by Henry on November 4, 2009
So we were down for a few hours this afternoon thanks to a massive flood of comment spam. Tyler Cowen had a post a few weeks ago on the cognitive benefits of spam, which made me realize that much of my knowledge of the society I live in comes from trawling this spam and deleting it. At least 80% of the (presumed) female celebrities whose nude pictures are yours if only you click on this dodgy-sounding address are known to me from spam and spam alone (Jessica Simpson???). I would have no idea that “Ugg boots” (whatever they are) existed, let alone that anyone cared about them, were it not that a particularly persistent Chinese spammer tries to tell the users of my academic blog wiki about them at every possible opportunity. Sadly, given the existence of Chris Uggen, I can’t just ban page changes using the term in question.
There’s a quasi-serious point buried in there, which is that the Internets, and the possibilities it offers to non-regular TV watchers like me to retrieve the information that we are interested in and no more can lead to deficits in certain kinds of common cultural knowledge. Not the kinds of civic knowledge that Cass Sunstein etc care about – but celebrity gossip, junky pop culture etc.1 Targeted advertising – to the extent that it actually works – is obviously no solution. But spam, designed as it is to cater to the lowest and broadest of tastes actually provides me with significant information that I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise. Not that it makes spam trawling worthwhile or anything, but at least it gives me some benefit.
1 Not that I am above these things at all; just that I don’t usually have the time, energy and attention to dig it out. It has to be a Jon Stewart-worthy scandal, preferably involving Republican senators, highly specialized providers of intimate services, and greased porcupines or the like, to make it through my filters.
by Henry on November 2, 2009
by Henry on October 29, 2009
Eric Posner has two responses to my earlier post on international law. I’ll be writing two responses to the responses – the first (on Eric’s second rebutting post) beneath the fold [click to continue…]
by Henry on October 29, 2009
Just after Mary Robinson announced that she was not interested in the EU Presidency, former Irish Taoiseach and outgoing EU ambassador to Washington John Bruton has put his hat in the ring. I know him and like him enormously (he’s a very decent right winger), so I won’t speak to the merits of his candidacy on grounds of manifest personal bias. But if I was a betting man (and there were a contract at Intrade), I’d think him well worth a considerable flutter. He fulfils the informal desiderata (Christian Democrat from a small state), but even more importantly seems like a very plausible compromise candidate. The Germans are likely to veto Blair, while the UK is almost certain to want to veto overly enthusiastic federalists like Jean-Claude ‘I am not a dwarf’ Juncker and Guy Verhofstadt. Bruton is plausibly acceptable to both sides – he is pro-European enough to keep the mainlanders happy, but very well liked in the UK. At the moment, I’m not seeing any other declared candidate who could plausibly get a consensus behind him or her. I’ll try to write more on the candidates as the politicking continues …
by Henry on October 25, 2009
Given recent ambiguous FTC mutterings, it is probably no bad thing that I make it clear that I receive lots of free copies of forthcoming books (partly because of CT; partly because I help out the Book Salon people at FireDogLake), and that any reviews I do are likely as not of books that I have gotten for nothing. When I first decided to write this post a few days ago, I was going to talk about all the things that I’d like to get for free but don’t, starting with good f/sf books (nearly everything I get is non-fiction) and in particular Unseen Academicals, then moving rapidly through ever more preposterous requests for technology (the new Barnes and Noble e-reader looks quite interesting; I would happily review one of the new Macs with the 27 inch screens), and finishing with the frankly unethical/completely implausible – books that didn’t exist but that I promised to review favorably if only the authors in question would get their arses in gear and produce them. I figured that I’d be prepared to trash my integrity for a complete and definitive edition of Bloom County, or indeed for an ARC of A Dance With Dragons (my come-on – George R.R. Martin Is Not My Bitch – but I’ll be his if only he gets it finished). But then I saw (via Laura) that Volume I of the complete Bloom County has just come out without any inducements whatsoever on my part. Can this be taken as a sign from the Fates that the GRRM logjam too is about to break …
by Henry on October 23, 2009
There’s been a lot of discussion of Ayn Rand the last few days, because of the new (and very-interesting sounding) biography. Personally, I could never stand her work, not because of the libertarian philosophy (I like me mid-period Heinlein just fine), but the excruciatingly bad writing. If Chris Hayes is right, she finally has a worthy successor. Ladies, gentlemen, I give you Ralph Nader and Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us.
As a novel it is a dismal affair: gracelessly written, ploddingly plotted, and long. Oh God so long. And as a political tract it advances a conception of politics both grossly condescending and depressingly elitist. Democracy, Nader seems to say, could be ours: if only the oligarchs would get behind it. The basic plot goes like this. Moved by pity to travel to New Orleans in the wake of Katrina to oversee relief efforts, Warren Buffett encounters one desperately poor and grateful recipient of his charity who announces, “Only the super-rich can save us.” This gets Buffett thinking, and he proceeds to convene a top secret meeting in a Maui resort. There he gathers an eclectic group of the super-rich: Paul Newman, George Soros, Bill Gates Sr., Ted Turner, Barry Diller, Peter Lewis (owner of Progressive Insurance), and, somewhat randomly, Yoko Ono, among others, to create a “people’s revolt of the rich.”
This is apparently not a satire. But it does raise the question of whether there are any genuinely good, genuinely political novels out there. Since we’re coming up on the weekend, I’ll throw this out as an open thread (I have a few nominations myself, but don’t want to bias the sample). Have at it.
by Henry on October 23, 2009
I wrote a review a couple of weeks ago of Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger’s “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” (Powells, Amazon)
Information technology has grown so entwined with our lives that it is easy to overlook the marvels flowering forth from it. … But if Viktor Mayer-Schonberger is right, these technologies may grow to entangle and choke us. They create a kind of external memory, recording our actions and interactions in digital video footage and thousands upon thousands of digital photographs. … Mayer-Schonberger argues that these developments challenge how we organise society and how we understand ourselves. … At its heart, his case against digital memory is humanist. He worries that it will not only change the way we organise society, but it will damage our identities. Identity and memory interact in complicated ways. Our ability to forget may be as important to our social relationships as our ability to remember. To forgive may be to forget; when we forgive someone for serious transgressions we in effect forget how angry we once were at them. … Delete argues that digital memory has the capacity both to trap us in the past and to damage our trust in our own memories.
I probably should have linked to it before, but didn’t, because I wanted to combine the link with a short review of Tyler Cowen’s recent book “Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World” (Powells, Amazon) As I mention in the review, Tyler’s book presents a very interesting contrast to Viktor’s. What Tyler sees as evidence of individual empowerment, Viktor sees as as a serious threat to personal identity. Viktor fears that technologies will undermine our sense of self, and our ability to remake ourselves in order to respond to a changing social environment. Tyler sees new technologies as valuable precisely because they allow us to remake ourselves and our identities, creating our own ‘economies’ (here, I think he is harking back to the Greek origins of the term) or internally ordered environments by picking and choosing “small cultural bits” and assembling them according to our own personal hierarchies.
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by Henry on October 22, 2009
Gideon Rachman
I thought the FT leader on the Goldstone report got it about right. The report on Israel’s assault on Gaza is a serious bit of work and it’s fairly desperate to try to discredit it by calling its author a “self-hating Jew”. The bigger problem lies with the UN Human Rights Council … And lying behind that, is a still bigger problem with the very idea of impartial international law. … I asked whether international law really deserved the same status as domestic law? After all, the very basis of justice in a nation-state is equality before the law – anybody who commits a murder should be arrested and prosecuted, no matter how powerful they are. But this basic principle does not apply in the international arena. Almost all the people hauled before the ICC have been African leaders; and the UN special tribunal on the former Yugoslavia (where Goldstone was chief prosecutor) only got to prosecute the likes of Milosevic because Serbia was defeated in a war. … The trouble is that … the system of international law that we currently have is as much about power in the international system, as about human rights or the law.
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by Henry on October 18, 2009
Via Mark Thoma, Mark Liberman presents us with The Pundit’s Dilemma.
Overall, the promotion of interesting stories in preference to accurate ones is always in the immediate economic self-interest of the promoter. It’s interesting stories, not accurate ones, that pump up ratings for Beck and Limbaugh. But it’s also interesting stories that bring readers to The Huffington Post and to Maureen Dowd’s column, and it’s interesting stories that sell copies of Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics. In this respect, Levitt and Dubner are exactly like Beck and Limbaugh.
We might call this the Pundit’s Dilemma — a game, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which the player’s best move always seems to be to take the low road, and in which the aggregate welfare of the community always seems fated to fall. And this isn’t just a game for pundits. Scientists face similar choices every day, in deciding whether to over-sell their results, or for that matter to manufacture results for optimal appeal.
In the end, scientists usually over-interpret only a little, and rarely cheat, because the penalties for being caught are extreme. As a result, in an iterated version of the game, it’s generally better to play it fairly straight. Pundits (and regular journalists) also play an iterated version of this game — but empirical observation suggests that the penalties for many forms of bad behavior are too small and uncertain to have much effect. Certainly, the reputational effects of mere sensationalism and exaggeration seem to be negligible.
(to avoid falling into my own version of this dilemma, I should acknowledge straight up that while I’m disappointed with the Freakonomics phenomenon ex-post, I was quite optimistic ex-ante )
by Henry on October 12, 2009
To amplify what Kieran has just said – political scientists are going to be very, very happy today. I had seen Lin cited as a 50-1 outsider by one betting agency a few days ago, and had been surprised that she was at the races at all, given that economists tend (like the rest of us) to be possessive of their field’s collective goodies. I’m delighted to see that my cynicism was completely misplaced. But this is also a very interesting statement of what the Nobel committee see as important in economics.
Lin’s work focuses on the empirical analysis of collective goods problems – how it is that people can come up with their own solutions to problems of the commons if they are given enough room to do so. Her landmark book, Governing the Commons, provides an empirical rejoinder to the pessimism of Garret Hardin and others about the tragedy of the commons – it documents how people can and do solve these problems in e.g the management of water resources, forestry, pasturage and fishing rights. She and her colleagues gather large sets of data on the conditions under which people are or are not able to solve these problems, and the kinds of rules that they come up with in order to solve them.
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by Henry on October 9, 2009
The Financial Times has an excellent article summarizing the institutional issues facing the EU if, as expected, Lisbon passes. Read it for the substance. But enjoy it for this suggestion, which I haven’t seen floated before:
However, as became clear this week, many smaller EU member states do not want a high-profile president. Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands circulated a document contending that the first president should be “someone who has demonstrated his commitment to the European project and has developed a global vision of the Union’s policies, who listens to the member states and the institutions, and who is sensitive to the institutional balance that corresponds to the Community method”. Translated from Eurospeak, this means a person with a lower profile than Mr Blair and from a country more deeply committed than the UK to the European ideal. Across Europe there is a recognition that the EU would do its image a favour if it awarded the job to a woman, one possibility being Mary Robinson, Ireland’s former head of state.
Depending on how Vaclav Klaus’s brinkmanship plays out, the new president will have to be chosen pretty soon. It would be very, very sad to see wingnuts’ heads exploding again in just a few weeks time …
by Henry on October 9, 2009
I’ve been doing my best to resist getting pulled back in by Clive Crook. I really have. I nearly succumbed when I read his Monday FT column, in which otiose self-congratulation dukes it out with utter lack of self-knowledge for seven hundred words but pulled myself back from the brink (self-congratulation wins, but it’s a very close call). But his follow-up blog post has propelled me into the abyss.
Mr. Crook has a theory of what is wrong with American politics. It involves partisanship, of the kind not practiced by himself and his friends.
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by Henry on October 7, 2009
He has just introduced an amendment to prevent the NSF from funding political science research (PDF). Apparently, Fox News and CNN pundits can do our job better than we can.
The largest award over the last 10 years under the political science program has been $5.4 million for the University of Michigan for the “American National Election Studies” grant. The grant is to “inform explanations of election outcomes.” The University of Michigan may have some interesting theories about recent elections, but Americans who have an interest in electoral politics can turn to CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, the print media, and a seemingly endless number of political commentators on the internet who pour over this data and provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions.
Whether the answers provided by this ‘myriad of viewpoints’ are good ones, I will leave as an open question. I obviously have a dog in this fight as a political scientist who will probably apply for NSF funding in the future. But I also think that there are measurable Good Things (in terms of understanding how our system of politics works etc) that come from good empirical work in political science. And the politics of Coburn’s amendment are not precisely difficult to discern (among his stated objections are that this money has gone to fund research concluding that the US is increasingly willing to torture suspected terrorists, and carefully unspecified work – doubtless some form of shameless subsidized leftwing punditry – by Paul Krugman). If you feel that political science doesn’t deserve any funding, feel free to say so in comments. If you disagree with Coburn (and are a political scientist) and live in the US, get on to your senator’s office to say so (and ideally, contact your university’s research vice president’s office or whatever while you are at it – they are likely to have good contacts). This may come up for a vote today.
Update: Senator contact information here.
by Henry on October 4, 2009
Glenn Beck ?!!???. Truly, these are desperate times for conservative would-be intellectuals (n.b. also the defence of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism as a ‘serious work’ that will stand the test of time).
by Henry on October 2, 2009
So the polls are open in Ireland for the Lisbon Treaty Mulligan referendum. Early reports suggest that more people are voting than the last time in Dublin, but that turnout elsewhere in the country is very low. I’m predicting a win by somewhere in the 6%-8% range (more predicated on ‘No’ voters being discouraged and not voting, than on any great sense of positive enthusiasm for the referendum). Also worth noting in passing that Wolfgang Munchau who suggested last year that the Irish could (and perhaps should) be kicked out of the EU for their impertinence in voting No the first time around now seems to have gone quite cold on the Treaty himself. He fails to tell us whether major European member states are monitoring his shifting beliefs against the likelihood that they might soon have to pull out of the EU and reconstitute themselves in a new organization that would specifically exclude Wolfgang Munchau. Perhaps his column next week will reveal more – in the meantime, feel free to speculate about the vote, provide updated information, opinions etc in comments.
Update: Looks as though I seriously underestimated the swing – the Treaty passed by a 17% margin.