Daily Archives: April 27, 2004


Still Visible

At the top of the right side bar you will find an entry for The Invisible Adjunct under Top Referrers. The site won’t be there next time. You may remember that I mentioned a while back that she was closing up shop.
Well, it is pretty clear that she is gone but not forgotten. This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education provides an interesting profile of the real invisible adjunct and her academic world:

The mystery surrounding her identity was part of what made her blog work. In a way, she stopped being just herself, transformed instead into Every Adjunct. Knowing who she was might have broken that spell.

Read it!
Via Crooked Timber where Henry Farrell uses her story as a stepping off point to a rant about The Calvinist illusion is that luck has nothing to do with it – markets reward virtue.
Most interesting is that Henry makes this point:

Calvinists sought evidence that they were favoured by God through accumulating goods without consuming them. If you did well in worldly affairs, you could take this as a sign of God�s favour.
This may or may not be a good historical explanation. Still, it captures a set of attitudes expounded by some (although certainly not all) exponents of free markets. In many important respects, markets are political creations – they reflect differences in the bargaining power of different social groups.

Seems to me that most serious free market proponents would agree with Henry that markets today, and for the past couple hundered years, are indeed political creations. They would go one step beyond and say that this is a major problem that we should be working to eliminate.