Many would-be radicals mistake throwing the baby out with the bath water for radical inquiry. “Abolish X thing” has been a useful frame for the moral immediatism we espouse. If it is cruel and unjust, our goal must be its abolition. However, after identifying X thing as Bad, we may, in our haste, obscure the…

I would like to emphasize that abolitionism is not a strategy that proposes an all-or-nothing stance or one that refuses cooperation and coalitions with non-abolitionists. It’s a particular theoretical framework for viewing social change and I think it can help libertarians and anarchists be better strategists. That said, there are, in my mind, three major,…

C4SS Feed 44 presents David S. D’Amato‘s “Policy Research and the Limits of Statistical Utilitarianism” read by Dylan Delikta and edited by Nick Ford. As an example of misguided attempts to reduce complex systems to something “legible,” “simplified,” and therefore controllable, James C. Scott describes the “scientific forestry” efforts of 18th and 19th century Germany, instituted to…

I should begin by affirming that I have no objection, in principle, to the use of or the appeal to statistical information, to assessing the empirical impacts of a given policy choice. [1] Such appeals are an important aspect of public policy research and of the advocacy of libertarian principles. Statistics, in and of themselves, are…