THE INDEXING PROBLEM PART ONE

With this post, I begin a three-part posting of the essay I wrote in  1985 for delivery at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association.  The paper appears to have been prepared as part of a panel duscussing a recent book by James Buchanan, who the next year won the Nobel prize in Economics for his work on public choice, but I confess that I have compeletly forgotten the details.

THE INDEXING PROBLEM  PART ONE

             Professor Buchanan has explicated for us, both in his paper today and in the book which this session serves to celebrate, the limitations of the sorts of unanimity partial orderings to which Vilfredo Pareto has given his name. In my remarks today, I should like to explore some of the ways in which economists and philosophers have sought to extend the scope of inter-systematic comparisons, and to suggest reasons for believing that intersystemic comparisons must always implicitly or otherwise embody some evaluative presuppositions. My thesis is one more instance of a much broader theme, to which I have many times returned in writing and teaching, namely that supposedly value-neutral models of formal analysis usually contain powerful unacknowledged value assumptions which shape their formal structure as well as their substantive content.

            The problem with unanimity partial orderings is that although they are transitive, they are not complete. If everyone at our picnic prefers chocolate ice cream to vanilla, then we can be sure that switching the dessert from vanilla to chocolate will produce an increase in social welfare, assuming that everything else remains unchanged, and that there are no externalities. Furthermore, if we all prefer vanilla to pistachio as well, then the transitivity of individual preference guarantees that we will all prefer chocolate to pistachio, and therefore a switch of the dessert from pistachio to chocolate must increase social welfare.  But suppose some of us prefer chocolate to vanilla and the rest prefer vanilla to chocolate. How shall we evaluate the move from vanilla to chocolate, as a collective or group decision? 

            Obviously, it becomes necessary, at the very least, to ask how much the chocolate lovers prefer chocolate to vanilla, and the vanilla lovers vanilla to chocolate. Some cardinal measure of preference intensity, pleasure, welfare, preference priority, or even, a la Plato and Mill, the relative objective value of the desire for chocolate versus the desire for vanilla, will have to be invoked if we are to aggregate the preferences or desires of the individuals at the picnic into a single group ranking suitable for the making of a collective social choice. In short, we shall have to define an index.

            Bentham assumed that pleasure is the only good, pain the only evil, and that pleasure and pains, no matter whom they afflict, are intersubjectively comparable and hence commensurable. These assumptions do not, of themselves, suffice for the construction of an index, of course. It was still necessary for Bentham to stipulate an aggregation rule or, in the modern jargon, a social welfare function. His version of utilitarianism is just such a rule. We might state it in modern terms something like this:

1.  As between two policies, actions, or states of affairs, A and B, if B provides to each individual in the society at least as much net happiness as does A, and if there is at least one person to whom B provides more net happiness than does A, then assign B a higher index number than A.

2.  As between two policies, actions, or states of affairs, A and B, one of which provides more net happiness to some individuals and the other of which provides more net happiness to other individuals, measure the amounts of happiness accorded by each alternative to each individual, using the same scale of measurement. Then [this, strictly speaking, is the aggregation or indexing rule], following the rule ‘everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one,’ add the quantities of net happiness accorded by each alternative to all the individuals in the society, and assign to A or B whichever has the larger sum.

            We are accustomed, in the light of the New Welfare Economics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to focus our attention on the phrase, ‘using the same scale of measurement,’ and then to invoke the supposed logical impossibility of interpersonal comparisons of utility as a reason for rejecting classical utilitarianism. But as Sen, Suppes, Harsanyi, and a number of other theorists have shown us, there are ways of getting around the problems of interpersonal comparisons which pose no greater philosophical difficulties than the extreme solipsism that generates the problem in the first place. The realproblem is the purely normative clause, ‘everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one.’ We can defend the assumption that the welfare of the society consists in the arithmetic sum of the welfares of its individual members only by positing the moral and political premise that all individuals are equally important, or that each individual's happiness deserves to be given equal weight in the social sum.  And this premise simply begs all of the questions of policy that utilitarianism was designed to resolve.

            Let us take a look, now, at a number of practical and theoretical contexts in which the indexing problem arises. My aim is to show you that in each case, a resolution of the problem requires a normative or prescriptive premise which must be exogenously introduced, as economists like to say.

            My first example is drawn from the work of John Raw1s. Raw1s, you will recall, undertakes to extract a normative principle of distributive justice from non-normative, or minimally normative, premises, by means of the conceptual device of a bargaining game among rationally self-interested agents. In order to avoid certain theoretical difficulties which stand in the way of his establishing the principle that he wishes to promulgate, Raw1s introduces into his theoretical construction a limitation on the knowledge available to the participants in the bargaining game which he labels ‘the veil of ignorance.’

            Unfortunately, the veil of ignorance deprives the players in the game of so much information that they no longer have any rational reason to care about its outcome. So Raw1s is forced to re-equipped them with knowledge that they have coherent life–plans whose fulfillment they are rationally committed to pursuing. But even this information is insufficient, for what one wishes to bargain for depends on what in particular one has chosen as a life plan. Hence Raw1s must add the notion of primary goods, which is to say those things – ‘rights and liberties, opportunities and powers, income and wealth’ – which, as he says ‘ a rational man wants whatever else he wants.’ The idea is simply that no matter what life plan one turns out to have chosen, possession of these primary goods will serve to advance it.

            But now the indexing problem rears its head. Clearly, as between two principles of distributive justice, A and B, if B promises at least as much of each primary good as does A, and more of at least one, then B is to be preferred to A. But suppose B promises more opportunity and less wealth, or greater income but less power. How then shall the rational man behind the veil of ignorance choose? [I say ‘rational man,’ because as a careful reader of A THEORY OF JUSTICE will discover, Raw1s' world contains only men.] The answer is to construct an index of primary goods. It is this number which the individuals in the original position bargain over.

            Although Rawls is aware of the problems of indexing, he glosses over them, admitting that we must ‘rely on our intuitive capacities.’ Nevertheless, he stands by the fundamental claim on which his entire philosophy rests, namely that his theory allows him’ to replace moral judgments by those of rational prudence…’ [THEORY OF JUSTICE p. 94]

            Raw1s’ actual discussion of the indexing problem is arbitrary in the extreme. First he stipulates, with very little ground, that bargainers in the original position will choose to make rights and liberties lexically prior to all other primary goods. This has the effect of eliminating the need for an index that aggregates rights and liberties with the other primary goods, for lexical priority stipulates that any increase in rights and liberties, however small, will take precedence, for example, over any loss of wealth or income, however large. 

            This still leaves the problem of aggregating wealth and income with opportunities and powers. Since this is manifestly impossible – how, for example, shall we compare an increase of ten percent in the opportunity to pursue a medical career as against a decrease in income of five thousand dollars a year? – Rawls make yet another simplifying assumption. Reminding us that the Difference Principle concerns itself primarily with the least well-off representative man, Rawls simply asserts that the least advantaged tend to have both the least wealth and income and the least powers and opportunities. In Short, Raw1s assumes away any indexing problem at all.

            But clearly the issue is not so simple resolved. One of the major points of controversy in modern social welfare policy concerns precisely the relationship, in the lives of the least advantaged, of income or power. Radical critics of current welfare practices have argued that transfer payments, particularly payments in kind, have the effect of depriving the poor of social and political power, and indeed may even have that as their purpose. Hence, as between two social policies, one of which increases the income of the least advantaged while making them impotent clients of the welfare bureaucracy, the other of which increases economic or political power but at the cost of a lowered income, it becomes a matter of substantive and evaluative social philosophy which to espouse.

Rawls himself has finally recognized the inescapably normative element in his notion of life plans and primary goods. In a recent volume of essays titled UTILITARIANISM AND BEYOND, edited by Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, Rawls returns to the subject in an essay on ‘Social Unity and Primary Goods.’ In the following passages, Rawls virtually acknowledges that the formation of an index of primary goods presupposes normative constraints on what will count as an acceptable life plan.

Imagine two persons, one satisfied with a diet of milk, bread and beans, while the other is distraught without expensive wines and exotic dishes. In short one has expensive tastes, the other does not. If the two principles of justice are understood in their simplest form (as I assume here), then we must say, the objection runs, that with equal incomes both are equally satisfied. But this is plainly not true…. The reply is that as moral persons citizens have some part in forming and cultivating their final ends and preferences. It is not by itself an objection to the use of primary goods that it does not accommodate those with expensive tastes. One must argue in addition that it is unreasonable, if not unjust, to hold such persons responsible for their preferences and to require them to make out as best they can. But to argue this seems to presuppose that citizens’ preferences are beyond their control as propensities or cravings which simply happen.

And Rawls continues:

The idea of holding citizens responsible for their ends is plausible, however, only on certain assumptions. First, we must assume that citizens can regulate and revise their ends and preferences in the light of expectations of primary goods. [And so forth]

            In short we can hope to arrive at a usable definition of an index of primary goods, only if we require that our prudentially self-interested bargainers constrain their life-plans by considerations of fairness and, as Rawls says a bit later in the same essay, the higher-order interests of moral persons.’ I think we can fairly conclude that Rawls has failed, in his own words, ‘to replace moral judgments by those of rational prudence.’

BACK TO SERIOUS STUFF

Tomorrow I shall start posting the paper I mentioned, "The Indexing Problem," in sections.  It should take three days in all to post.  Today, I am going to say a few words about the background of the paper, which is one small part of what I now realize has been a theme of much of my work for more than half a century, and which came to be the central focus of what I think of as my Middle Years -- the late 1970's to the early 1990's.

 As long ago as 1962, I became aware of the many ways in which modes of social analysis, especially as expressed in mathematical form, conceal normative presuppositions, thus passing themselves off as value neutral or objective.  Indeed, I came to believe that this presentation of the normative as value neutral is the distinguishing mark of what is usually called ideology.

My very first attempt to explore this idea took the form of a book manuscript growing out of my deep engagement in the nuclear disarmament movement of the 1950's and 60's.  That manuscript, The Rhetoric of Deterrence, was deemed unpublishable by the presses to which I showed it, but it can be found online at box.net, accessible by following the link at the top of this blog page.  Even at that very early date, when I was not yet thirty, I had begun trying to bring into useful conjunction the insights of philosophy, literary criticism, and mathematical economics.  No doubt this will sound strange, and I am not aware of anyone else, with the notable exception of Karl Marx, who has ever undertaken such a fusion, but to this day I remain convinced that this approach is the only proper way to understand the complexity of human society.  Indeed, it is this, more than anything else, that I have learned from my long engagement with Marx's writings.

In 1975, I offered a graduate course on "The Use and Abuse of Formal Models in Political Philosophy."  My analysis in that course of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia eventually was published in the Arizona Law Review[see box.net] and my lectures on Rawls' A Theory of Justice appeared with Princeton University Press as Understanding Rawls.  I argued that Nozick and Rawls used the formalism of Game Theory to lend an air of objectivity to what were, in both cases, unacknowledged and inadequately defended normative presuppositions. 

Two years later, I offered a graduate seminar on "Classics of Critical Social Theory," devoted to  works by Marx, Freud, and Mannheim.  In preparation for the seminar, I re-read Volume One of Capital, which I had first read in 1960 in preparation for a Sophomore tutorial at Harvard that I was co-teaching with Barrington Moore, Jr.  Reading Capital this time around was a revelatory experience.  I had what I can only describe as an eclairecissement, a sudden insight into the rich complexity of Marx's analysis of capitalist economy and society.  It seemed to me that there was an essential connection, never adequately understood by his commentators and disciples, between Marx's formal economic analysis of capitalism, his critique of the mystifying forms and appearances of bourgeois society, and the extraordinary language in which he expressed his insights, language that stood in marked contrast to the language of the Classical Political Economists [the Physiocrats, Smith, Ricardo] whom Marx conceived himself to be both building on and subjecting to critique.

With great good fortune, I had a one-semester sabbatical leave in the Spring of 1978 [one of only three sabbatical leaves in my fifty years of teaching].  After a month spent teaching myself Linear Algebra, I launched on an intensive study of mathematical economics, concentrating on a series of brilliant books written by a world-wide network of economists devoted to rendering Marx's insights in modern mathematical form.  Rather quickly, I formulated a grand plan for a systematic reinterpretation of Marx's economic theories, bringing into fruitful conjunction philosophical, mathematical, economic, literary, historical, and sociological methods and insights.  I began reading widely in the voluminous writings of Marx and Friederich Engels, including not only such juvenile works as The Holy Family [a real hoot, if you have a taste for a send-up of Hegel] but also volume after volume of the letters Marx and Engels exchanged over the many years of their collaboration.

Eventually, I decided to sort my thoughts out in the form of a trilogy [my first wife and my good friend Robert Ackermann persuaded me that there was not much of a market for a single book that was half literary criticism and half mathematical economics.]  The first volume in the projected series was Understanding Marx, my reconstruction and simplification of the mathematical economists' rendering of Capital.  The second volume, delivered at UMass as a series of Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa lectures, appeared as Moneybags Must Be So Lucky. 

But Moneybags, if I may appropriate the lovely phrase of David Hume, fell stillborn from the presses.  No one reviewed it and no one read it, so far as I could make out.  By now, America had gone through eight years of Reagan, and whatever transformative impulse had ever existed in the late 60's and 70's was extinguished.  My disappointment was such that I never wrote the third volume of the trilogy, in which I had intended to draw together the themes of the first two volumes and lay out their interconnections.

In the late eighties, however, as Moneybags was being written, I did begin work on that third volume, and odd though it may sound, my first task was to carry out a careful study of the history of the development of index numbers.  Index numbers?  Why index numbers?  Indeed, what are index numbers?

What, first.  Index numbers are one-dimensional measures of a multi-dimensional aggregate.  The Consumer Price Index is an index number.  The Unemployment Rate is an index number.  A brief explanation, for those to whom this is not, as the saying goes, mother's milk.  There are thousands upon thousands of commodities offered regularly in markets, and their prices vary a good deal from day to day or year to year.  A loaf of bread [but then, there are countless kinds and brands of bread], a jug of wine [Merlot, Cabernet, Sauvignon Blanc?], and even thou [sex being, after all, a commodity with its market price.]  The prices of commodities do not move in lockstep.  From Monday to Tuesday, grapes may go up, bread may go down, and Corn Flakes may remain unchanged in price.  What, if anything, can we say about "the movement of prices" in the face of such complexity of fluctuation?  The answer is an Index.  Economists, after careful study of consumer behavior, design an imaginary market basket of goods and services meant to reflect the "typical" or "average" or "customary" mix of items that consumers spend their money on.  They then sample prices at a large number of retail stores to discover what that notional market basket would cost on a given day.  Changes in that price are said then to reveal "the movement of prices."  If the price of a market basket of goods and services increases by 3% from last January 12th to today, while the goods and services themselves remain unchanged in quality and quantity, then prices are said to have undergone a 3% rise, and the headlines the next day read "inflation running at 3%."

Now, it takes very little wit at all to realize that an index of this sort has a great deal of arbitrariness built into it.  There are in fact probably very few households that spend their money for just precisely the collection of goods and services in the economist's notional market basket.  If meat prices soar, do vegetarians experience sharp inflation?  Presumably not.  If I own my own home and have no intention of moving, peaks and valleys in housing prices are without significance to me. 

Strange as it may sound, this commonplace observation, suitably expanded and complicated, holds the key to the proper analysis of the ideological encoding of our cognitive appropriation of social reality.  [God, don't you just love to write phrases like that?]  Eventually, I came to the conclusion that there is no social reality that is objective, value-neutral, and independent of our ideological representations.  Because society is a collective human product, and because we unavoidably employ concepts in appropriating that social reality that are normatively encoded, society itself is inevitably mystified.  Even those of us who have fought our way to a knowledge of this fact are incapable of separating ourselves from our ideological awareness.  Not even Marx, had he lived to see a socialist society [from my mouth to God's ear!], could ever have managed to experience society as other than mystified.

Well, all of that is the background to the little paper I am going to start posting tomorrow, a paper I wrote in 1985 just when I was giving the Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa Lectures.

I TAKE IT BACK

Shortly after the Newtown horror, I wrote an angry post in which I, in effect, accused Obama of sacrificing those murdered children in order to make progress on economic problems facing the nation.  I was wrong.  He and his administration are moving with commendable speed and energy to seize this moment and convert it into lasting gun control legislation.  He may fail, of course, but not through any inadequacy of his effort.  I am delighted to be able to take back what I said and -- should he be listening -- apologize.

Now, on to the trillion dollar coin.

SENATOR BARNEY FRANK

Liberal hearts have been swelling and beating faster with Barney Frank's surprise announcement that he would like Governor Deval Patrick to appoint him to John Kerry's Senate seat for the three months or so until a special election can be arranged.  Kerry will shortly be confirmed by the Senate as Hillary Clinton's replacement at State.  The very thought of a Massachusetts Senate delegation consisting of Elizabeth Warren and Barney Frank, even if only for a few months, must be causing widespread indigestion on Wall Street.  It is enough to give this old leftie fleeting hopes of Resurrection.

Massachusetts is one of those states [I think there are a number of others] in which politicians for the most part wait their turn patiently for the opportunity to clamber up the electoral ladder another rung.  When I arrived in Western Massachusetts in 1971 to take up my new position as Professor of Philosophy at UMass Amherst, the huge First Congressional District, comprising everything west of Springfield all the way to the New York border, was represented by benevolent Silvio Conte, a Republican who had held the seat since 1959 and had moved steadily to the left as the political complexion of the Massachusetts First shifted.  Conte died in office in 1991, and immediately office holders up and down the ballot started making their calculations.  John Olver, a former UMass chemistry professor who had served as a liberal Democrat in the Mass House for 14 years and the Mass Senate for 18, made his move.  Hew ran for the Democratic nomination to replace Conte, and when he was elected [there was never any doubt that the Democratic nominee would win the seat], that opened up a Massachusetts State Senate seat.  Stan Rosenberg moved up from the Massachusetts House to take Olver's seat, leaving open a House seat for the district that included Amherst.  Ellen Story, a wonderful, very liberal woman strong in the Pioneer Valley's women's movement, ran for and won Stan's old seat.  I worked on Ellen's first campaign [since then she has been a shoo-in].  You will know how low-tech the operation was if I tell you that I was the campaign's computer expert!

Ed Markey, a strongly liberal long-time member of the Massachusetts House delegation, has announced for Kerry's seat in the special election, and Kerry has endorsed him, which pretty much forecloses a contest for the nomination.  Even so, I cannot help dreaming that after several months Barney decides he likes it in the Senate chambers and makes a run for the seat.

A READER RESPONDS

Ron Irving, at the University of Washington, wrote a very interesting email response to me about my Andrew Sullivan remarks.  With his permission, I am reprinting it here.

Dear Bob,

I believe you have somewhat misrepresented the history of Sullivan's blog, for you have described the history (or so I imagine) from when you showed up at his door, rather than from when he began. Like you, I tend to think of it as an Atlantic enterprise that moved, but he started it years before he joined the Atlantic. Like the Daily Beast, the Atlantic was just a temporary home. Perhaps it's better to think of Sullivan as a version of any number of faculty members we both would have encountered over the years, ones who move from university to university every 4-5 years, always getting a good startup package, higher salary, and so on. Suppose one such faculty member got tired of negotiating with the current or a prospective new university and decided to strike out on his or her own, making a go of it with books, online courses, and a staff that helps generate the material. Maybe we'll see that before long.

As to the substance of your argument for not paying the $20, it leaves me puzzled. If Sullivan were a lone blogger presenting his views (without all the mirroring that occupies much of his space), he would then occupy a role similar to the many bloggers I read daily, some of whom I have happily contributed to (Greenwald, Atrios, emptywheel). If he asked for donations or had fund drives, as they do, I might contribute. But he isn't like them, because of all the extra baggage. And with this baggage, to my mind, he appears to be more like an independent magazine than a lone blogger. A Reader's Digest if you will. On this basis, it strikes me as entirely reasonable that he is proposing a subscription fee. Of course, no one has to pay it. I don't subscribe to Reader's Digest. But what he's doing, in effect, is leaving one online magazine and starting another. I don't think he's making us pay for his opinion. He's asking us to pay for a wide array of services.

Now, as to what I think of those services, I believe that as his operation has grown, the quality has steadily declined. More and more of the material he and his team put up is presented without any consideration of whether it's true. If someone writes garbage, they don't edit or reflect on it, they throw it up there. Well, there's editing of course in the decision as to what to put up, but as far as I can tell, there's no effort to consider whether the underlying information or data is correct. The team doesn't have that capability. And in this respect, I agree with you, which is why I may choose not to pay the $20 either. They are adding to the hall of mirrors effect of the internet, letting garbage spread along with the good stuff. I find it infuriating. All I really want to read are the posts (fewer and fewer it seems) in which Sullivan actually says what's on his mind. I wish they had a separate channel for that.

I suppose in the end, then, I reach the same point you do. And that's without even mentioning Sullivan's pomposity. But I suppose we all struggle with that condition.

Sincerely,

TECHNICAL REPORT

I solved my pop-up or banner problem the old-fashioned way.  I paid someone to fix it.  More precisely, I used a service I had already paid for.  When I bought my computer at Best Buy, I signed up with the Geek Squad for a service contract.  I called them with my problem, and a very nice geeky guy took control of my computer remotely [a kind of weird experience] and spent half an hour or more rummaging around in it until he found a menu of enablings and disablings.  He disabled the enabled banner option, and that did it.  Then, while he was in my computer, he spent half an hour more deleting about a gig and a half [his term] of unneeded garbage.  My computer now is super fast with no irritating popups or banners.  I must say that for a geezer like me, that was terrific.

THE FIFTH VOYAGE OF GULLIVER

Readers of this blog, I am sure, will be familiar with the great eighteenth century satire of English politics and culture by Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels.  Lemuel Gulliver, the hero of Swift's novel, takes four voyages:  to Lilliput, to Brobdignag, to Laputa, and to the land of the houyhnhnms and yahoos.  Let us imagine, if we may, that an account has just been discovered of a fifth voyage, to a curious land called Blog.  Blog, Gulliver tells us, is a land composed entirely of mirrors, which endlessly reflect the doings of the inhabitants.   [Needless to say, I do not in my most self-referential fantasies compare myself to the incomparable Swift, although I did for a brief moment ascend to the heights of satire in my review of Allen Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, but bear with me.  I shall connect up, as the trial lawyers say.]

In Blog, the sole product of the endless labors of the inhabitants is opinions, on matters political, economic, religious, cultural, and even athletic.  For a long time, the Bloggians, or Bloggers as they are sometimes called, offer their products to one another in a pre-capitalist frenzy of gift exchange, rather in the manner of the South Sea Islanders described by Margaret Mead.  But then, an enterprising Blogger conceives the idea of charging for her opinions.  The other bloggers are taken by this innovation, and soon each blogger goes forth into the town square carrying a little change maker, rather like those that bus conductors once wore.  When someone wishes to hear an opinion on some matter, he must place a coin in the appropriate slot, whereupon the opinion is divulged.  Each opinionator keeps careful track of how many coins are deposited, and wears a sign on which the number is displayed.  The most popular opinion-producers receive thousands of coins, and enter into agreements with other leading opinion-makers to share their opinions on a reciprocal basis with inquiring minds.  Some of the most successful inhabitants of Blog do not even themselves formulate opinions, content to recycle the products of other opinionators.  At the outskirts of the town square are a few would-be opinionators who cannot find anyone to offer even one coin for their opinions.  These pathetic aspirants continue to offer their opinions freely, hoping against hope that their opinions will some day be sufficiently in demand to allow them to charge a few coins for them.  Because Blog is composed entirely of mirrors, it is difficult to tell which opinions are original and which are merely reflections of other opinions.  Eventually, the distinction itself evaporates, and originality gives way to repetition.

What has inspired in me this Swiftian fantasy?  The answer , in a name, is Andrew Sullivan.  As some of you may know, Andrew Sullivan is a Gay Catholic conservative English opinionator who used to be on the staff of The Atlantic Monthly.  His blog, The Daily Dish, was featured on the Atlanticwebsite for a while, until Sullivan left that site and signed up with The Daily Beast, an entirely web-based e-zine.   I have been reading The Daily Dish regularly for several years, principally because it is a convenient way of keeping track of conservative opinion on matters political.  Sullivan's religious anxieties and cultural predilections [he is, among other things, obsessed with beards] are, I find, rather a bore, but at certain important moments he has performed a genuinely valuable service, for example by reproducing verbatim the texting from the streets during the Iranian protests a year and more ago.  He is also deeply concerned with the campaign for the legitimation of same-sex marriage, which of course concerns me greatly, and has himself recently entered into marriage with his long-time partner.  The Daily Dish, like many of the major blogs, devotes most of its space to the recycling of things written elsewhere, which gives to it somewhat the air of a hall of mirrors [hence my fantasy].  It is extremely successful, claiming more than a million readers, and again like other major blogs, employs a staff, which in Sullivan's case numbers five or six.

Now Sullivan has decided to cut loose from The Daily Beast, not for yet another host site but rather to strike out on his own as an independent operation.  There are essentially three ways for such efforts to generate income:  ads, donations, and subscriptions.  Sullivan has opted for subscriptions.  Shortly, he will require those who wish to continue to read his blog to pay a subscription fee of $19.99 a year.  [The precise details are somewhat obscure to me, and involve keeping RSS feeds free, whatever they are, but satire has long played fast and loose with the complexities of reality, and I plead poetic license.]

I shall not pay, even if it means that I am denied access to The Daily Dish. 

Why on earth not?  In my comfortable upper middle class life, twenty dollars is a negligible fee.  It is, to choose just one example, the amount I tipped an airport employee on Christmas Eve who met Susie and me at the airplane door as we returned from Europe, pushed Susie in a wheel chair on the long walk to immigration, waited with us for our luggage, saw us through customs, and finally delivered Susie to a taxi rank where we caught a cab home to Chapel Hill.  Twenty dollars is a good deal less than I spend in one week for the lemon poppy seed muffin and coffee that I eat while doing the NY TIMEScrossword puzzle each morning.  It is not the money. 

My decision not to pay was immediate and unreflective, and it has taken me a bit of thought to figure out why I was offended by the demand that I pay to read Sullivan's blog.  I have been reading books for seventy years, and it has never seemed inappropriate that I be asked to pay for the books I read.  I regularly pay to attend concerts [although Susie and I make full use of the countless free concerts offered in out of the way churches in the higher numbered arrondissementsof Paris.]  I have even paid to hear lectures, and of course I have on countless occasions been paid to give them, even though they are, when all is said and done, nothing but compendia of my opinions.  After all, Sullivan must live.  So why this instinctive revulsion at the demand that I pay him for the right to read his opinions?

The answer, I think, is this:  The blogosphere is, or purports to be, a global village.  Through its intermediation, each of us encounters and forms some sort of relationship with countless others passing through the village square.  Were I in a real village, could I imagine, save in a Swiftian satire, an encounter like this?  "Good morning, Bob, what do you think of the UNC football game last evening?"  "Well, Emily, put a quarter in my change purse and I will tell you."  "Fine, here is my quarter.  For fifty cents, I will tell you my reaction to the Fiscal Cliff negotiations."

Perhaps those of us not living on the pensions earned in a lifetime of work need to find a real job before we decide to blog.