A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Category: Economics

Democracy / Economics / General / Work

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Workplace Democracy – a proposal for saving democracy

This is an interview with Isabelle Ferreras, who has just published a book on workplace democracy – to my knowledge, it’s the most detailed argument and proposal for a specific form of workplace democracy that has been provided in recent years. To get a sense of what it is all about, check out the animated trailer at www.firmsaspoliticalentities.net. We asked Isabelle to tell us more about her book, and we are very happy that she immediately agreed to do so.

Q: How did you get interested in the topic of workplace democracy?

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Academia / Democracy / Economics / Education / Work

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What, if anything, is wrong with private money in political philosophy?

Recently, there have been increasing worries about the role of private money that funds libertarian political philosophy (see e.g. here or here). The role of private money in academic research is not precisely a new problem; it has plagued other fields for decades (see e.g. here for a study of some of the more problematic forms). But it seems to be rather new for political philosophy, or at least it seems to have gone to levels it has not had in the recent past. But what exactly is wrong with it? Isn’t it simply an exercise of freedom of expression to use one’s money to sponsor scholarship one is interested in?

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Distribution / Economics

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Sufficiency on Political Inequality

If you consider yourself a political philosopher, it seems that you must be doing political philosophy. What does this political constraint imply? To me, it does certainly not imply that you are not allowed to used farfetched hypothetical thought-experiments, or that you take a specific stand on ideal contra non-ideal theory. Nor does it imply that it is morally impermissible for us to raise certain philosophical questions, if we foresee a reasonable chance that answering these questions could make the world worse or more unjust, as some activists claim. What it implies is that you should acknowledge the political relevance of your philosophical work, and that you have a commitment to make this relevance explicit.

For an excellent example, see Lisa Herzog’s recent post on the blog. But I wish here to briefly present an analysis of my own on the reasons for concern with political inequality (“What is Our Real Concern with Real Inequality?”, Policy Studies Journal).

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Economics / Governance / Health / Rights

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Why should housing be fit for human habitation?

There is currently a lot of attention on the UK’s “housing crisis”. One issue here is the quantity of available housing. There are commitments to address the shortage of housing in the 2017 manifestos of both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. Another issue is the quality of housing. On this issue, the Labour Party have restated the commitment they made in a 2015 Homes Bill to require that all homes meet the standard of being “fit for human habitation”. In this post, I explore the reasons in favour of this commitment.

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Distribution / Economics

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Justice and the Great Recession: Has the financial crisis increased inequality?

 

 

 

 

Have a few thousand bankers made the world more equal than it had been for a hundred years? In this blog post, I will investigate the distributive impact of the 2008 financial crisis and show that today’s inequalities are more complex than we think: if political philosophers want to understand the repercussions of the crash, they need to team up with economists and track down the hidden divides in post-crisis societies.

It was on 14 September 2007 that the general public first noticed that something was wrong. Hundreds of desperate customers queued in front of the branches of mortgage lender Northern Rock, fearing that their savings were already gone. (more…)

Distribution / Economics / Gender / Liberty / Work

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From the Vault: Good Reads in Economic Ethics

While Justice Everywhere takes a break over the summer, we recall from our archives some of our memorable posts from 2016-2017.

Here are four good reads in economic ethics that you may have missed or be interested to re-read:

Anca Gheaus’ ‘There is too much division of labour‘

Lisa Herzog’s ‘If everything is measured, can we still see one another as equals?‘

James Hickson’s ‘Freedom for Uber Drivers‘

Mirjam Muller’s ‘Are Sweatshops Drivers for Gender Equality?‘

 

Democracy / Distribution / Economics / International

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Germany and European Solidarity (or Lack thereof!): Why We Need the Right Kind of Leader

… and why Schulz could be the one

Saying that the right thing to do is for Germany to show more solidarity towards the European South is hardly news. But how can this be achieved in times of populism? In spite of the odds, Martin Schulz (the Chancellor candidate of the SPD) could play a surprisingly refreshing role in this respect.

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Duties / Economics / International

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Is Aid Effective?

Picture a hospital, bringing in thousands of people every day who suffer from a host of different ailments, many of them contagious. If you go there for one reason, there is a risk you will end up suffering from something else by the time you leave: a complex medical procedure could go wrong, or – more likely – you could end up catching something from a fellow patient or a visitor. Working there puts you in an equally dangerous situation, as you spend your days alongside seriously ill people. A hospital, in short, has a “negative baseline” of secondary effects that must be overcome for it to be beneficial to the community it serves. Yet very few people would be bold enough to suggest we would be better off without hospitals.

This is development economist Paul Collier’s (2006, p. 1485) defence of development aid. I believe it strikes at the heart of a common misconception about aid. And it matters when it comes to the philosophical question of what we owe to others.

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Economics / Education / International / Migration

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Call for Papers: Journal of Global Ethics Special Issue on Education and Migration

Guest editors Julian Culp (Frankfurt) and Danielle Zwarthoed (Louvain)

Submission of abstracts: asap

Submission of papers: October 15, 2017

Direct enquiries and submissions to: Culp@em.uni-frankfurt.de ; Danielle.Zwarthoed@uclouvain.be

Following upon the special issue Refugee Crisis: The Borders of Human Mobility (December, 2016), The Journal of Global Ethics introduces a special issue concerning the responsibilities for education that pertain to international migration. The Journal of Global Ethics invites scholars and practitioners from the disciplines of education, economics, law, philosophy, political science sociology and other fields to submit articles for review.

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Democracy / Duties / Economics / MediaPhilosophy / Moral values

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If everything is measured, can we still see one another as equals?

Relational egalitarians hold what matters for justice is that all members of a society “stand in relations of equality to others.” The idea that all human beings are moral equals is widely shared: it underlies the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many national constitutions. How will this norm be affected by the arrival of “big data,” the collecting and analysing of huge amounts of data about individuals? Internet companies and government services collect data about individuals’ activities, including geographic locations, shopping behaviour and friendships. Many individuals voluntarily share such information on social media, some also track their physical activities in meticulous details. Experts expect that “people analytics” – big data applied to the measurement of work performance – will have a revolutionary impact on labour markets.

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