Fans of Friedrich von Hayek may be surprised to learn that the Austrian economist is the talk of Occupy London. Hayek’s observation that distributed intelligence in a voluntary co-operative is a hallmark of real economy rings true beneath the bells of St Paul’s. Occupy is often criticised for not having a single message but that misses the point: we are committed to incorporating different preferences before coming up with policies. In this sense, it could be said we work more like a market than the corporate boardroom or lobbyist-loaded politics – our ideas are radical but also just and democratically decided.

The policy proposals that follow focus on reducing tax-avoidance, using monetary policy to boost the housing market, and changing the way executives are compensated — hardly revolutionary stuff, but probably beneficial. (I’m not sure, though, how the idea for the Bank of England to use “quantitative easing… to fund housebuilding” would work either logistically or in terms of getting the desired outcome.)

I understand that these kinds of demands are uninspiring for any number of reasons, above all because they embrace the logic of capitalism and implicitly legitimate the system by reference to a “better way” to execute it. At the same time, I don’t think there is widespread understanding of more radical alternatives, in large part because it’s not at all clear, objectively, what the desired answer would be. (In this respect, I’m reluctant to embrace the notion that the problem is the open-ended, anarchist nature of the Occupy movement — though I’m skeptical of that approach to some degree, I don’t think that having greater discipline and structure would be beneficial in the absence of an actual workable program. If an anarchistic/democratic form doesn’t automatically lead to good results, surely we can agree that a centralized “organized” form doesn’t either.)

Indeed, what’s most depressing isn’t that this group would cite Hayek, but that Hayek is objectively to the left of mainstream neoliberal economic ideology at this point — and of course Keynes counts as a radical leftist in this context. To put it another way: what’s most depressing is that drawing on Hayek genuinely counts as a step in the right direction compared to the idiocy that’s driving most policy makers.

Another thing that stands out to me is the mismatch between how relatively painless the task is and how ridiculously backed up most journals’ review processes tend to be. Part of that surely results from the procrastination that forms the bedrock of the academic life, but I also assume that there are many academics who are doing little to no peer reviewing at all.

And that’s when it hit me: I’m writing this post to procrastinate on reviewing an article!

In all seriousness, though, there’s no reason academics who are actively involved in research shouldn’t be peer reviewing regularly. I’d even suggest that doing as much as one article per month would not be particularly burdensome.

• The belief in creation ex nihilo
• Anthropocentrism: the contingent becoming of the universe reaches its pinnacle and unsurpassable goal in humanity
• Faith in the resurrection of the dead
• Hope in a coming mediator figure who, though possessing the divine power necessary to inaugurate the resurrection, empties himself
• An ethics based on living in joyful hope of the resurrection

It’s a good thing we have Meillassoux to tell us about these radically new and unheard-of ideas! I wonder if the other sections tell us about such innovations as a ceremonial cleansing to enter the messianic community or a symbolic meal commemorating the mediator figure.

1. Send a physical letter to all rejected applicants. First of all, of course, one should actually notify unsuccessful applicants. All of them have put considerable work into the application packet, and simply assuming they’ll get the idea if they don’t hear from you is disrespectful. Sending a paper letter has two benefits over e-mail: it takes more effort (hence showing some modicum of respect for the applicants’ efforts) and it is less likely than an e-mail to “ambush” the applicant at an inopportune moment.
2. Don’t try to reassure the applicant. The last person the applicant wants to hear praise from is the person notifying them that yet another avenue of professional advancement has been closed off to them. Learning that their file, “while excellent,” did not make the cut is more likely to produce despair than consolation.
3. It’s not about you. Do not talk about the difficulty of the decision. It can come across as asking for pity from the very person you are disappointing.
4. It’s also not about the other applicants. Nothing is gained by sharing that you received over 100 applications — basically every job does. Also, implicit comparisons to the successful applicant are distasteful. Obviously you preferred that person, and obviously you had a good reason to do so. Language like “we hired a candidate who more closely met our requirements” is both unnecessary and slightly arrogant, implying a degree of certainty and rigor that no hiring process can actually provide. If we change the formula to make it more honest — “we hired a candidate who we believe will prove to be a better fit” — it becomes clear that these kinds of statements are redundant.
5. Don’t string applicants along. If you’ve moved to the level of screening interviews, alert the leftovers that they should give up hope right away. If you think you may need to dip back into the other applications after screening interviews, then select a limited number of secondary choices and alert everyone else. It may be more convenient to leave everyone “in contention” in some sense, but it’s inappropriate for candidates to have to turn to the rumor mill to figure out where they stand. If they no longer have a real shot, let them know yourself.
6. Take responsibility. Phrasing like “your application is no longer under consideration” is disturbingly Orwellian, implying that the application (as an active agent) somehow failed to measure up to an objective standard — when the reality is that a group of people made a decision. That group has the real agency; “we” should be the subject of all sentences relating to hiring decisions.
7. Keep it short. All the candidate can do at this point is put the disappointment behind them — providing extraneous materials allowing them to speculate about alternative histories is not helpful. It may seem impersonal to use a “just the facts” tone, but then the purpose of this letter is, after all, to inform someone that you are not intending to have an ongoing relationship with them.

So with those tips in mind, here is my proposed form letter:

Dear [applicant],

Thank you for your interest in [our position]. We are writing to inform you that [we are no longer considering your application / we have hired another candidate].

Best,

[Search chair]

Just picked up his Anti-Badiou. If I were to write a book called Anti-Laruelle, I would be treated by Laruelle’s tweep army like someone who drowns puppies and crushes kittens.

Considering that writing such a book would require Harman actually read and try to understand Laruelle, I think he’s safe from any attack by the United-without-Unity Tweep Army. Sad that this constitutes his response to a number of questions raised about his abominable review.

Naturally, I’ve gotten some push-back. What this has all led me to wonder is not how the Soviet Union performed compared to some ideal, but compared to the available alternatives.

Obviously it was never going to be much like the United States, with its long history of capitalist development and its durable political institutions. One might think whistfully on the possibilities that were cut short by the Bolshevik take-over that followed on the establishment of liberal democracy — but was a “normal” liberal-democratic Russia really ever in the cards, in the wake of World War I? Had the Bolsheviks not managed to seize power, would it not be more reasonable to believe that Russia, on the model of Weimar Germany, would’ve stumbled along with its unaccustomed liberal-democratic institutions until some right-wing nationalist demagogue managed to overthrow the whole thing? (I know, I know: as opposed to the left-wing nationalist demagogue they actually wound up with…)

Surely there are many readers better-informed about such issues than I am.

A little while after reading: “Wait, no — that’s completely insane.”

This leads me to a curmudgeonly observation: it seems to me that we often rush into new technology because it seems new and cool, without really thinking about what works best. Perhaps the Amish have the right idea, though their openness to new technology is probably a little too limited. Take the printed book, for example. Yes, it has obvious drawbacks — poor searchability above all. Yet for the primary purpose of actually reading, I don’t think we’re ever going to top it.

This is not to say, however, that e-books will inevitably fail — because the Western consumer seems more than content to embrace new technologies that actively undermine the purposes they supposedly serve. Take cell phones, for instance. They obviously serve a valuable purpose of allowing us to make phone calls “on the go.” Yet as phones, they’re miserable. I hate talking on cell phones, particularly indoors, which is where the majority of phone calls are made. We’d all probably be much happier with a landline, which never drops calls and has much clearer sound, supplemented by a cheap cell phone. As a society, however, we’ve all basically decided on the shittier option, presumably because it seems cooler or more convenient on some superficial level. Why keep the antiquated landline when I can make all my calls with a glorified tin can and string?

The same goes for wireless internet access. Again, it’s great for “surfing the web” “on the go.” But it’s nowhere near as reliable as an actual hardwired ethernet connection. Most of us, I’d say, don’t really move our laptops — and I’m going to leave my complaints about the universalization of laptops as an exercise for the reader — to more than two or three locations within our house, and it would not be any harder to wire a house for ethernet than it is to wire it for cable TV (i.e., jacks spread throughout the house). Yet because wireless seems cooler, and because plugging and unplugging occasionally is marginally inconvenient, we opt for the shittier option for all of our internet use, rather than as a helpful supplement for when we’re out of the house.

Of course, the biggest example ever is the individual automobile. The nation used to have a network of train lines and street cars that provided amazing freedom of motion, without requiring every adult to regularly operate a huge and dangerous piece of machinery and without requiring them to take on the sunk cost of the car, insurance, etc. The appeal of the car is obvious — flexibility and independence. Yet it’s only like that when only a small minority of people are actually driving cars. Instead of relying primarily on the robust network of shared means of transportation, supplemented by occasional use of cars for certain uses (i.e., deliveries, people living in rural areas, etc.), we as a society went for the shittier option that is making us miserable and destroying the environment on top of it.

People criticize the inefficiencies of a centrally planned economy like the Soviet Union, and there’s obviously truth to that — but sometimes I think the only real “benefit” of decentralized capitalist dynamism is that there’s no one to blame when the destructive equilibrium is inevitably reached.