Marketizing universities

[Marketising universities] rests on a fundamental misconception of the market and its functions: a misconception that could only be held by people who have not thought seriously about the market or its history. 

The market itself, for example, rarely drives innovation; on the contrary it usually reacts. Entrepreneurs certainly have a sense of what might be profitable, but the market does not tell them what will and what won’t. They rely, largely, on guesswork; they put something on the market and keep their fingers crossed. There is no certainty in the market. Nor does it necessarily signal what needs to be done. The market did not synthesise penicillin or put communications satellites into the heavens or discover how cholera is spread. In many cases the market can resist innovation. Businessmen get set in their ways or simply make the wrong guess. Nor are consumers natural innovators. On the contrary they are often very conservative and have to be induced to change their habits by the enormous engine of advertising.

In Defense of British Universities

Normalization by the virtue of "values"

12:51 AM me: TTV does give an impression of Taiwan as a normalized liberal society in keeping with the spirit of the times 

12:59 AM V: You talk about normalisation so skeptically, but what other perspective would they have?

1:00 AM It's like saying, boy, you can tell those Mainland TV shows are up to trouble by how hard they try to hide how naturally inscrutable and untrustworthy Chinese people are

1:04 AM me: it's like... Zhang Ailing writing about being love stricken in WW2 Japanese occupied Shanghai. One also gets the sense then that Republican China was modern and normalized, when it was actually mired in corruption and faced existential threats from the outside

1:06 AM Think about Shame...Amah! (which was published in 1944, before the war ended)

1:07 AM did you get the sense from the story that China was/or was about to be engaged in a struggle for its national survival?

1:10 AM I think normalization is meant to speak to a universal audience. In any age you would have people talking about love, nostalgia, childhood, innocence, remembrance

1:11 AM intentionally or unintentionally placed, it exists; it's reassuring

1:12 AM me: but it is tempting to think that the people on these TV shows reflect a society that has privileged access to normalization by the virtue of its "values", when another society under very different circumstances and values did experience it, as have others1:13 AM that is the skepticism I am trying to convey

View on Age of Fracture

One of the consequences of the disunity of a dominant idea is counter-revolution.

Corey Robin on Age of Fracture by Daniel Rodgers