Thanks for having me! Had a great time out at USC.
03.12.2025 22:48
👍 2
🔁 0
💬 0
📌 0
Thanks for having me! Had a great time out at USC.
ANYWAY. If you're ever tempted to argue with Marxist geographers (or philosophers who believe the same things) you can just cite my paper instead. YOU'RE WELCOME AMERICA 🇺🇸🇺🇸
Problem: literally any large scale social cooperation depends on "alienated" social relations. This isn't an objection to *housing markets*. It's an objection to *civilization* (extended version of this tweet coming soon to an MPSA near you).
But maybe alienation is intrinsically bad independently of distributive justice. Maybe it's just bad when we aren't intrinsically motivated by others' welfare.
So the claim that alienation is responsible for distributive injustice has to be empirical. PROBLEM: It's false. As we know thanks to Mast, Puga, Glaeser, Gyourko, and a WHOLE bunch of other people, high prices are ~caused by supply restrictions
Contra geography professors, markets are conceptually compatible with egalitarian distribution. I illustrate this with the Feeding America choice system auction (shout out to Canice Prendergast)
Some people think housing markets are *alienating*, because buying and selling housing causes us to view it and each other instrumentally. That's supposed to explain our housing crisis. PROBLEM: This argument is either false or self undermining.
Some MORE professional news: my paper "Cash Rules Everything Around Me: In Defence of Housing Markets" is out at Economics and Philosophy. I ignore Matt Yglesias' advice and argue with Marxist geographers so you don't have to!
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
What's your email?
Some professional news: Jake Monaghan and I have a reply to Dave Estlund's recent piece on structural injustice, just out in Ethics
journals.uchicago.edu/eprint/TTISS9F…
Don't Look Up is God's Not Dead for left-of-center politics people
It's populated by humanities professors?
Noted plagiarist baselessly accusing *another* academic of malfeasance...feels like a shockingly on the nose metaphor for the state of academia
Unironically I am fine with this
I'm so happy this exists
“Sports ball” and “I don’t even own a TV” are virtue signaling for virtues that suck
This is beautifully written and super clear. Really good!!
oh hell yeah I didn't want to write today anyway
Think y'all can afford that buyout?
It's world philosophy day, so post your favorite thing about philosophy.
Mine is that philosophy has never had disciplinary boundaries. Every other field has always been within our purview. Anyone who tells you different has to ignore millennia of examples.
Not a jmp but I'm pretty sure Doug Mackay has written about it
The next step in this project is to give a general story about why liberals should think state capacity is important, and why the popular options don't really do a great job of explaining it. My little contribution to the political theory of innovation policy.
While some philosophers argue that contracting hollows out the core functions of government, I argue that because, in some cases, contracting can solve failures in innovation markets, it sometimes is justified for the same reasons as the welfare state.
BIG NEWS: My paper "The Body Politic Has Private Parts: Market Creation as a Policymaking Tool" is out in Economics and Philosophy (@CambridgeCore).
doi.org/10.1017/S02662…
In it, I argue that contracting can complement core functions of government...
GiveWell and the systematic evaluation of charities' effectiveness are pretty unalloyed human goods; this is a deeply silly statement
