CONSPICUOUSNESS TRUMPS COMPETENCE.

In The Daily Economy, Surse Pierpoint asks, "If the economic argument was already lost by 1917, and the Soviet revolution supplied prestige rather than proof, what explains the durability of Marxist categories in Western universities, long after the calculation debate was settled and the planned economies it inspired had produced the most devastating body counts of the twentieth century?"

I've reduced his argument to a clickbaity headline.  Take a long march through the institutions, dear reader, and it might make sense.

What is not in dispute is the strategy itself and its adoption across the postwar academic left: if the economic argument could not be won, the institutions that credential, publish, and platform could be occupied instead.

This is where a discipline should ask an empirical question rather than an ideological one. Occupying an institution is not the same as running it well, and a strategy built around capturing credentialing bodies produces a specific, predictable personnel problem. Peter Turchin’s structural-demographic theory, developed across Ages of Discord and subsequent work, describes what happens when a society produces far more credentialed aspirants to elite status than there are elite positions to hold them: law graduates, doctorate holders, activist-class professionals, all competing for a fixed and often shrinking number of visible slots.

I'm not sure "better to be outrageous and wrong than extraordinarily good" works as a get-hired strategy, but there it is.  "Extremity is a cheap, reliable signal in a market where everyone already has the degree."

The author's focus is on the popularity of potted Marxism in domestic politics these days.  A variant of it might be at work in academic hiring, although perhaps it helps to be conspicuously controversial and to belong to one or another of the personnel office's set of preferred hires.

Consider Beans Velocci, whose portfolio is History and Sociology of Science and Core Faculty in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who recently wrote Sex Isn’t Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary.

Are we seeing Deep Thinking, or is the book, which, note, Duke University Press saw fit to publish, and at the end of the interview offer a deep discount on the paperback version, an extended cry for attention?

In terms of the book’s various arguments, “Sex Isn’t Real” means that the supposed entity called sex isn’t actually a fact about bodies—as one of my early twentieth-century historical actors put it, “there is no such biological entity as sex.” Rather, sex is a classification system that has been made by people, primarily in the service of consolidating or maintaining power. There’s a lot of work that’s been done on the meaning of “real” (Lisa Messeri and John Law come to mind), but the “real” in Sex Isn’t Real is, to be honest, not that deep.

The title, like so many things I end up doing, started out as a joke—in some back and forth with my editor Liz Ault and the Duke marketing department as we were trying to come up with a punchy yet clear title, I said something like, “I wish we could just call it Sex Isn’t Real So Leave Us the Fuck Alone.” And eventually after trying a few other titles, we wound up coming back to it and were kind of like, well, why not. So personally, what I find most satisfying about the title is how it captures the exasperation of having all of this evidence that the present anti-trans obsession with “biological sex” is total nonsense, and yet still having to live in a world in which that obsession is making life way harder for trans people. That still living in the world for me, at least, requires a little bit of irreverence, and a lot of refusal. The politics of both the book and the moment we’re in demand urgency, and I think the title reflects my own rejection of the framing of trans existence as a debate.

Also, any right wing or TERF detractor who wants to shit-talk the book is going to have to say or write the phrase “Sex Isn’t Real” in the process, and I’m taking my bits of joy where I can right now.

Whatever.  Is there any classification system that is not "made by people?"  Good grief.  Does the professor really think that "taking my bits of joy" every time people mention the work the better to make mock of it do anything to make life less hard for crossers?  Does the culture-studies jargon that fills the interview really help?

One of the major questions for me going into the research for the book was: what happens if we take white supremacist nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers at their words when they claim that Black women aren’t really women, or that Africans are “primitive” as indicated by an imagined failure to attain full sexual dimorphism? The ongoing denial of Black womanhood is a question that has animated Black feminist studies for decades as well as recent scholarship in Black trans studies (thinking here with Hortense Spillers, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, C. Riley Snorton, and Marquis Bey, among many others).

Rather than wade through all those things, dear reader, why not read Deirdre McCloskey's Crossing: A Memoir?  The idea is to get Beans Velocci's citations up, isn't it?

So too, does conspicuousness appear to trump competence in "More LGBTQ economists are needed," a recent plea in San Francisco's Bay Area Reporter.  It's too bad Salem Media sites don't register on the Social Science Citation Index, as Red State's Mike Miller found it well worth mocking.  "The headline smacks as if it came from a satire site."  So it might be, but if The Onion won't run it, maybe the authors can take their bits of joy from mockery by Militant Normals.

According to a self-identified "cis gay man" economist and a "cis androsexual woman" economist, the field of economics needs more gay and gender-confused economists, because the economy is under assault from... wait for it... President Donald Trump.

Yep, Bard College Professor Michael Martell, who wrote a book called “Queering Economics,” and Franklin and Marshall economist Leanne Roncolato, have concluded that Trump's economic policies "discourage dissent and diversity [and] marginalize queer voices."

I'm not sure how Donald Trump, or any other political figure, stops academic economists from participating in their disciplinary conversation; furthermore, to claim, as the authors do, that economic inquiry is stunted because the field has less of the usual sorts of diversity than sociology, let alone culture studies, is to suggest that the best research is generalizing from your own experience, which is the plain meaning of

For nearly half a century, feminist economics has shown us how the under-representation of women in the field contributes to its masculine bias. Stratification economics has similarly shown us how the under representation of racialized minorities has contributed to the field’s racial bias. Things have gotten better – with no small thanks to those who have dedicated their careers to promoting diversity, inclusion, equity, and excellence within the field – but there is much left to do.

Which is foolish.  The authors completed Ph.D.s at American University, which has a respectable department and a history of employing scholars working in left-heterodox areas of inquiry.  Professor Martell reports publications in Contemporary Economic Policy, which serves as a conference volume for the Western Economic Association, as well as in Eastern Economic Journal, which sometimes serves as a conference volume in addition to peer-reviewing unsolicited submissions in the traditional manner.

Such work is evidence of scholarly competence in the traditional manner, and special pleading to the graduate school admissions committees on the supply side of future professors or to make the personnel committees more receptive to hiring a more diverse set of scholars ... by blaming the Trump presidency ... strikes me as futile.

Perhaps, being slagged on by Salem Media types provides those authors with "bits of joy."