Jatan > Recent Status Updates

A discussion of the work ethic from progressive and conservative viewpoints: spanning diverse thinkers from Locke, Smith, Ricardo, Mill, and Marx on the one hand, and Bentham, Malthus, Burke, and Whatley on the other. It promises to be a doozy!

Picked it up for a bargain at Book Culture on MLK day 2023.

Fondly revisited the titular essay and was glad to be reminded by the brilliant Jesse McCarthy that: “no amount of monetary compensation [in the form of reparations] can rectify a debt that consists in the broken promise of a social contract; this contract is a moral good, and therefore its abrogation is a moral debt.”

Was inspired to read this after coming across the profile of a classics professor at Bennington College who inspired the character of Julian Morrow in the book.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

“Individual expectations and hopes are built on the standards prevailing in the community. The general standard is a collective good in which all have an interest but none will affect perceptibly through their own actions. People looking individually to their own situations will therefore tend to neglect this collective interest.”

"The [socioeconomic] choices offered by market opportunities are justly celebrated as being liberating for the individual. Unfortunately, individual liberation does not make them liberating for all individuals together."

This book is giving me the hives. It’s like logging onto a subreddit that is all about a meta-commentary on the rest of reddit users.

In memory of Philip Roth, whose own fiction I cannot bear to read.