Crooked Timber

Kevin Drum points to this piece by Michael Gerson, denying the existence of a Republican War on Science. As Drum points out, Gerson doesn’t even mention the major battlegrounds like global warming denialism, creationism and intelligent design, and the Gingrich-era shutdown of the Office of Technology Assessment, focusing on a much narrower set of issues including stem cell research and abortion.

Moreover far from refuting the claim of a war between Republicanism and science, Gerson spends most of the article fighting on the Republican side. Most obviously the obligatory, and in this case, lengthy discussion of eugenics, tied in Jonah Goldberg fashion to contemporary liberalism.

There’s an even more fundamental problem here. Gerson is so focused on the political/cultural/ethical war he is fighting that he doesn’t even consider the question of whether there are any scientific facts that might be relevant to the question.

Continue reading “The Republican War on Science, yet again”

I was pretty much stunned into silence by the proposal for a gasoline tax holiday put forward by John McCain and Hillary Clinton (not that it matters but I’m not clear which of them came up with it first – can anyone set me straight on this). I won’t bother repeating all the reasons why this is a terrible idea ( when Tom Friedman has your number, I’d say your number is up).

Just a couple of observations. First, I find it hard to see how anyone serious can support either McCain or Clinton after this.

Second, the fact that the proposal has lasted this long suggests to me that the chance of any serious US action on global warming after the election is not that great. Without the US, we won’t get anything from China and India either, so that means we’re setting course for disaster. Perhaps if Obama wins, he’ll be able to turn this around, but this episode has me very depressed.

Northwestern University has withdrawn its offer of an honorary degree to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright “in light of the controversy around” him. University Commencements in the U.S. are annual sites of ritual fighting over the appropriateness of commencement speakers and honorary degree recipients. Maybe this will be one of the highlights of the season. (Via Scatterplot.)

The first time I tried to celebrate May Day was by waving a black flag at Wills Point High School (about fifty miles east of Dallas, Texas) in 1981. None of the other students had any idea what that was about, and the teachers were probably just glad to know the Class of ‘81 would be gone soon, and my wierdo ass with it.

And for the next quarter century, celebrating May Day in the United States remained a pretty good sign that you were on the political margins. That started to change two years ago. Turnout was lower in 2007. But it’s a good sign when the website of the AFL-CIO’s Washington, DC Metro Council runs an announcement for tomorrow’s protests.

Meanwhile, there are interesting developments elsewhere…

Continue reading “All Out For May Day!”

The FLDS incident has stirred up plenty of discussion in the blogosphere. Laura got so annoyed in her first thread that she, sensibly, shut it down, and then, equally sensibly, opened up a more general thread about when the government is justified in terminating parental rights. (See also Russell, here and here). I am uneasy about commenting much on the FDLS issue, mainly because I have not been following it as obssessively as I’d have needed to to feel comfortable. But I do have some observations about parental rights. These are partly drawn from my paper with Adam Swift, Parents’ Rights and the Value of the Family (pdf, but free, and no registration required, at least as of now), so in what follows the usual Brighouse/Swift rule for anything I say that draws on our work—whatever you agree with credit him, whatever you disagree with blame me—applies (for the final, published, paper, we get joint credit/blame).

Continue reading “Terminating Parental Rights”

Ms. Almontaser, a teacher by training and an activist who had carefully built ties with Christians and Jews, said she was forced to resign by the mayor’s office following a campaign that pitted her against a chorus of critics who claimed she had a militant Islamic agenda. In newspaper articles and Internet postings, on television and talk radio, Ms. Almontaser was branded a “radical,” a “jihadist” and a “9/11 denier.” She stood accused of harboring unpatriotic leanings and of secretly planning to proselytize her students. Despite Ms. Almontaser’s longstanding reputation as a Muslim moderate, her critics quickly succeeded in recasting her image.

The conflict tapped into a well of post-9/11 anxieties. But Ms. Almontaser’s downfall was not merely the result of a spontaneous outcry by concerned parents and neighborhood activists. It was also the work of a growing and organized movement to stop Muslim citizens who are seeking an expanded role in American public life. The fight against the school, participants in the effort say, was only an early skirmish in a broader, national struggle. “It’s a battle that’s really just begun,” said Daniel Pipes, who directs a conservative research group, the Middle East Forum, and helped lead the charge against Ms. Almontaser and the school.

I’m temporarily coming out of hiatus to point to this New York Times article which should, I hope, give some pause to people who claim that concerns over whether to fire people like John Yoo reduce down to academics trying to defend their privilege of tenure. And yes – I completely agree that there is a vast gaping difference between trying to fire someone for actions that were directly intended to facilitate torture,¹ and firing someone because vicious paranoid hatemongers like Daniel Pipes and his cronies say that she deserves firing. The question is whether that distinction can be maintained politically in an employment system where very few people indeed have the kind of job protections that academics (or, to a lesser extent, teachers in an unionized system) have, and where people like Daniel Pipes have considerable political sway. I think it’s perfectly legitimate for people to maintain either (a) that firing people like Yoo in the absence of external proceedings is still worthwhile, even if it has substantial knock-on effects, or (b) that firing Yoo is unlikely to have the kinds of repercussions that I fear. But I also think that my position is legitimate (and I also think that it’s right or I wouldn’t have put it forward), and whatever you believe, it’s clear that the battles that are about to begin are only indirectly about academic freedom. They’re better considered as battles over whether people who hold minority views (‘middle ground’ Muslim views, certain political beliefs), whether they be professors, teachers, or whatever are going to be persecuted (either sporadically or systematically, depending on how successful Pipes is), sacked or forced to resign, and forced out of public life in its myriad forms. That’s the agenda that Pipes is proposing. Now back to my cave …

¹ I should say, by the way, that I think that Brian Leiter’s claim that

Anyone calling for him to be fired is calling for him to be punished for his ideas, and nothing else. Attempts to claim it is more “complicated” are just attempts to rehabilitate the idea that having bad ideas, even bad ideas others act on, is a crime.

is misleading and very badly wrong. “Ideas” that are floated in an academic paper are very different from legal analyses that are offered by someone working within a bureaucratic apparatus, which are directly intended to help others in that apparatus to carry out war crimes. The latter are better considered as actions than ideas – they are directly connected to the activities that are carried out on their basis in a way that free floating ideas are not.

UPDATE: I should perhaps have made clearer that I am not diving into the comments section of this post for reason of time commitments. I recognize that this isn’t very satisfactory for people who might want to push me on this or that aspect of my argument, and promise that I’ll post again on this when I return …

Apparently. Not the CP, I’m afraid. Just a CP.

Brian Knight and Nathan Shiff have a paper on momentum and voter choice.

This paper provides an investigation of the role of momentum and social learning in sequential voting systems. In the econometric model, voters are uncertain over candidate quality, and voters in late states attempt to infer the information held by those in early states from voting returns. Candidates experience momentum effects when their performance in early states exceeds expectations. The empirical application focuses on the responses of daily polling data to the release of voting returns in the 2004 presidential primary. We find that Kerry benefited from surprising wins in early states and took votes away from Dean, who held a strong lead prior to the beginning of the primary season. The voting weights implied by the estimated model demonstrate that early voters have up to 20 times the influence of late voters in the selection of candidates, demonstrating a significant departure from the ideal of “one person, one vote.” We then address several alternative, non-learning explanations for our results. Finally, we run simulations under different electoral structures and find that a simultaneous election would have been more competitive due to the absence of herding and that alternative sequential structures would have yielded different outcomes.

I’ve not even a scintilla of the technical expertise that would be required to assess the claims of the paper. And they could certainly have chosen a better election year to make it in (later votes in the primary process clearly count for quite a bit more than usual this time around). But the basic underlying argument – that peoples’ primary votes in Iowa will usually count for some multiple of the influence that people’s votes in, say, Pennsylvania count for, seems to me to almost certainly be true. So is this something that people should be concerned with on basic grounds of equity etc? Does this provide enough grounds that people should push for reform (either through having all primaries on one day, or perhaps semi-randomizing the allocation of slots in the calendar if that isn’t feasible)?

Obviously, there are similar inequities in the apportionment of US Senate seats by population – but that is built into the system by design, and can’t be gotten rid of without constitutional change. Calendaring is in the remit of the parties and the states themselves. My memory is that a couple of states benefitting from the current set-up have sought to make their threats more credible through amendments to their domestic constitutions, but I am skeptical that these commitments would in fact be credible if every one else converged on a single date or changed system. This is, indeed, one of those cases where we would be better off if the simplest one-shot game theory prediction came true (i.e. the outcome in which every state party converges on the equilibrium of the earliest possible date). So would this be a bad idea?

I invited my political philosophy undergraduate class to attend the conversation about No Child Left Behind, and several of them came along. I told the students beforehand that it would be fun, because lots of people would be annoyed with what I had to say, and that certainly someone would accuse me of using a “deficit model” of poverty. The thing is, if you didn’t already know what the “deficit model” of poverty is, and heard the talk (which you can read here), you couldn’t discern that I was saying anything rude or insulting. So after I had spoken, I could see a couple of my students at the back puzzling at why anyone would give me a hard time. But then it came, second question, and I watched one of them open her eyes in thrilled disbelief, as if I were some sort of soothsayer. I’ll forward this link to her to apologise for giving her that impression.

How, my student may have wondered, could I have known that I would be accused of holding a deficit model of poverty?

Continue reading “The Deficit Model of Poverty (and NCLB).”

Welcome to Education Optimists, a new blog written by my colleague Sara Goldrick-Rab, and her husband Liam Goldrick. Sara is in the EPS department at Madison, and Liam is Policy Director at the New Teacher Center. My prediction is that you can expect smart, well-informed, and heterodox commentary there. To start you off, here is Sara’s warning about the new TEACH grant program, which offers a $4000 per year grant to students willing to commit to getting an education degree and then spend 4 years teaching in high poverty schools in a particular subject area:

Beware: If a student does not fulfill the terms of the grant it is automatically converted into an unsubsidized loan, with interest accruing starting when the loan began.

One can easily imagine many ways a student could fail to fulfill the terms of the grant.
Here are but a few examples:

Over at our joint I’ve been doing a fair bit of “this day seventy-five years ago” because of the anniversary of Roosevelt’s hundred days and, well, because. This one may hold some interest for an international readership:

On this day in 1933, British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald delivered an address from the National Press Club in Washington, DC, discussing the common problems of the US and UK: “In America at this moment and in Great Britain there are millions of men who want work and can’t get it…. Governments cannot be indifferent to a state of things like that.”

MacDonald looked forward to “wise international government action,” to be established at the upcoming international economic conference. He hoped it would revive “a freely flowing international exchange,” i.e., trade—“Self-sufficiency in the economic field on the part of nations ultimately ends in the poverty of their own people.”

He was mindful of the apparent irony in Britain’s having taken the nationalist, defensive action of going off the gold standard: “Can you imagine that in the early days of that crisis we said gayly and light-heartedly, ‘Let it rip. Let it rip. We will go off gold. There are benefits in being off gold, and we will reap them.’” Obviously he meant the answer to be “no.”—“And so on this currency question, agreement is the only protection.”¹
Continue reading ““Let it rip.””

I suspect that I disagree with Eric (and very likely other CTites) on how we should think about academic freedom. To clarify this (and also to figure out better for myself why I think what I think), some propositions below. Continue reading “Academic Freedom: Some Propositions”