Selection of posters and placards from today's student protests in Dublin, Ireland

Thousands of students marched in Dublin today in protest against increases in fees and expected cuts to student maintenance grants in the forthcoming budget. Here is a selection of posters and placards from the march.

"What ever happened to free education"

"we write the future"

"If you're gonna take my education, at least book my ticket to Australia"

"Make the 1% pay"

"No cash, no jobs, no hope"

"Sentenced to debt"

"Pay my fees or pay my dole"

"Feck off fees"

"Emma was here! (But probably won't be next year ... )

"Dumbledore wouldn't stand for this sh!t"

"Beans on toast + fees = toast"

Blaming the poor for their condition...

Faced with inexplicable inequalities and injustices in society, and feeling disempowered to challenge the status quo, we have a natural tendency to try and rationalize the situation by assigning blame; the unemployed must be lazy, rape victims were "asking for it" etc. In this way we try to evade the unpleasant prospect that such circumstances could befall any one of us.

Oliver Burkeman describes this phenomenon in his latest Guardian column. However, he mistakenly sees this "just world hypothesis" as a difficulty the Occupy protestors will have to overcome. If the majority of us view the travails of those less well off than ourselves as their just desserts, why bother trying to alter "the system"? In fact, the Occupy movement presents an alternative to the vicious cycle of inequality being reinforced by negative stereotyping of the less fortunate members of society. The Occupy protestors force us all to face up to the injustices, to which we have become - subconsciously or otherwise - desensitized. Perhaps even more significantly, the movement also offers a voice of empowerment and the prospect that such inequalities are not inevitable.

Favourite Steve Jobs quotes

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Don' t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.

- as quoted by the BBC

Unconventional wisdom on the retirement age from James K. Galbraith

In keeping with the spirit of this blog, here's a nice challenging piece of creative thinking from James K. Galbraith on why governments should consider reducing the retirement age ...

Kevin O'Rourke on the importance of Economic History

Excellent post on Irisheconomy.ie by Kevin O'Rourke on the importance of Economic History:

One of the most important things that a bit of history gives you is a sense of the importance of context. A model will work very well in some technological or institutional contexts, but not in others. 

[...]

If the only thing that economic history did was protect us from one-size-fits-all merchants, it would still be worth the price of admission.

 

 

David Cameron probably has a vision ... but I don't know what it is

In a recent poll in Britain, 55% of people agreed with the statement that "David Cameron probably has a vision for the country ... but I don't know what it is."

- as reported in the Guardian, 6 October, 2011.

Tony Judt on Captive Minds

The following is an extract from Tony Judt's essay "Captive Minds" in the NYRB:

Today, we can still hear sputtering echoes of the attempt to reignite the cold war around a crusade against “Islamo-fascism.” But the true mental captivity of our time lies elsewhere. Our contemporary faith in “the market” rigorously tracks its radical nineteenth-century doppelgänger—the unquestioning belief in necessity, progress, and History. Just as the hapless British Labour chancellor in 1929–1931, Philip Snowden, threw up his hands in the face of the Depression and declared that there was no point opposing the ineluctable laws of capitalism, so Europe’s leaders today scuttle into budgetary austerity to appease “the markets.”

But “the market”—like “dialectical materialism”—is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers—mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers—who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in theUS especially have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives. We know perfectly well that untrammeled faith in unregulated markets kills: the rigid application of what was until recently the “Washington consensus” in vulnerable developing countries—with its emphasis on tight fiscal policy, privatization, low tariffs, and deregulation—has destroyed millions of livelihoods. Meanwhile, the stringent “commercial terms” on which vital pharmaceuticals are made available has drastically reduced life expectancy in many places. But in Margaret Thatcher’s deathless phrase, “there is no alternative.”

It was in just such terms that communism was presented to its beneficiaries following World War II; and it was because History afforded no apparent alternative to a Communist future that so many of Stalin’s foreign admirers were swept into intellectual captivity. But when Miłosz published The Captive Mind, Western intellectuals were still debating among genuinely competitive social models—whether social democratic, social market, or regulated market variants of liberal capitalism. Today, despite the odd Keynesian protest from below the salt, a consensus reigns.

For Miłosz, “the man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.” This is doubtless so and explains the continuing skepticism of the Eastern European in the face of Western innocence. But there is nothing innocent about Western (and Eastern) commentators’ voluntary servitude before the new pan-orthodoxy. Many of them, Ketman-like, know better but prefer not to raise their heads above the parapet. In this sense at least, they have something truly in common with the intellectuals of the Communist age. One hundred years after his birth, fifty-seven years after the publication of his seminal essay, Miłosz’s indictment of the servile intellectual rings truer than ever: “his chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.”