Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

When does the right to vote have a negative value, and why? Shares in one of Rupert Murdoch's concerns, Twenty-First Century Fox Inc., are divided into voting and non-voting classes. Both represent an equity interest, so both are inferior to debt in the event of a restructuring or litigation. The reason for the division is that Murdoch and his family want to maintain control, yet they don't want to have to own as large an equity share as they would need in order to do so. The two class share structure allows him effective control of the company, with 39.7% of the voting rights, even though he (and his family) have a total of only 12% of the equity. Twelve percent is still a large chunk of a corporation, but dissidents could conceivably challenge Murdochian control if both classes of stock were equity, challenges that are cut short since he controls almost 40% of the shares that count for purposes thereof. My curiosity is piqued, though, by the fact (a recent turn of eve...

This is my first post-Labor Day post, so we'll write about the subject that comes to mind. Desi Arnaz. It is a fact, to be condemned or welcomed at your leisure, that labor unions represent a shrinking portion of the labor market pie. Despite (or because of?) the protection of union activity in the private sector, the role of unions there has been in decline for decades. In the 1950s one in every three private sector employees was a member of a union. By 2011, only 6.9%, roughly one out of every 14 were union members. Here's a link for that 6.9% figure, in case fact checkers are reading. I think reporter Greenhouse rather buried his lede, though: that critical figure doesn't appear until the fifth paragraph . Anyway: some conservatives talk about this decline almost as if it is karma. Unions are, in their view, inherently suspect operations, and they are shrinking because of their own cosmic badness. I disagree. Further, I'd like to tell a stor...

June 2013 correction: Most of what I wrote here holds up. But I was wrong about the reference to "The Claimant." Somehow the Roger Tichborne case had escaped me. Oops. ______________________________ In my now-suspended blog I wrote several entries concerning Dorothy Sayers, and some comments she made in the introduction to her 1949 translation of Dante's Inferno . Today, while we are still quite early in the history of this blog, I'd like to stitch all those entries together. This is my best answer to the question: what did her allusions mean? The allusions in question arose because Sayers was addressing the question of why contemporary readers need as much apparatus as she had attached in order to understand an early 14th century poet. "Let us suppose that an Englishman were to write a contemporary Divine Comedy on Dante's model, and that in it, mixed up with a number of scriptural and mythological characters, we were to find, assigned to vario...