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Link Biscuits: 5 March 2010

Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Fri, 03/05/2010 - 12:55
  • Crooked Timber, Measuring Justice: "Cambridge has just published a new book, Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities, which Ingrid and I edited (the idea of doing it was entirely Ingrid’s, I should say, and a brilliant idea it turned out to be). Its a fairly tightly focused collection, for which we invited two kinds of contribution. It opens with a shortened version of Pogge’s essay “Can the Capabilities Approach be Justified?” which many of the contributors refer back to, and the first part continues with a series of chapters considering the relative merits of Rawls’s social primary goods approach and the capabilities approach to the metric of justice; for this we invited contributors whom we believed would defend one or another of these metrics while giving careful criticisms of the rival, plus Dick Arneson whom we believed (rightly) could be relied on to help make progress despite not being associated with either view. For the second part we invited contributors who would think about some specific issue of justice (in health, education, gender, the family, disability) and consider the relative merits of the approaches with respect to that specific issue. We wrote a short analytical introduction which locates the debate in a broader context, and which, we hope, helps guide the reader through the book (the CUP page has a pdf of it, so you can judge for yourselves); the book concludes with a nice, partly autobiographical, essay by Sen engaging with the chapters in the first part of the book."
  • Chicago News Cooperative, Environmentalist Prods Fellow Blacks to Join in Her Crusade: "Ms. Davis also preaches do-for-self to go along with her gospel of green. “The move toward eco-friendly development, and the jobs it creates,” she said, “is an opportunity for blacks and other minorities to take more control of their destiny. In that sense, it is a way to move forward for communities that often feel left behind by economic opportunity.” “What we reject is the ‘Help the Negro Industry,’ ” she said. “People coming into our community, thinking they know best, trying to save us. We can save ourselves. “The ‘Help the Negro Industry’ is what allowed billions of dollars to come down for urban renewal, but the urban did not get renewed. We are absolutely committed that urban renewal not be repeated.” Ms. Davis said she believed that minorities must educate and prepare themselves to take advantage of the changing, more environmentally attuned economy. It was just as important, she said, to educate people about the “economics of ecology” as it was to protest the dire environmental conditions in many black and Latino neighborhoods — including accusations by some that “environmental racism” contributes to the problem."
  • Sarika Gupta, Reconciliation and Representation: The Share of the Population Represented by the Democratic Majority: "With the debate over health care dragging on, it is becoming increasingly likely that the Senate will pass a bill through the reconciliation process, requiring just a simple majority rather than the super-majority needed to break a filibuster. This paper shows that if this path is taken, senators who represent the vast majority of the nation’s population will have supported the bill. This assessment holds even if several of the senators who have indicated serious reservations end up voting against it."