Crooked Timber

This should be enough to get you through the next couple of days.

I didn’t find entries on Sir Alec Clegg (a brief mention here), the late Gordon Hainsworth, Sir Peter Newsam, or my dad. (Clegg was only one of the heroes of my childhood home—I am glad to see that the other has a nice long entry). There is, indeed, an entry on Otto Clarke but his entry is far, far, shorter and less informative than the entry on his considerably less accomplished son. (My dad’s non-entry is infinitely shorter than the one for his considerably less accomplished son, which JQ nicely salvaged from my daughter’s attempted sabotage).

I’m not really criticising the wikipedians, but the lacunae do show up a problem, which is that there will be a tendency for people whose accomplishments, however considerable, precede wikipedia’s birth to be much less well documented than those whose accomplishments, however minor, postdate its birth. Any more names of the missing?

Megan McArdle responds to my earlier post on taxes and revealed preferences and really makes a bit of a mess of things. More detailed discussion below the fold. Continue reading “McMuddled”

The following in the comments thread of Kieran’s recent post reminds me of an issue I’ve wondered about in the past. The comment exchange:

Do people think it’s worth learning R if you already use STATA*?
Probably in the general sense that it’s worth learning new languages or applications so as not to get too rusty.

I’m not sure whether Kieran meant to refer to computer languages here only or foreign languages as well. I remember reading generals requirements in some graduate program (perhaps my own, I don’t recall) that equated speaking a foreign language with being proficient in a programming language. I’d always found that to be curious. While I believe both are helpful and important skills to have, they seem to be sufficiently different not to equate. Foreign languages (and time spent in other countries) allow us to get to know cultures, histories, peoples in a way that is very difficult to do through translation. Knowing a programming language lends itself to other potential benefits.** The two hardly seem interchangeable. I’m just curious to know what other people think about this.

[*] It’s actually Stata not STATA, I’m not sure why so many people spell it with all caps. Same goes for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. It’s Pew, not PEW.

[**] Yes, yes, I can think of ways in which knowing a programming language might also help one get to expand one’s horizons on those other dimensions as well and feel free to offer entertaining scenarios, but my overall question still stands.:)

Well I thought it was funny.

Matt Yglesias is amazed that you can buy a coconut-flavoured candy called ‘Super Osama Kulfa Balls’ in China. There’s worse to be found in every German supermarket that I’ve ever been in …

I learned today that the Admissions Department of the University of Arizona’s Law School is located in the Corleone Building. Arizona has always been a retirement spot for the mob, I suppose. There must be examples of this sort of thing elsewhere, too. Anyone?

I’ve been too busy to post on a lot of things I’ve noticed so I thought I’d just post some quick links.

• One measure of the death toll in the wars launched by Saddam and then by Bush is the number of Iraqi widows, estimated at between one and two million. Widows are largely excluded from paid work and many are in a desperate position.

• What have the unions ever done for us (Via Eric Lee at Labourstart

• Finally, some real progress in the struggle against malaria.

Worth reading (and blogging about if I had more time):

Lane Kenworthy on “the (il)logic of the new Laffer Curve“.

Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn on John Edwards’ withdrawal from the race.

Ricardo Hausman on the curious inconsistencies between the macroeconomic advice that Washington Consensus folks doled out to east Asia, Russia and Latin America, and what the same people are saying today about the so-called sub-prime crisis.

Gideon Rachman is skeptical about economic freedom will indeed produce political freedom in countries like China and Russia (I’ve been meaning to blog about this essay for a couple of weeks, but have been swamped with other commitments, and am realizing this is unlikely to change soon …).

Eric Rauchway on Findlay and O’Rourke’s Power and Plenty (a book that will probably be finding its way onto my IR syllabus next year).

I was driving home from the office this evening (yeah, yeah, I know—I prefer to think of it as Arizona taxpayers getting good value for money) and I saw this enormous Ron Paul Revolution limousine thing go by. It was as long as a semi. Arizona is McCain country, but there are also plenty of libertarians out here, too, and many of them are even opposed to state-sponsored torture. So it makes sense that Paul is doing a bit of campaigning in the vicinity.

Naturally, there’s a website. Now that I look at the photo, it seems that it’s more a glorified pickup-truck camper attachment than a limo as such. It seems like there should be a joke there about Paul’s candidacy, or libertarianism, but it’d probably be too much of a—well, you know.

Jeremy is not the only one working on his Northwestern courses. I am putting the finishing touches on my junior writing seminar syllabus when I glance over at Yahoo! Music and see this (on 80s music random play):

This is generally amusing given the topic of my course (“Adolescents’ Digital Media Uses, Skills and Participations”), but it’s additionally funny since I was just adding an article to the syllabus that appeared in the journal The Information Society.

Stuff elsewhere on the WWW that I would blog if I wasn’t catching a plane to Ireland in 4 hours …

Mark Schmitt argues that Obama’s bipartisanship is actually a clever strategy for bringing change through.

Ari Kelman gives tips to job candidates who’ll be attending the American Historical Association meeting.

Andrew Gelman crunches the numbers to show that while Democrats are gaining support over time from professionals, business owners are going more and more Republican.

Lots of interesting stuff from Charles Taylor et al. on religion in the public sphere at the Immanent Frame.