Elizabeth Anderson & Dewey Duck

Speaking generally, a New Yorker essay profiling a scientist will be so well written and filled with such telling, humanising, details that we will almost believe we understand the nature of the mind boggling discovery that have been made.

What happens when the same method is applied, not to a scientific genius, but a retarded philosopher? Let us see-

American stories trace the sweep of history, but their details are definingly particular. In the summer of 1979, Elizabeth Anderson, then a rising junior at Swarthmore College, got a job as a bookkeeper at a bank in Harvard Square. Every morning, she and the other bookkeepers would process a large stack of bounced checks. Businesses usually had two accounts, one for payroll and the other for costs and supplies. When companies were short of funds, Anderson noticed, they would always bounce their payroll checks. It made a cynical kind of sense: a worker who was owed money wouldn’t go anywhere, or could be replaced, while an unpaid supplier would stop supplying. Still, Anderson found it disturbing that businesses would write employees phony checks, burdening them with bounce fees. It appeared to happen all the time.

Anderson was 19 or 20 years old at that time. She had taken Econ 101. She must have understood that it is only the marginal employer who bounces payroll checks. Everybody else reduces risk by paying an 'efficiency wage'- i.e. a premium on transfer earnings so as to purchase loyalty and obedience- thus, it would be crazy to impose risk on the employee because that would mean the efficiency wage would have to be much higher. It is in the average, not marginal, employer's interest for the employee to feel safe from arbitrary dismissal or discrimination or being stiffed out of their hard-earned dues.

That's why, when you finally get your degree and can switch from working in some 'Uncle's' sweatshop or takeaway, to a proper salaried position with a reputable Employer, you don't have to worry about your paycheck bouncing. Indeed, back in the Seventies, if you worked for a big company or a respectable University or the Government, your paycheck was wholly fungible. You could cash it at the local S&L just by signing it on the back.

The other thing Anderson must have noticed was that marginal employers who bounce payroll checks are also 'accidentally' issuing unsigned checks to Trade Creditors and Utility companies. Normally, when they go down, they owe six months or more to such creditors whereas arrears to workers might be for two or three months.

Why was Anderson 'disturbed' by what she was seeing? It confirmed Econ 101. Furthermore, most States had stiff penalties for this sort of behavior. Unless there was a 'negotiated' risk premium, the employee could simply start claiming Unemployment Benefit while the relevant Government Agency pursued the employer for full restitution. Deliberate fraud, of the sort depicted here, could carry a 2 year jail sentence.

In other words, what Anderson was seeing should not have 'disturbed' her at all. Unless she was really really stupid.

Midway through summer, the bank changed its office plan. When Anderson had started, the bookkeepers worked in rows of desks. Coördination was easy—a check that fell under someone else’s purview could be handed down the line—and there was conversation throughout the day.

Right! Coz conversation throughout the day is good for productivity! You might find it cool when you are 19, but the thing starts to pall pretty quickly. By the time you are in your thirties, it is nothing but noise pollution. You just want to get on with your job. Furthermore, you are looking to advertise your higher productivity or suitability for a more responsible position. By this stage, you are negotiating your salary increment or bonus on an annual or bi-annual basis. Cubicles are the way to go because the last thing you want is other people finding out how much you are being paid. Thus, if you've bought yourself a new watch or car or whatever, you don't want the thing being broadcast up and down every corridor. Birds of passage- College kids doing Summer jobs- might prefer a gossipy commune, but 'lifers' have good reason to prefer greater privacy and less chit-chat.

Then cubicles were added. That transformation interrupted the workflow, the conversational flow, and most other things about the bookkeepers’ days. Their capacities as workers were affected, yet the change had come down from on high.

Coz, people 'on high' get bonuses if they reduce per unit labor costs.

These problems nagged at Anderson that summer and beyond.

Why? They were all explainable by Econ 101 and Business Studies 101 and other such first year Undergrad Courses.

She had arrived at college as a libertarian who wanted to study economics. In the spirit of liberal-arts exploration, though, she enrolled in an introductory philosophy course whose reading list included Karl Marx’s 1844 manuscripts concerning worker alienation.

But Marx says his theory has nothing to do with 'services'. It only applies to commodities.

Anderson thought that Marx’s economic arguments about the declining rate of profit and the labor theory of value fell apart under scrutiny. But she was stirred by his observational writings about the experience of work.

But Marx's observations were second hand and not concerned at all with either Service industries or Modern Corporations paying 'efficiency wages'.
Thus she was being stirred by her own stupidity and ignorance of history which, to be fair, senile or lazy Professors found it worthwhile to foster.

Her summer at the bank drove home the fact that systemic behavior inside the workplace was part of the socioeconomic fabric, too: it mattered whether you were the person who got a clear check or a bounced check, whether a hierarchy made it easier or harder for you to excel and advance.

If you are a 'marginal' worker, you don't get the efficiency wage and have to accept a risk premium. You want to stop being marginal, so you improve your hygiene, punctuality, work skills etc, till you transfer to higher paid, lower risk, employment.

Hierarchy is worth climbing because at each step 'risk pooling' is less adversely selective. Thus you have lower risk and there is less information asymmetry.

Anderson herself rose in a particular hierarchy- which is why the New Yorker is profiling her. Unfortunately, the hierarchy was adversely selective because her chosen subject was shite. Suppose this article was about a Statistician, not a Philosopher. Then, the same experiences Anderson had would have caused the Statistician to devise a better Management Information System which improved efficiency and had unexpected applications in tackling serious Social Problems. We can imagine Malcolm Gladwell- who may not know what an eigen value is but who can dramatize Econometrics or Operations Research like nobody else- showing the subtle manner in which our heroine was able to go beyond Econ 101 and thus help Society to use scarce resources in a wiser and kinder way.

Yet economists had no way of factoring those influences into their thinking.

Nonsense! The theory of incomplete contracts factors all this into its thinking. That's why they guys who pioneered it got Nobel prizes. The thing is very useful for mechanism design. It can make Public or Charitable spending on Social Problems much more effective.

As far as they were concerned, a job was a contract—an exchange of labor for money—and if you were unhappy you left. The nature of the workplace, where most people spent half their lives, was a black box.

Sheer nonsense! The Coasian firm internalizes externalities. It is a 'white box'. We look at how a successful firm or other organization tackles information asymmetry and get a clue as to how 'mechanism'  can embody the 'Revelation Principle'.

Anderson grew intellectually restless.

Because her teachers were keeping her in ignorance of what had happened and was happening in Econ.

Other ideas that were presented as cornerstones of economics, such as rational-choice theory, didn’t match the range of human behaviors that she was seeing in the wild.

Sheer nonsense. A 'regret minimizing' rational-choice theory- though not taught- was known to exist. But, stupid Profs. like Amartya Sen preferred to go after straw-men or Aunt Sallys rather than specify a canonical form for the 'real world' theory.

She liked how philosophy approached big problems that cut across various fields, but she was most excited by methods that she encountered in the history and the philosophy of science.

These were not 'methods',  they were 'just so' stories.

Like philosophers, scientists chased Truth, but their theories were understood to be provisional—tools for resolving problems as they appeared, models valuable only to the extent that they explained and predicted what showed in experiments. A Newtonian model of motion had worked beautifully for a long time, but then people noticed bits of unaccountable data, and relativity emerged as a stronger theory. Couldn’t disciplines like philosophy work that way, too?

This is simply wrong. The Newtonian theory was inconsistent. Relativity made some strange predictions but was empirically more successful. Both theories made predictions which were useful and alethic. Philosophy doesn't work like that at all, as Socrates observed when he first coined the term.

The bank experience showed how you could be oppressed by hierarchy, working in an environment where you were neither free nor equal.

WTF? A 19 year old gets paid a little money for a Summer job in a Bank. If that is 'oppression', then the word has no pejorative meaning. Any disutility is oppression.
Hierarchy in the Bank was less discriminatory than in Academia. Anderson preferred to suck up to her supervisors and write worthless shite so as to get more and more useless degrees and other credentials till she finally secured tenure and could tyrannize over an equally cretinous serf caste of graduate students.

But this implied that freedom and equality were bound together in some way beyond the basic state of being unenslaved, which was an unorthodox notion.

Freedom and equality are bound together in only one way- Hohfeldian rights and obligations don't change when assignment is changed. Any immunity concerning x currently accruing to y, can cease to do so and accrue wholly to z, iff y & z are equal.

Suppose I am your slave. You go bankrupt and are sold into slavery. I buy you. Are you now my slave? No. I am not your equal because I am a slave. It may be legal for me to buy a slave but this slave belongs to my owner. Thus, in this scenario, by buying you as a slave I have actually enfranchised you because I belong to you already.

It is a different matter that a particular set of people might decide to pool risk such that outcomes are equal. But this is a story about Insurance not Equality. Philosophers may pretend otherwise but they do not pool their earnings irrespective of whom got tenure or where or at what salary.

Much social thought is rooted in the idea of a conflict between the two. If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality.

This idiocy has gone on too long. All that is being described is risk pooling. It is perfectly rational for a 'core' to impose a 'pooling equilibrium'. However, it is equally rational, to permit 'separating equilibria' based on 'costly signals'.

Philosophy may not understand why there is a huge big Insurance industry well supplied with actuaries and Statisticians and vast Data-banks. It may think the solution to Risk is gassing on about 'Equality'. But this is silly. Why not gas on about 'Charity' or 'Santa Claus' or the 'Ghost of Christmas Past' instead?

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.”

Poor fellow, he was paid to say things like that. There were other people in other Departments of the University he taught at who had moved beyond the Middle Ages and who were finding the cure to terrible diseases and inventing cool new stuff.

What good would it to do to go on repeating some shite Berlin said? Why not just pray in Latin or sacrifice a virgin to the Corn God?

It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them.

Thatcher and Reagan and so forth showed Berlin was wrong.We don't care about Equality. We only care about Insurance.

In this respect, it might seem odd that, through history, equality and freedom have arrived together as ideals.

Ideals don't exist. They don't arrive together at the cocktail party coz they are secretly having an affair. This shite is just worthless verbiage of a particular sort. It's like how when a guy who is ranting on about the Jews and the Freemasons quickly segues into ranting about Gays in the Mainstream Media who brainwashed my wife into believing 3.5 inches wasn't a truly massive dick size and anyway she's changed the locks and could I sleep on your sofa?

What if they weren’t opposed, Anderson wondered, but, like the sugar-phosphate chains in DNA, interlaced in a structure that we might not yet understand?

Is there any Scientist who is wondering whether sugar-phosphate chains in DNA are interlaced in the same manner as Liberty and Equality? No. Why not? The two aren't interlaced at all. They don't actually exist. Talking about them is a waste of time.

What if the way most of us think about the relation between equality and freedom—the very basis for the polarized, intractable political division of this moment—is wrong?

What if the way most of us think about Morality and Spirituality, or Beauty and Truth, or Kissiness and Cuddlability, is wrong? Would anything actually change? Nope. Nothing at all.

'Polarised, intractable political divisions' don't matter coz only a few nutjobs bother about them. But they are utterly and obviously useless wankers. They cancel each other out as noise, though in the short-run, if people are stupid, they may create a great public nuisance.

At fifty-nine, Anderson is the chair of the University of Michigan’s department of philosophy and a champion of the view that equality and freedom are mutually dependent, enmeshed in changing conditions through time. Working at the intersection of moral and political philosophy, social science, and economics, she has become a leading theorist of democracy and social justice. She has built a case, elaborated across decades, that equality is the basis for a free society. Her work, drawing on real-world problems and information, has helped to redefine the way contemporary philosophy is done, leading what might be called the Michigan school of thought. Because she brings together ideas from both the left and the right to battle increasing inequality, Anderson may be the philosopher best suited to this awkward moment in American life. She builds a democratic frame for a society in which people come from different places and are predisposed to disagree.

So the lady has 'built a case'. Is it justiciable? Lawyers built a case challenging racial discrimination by an Organ of the State. They won billions in damages and changed the system. Did Anderson do anything similar? Is this 'democratic frame' that she has built something that can be enacted by the Legislature? If not, what good is it? Did Anderson contribute to Trump's flipping of Michigan? Is she contributing to its flipping away from him? I doubt it. She is just adding noise to signal.

One recent autumn morning, Anderson flew from Ann Arbor, where she lives, to Columbus, to deliver a lecture at Ohio State University. With a bit of time before her talk, she sat in a high-backed chair and spoke with undergraduates about her work. “Almost everyone wants to be respected and esteemed by others, so how can you make that compatible with a society of equals?” she asked. The students, looking a touch wary, listened intently and stared.

There is an easy answer to this question. Everyone has a 'soul' according to Scripture. So esteem and respect all in obedience to Divine Revelation.

People who meet Anderson in the world often find that she is more approachable than they imagined an august philosopher to be. She is, she’d be the first to say, a klutz. Most days, she wears a colorful cotton blouse, hiking sneakers, and hard-wearing khakis that could bear a carabiner full of keys. “Liz doesn’t put on airs,” her friend Rebecca Eisenberg, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, says. Dan Troyka, another friend, says, “She could be at a potluck as easily as at a philosophy symposium.” She talks on a dais the way she does to buddies over lunch—in a trumpety voice, flattened across mid-American vowels—and has only a nodding acquaintance with many decorums. A few friends felt unsettled when she was interviewed on cable news earlier this year; it was the first time they had ever seen her wearing makeup.
In Ohio, she wore a loose black dress, trimmed in hot pink, over billowing pants and black flats. (“Feminists work to overcome the internal obstacles to choice—self-abnegation, lack of confidence, and low self-esteem—that women often face from internalizing norms of femininity,” Anderson, who holds a joint professorship in women’s studies, has written.) She crossed her right leg over her left and blinked as students formulated questions. She takes great pleasure in arranging information in useful forms; if she weren’t a philosopher, she thinks, she’d like to be a mapmaker, or a curator of archeological displays in museums.
As the students listened, she sketched out the entry-level idea that one basic way to expand equality is by expanding the range of valued fields within a society.

Oho! Now I get it! If a cretin is given a Doctorate in Medicine she might well kill her patients. Let us give Doctorates in useless subjects like Philosophy to stupid cretins so that they can get 'respect and esteem'.
But this is costly. So, the better course is to just respect and esteem everyone coz they've got an immortal soul and, anyway, the Bible tells us to.

Unlike a hardscrabble peasant community of yore in which the only skill that anyone cared about might be agricultural prowess, a society with many valued arenas lets individuals who are good at art or storytelling or sports or making people laugh receive a bit of love.

They get a lot of money. Love? Maybe. That would depend on their immortal soul.

“Is the idea that we expand the number of values so that everyone gets a piece of the scene?” a young woman asked. She was trying to understand how hierarchies of esteem could be compatible with equality. “Or is there some sort of respectable limit, so we’re, like, We’ve sort of found the things we value, and you’ve got to aim for one of them!”
Anderson replied with a bright cackle of delight: Hah-hah-hah! Friends have noted that her laughter, like the autumn weather, comes in warm and chilly forms. There’s a staccato laugh of encouraging good humor (Hah!). There is, more ominously, a rough, guttural chuckle of declining barometric pressure (Hhhh-aahr-aahr-aahr), with which she introduces ideas she considers comically, dangerously bad. Addressing the student’s question, she posited endless innovation within general values. “Like, every society has music, and great musical performers always get esteem,” she said, extending her forearms in a teddy-bear position of embrace.

This is silly. Thanks to the internet, productivity in the Arts has greatly increased. A guy singing 'kolaveri di' can reach billions within hours. Not every guy- only a handsome guy who has a lot of talent can go viral. My chance of doing the same has actually decreased greatly precisely because of how much the internet has burgeoned and become accessible to poor people.

Thus the only cheap way to get respect and esteem for everybody has to do with God and the immortal soul we each possess.

In general, Anderson is outgoing when conversation turns to ideas and shy about other things. (“If you want to make her totally uncomfortable, tell her she has to go to a fancy function in a cocktail dress,” her husband says.) Now she cleared her throat noisily. “If you look back at the origins of liberalism, it starts first with a certain settlement about religious difference,” she said. “Catholics, Protestants—they’re killing each other! Finally, Germany, England, all these places say, We’re tired of these people killing each other, so we’re going to make a peace settlement: religious toleration, live and let live.”

This is a just-so story which we can all very quickly verify to be utterly false just by looking up Wikipedia. The Wars of Religion ended when Kings enforced a common religion on their subjects- Cuius regio, eius religio- and other sects were exiled or persecuted.

She spread her hands wider. “Then something remarkable happens,” she said. “People now have the freedom to have crosscutting identities in different domains. At church, I’m one thing. At work, I’m something else. I’m something else at home, or with my friends. The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains?” She paused. “That is what it is to be free.”

Anderson is describing something which has always existed everywhere. A slave was one person at church, another at work and so on. According to Anderson's just-so story, that slave was actually free. By contrast, a hopeless alcoholic may be the same incontinent hooligan at church, at work, at home and in the police cell. But, once released from that last, he is free and, what's more, at liberty to change his way of life.

A few years after her summer at the bank, Anderson was back in Cambridge, as a Harvard graduate student, studying political and moral philosophy under the mentorship of John Rawls. At a dinner party one evening, she was introduced to a former philosophy undergraduate named David Jacobi. He was smart, winsomely geeky, and uncommonly kind, and he had a thing for brainy women. They began dating. Jacobi wound up in medical school. Anderson wound up teaching at Michigan. She was touched when he requested a hospital near her, in Detroit, for his internship. Sometime after that, they got married, though neither recalls exactly when. They looked for a place to live near Jacobi’s job, and their criteria were simple: price, neighborhood, and space.

As Anderson toured apartments, though, she noticed other forces in play. Greater Detroit was effectively segregated by race. Oak Park had middle-class white sections and middle-class black sections. In Southfield, a real-estate agent told her not to worry, because locals were “holding the line against blacks at 10 Mile Road.” Until then, Anderson had not thought seriously about race; she assumed that reasonable people treated it as undefining.

Anderson did not know America had a color problem. Perhaps no one told her about Slavery and Jim Crow. But, did Anderson really not know Schelling's work on segregation? Why? How ignorant was she?

Now she felt herself being swept, as a middle-class white woman, into a particular zone.

She was 'swept'? By what? By whom? She could have chosen to live elsewhere. Why did she feel she had no agency? Was it coz hubby was bringing in the big bucks?

To the extent that it constrained her options, it felt like an impingement on freedom.

Wow!  Anderson sure had it tough. If she went to an Italian restaurant for lunch, she would feel her options were constrained, her freedom had been impinged because she could not order Chow Mein.

To the extent that it entrenched racial hierarchy, it seemed anti-egalitarian as well.

She entrenched herself in an academic hierarchy- that was by itself anti-egalitarian- more particularly because her subject is a zero sum game. It yields no larger dividend for Society.

As a rule, it’s easy to complain about inequality, hard to settle on the type of equality we want. Do we want things to be equal where we start in life or where we land?

This is a silly question. What we want is to Insure ourselves by Risk Pooling. Mechanisms to do so are themselves subject to uncertainty and evolve as  information asymmetry changes. Philosophy can't help us here anymore than it can help us tinker with sugar-phosphate chains in DNA so as to cure genetic diseases.

When inequalities arise, what are the knobs that we adjust to get things back on track?

There are no such knobs because Evolution has never needed or used any such mechanism. Risk pooling is a different matter.

In the short run, we can systematically mistake an 'inequality' (in the eye of the beholder) to be a violation of a pooling equilibrium.  But, this can backfire quickly because of adverse exist and entry. So the pooling equilibrium quickly collapses. The Pilgrims discovered this for themselves very quickly. So long as it was a case of 'from each according to his ability', nobody's needs were satisfied. So they went the other way and flourished rather than starved.

Individually, people are unequal in countless ways, and together they join groups that resist blending. How do you build up a society that allows for such variety without, as in the greater-Detroit real-estate market, turning difference into a constraint?

You don't 'build up a Society'. If you did, that Society would collapse very quickly because you have shit for brains. Just concentrate on looking after yourself. This means identifying sources of risk and finding Insurance mechanisms.

How do you move from a basic model of egalitarian variety, in which everybody gets a crack at being a star at something, to figuring out how to respond to a complex one, where people, with different allotments of talent and virtue, get unequal starts, and often meet with different constraints along the way?

Why have a 'basic model' of something silly and useless? Why move from that basic model to something more foolish yet?

There are 'coordination games' where everybody aims at an equal outcome- not more, not less. Study them by all means. Mechanisms of that sort can yield first order good. Second order discussion, however, is just a wank.

In 1999, Anderson published an article in the journal Ethics, titled “What Is the Point of Equality?,” laying out the argument for which she is best known. “If much recent academic work defending equality had been secretly penned by conservatives,” she began, opening a grenade in the home trenches, “could the results be any more embarrassing for egalitarians?”

Anderson is right that Philosophers writing about Equality scored an own goal- BUT they did that no matter what they wrote about. Economists can write about Equality in a manner which causes policymakers to back-away from failed 'supply side' panaceas. But this involves Risk analysis and Mechanism design of a rigorous mathematical kind.  Anderson and her ilk can contribute nothing.

The problem, she proposed, was that contemporary egalitarian thinkers had grown fixated on distribution: moving resources from lucky-seeming people to unlucky-seeming people, as if trying to spread the luck around.

Human beings need to pool risk because if they don't do so 'coordination games' collapse, correlated equilibria become unattianable, everybody is worse off (in a repeated game). Anderson does not grasp this. She thinks people want equality and theorists design Societies to meet that desire. Furthermore, she invokes an externalist notion of luck- as if the thing was a natural, organic, property, like the colour of one's eyes.

This was a weird and nebulous endeavor. Is an heir who puts his assets into a house in a flood zone and loses it unlucky—or lucky and dumb? Or consider a woman who marries rich, has children, and stays at home to rear them (crucial work for which she gets no wages). If she leaves the marriage to escape domestic abuse and subsequently struggles to support her kids, is that bad luck or an accretion of bad choices? Egalitarians should agree about clear cases of blameless misfortune: the quadriplegic child, the cognitively impaired adult, the teen-ager born into poverty with junkie parents. But Anderson balked there, too. By categorizing people as lucky or unlucky, she argued, these egalitarians set up a moralizing hierarchy.

That's the problem with externalist theories and the reason Economics has a theory of Value while Philosophy showed its worthlessness by pretending this involved a Paradox.

In the article, she imagined some citizens getting a state check and a bureaucratic letter:

To the disabled: Your defective native endowments or current disabilities, alas, make your life less worth living than the lives of normal people. . . . To the stupid and untalented: Unfortunately, other people don’t value what little you have to offer in the system of production. . . . Because of the misfortune that you were born so poorly endowed with talents, we productive ones will make it up to you: we’ll let you share in the bounty of what we have produced with our vastly superior and highly valued abilities. . . . To the ugly and socially awkward: . . . Maybe you won’t be such a loser in love once potential dates see how rich you are.
By letting the lucky class go on reaping the market’s chancy rewards while asking others to concede inferior status in order to receive a drip-drip-drip of redistributive aid, these egalitarians were actually entrenching people’s status as superior or subordinate. Generations of bleeding-heart theorists had been doing the wolf’s work in shepherds’ dress.

Theorists may earn a little money as pedagogues in worthless Departments but they don't have any effect on Society. Insurance does. Good Risk Pooling increases Economic activity. Actuaries can help, Ethical Theorists just make a nuisance of themselves.

In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to.

So the way forward is to shift from a feasible solution to Society's Transportation Problem which however can't be implemented (for reasons of concurrency, computability, and complexity) to something else which can't be specified at all.

This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions. If one person’s supposed freedom results in someone else’s subjugation, that is not actually a free society in action. It’s hierarchy in disguise.

The opposite point is equally valid,; no society is truly free in action if at least one person is not subjugated. This is because this Society Dictatorially disallows antagonomic preferences. Furthermore, it is not enough that at least one person is theoretically subjugatable, the subjugation must be actual otherwise Rational Regret Minimization would require withholding belief in that Society's freedom.

To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest).

They could do all this while being truly slaves- albeit to a benevolent slave-owner.

Egalitarians should focus policy attention on areas where that order had broken down. Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem.

It makes sense to pay into a Social Insurance scheme so as to avoid that fate. Why bring 'Egalitarians' into the discussion? What we need is actuaries.

A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps.

Again, it makes sense to 'regret minimize' by paying into what is essentially an insurance scheme so that, should you become quadriplegic, buildings would already have ramps.
Once again, Egalitarianism has nothing to do with the underlying risk. Those nutjobs might not want anyone to have buildings till everybody has buildings.

Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences.

Anderson, like Amartya Sen and other such useless people, is just playing with words. We could as easily say 'all people should be equally the slaves of the Nicaraguan horcrux of my Neighbor's cat and thus have equal access to buildings so as to delight their feline master by fulfilling their human conatus or capabilities.

A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence.

A society in which everyone had the same material and psychic benefits could still be unequal even if consisted of just one individual because democratic equality is not something you can simply tax into existence. Nor can it be syntaxed into existence because of Wittgenstien's Private Language argument.

'People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,” Anderson wrote.

People, not nature, are responsible for their being people. So they are responsible for everything that happens to people. However, for precisely this reason, they are not responsible for anything they themselves do. It was always other people who were at fault.

Games against nature are worthwhile. Talking philosophy is a waste of time.

Anderson was born early, at three pounds six ounces, and stayed small through childhood, wearing toddler-size clothes into the second grade. “People tended to treat her as much younger than her real age and ability,” her mother, Eve, says. For years, she scarcely spoke; she had a lisp and seemed loath to reveal the imperfection. Eve recalls passing her bedroom and hearing her practicing her name repeatedly, E-liz-a-beth, trying to get it right. When she was three, her mother asked, “Why do you allow your brother to talk for you?”—why didn’t she speak for herself?

“Until now, it simply was not necessary,” Elizabeth said. It was the first full sentence that she had ever uttered.
Their household, in Manchester, Connecticut, was mixed and fluid. Eve, a freelance journalist, was Jewish; Anderson’s father, Olof, an aeronautical engineer, had been brought up Swedish Lutheran. They helped found a local Unitarian Universalist worship space. Eve volunteered at the local Democratic Party headquarters and had campaigned for Adlai Stevenson; in 1964, Olof was elected to a Democratic seat on the Manchester board of directors. “They were throwing fund-raising parties all the time,” Anderson recalls. She, in contrast, felt awkward and anxious. “Books were secure—this was something I could master and control.”
The reading led to other interests. “Everyone had something to teach her,” Laura Grande, a childhood friend, says. “She wasn’t interested in parties, or in social gatherings that weren’t enlightening.” Anderson dreamed of studying math and economics, because she loved the way they hung together in a tight system. At one point, Olof and Elizabeth read Plato’s Republic and Mill’s “On Liberty” together. The world outside seemed untidy; she found peace in the stability of shared ideas.

Okay. She was genuinely retarded. Boy, do I feel bad!

One Friday afternoon, Anderson sat with Kimberly Chuang, a soft-spoken twenty-nine-year-old who had just defended her dissertation, the final rite of passage before the Ph.D. Chuang had devised a model for “contributive justice,” determining what people owe society, rather than what society owes them: a frameshift with implications for taxation. At the defense, five professors prodded her with questions in the manner of a dental scaler scraping away plaque—an excavation that Chuang seemed to enjoy in proportion. They deliberated, then issued good news. “You’re a doctor!” Anderson said. Everybody stood up and applauded.

Yup! Every retard should get to be a Doctor- but of something useless like Philosophy, not Medicine- so as to talk shite about 'contributive' rather than 'distributive' Justice' coz fuck else can these fuckwits do?

Anderson had invented a “Ph.D. to lecturer” program at Michigan, to give new doctors a grace year to teach and to apply for jobs, and Chuang was to be the inaugural fellow. Still, Chuang blanched as they discussed the scope of her new obligations. She had four classes to help teach, and was supposed to give talks at a slew of international conferences. How should she prepare these audition-like presentations?
“Don’t write up,” Anderson advised. “Just do PowerPoint slides.” Behind her, a PC was mounted on a treadmill desk; she tries to get in ten thousand steps a day. She went on, “Give the big picture, make points to motivate the idea, and punt all the objections to the Q. & A. What ensues is a very lively Q. & A.”

Yes. Lively Q&As for the retarded, by the retarded, so that the Democratic Equality of the retarded does not disappear from the earth.

Chuang knitted her brow. An esteemed philosopher at Oxford reads his talks, she said.
“Yeah, horrible,” Anderson said. “So retro.” The issue was that people were afraid of questions, and tried to address them all preëmptively. She laughed darkly: Hhhh-aahr-aahr-aahr. “Philosophers are too risk averse, and this makes listening to philosophers tedious.”
Anderson landed at Michigan out of graduate school, in 1987, and never left, despite being courted by other universities, starting with an “out of the blue” tenure-track job offer from Princeton the following year. Michigan, despite its winters, seemed a warmer place. The school was huge, but Anderson liked the size. (“For any subject I’m interested in—and I’m interested in a zillion things—I know there will be an expert who can lead me to essential sources,” she says.) Still, there were challenges. On her first day, a senior colleague took her to lunch—a friendly welcome, she assumed, until he started telling her his thoughts on why she was the only woman in the department. Then he lighted into Martha Nussbaum, who had taught her Plato at Harvard, and Nussbaum’s recent book “The Fragility of Goodness,” which had made her a star. Many people have doubted that women are capable of doing good philosophy, he mused, and this book offered no counterevidence. Anderson remembers, “I was, like, Uh-oh.”
Until then, Anderson had never really considered the role of gender in her career. She later learned that there were fewer women in academic philosophy than in either math or astrophysics, and a sense of the way inequality was built into that pipeline propelled her interest in feminist philosophy. In 1993, she became the first woman in Michigan’s department to be tenured from within.
Her first book, “Value in Ethics and Economics,” appeared that year, announcing one of her major projects: reconciling value (an amorphous ascription of worth that is a keystone of ethics and economics) with pluralism (the fact that people seem to value things in different ways). Philosophers have often assumed that pluralistic value reflects human fuzziness—we’re loose, we’re confused, and we mix rational thought with sentimental responses. Anderson proposed that, actually, pluralism of value wasn’t the fuzz but the thing itself.

The Economic theory of value has to do with shadow prices and the solution to the Transportation problem. It is mathematical. Anderson resurrects an externalist theory of value- which is foolish- but does so in a meaningless manner.

She offered an “expressive” theory: in her view, each person’s values could be various because they were socially expressed, and thus shaped by the range of contexts and relationships at play in a life.

So, she didn't really have a theory of Value. She was talking about people expressing themselves.

Instead of positing value as a basic, abstract quality across society (the way “utility” functioned for economists), she saw value as something determined by the details of an individual’s history. Like her idea of relational equality, this model resisted the temptation to flatten human variety toward a unifying standard. In doing so, it helped expand the realm of free and reasoned economic choice.

Nonsense! It was just worthless verbiage.

Consider a couple who has worked for years to run a family restaurant and is offered a corporate buyout, worth more than they could earn by keeping it open. Traditional economists and many philosophers would say, Take the money! That would maximize value. Maybe you can use it to start a new restaurant. In Anderson’s expressive model, the couple might have a sound reason to refuse. “They did not work all those years to make millions for some brand-x corporation,” she wrote. “A concern for the narrative unity of their lives, for what meaning their present choices make of their past actions, could rationally motivate them to turn down the offer.” The value of that narrative unity was beyond the reach of the market: for that couple, no price was the right price.

When we make decisions under uncertainty, we try to minimize the regret we will feel when we look back. In this case, the couple knew they'd regret selling out more than not selling out and maybe losing the thing anyway during an economic downturn. Traditional Econ, or Ethics, has no difficulty understanding this. However, in this case, there is some extra information- viz. the disutility they will experience from knowing the big Corporation made mega-bucks off their hard work- and this introduces a different economic concept- 'super fairness' or 'envy free' division. Essentially, a proper economist (but not a philosopher) could work out a better deal for all concerned. This story can have a happier ending. There is an element of akrebia in both the Corporation's offer and the family's rejection of that offer. Economia, however, is about finding a better way forward.

In this sense, “Value in Ethics and Economics” was partly about reclaiming moral authority from the cold-eyed neoclassical economists who guided policy in the eighties and nineties.

Sheer nonsense! The eighties and nineties were about kicking organised labor in the goolies and replacing welfare with work-fare and breaking up a technocratic Corporate elite in favor of, initially, Institutional Investors, but- quite swiftly- to the advantage of Hedge Funds, V.C's, & Private Equity mavens. This had everything to do with incomplete contract theory and nothing to do with neo-classical Econ.

Anderson’s model unseated the premises of rational-choice theory, in which individuals invariably make utility-maximizing decisions, occasionally in heartless-seeming ways.

But that was already old hat. Regret minimization, Hannan Consistency, was the way to go.

It ran with, rather than against, moral intuition. Because values were plural, it was perfectly rational to choose to spend evenings with your family, say, and have guilt toward the people you left in the lurch at work.

What is this shite? When has this kind of thing not been rational? Cicero mentions an Epicurian Economist who poured scorn on Aristotelian Econ two thousand years ago.
When Amartya Sen beats up a straw-man, that's cool coz he's an actual Economist and so his being so utterly ignorant is funny- more particularly coz he's from a very poor part of the world. But Anderson isn't an Economist. She just comes across as retarded and...like...from Michigan.

The theory also pointed out the limits on free-market ideologies, such as libertarianism. In ethics, it broke across old factional debates. The core idea “has been picked up on by people across quite a range of positions,” Peter Railton, one of Anderson’s longtime colleagues, says. “Kantians and consequentialists alike”—people who viewed morality in terms of duties and obligations, and those who measured the morality of actions by their effects in the world—“could look at it and see something important.”

Yes. But only because it was sillier yet and thus opened fecund fields of riper fatuity.

“She has this way of challenging the dominant model and assumptions in multiple areas,” Sally Haslanger, a former colleague of Anderson’s who is now at M.I.T., says. “She has that ability to turn the lens so that people who thought they knew the way to proceed are now seeing very different things.”
Part of the novelty in Anderson’s approach came from a shift in how she practiced philosophy. Traditionally, the discipline is taught through a-priori thought—you start with basic principles and reason forward. Anderson, by contrast, sought to work empirically, using information gathered from the world, identifying problems to be solved not abstractly but through the experienced problems of real people.
Shortly after arriving at Michigan, she had been struck by the work of a law-school colleague, Don Herzog, which incorporated a turn-of-the-century school of American thought called pragmatism. To a pragmatist, “truth” is an instrumental and contingent state; a claim is true for now if, by all tests, it works for now. This approach, and the friendship that had borne it, enriched Anderson’s work. Herzog has offered notes on almost everything she has published in the past three decades.
In 2004, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy asked Anderson to compose its entry on the moral philosophy of John Dewey, who helped carry pragmatist methods into the social realm. Dewey had an idea of democracy as a system of good habits that began in civil life. He was an anti-ideologue with an eye for pluralism. Anderson was quickly smitten. In 2013, when she was elevated to Michigan’s highest professorship and got to name her chair—a kind of academic spirit animal—she styled herself the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor. “Dewey argued that the primary problems for ethics in the modern world concerned the ways society ought to be organized, rather than personal decisions of the individual,” Anderson wrote in her Stanford Encyclopedia entry. As she turned to problems in her work and her life, his thought became a crucial guide.

Dewey, as I well remember, was Donald Duck's middle nephew. It is good to know that Anderson is now sitting on a Chair named for him. Not till every last retard has a tenured Professorship and a Chair named after a Disney Character can true freedom, genuine democratic equality, and authentic niceness be achieved.