Astral Codex Ten

Harvey

5 min read

Harvey

Article

Harvey is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 12, 2021 and October 27, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “the recent Agan, Doleac, and Harvey paper”; “Agan, Doleac, and Harvey paper”; “Harvey’s theses, framed uncharitably, are:“. It most often appears alongside China, New York, New York City.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: April 12, 2021
  • Last seen: October 27, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For April
April 12, 2021 · Original source
6: Claim: Baltimore suspended prosecutions of minor crimes to prevent people from being in jail during the pandemic, and major crimes dropped (even though they rose in many other cities over the same period). Now they’re experimenting with ignoring minor crimes indefinitely. See also the recent Agan, Doleac, and Harvey paper (or, even better, the Marginal Revolution post on it) exploiting random variation in misdemeanour prosecution to show that people prosecuted for misdemeanours are more likely to commit further criminal behavior in the future, as well as showing an effect in Boston similar to the one in Baltimore. Seems kind of like the opposite of (a certain interpretation of) broken window policing, so ought to be interesting to watch this debate develop.
Inline links: major crimes dropped, Agan, Doleac, and Harvey paper
Related: Katja Grace’s piece on Oliver Sipple, the “milkshake duck” of the 1970s. Sipple was a quick-thinking veteran who fought and disarmed an assassin trying to kill President Gerald Ford. He briefly became a national hero, until Harvey Milk tipped off the media that he was part of SF’s gay community (Milk was hoping to prove that gay people could be heroes too, but Sipple didn’t want to be outed and Milk comes off really badly here). Sipple begged the media not to publish, but the papers decided he was a public figure and so fair game. His family disowned him, his health declined, and he ended up drinking himself to death.
Inline links: piece on Oliver Sipple
Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
May 04, 2021 · Original source
Sound straightforward? Not if you read about it in David Harvey's A Brief History Of Neoliberalism. This treatment is almost the opposite of the way ABHoN describes events. Telling the story this way makes me feel like Jacques Derrida deconstructing some text to undermine the author and prove that they were arguing against themselves all along.
Inline links: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
There were some other supposed examples of neoliberal practice contradicting liberal ideology - although I can’t find easily quotable bits, I think he’s thinking of the Iraq War and various bailouts (though not the 2008 bailouts, since this book was written in the early 2000s). I agree that the government has not been a perfect ideological neoliberal at all times, but this impresses me less than it seemingly impresses David Harvey. Again, I think this critique is strong enough to apply to any ideology - what government has ever perfectly followed the diktats of socialism, or conservatism, or theocracy? The government is a blob of power that gets captured by different groups at different times and directed willy-nilly to one purpose or another; just because it does not perfectly follow a specific philosophy without deviation for fifty years doesn’t make that philosophy inherently fraudulent.
One more great thing about David Harvey: he makes specific predictions. And since it’s been 16 years since he wrote ABHoN, we can check how he did. In order to avoid debate over which things I count as predictions, I’ll only be looking over the middle of his last chapter, Freedom’s Prospect, which deals with the future. You can follow along here and make sure I’m representing him honestly.
Inline links: here
My Left Kidney
October 27, 2023 · Original source
My cousin Harvey and his wife Pam, who let me stay at their house on Long Island while I recovered, and their son Will, for visiting me in the hospital.