backing fairly common sense stuff with "actual research", like all things, can be done to excess > Think of it like this: the takeaway of Bartels’ post is that

backing fairly common sense stuff with "actual research", like all things, can be done to excess > Think of it like this: the takeaway of Bartels’ post is that something like a 1% exists. (It’s actually more like a 10% for the purposes of the study he cites.) I refer back to Occupy’s figuration for two reasons. One, I imagine that Bartels would be rather sympathetic to the liberal-progressivist ends to which this slogan was put, or at least not hostile. Two, it’s a figure that drew upon pop economic knowledge, that attempted to derive from the latter the kind of epistemic aura that numbers hold for Serious People. It would have been utterly natural for Bartels to have referred to this figure, to the social movement that buoyed it, to the knowledges that sustained it. Instead, he directs us to “a flurry of commentary” surrounding McCutcheon v. FEC, a case adjudicated well, well after Occupy. If Occupy was a movement touting an idea whose time had come, Bartels refuses to validate forms of knowing that know too soon, forms of knowing that short circuit the positivist time of coming-to-know with the punctuality of a deeply plebeian “Shit’s fucked up and bullshit!” http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2014/04/ideas-whose-time-has-belatedly-come-or.html http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2014/04/ideas-whose-time-has-be...