Stamp Collecting As Metaphor For The Free Market

This was posted a year ago and I searched SCF but did not see a discussion of it.

I admit the author's point is a bit lost on me ... would welcome chance to see what you all think.

https://daily.jstor.org/stamp-colle...free-market/

Article is by Matthew Wills for JStor Daily with same heading as I listed for this post.

He gets paid by the word.

Gelber's original article looks to be worth a read. Odd that Wills should pick up on it nearly thirty years later.

Reading the first line is enough to understand the author lost the plot.

Most male collectors start as schoolboy, before they get taught economics. When I started, "Market" was the village main street with stands selling all kind of things on each side of the road. I started out with used stamps that came on mail. My father, who was born in the early 1920s started by corresponding. His correspondents sent him stamps and I guess he sent them some. There were no economics considered other than having the money to buy stamps (either to put in an album or to send).

Looking at the vast majority of the inheritance post, a lot of people had an old album collected whatever came their way from different countries and probably not buying any.

I don't think he knows anything about the subject.

Like so much academic writing, this seems to me like a lot of hot air. It certainly has nothing to do with why I personally got into stamp collecting, as a seven-year-old with an interest in history.

It's hard to articulate or characterize what contemporary academics in the humanities do. I'm working on this very issue (I'm a social psychologist). Something quite distinctive happened over the past 70 or so years. We "made" many thousands or purported scholars and full-time intellectuals, and did so within a historically unprecedented set of institutions and career structures with extreme job security. That looks like a tragic mistake.

What's most striking to me about humanities academics is that they make empirical claims without any attempt to furnish empirical evidence for them. That's shocking to me, and the shock has never worn off. That method or whatever is so absurdly non-rigorous and non-serious that we shouldn't be calling these people scholars or intellectuals. They don't produce anything that we can characterize as knowledge, discovery, insight, wisdom, or any other valuable thing. It's just an arbitrary, extremely strange genre of I don't know what. An example here is:

"Even when the collector felt he was escaping from some limiting element of his job, he was nevertheless participating in a performance of meta-values that defined the very job he thought he was escaping."

This is a typical example. They're not purporting to write fiction or anything. They seem to think they're describing reality, describing or reporting some aspect of the social world, human psychology, etc. Moreover, they're making claims about specific human beings, humans who they never actually met, surveyed, or studied in any way whatsoever.

It's common for them to assert things that would require mind-reading abilities or technologies, that they presumably don't possess. It's also common for them to make claims about other humans' inner thoughts, their motivations, and ways in which they were or are blind to what was really happening. And what was "really happening", according to contemporary humanities academics, is often a very hard to characterize chain of bizarre and unexamined abstractions and symbolic/metaphoric packages that they treat as real, as things that actually exist.

The original also says: "Collectors struggled with the issue of gender roles..." Without any evidence. It's amazing how they make these sweeping claims about vast numbers of humans they haven't even talked to, or even humans who are long dead. Leftist academics routinely project their arbitrary ideology and constructs on everyone, and just sort of assert that X, Y, and Z are true. They get paid to do that for a living. It's an extremely strange situation.

But don't let academic rigour prevent my generalising from the particular …

Rightist academics routinely project their arbitrary ideology and constructs on everyone, and just sort of assert that X, Y, and Z are true.

Exactly as valid/invalid as what you said.

You don't reaise it but you are no different from the people you are so worked up about - you are making things up while offering no empirical evidence.

When there is empirical evidence (often conflicting), people pick and choose what they want to prove their point whether they get it directly by their own source research or online from many "fact" generators. You can spot the biased ones by their inclusion of labels as a substitute for fact to make generalizations.

For example, I am an avid reader of Vietnam War history starting as early as WWI. Politicians and military said many things publicly and privately often in contradiction to what was actually done. Then one can cherry pick sources to use to construct whatever premise you want. And, then extrapolate to what could have happened if events unfolded differently.

Don

None of that is true. First, "rightist" academics will be discriminated against (see the Inbar and Lammers survey), and generally won't be allowed to exist. Leftist ideology is embedded in the application process now, so outsiders can't really participate if they want to be honest. Non-leftists are not a particular thing – they're just not leftist. They might be libertarians, or conservatives, or not have a political identity at all, or have something new and original. There's no symmetric opposite of the left, not even conservatives. Leftist ideology is structured differently than other schools – no one else has that structure.

No other school does any of the things I mentioned. There's no conservative or libertarian equivalent to something like just saying that stamp collectors in the 1800s had such and such motives. It wouldn't occur to non-leftists to talk that way – they'd have no framework for that kind of thing. Leftists explicitly proclaim that "Everything is political", and they proceed on that basis. No one else thinks that.

The empirical evidence thing isn't a viable demand here, because the evidence is far too large in scope and in complexity to be diving into in a stamp forum. You can just read the articles under discussion – that's good evidence. Read any humanities journal – good evidence there. There's no serious possibility that what I said isn't true – I quoted an example, and we'll never run out of such examples. If something is true of an ideology, that's not evidence that it's true of all ideologies – that's not a thing. There's no necessary symmetry. If you wanted to claim something about a camp, you'd need to actually point to examples, the non-leftist journals or academics that do the arbitrary making stuff up thing. I don't think we'd find much.