next seminar is scheduled for Saturday, July 21. It will be hosted by the Church of the Holy Redeemer and take place at 1440 South St., Philadelphia, P.A..
Philadelphia City Council Members Curtis Jones, Jr., Jannie Blackwell and David Oh each expressed support for the group's Outreach and Stand-Down Center as a first point of contact for vulnerable veterans.
Photo Credit: Philadelphia Folklore Project
At a packed house in Philadelphia's City Hall, Knight Foundation, in partnership with The City of Philadelphia Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy and Springboard for the Arts, recently launched Community Supported Art.
The idea of Community Supported Art is based on the Community Supported Agriculture model, which allows local residents to buy food direct from local farmers. Laura Zabel, who serves as the executive director of Springboard for the Arts, created the program to help local artists with new works establish relationships with local "collectors."
In Philadelphia, eighteen artists have been selected by two local arts organizations to create 100 shares of the program. For $450, a "collector" can get nine pieces from local artists selected by Grizzly Grizzly a local arts collaborative and for $350, a collector can get pieces from nine artists at Philadelphia Folklore project. Each organization will sell fifty shares. Once all the shares are sold, artists and collectors come together throughout the year for "pick up" events, where collectors pick up their artwork and have a chance to meet the artists.
It is a model where everyone wins, artists get paid for their work, everyday people like me get to become collectors and our dollars stay in Philadelphia supporting our own.
The Tiziano Project students, Elirë Xhemaili (l) and Aulona Hoxha (r), work on their iPads during a two-week iPad video workshop at the Dokufest International Film Festival in Kosovo. Photo: Grant Slater/The Tiziano Project.
The Tiziano Project is excited to announce the launch of its new community storytelling platform, StoriesFrom, funded by a 2011 Knight News Challenge grant.
The platform allows individuals and organizations to easily create immersive documentary projects that combine the work of both community members and professional journalists and filmmakers. The resulting showcases display completed projects in beautiful and engaging online packages.
StoriesFrom launched on Saturday at the Dokufest International Film Festival in Kosovo, where The Tiziano Project is concurrently teaching a two-week video storytelling workshop entirely using the new iPad. The resulting work will be screened on the last day of the festival and used to populate a new showcase from Kosovo within StoriesFrom.
On July 10, NPR celebrated composer Philip Glass's 75th birthday with a commissioned "flash choir" in Times Square. Enjoy the video at this link and count down with us as we hit 1,000 Random Acts of Culture™. Why Does Knight Foundation Fund Random Acts of Culture™? Knight Foundation, like its...
Last month I spoke with Rachel Botsman, founder of the Collaborative Fund and author of What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. Botsman's work explains how our traditional relationships of mutual assistance – things like sharing, trading and renting – have been entirely reinvented and scaled with the help of new network technologies.
Last year, as part of a Knight Foundation study on social networks, we talked about how various initiatives are trying to catalyze mutual support in communities. They seek to connect residents with one another, encourage them to discover latent assets in their community and build trusted, reciprocal relationships. Through our Technology for Engagement initiative, Knight has supported a number of projects that help neighbors connect with each other to exchange information, goods and ideas, including CommonPlace. Recently, we supported FavorTree, an online platform that allows community members to share, lend or swap goods, services, and information, and as a result, the community increases its social capital. Favor Tree is led by Micki Krimmel, the founder and CEO of NeighborGoods.net, a site that allows users to save money and resources by sharing stuff with their friends.
Four insights stood out from my conversation with Botsman that are relevant to efforts to build mutual support networks in communities.
1. Rethinking Proximity: Transactions of goods or services in a collaborative consumption setting tend to happen physically, even if the introduction is done remotely. This means that people have to be in the same space. We tend to think about proximity in terms of where people live, but there are a range of different places that end up being useful exchange points that fit into someone's everyday life, such as where they work, where they drop their kids off at school and where they go to church, etc. For example, FavorTree, , an online forum for sharing goods between community members, allows users to create a group for their small business, religious organization, or sports team in addition to their entire neighborhood.
Photo Credit: Flickr user Dean Terry
Imagine it's Saturday afternoon in the summer and you've just found a lawn chair, a good book and a spot on the front porch to get situated. But the one thing you don't want to do once you sit down is get up again, so you'll need a ready supply of cold drinks. For that you need a cooler, which, unfortunately, you don't have.
As luck would have it, last week you noticed your neighbors wheeling a cooler into their place. You decide to knock on their door and ask if you can borrow it. Ten minutes later, you're back in your lawn chair, not only with your cooler stocked, but feeling a bit better about your neighborhood and your community.
To understand the promise of the new startup Favortree, a mobile sharing service funded by Knight that is now open for registration, think about all of the things that had to go right for you to borrow your neighbors' cooler. Your neighbors had to have a cooler. They had to know that you needed one. You had to know that they had a cooler. They had to be home for you to borrow it and they had to think you were reputable enough to agree to lend it to you.
Favortree is looking to facilitate more of this type of sharing by making all of that information readily available and by enabling users to build reputations as responsible borrowers and lenders in a game-like format. In the process, it hopes to build stronger communities.
Today in Miami, we're gathering 17 journalists, engineers, and entrepreneurs to help us review the applications in the latest Knight News Challenge, on data.
By the end of the day, we hope to have 10-12 finalists that we'll examine more deeply over the next few weeks. We expect to bring about five of those forward for consideration by Knight Foundation trustees at their September meeting and to publicly announce the winners shortly thereafter. (If you are one of those finalists, you can expect to hear from us by next week.)
We'd like to thank the following people who have taken two days to join us:
Knight Foundation supports Safecast, a global network of sensor devices that collects crowd-based submissions of data about the environment. Safecast's Director of Global Operations, Sean Bonner, who was recently profiled for his efforts documenting radiation data in Japan, writes about the project's progress and what's next. Above: Safecast volunteer Richard Zajac.
When Safecast started, we set out to solve one single problem. People in Japan could not get accurate data about radiation contamination and we felt that our efforts could be well spent collecting and publishing that data for people. It was a lofty goal perhaps, but it seems straightforward enough that it was worth a shot.
The fast action and generous support from Knight Foundation gave us the ability and motivation to try and realize that goal.
Our task was not small to say the least. As there was very little interest in measuring radiation prior to March 11, 2011, there was almost no stock of available monitoring devices for us to use. We were able to get our hands on a limited number of devices and to solve the coverage problem we engineered a way to make them mobile thanks to a dedicated team at the Tokyo Hackerspace. We created the "bGeigie" which enabled us to cover a lot of ground in Japan and add sometimes upwards of 20,000 data points in a single day. To just continue along with this would have eventually solved our initial challenge, however we saw the opportunity to take things a bit further.
We realized that the data we were creating because it didn't exist in Japan, also didn't exist elsewhere around the world and there was a clear need to help document a global radiation baseline – so we set out to do that as well. It became clear that if we had the accurate and granular data we were creating from prior to March 11, we'd know a lot more about what had actually happened. Unfortunately all we know is the results so we're left guessing what things were like before. Our hope is the global dataset we're now building will be valuable for future researchers. Within the first 12 months of monitoring we collected and published over three million new data points.
Along with Jerry Ceppos, dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University, and others, I've argued that much of journalism and mass communication research is not as useful as it should be. So it seems only fair to note that some research is useful and much appreciated. Recently at the Harvard Faculty Club, at a meeting chaired by the Shorenstein Center's Alex Jones, nearly a dozen deans and foundation leaders heard research of the interesting kind.
The deans were from schools participating in the Carnegie Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. A year ago, they had decided to explore the recommendations of the FCC report led by Steven Waldman. Information Needs of Communities, modeled after the Knight Commission's report of the same name, declared a crisis in "local accountability journalism" in the United States. The June meeting at Harvard was an update on research into the report's suggested remedies.
Several professors agreed with Waldman's point that foundations can ease the digital transition. They singled out community foundations as helpful new funders of local news and information. Knight Foundation has encouraged this trend through the Knight Community Information Challenge, which is matching some $24 million to help create more informed and engaged communities. Our insights are here. The projects have contributed to Oklahoma taking on chronic prison system problems, Dubuque increasing water conservation, Northeast Ohio improving public health services for the mentally ill and much more. The projects work best when they are collaborative.
Also encouraging was Arizona State professor Len Downie's paper. Among its recommendations was an endorsement of the Waldman recommendation that the IRS update its rules for approving nonprofit media. Downie, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, knows what nonprofit media can do from his experience with the News21 project. Since Knight currently are funding a project to look at the nonprofit media rules, which haven't been updated since the 1970s, we were happy to hear of Downie's support.
Innovative mobile games, especially those that take place at the local level and focus on issues like art or civics, are often relatively low profile. Thus, it's hard to determine their impact on communities and the larger engagement field.
A new report seeks to address that problem by profiling nearly 40 games and revealing key opportunities and constraints that will be useful to both practitioners and academics. It outlines the emerging field of mobile and pervasive games across three dimensions: civic learning, performance/art and social change.
"The Civic Tripod for Mobile and Games: Activism, Art and Learning," argues that these three domains are currently fragmented, which makes the learnings hard to share. Its authors believe that this fragmentation of isolated examples undermines the ability to think big, design holistically and evaluate more broadly.
The authors hope that by curating a set of important mobile projects and connecting them across issue areas, they'll be able to weave them together across their distinct fields of practice. The different domains of civic learning, performance/art and social change "can and should speak jointly," the report said.
Photo Credit: Flickr user callumscott2
By Paula Ellis, VP/Strategic Initiatives
While engagement is widely seen as a core feature of the best solutions to community challenges, there isn't yet an agreed upon way to describe it, copy it, measure it - or even know if it's spreading.
A yearlong study of collaboratives found that nearly all of them struggled with how to engage residents as co-producers of change. The study, which examined 100 such community-wide efforts and identified 12 as best of class, looked specifically at how institutions engage with each other and how community members themselves engage to produce impact.
Armed with this body of research on what works and with newly announced support from Knight Foundation, the Aspen Institute is launching a Forum for Community Solutions to do two things: share practical tools and skills that can be put to use immediately and build a community of practice that digs deeper.
To accomplish these goals, they'll host roundtable discussions around the country with mayors, community leaders, philanthropists and businesses to walk through successful "needle-moving strategies." The institute uses the term needle-moving to help determine impact. It refers to instances when at least a double digit improvement occurs based upon an agreed measure. They'll launch a media campaign to publicize what works and provide support to communities with promising, impact-driven engagement projects.


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FBI sources confirmed that voter databases in Illinois and Arizona were compromised by hackers.
Insys, an opioid producer which has come under fire for using doctors with troubled histories to promote or consult on its products, faces new claims from Illinois' attorney general.
Charter schools were supposed to better serve the highest need students -- with a unionized workforce, empowered teachers and diverse students. But most today are more racially segregated than traditional schools and only around 12 percent are unionized. No wonder resistance to charters is growing.
European nations are racing to provide lawyers for children prior to questioning or interrogation by police, rather than after arrest. Conscience requires that we in the US hasten to adopt this model for children and adolescents to fortify the right to a fair trial.
Fourteen-year-old Bresha Meadows has been caged for killing her abusive father. In a moment such as this, what does justice look like? Accountability lies with all of us and our systems, which offer few exits to those trapped in cycles of domestic violence.