Without believable characters, novels are nothing. So it isn’t particularly surprising that sometimes, authors take the somewhat safer option. They “borrow” characters from other writers’ works – the more famous, the better – and place them in their own books. … So why do authors continue to use well-known characters? Is it a self-imposed challenge to carry on somebody else’s iconic work, or just an easy way to make a quick buck? … Banana Republican, gives Tom Buchanan – the racist, snobbish, despicable excuse for a human being in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – a second chance. … The New York Times called it a gimmick: “It’s as if Rauchway wrote a generic farce about a long-forgotten revolution and then decided the book might get more attention if he recast the narrator as a refugee from The Great Gatsby,” wrote Joe Queenan. … Perhaps, I suggest, the difficulty is that readers often feel authors are writing with somebody else’s characters because they know they have a ready-made audience. That, well, they’re being just a little lazy and unimaginative. … “

There’s a very obvious reason why Rauchway has “borrowed” the character of Tom Buchanan. He’s riffing on a famous “borrowing” that sought to do for nineteenth century British imperialism what Rauchway wants to do for the early twentieth century version – the exploits of Sir Harry Paget Flashman, VC. Flashman was, of course, the bully who gets sent down from Rugby in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays. McDonald Fraser appropriates this character from a novel that is in every way inferior to his own books, problematic though they are in some ways, and transforms him from a thick-headed boor into an intelligent, charming, selfish and completely cowardly representative of the British upper classes. Queenan notes the broad resemblance between Banana Republican and the Flashman novels, but seems completely ignorant of the fact that Flashman is himself a borrowing from another novel, suggesting that he needs to pay a little more attention to the stuff that he’s reading. That East elevates this misreading into a fundamental principle of aesthetics (that those who use other’s characters in their own novels are lazy, unimaginative, and timorous and that their novels, with a tiny list of exceptions are failures), suggests that his problem is rather more fundamental. Indeed, if one wanted to apply adjectives to a critic who doesn’t seem to have actually read the book he’s trying to take down (East makes no independent judgments of the book in the course of the review-essay), lazy, unimaginative and timorous might be excellent ones to start out with. Matt Yglesias wrote somewhere that the National pays remarkably well for book reviews. If I were them, I’d be asking for their money back.

[updated to clarify argument]

The striking thing is that several key books, some of which must be contenders, are missing. Regular readers will be able to guess the three absentees which top my list, and which would have competed only with The Ordeal of Equality for my permitted three votes if they’d been there. But to ensure there’s no mystery, here they are:

1. Richard Rothstein, Class And Schools: Using Social, Economic, And Educational Reform To Close The Black-white Achievement Gap must have outsold all but two or three of the books on the list, and has more google scholar citations than any of the ten books on the short list that I looked up (it’s discussed here (which should explain why It’s Being Done doesn’t belong on the list) and here)

2. Again Richard Rothstein, this time with Tamara Wilder and Rebecca Jacobson, Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (discussed here)

Ravitch’s likely winning entry draws on very heavily on both of the above books, so, really, they must be important if hers is.

3. CT favourite, Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (discussed here and lauded here).

Perhaps it was the curse of a positive Brighouse mention on CT that sunk them (but then why is The Global Achievement Gap on the list?). Feel free to recommend other absentees from the list in comments.

Carr’s “delinkification” critique is part of a larger argument contained in his book The Shallows. I read the book this summer and plan to write about it more. But for now let’s zero in on Carr’s case against links, on pages 126-129 of his book as well as in his “delinkification” post. … The nub of Carr’s argument is that every link in a text imposes “a little cognitive load” that makes reading less efficient. Each link forces us to ask, “Should I click?” As a result, Carr wrote in the “delinkification” post, “People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form.” … [The] original conception of hypertext fathered two lines of descent. One adopted hypertext as a practical tool for organizing and cross-associating information; the other embraced it as an experimental art form, which might transform the essentially linear nature of our reading into a branching game, puzzle or poem, in which the reader collaborates with the author. … The pragmatic linkers have thrived in the Web era; the literary linkers have so far largely failed to reach anyone outside the academy. The Web has given us a hypertext world in which links providing useful pointers outnumber links with artistic intent a million to one. If we are going to study the impact of hypertext on our brains and our culture, surely we should look at the reality of the Web, not the dream of the hypertext artists and theorists.

The other big problem with Carr’s case against links lies in that ever-suspect phrase, “studies show.” Any time you hear those words your brain-alarm should sound … Carr’s critique of links employs a bait-and-switch dodge: He sets out to persuade us that Web links — practical, informational links — are brain-sucking attention scourges robbing us of the clarity of print … The researchers Carr cites divided a group of readers into two groups. Both were provided with the text of Bowen’s story split into paragraph-sized chunks on a computer screen. (There’s no paper, no print, anywhere.) For the first group, each chunk concluded with a single link reading “next” that took them to the next paragraph. For the other group, the researchers took each of Bowen’s paragraphs and embedded three different links in each section — which seemed to branch in some meaningful way but actually all led the reader on to the same next paragraph. (The researchers didn’t provide readers with a “back” button, so they had no opportunity to explore the hypertext space — or discover that their links all pointed to the same destination.) … . They didn’t turn the story into a genuine literary hypertext fiction, a maze of story chunks that demands you assemble your own meaning. Nor did they transform it into something resembling a piece of contemporary Web writing, with an occasional link thrown in to provide context or offer depth. No, what the researchers did was to muck up a perfectly good story with meaningless links. Of course the readers of this version had a rougher time than the control group, who got to read a much more sensibly organized version. All this study proved was something we already knew: that badly executed hypertext can indeed ruin the process of reading. So, of course, can badly executed narrative structure, or grammar, or punctuation. Carr also makes reference to a meta-analysis … none of the studies the meta-analysis compiles looked at Web-style links. They all drew comparisons between linear hypertexts (screens with “next” links, not printed articles) on one side, and on the other, literary-style hypertexts broken up into multiple nodes where “participants had many choices in sequencing their reading.”

It’s certainly possible that hypertext (even of the moderate version associated say, with blogs that set out to inform rather than to create SEO-clickfarms) imposes a high enough cognitive burden to outweigh e.g. the benefits of being able to look at the source material that authors are drawing on. It’s also possible that Carr’s proposed solution – of having a selected group of links at the end of the text, along the line of footnotes or endnotes, is a superior one. I’d love to hear from people who have seriously thought about these issues (Anthony Grafton – if you are reading this post, consider this to be an explicit invitation to weigh in). But if Rosenberg’s summation is on target, these studies (and in particular the study that he singles out) are simply not informative in the ways that Carr suggests that they are informative (it would of course be nice to see studies which were informative on this question). Rosenberg notes that it is rather peculiar that he seems to have been the first person to actually look up the studies that Carr draws upon. He doesn’t explicitly note the irony that if Carr had actually linked to the studies, people would have been more likely to have clicked through and read them. But I imagine the thought has occurred to him.

This can be generalized into a broader point on the role that research should play in public debate (see also Fernando Pereira on this ). I’m not inclined to be as harshly critical of Carr as Pereira is – he is not unique. My understanding is that people who want to write non-fiction bestsellers are, shall we say, strongly encouraged to make strong forthright arguments without cavils and hesitations if they want to see their work published and promoted. This does not provide incentives for trustworthy engagement with the existing body of research, which (on most interesting questions in the social sciences and communication studies) is shot through with hedges, doubts, disagreements and qualifications. But this also means, I think, that work which draws upon academic sources should be hyperlinked – and hyperlinked quite extensively too. This in principle would allow people to read the relevant studies for themselves (if they have enough training to make sense of it), and make it more likely that they will see the alternative interpretations of those who do have such training, if they themselves do not. Of course, this also points to the broader need for ungated academic research – if academic work is to have an impact in general public argument, it needs to be broadly accessible to people engaged in these arguments.

Update: See also Mark Liberman .

Every classroom should have a well-educated, professional teacher, and school systems should recruit, prepare, and retain teachers who are qualified to do the job. Yet in practice, American public schools generally do a poor job of systematically developing and evaluating teachers. Many policy makers have recently come to believe that this failure can be remedied by calculating the improvement in students’ scores on standardized tests in mathematics and reading, and then relying heavily on these calculations to evaluate, reward, and remove the teachers of these tested students.

While there are good reasons for concern about the current system of teacher evaluation, there are also good reasons to be concerned about claims that measuring teachers’ effectiveness largely by student test scores will lead to improved student achievement. If new laws or policies specifically require that teachers be fired if their students’ test scores do not rise by a certain amount, then more teachers might well be terminated than is now the case. But there is not strong evidence to indicate either that the departing teachers would actually be the weakest teachers, or that the departing teachers would be replaced by more effective ones. There is also little or no evidence for the claim that teachers will be more motivated to improve student learning if teachers are evaluated or monetarily rewarded for student test score gains.

A review of the technical evidence leads us to conclude that, although standardized test scores of students are one piece of information for school leaders to use to make judgments about teacher effectiveness, such scores should be only a part of an overall comprehensive evaluation. Some states are now considering plans that would give as much as 50% of the weight in teacher evaluation and compensation decisions to scores on existing tests of basic skills in math and reading. Based on the evidence, we consider this unwise.

Any sound evaluation will necessarily involve a balancing of many factors that provide a more accurate view of what teachers in fact do in the classroom and how that contributes to student learning.

Read the whole thing for the details.

The first, riffing on David Harvey, and what sounds to be a terrible book by Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis, is your standard-issue dismissal of economic notions of rationality as a kind of imperialism.

One aspect of this specious conception of “reason” is the encroachment of a set of analytical principles established by marginalist economics into other fields of social science. … Underpinning this approach is three basic analytical principles. … individualism … rational self-interest … exchange. … This imperialism of “reason” (“economic imperialism”, as Fine and Milonakis dub it), has policy consequences. ‘Public choice’ economics, for example, has acquired a prized position in the academia, in think-tanks, and among policy ‘wonks’. … rightist political animus … What I’m describing as the imperialism of market “reason” is nothing other than the ability of the ruling class to naturalise and universalise its accumulation activities, to express it as an ideology, a pseudo-sociology with pseudo-explanations for social phenomena, and to use that ideology as a justification for advancing on and enclosing all areas of public life that are not commodified, not subject to the laws of accumulation.

The second, is (well justified) praise for Erik Olin Wright.

In 1979, Erik Olin Wright produced a book on the relation between class and income inequality with the aim of persuading social scientists working in the field of inequality to take marxist ideas seriously. He was, to put it mildly, in the wrong place at the wrong time. But his procedure was to rigorously conceptualise class as an antagonistic relationship centred on exploitation, rather than a system of gradations, or a competitive system based on the technical division of labour, market position, or authority relations. Having done this, he proceeded to show that with this understanding of class divisions in mind, it was possible to provide a powerful explanatory framework for understanding how income inequalities are perpetuated.

The problem is, of course, that Olin Wright’s work builds heavily on just the kinds of rationality-based modeling that lenin has excoriated a few weeks previously. His intellectual project (as I understand it – and we will be talking about it in greater detail in a few months), goes in two directions. The first is to try, as lenin suggests, to persuade social scientists to take class and related concepts seriously. The second is, however, to try to get Marxists and other radicals to think more seriously about the microfoundations of their arguments. And rational choice (as Wright discusses in an interview that everyone should read, especially those interested in the forthcoming seminar on his new book), is one very useful way for constructing theories about these microfoundations.

Rational choice models are models of human action and interaction in which the actors are assumed to consciously make choices in which they systematically take into account the alternative pay-offs (the “costs and benefits”) of different choices, and make their choices on this basis. … Nothing in these models depends upon concepts of class relations, modes of production, or any of the other ingredients of Marxism. … his does not imply, however, that rational choice models are inappropriate for Marxist questions. As long as one believes that in some circumstances human agents make choices consciously and that they at least sometimes attempt to rationally evaluate the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action, the rational choice models are potentially useful. … even within classical Marxism there were many problems in which Marxists effectively deployed rational choice models, although without the formal apparatus of such models. … The basic point here, then, is this: rational choice models and game theory are perfectly usable within Marxist analysis and have, at least implicitly, been present from the beginning of the Marxist tradition. … the evidence is pretty strong that some of the significant advances in the Marxist tradition in recent years have been aided by the use of these tools. I would point people to the various important work of John Roemer on exploitation, Adam Przeworski’s work on the class basis of social democracy, Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis’s work on contested exchange, and my work on class compromise.

In his first post, lenin is perpetuating a pretty commonly held myth among people on the left – that there is something inherently right-wing about rational choice microfoundations. In his post, if you read it carefully, there is an unexplained jump from the description of microfoundations to more specific claims about public choice economics. Here, lenin is right that public choice economics has a fundamental right-wing bias but this does not spring from the microfoundations themselves, but from the specific features of the models that public choice economists use. “Exchange” need not take place on equal terms after all – and game theory provides one useful way in which one can capture the likely sources of inequality in exchange relations. This paper by Sam Bowles and Suresh Naidu, for example, uses evolutionary game theory to show how persistently unequal (and exploitative) institutions may arise as a result of repeated contact between actors with unequal bargaining power (Jack Knight’s book, Institutions and Social Conflict makes a similar argument from mixed-motive coordination games.

Rational choice theory has its flaws, but it should be a key part of any leftist’s conceptual vocabulary. First, it forces leftists to ask themselves some awkward questions. If you want to make arguments about class solidarity, the power of social democratic ‘majorities’ to win elections where the working class is not actually in the majority etc, you need to think carefully about the microfoundations of these arguments. Rational choice lets you do this. It sometimes comes up with the wrong answers (there are many aspects of social life that it models badly, and that are better modeled using other assumptions) – but it helps serve as a useful mental astringent to the persistent tendency of the left to make claims that are more inspired by wishful thinking than any deep understanding of the mechanisms of social coordination. Second, it allows leftists to understand how many of the arguments made for the benefits of deregulation etc are intellectually extremely weak, and rely on the systematic obfuscation of many of the implications of rational choice theory for the interdependence of choice, for the ways in which self-interested actors can exploit asymmetries of power and information etc. Tom Slee’s book on this is the best and most lucidly argued introduction to the ways in which game theory provides both insights and a political rationale for the left that I know. Everyone (including those someones who already have some grounding in this debate) should read it.That leftists so frequently make blanket condemnations of ‘rational choice,’ ‘market reason’ and the like suggests to me that they don’t really understand the flimsiness of the relationship between the ideology and its theoretical priors, and the ways they themselves can use these priors to improve their arguments.

Anything could happen: four of the six have in the past been Nationals (rural conservatives), though they have gone in very different directions since. If they let bygones be bygones we could have a very conservative government. On the other hand a couple of them now have a greenish tinge, and, with the remaining independent and the single Green party member, we could get a government more progressive than the one that went out.

Overall, this was the kind of election that both major parties deserved to lose and, in some sense, they both did. Isn’t democracy wonderful?

fn1. Here I’m counting as independent one candidate from a dissident branch of the National Party who has stated that he won’t join the coalition.

I just finished the Bridge to Brisbane 10km fun run. I was doing really well on my training, and seemed certain to beat my personal best when I started getting knee pains – nothing really bad, but enough that I stopped before it got any worse. I got some help from the physio and did lots of stretches, but it was still a problem. So, on the day, I just took a couple of ibuprofen, and did my best to ignore it[1]. And, if I could have taken a pill that would fix my knees for me, I would have done so.

Am I, then, a budding drug cheat?

fn1. updated My friend (who beat me by 3 minutes) advises me that my time was 53:20, which is (just) a PB. My knees advise me that they will forgive me just this once. And, I should mention that, thanks to a series of miscalculations, i did the run with no assistance from caffeine, the wonder drug on which I rely for all things. So, with good knees and strong coffee, I can still hope to break 50 (in the right direction – I’ve already broken it chronologically, and of course the wrong way).

Ibuprofen is on the approved list, but on some of the more puritanical views of the question, taking it before a run/race is morally dubious performance enhancement.

More relevant than the official classification is my motivation. I don’t want to get an unfair advantage, just to do the best I can without being hampered by injury. But of course I wouldn’t have the injury if I hadn’t trained for the race. And the main function of a lot of the banned drugs is to allow you to recover faster from training injuries, and therefore to train harder. If I can justify taking a drug to achieve a PB in a fun run, how much stronger is the case as it would present itself to a full-time athlete, even leaving aside the financial rewards of success.

Then there’s the question of long-term damage. In my case, the big risk is not that I will suffer ill effects from drugs but that, if I ignore the warnings from pain, I’ll wreck my knees. That raises some questions about the most reasonable argument for laws against performance-enhancing drugs, namely that they have bad long-run effects on athletes’ health. The problem is, so do a lot of the sports themselves, and the training required for them. Up to a point, that’s obviously outweighed by the health benefits of physical activity, but I suspect a lot of training regimes go past that point.

I don’t really have an answer for this. I think it would probably be better to allow some supervised use of recovery-promoting drugs, while recognising that this wouldn’t stop people going outside the rules. The idea, as with drug policy in general, would be to focus on harm minimisation.

Hopefully, with limited drug use permitted, the additional benefits of unauthorised drug use would be small enough that the deterrent effect of penalties would be enhanced. On the other hand, I expect that if some drug use were legal, detecting cheating would become harder. Any thoughts?

Quiggin thinks he’s only writing about the failure of free-market ideas, but he’s actually describing the intellectual life cycle of most ideas in political economy. All intellectual movements start with trenchant ways of understanding the world. As these ideas gain currency, they are used to explain more and more disparate phenomena, until the explanation starts to lose its predictive power. As time passes, the original ideas become obscured by ideology, caricature and ad hoc efforts to explain away emerging anomalies. Finally, enough contradictions build up to crash the paradigm, although current adherents often continue to advance the ideas in zombielike form. Quiggin demonstrates with great clarity how this happened to the Chicago school of economics. How he can think it won’t happen with whatever neo-Keynesian model emerges is truly puzzling.

hmmm … Stable mode of production. Gradual accumulation of contradictions. Crisis. Emergence of new mode. I wonder where we might have encountered these claims before ….

More seriously – I don’t buy Dan’s arguments here. As with most stage theories (not only Marx, but also Kuhn), the mechanisms of institutional reproduction and change in his account are sorely underspecified. ‘Contradictions accumulate’ isn’t a much more helpful empirical claim than ‘shit happens.’ To really understand what is happening, you need a proper theory of the underlying conditions for ideational retention and reproduction. Why do some ideas decay into self-parody, while others do not? After all – not all ideas decay (or at least: not all ideas decay at the same rate). Some economic ideas have continued for centuries (the limited liability corporation), while others have disappeared completely, while others yet have disappeared and reappeared. We don’t know why – but if we want to make the kinds of claim that Dan is making, we need to know why, or at the least, have some rough idea. Otherwise, what we have is at best a sometimes-observed empirical regularity melded to a smidgen of intuition, which is not enough (in my book at least) to dismiss a counter-claim (that one particular idea may have a longer shelf life than previous versions) out of hand. The only large scale effort to come up with a proper theory that I am aware of is the sociological literature on performativity, but this is distinctly more useful in explaining how ideas succeed than how they become ossified, and lacks any account of the mechanisms producing variation.

Shorter version: if you want to dismiss someone else’s argument on the basis of a theoretical claim about the life-cycle of ideas in political economy, it’s a good idea to have an actual theory (with mechanisms and such) of the life-cycle of ideas in political economy. I’m not seeing that Dan has one here.

Update: see Dan’s response here, with a set of postulates about what may explain ideational persistence. As he notes, this is not a theory – but in fairness, political science and international relations in particular has done a terrible job in providing such theories to date (some interesting work on norm diffusion, which is not quite the same thing, aside).

There’s a tiny element of truth in this – after the oil shock, the collapse was rapid and disorderly. But the Keynesian economic order had already broken down by October 1973, and the oil shock was a consequence of that breakdown, not a cause.

An inflationary upsurge had been going on for five years or moe by the time OPEC oil ministers met in October 1973. The term ‘stagflation’, apparently coined in 1965 by Iain MacLeod was in widespread use, to reflect the breakdown of the historically observed Phillips curve relationship between unemployment and inflation. Wage and price controls had been imposed in the US in 1971, but had broken down by early 1973 – the oil shock merely administered the coup de grace, leading to the final abandonment of controls.

Internationally, the Bretton Woods system, based on fixed exchange rates tied to gold by way of a fixed $US price of $35/oz had been under pressure since 1968. The Smithsonian agreement of 1971 was the last attempt at rescue, and the system had collapsed completely by February 1973, although it took a decade or so for the remnants of the associated regulatory architecture to be cleared away by the process of financial deregulation.

Prices of all kinds of commodities were skyrocketing,. Because of the cartelised nature of the oil market, oil prices responded with a lag, just as the world economy was beginning its downturn. The shift from dominance by a buyers cartel (the ‘Seven Sisters’ of Big Oil) to a sellers’ cartel meant a bigger and more sudden jump in prices than for some other commodities, but that’s just the way cartels work.

In response to all this monetary policy was being tightened, making a decline into recession inevitable. The recession was just as bad in countries like Australia, self-sufficient in oil and a net energy exporter, as in oil-importing countries like Japan and the US.

Why does this matter? To quote myself from Zombie Economics

The Keynesian Golden Age ended in the stagflation of the 1970s. The causes of this breakdown are many and complex, but they must be addressed if we are to avoid repeating them. In particular, it is important to avoid relying on easy excuses, such as the 1973 oil shock and to face the fact that the emergence of stagflation reflected serious failures in the dominant version of Keynesian macro theories, and in the political and industrial strategies of the social democratic, left, and labor movements. (emphasis added)

fn1. Rule 2 from Zombieland. I wish I’d seen this movie before I finished writing my book

As far as it went, Caesar III was an experiment in refutation. If a graduate from the Mises University has trouble planning a make-believe Roman colony, what hope is there that anyone could plan the real thing?

says it all, really.

… Quiggin is clear-eyed about Keynesianism’s failures as well as its successes, but he believes that:

The failures of the 1970s were the result of mistakes that could have been avoided with a better understanding of the economy and stronger social institutions. If so, the current crisis may mark a return to successful Keynesian policies that take account of the errors of the past.

He might be right, but if so it would contradict everything else contained in Zombie Economics. Quiggin thinks he’s only writing about the failure of free-market ideas, but he’s actually describing the intellectual life cycle of most ideas in political economy. All intellectual movements start with trenchant ways of understanding the world. As these ideas gain currency, they are used to explain more and more disparate phenomena, until the explanation starts to lose its predictive power. As time passes, the original ideas become obscured by ideology, caricature and ad hoc efforts to explain away emerging anomalies. Finally, enough contradictions build up to crash the paradigm, although current adherents often continue to advance the ideas in zombielike form. Quiggin demonstrates with great clarity how this happened to the Chicago school of economics. How he can think it won’t happen with whatever neo-Keynesian model emerges is truly puzzling.

How then, should we think about the Keynesian era and its failure?

One possible interpretation, a pessimistic one, is that business cycles are so deeply embedded in the logic of market economics, and, perhaps of all modern economies, that they cannot be tamed. Success breeds hubris, and hubris leads us to ignore the lessons of the past: that resources are always constrained, that budgets must ultimately balance, that wages and other incomes cannot, for long, exceed the value of production and so on. It the 1960s and 1970s, this hubris manifested itself in unsustainable budget deficits and the wage–price spiral. In the 1990s and 2000s, it was seen in the speculative frenzy unleashed by the self-styled Masters of the Universe in the financial sector.

But this is not the only possible interpretation.

Perhaps the failures of the 1970s were the result of mistakes that could have been avoided with a better understanding of the economy and stronger social institutions. If so, the current crisis may mark a return to successful Keynesian policies that take account of the errors of the past. (emphasis added)

On Sunday, policy makers, higher education watchers and ordinary readers opened their newspapers and Web browsers to an editorial endorsed by the Post’s staff board that took a stance that could’ve come right out of Kaplan’s playbook. After disclosing the corporate link—noting that the paper is owned by the same company that “owns Kaplan University and other for-profit schools of higher education that, according to company officials, could be harmed by the proposed regulations”—the editorial bashed the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed rules, voicing concerns about access for low-income and working students, and worrying more broadly about how the country could meet President Obama’s higher education goals without for-profit colleges. … The editorial’s disclosure and others like it in the Post’s news coverage of for-profit colleges—touted by the Post’s ombudsman in a column this weekend—don’t go far enough, Asher argued. It’s one thing to acknowledge that Kaplan is owned by the same company, “it’s another to acknowledge the financial dependencies that the Post has on Kaplan, which they don’t do.” Close to 60 percent of the company’s revenues in the most recent fiscal year came from Kaplan. .. Today’s Post features another op-ed denouncing the proposed rules on for-profit higher education. The author is the chairman and chief executive of Strayer Education Inc.

At least this time they are providing some kind of disclosure. I used to wonder why the Post regularly trotted out editorials against broadband regulation, basing arguments on flagrantly bullshit statistics about rural access to broadband. When I found out that the Washington Post Company is the owner of a cable company specializing in service provision to small rural areas my wonderment evaporated. As news publishing becomes ever less profitable in its own right, we can expect ever more attention to the possible side benefits of owning a substantial share of the public debate. The Washington Post has already been a pioneer in exploiting these synergies, and can, I suspect, be relied upon to do more as time goes on.

More striking was the simultaneous departure of Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson. Lindsey has been the leading proponent of a rapprochement between libertarians and (US-style) liberals, under the unfortunate portmanteau of “liberaltarianism”, and Wilkinson was similarly seen as being on the left of Cato.

These departures presumably spell the end of any possibility that Cato will leave the Republican tent (or even maintain its tenuous claims to being non-partisan). And Cato was by far the best of the self-described libertarian organizations – the others range from shmibertarian fronts for big business to neo-Confederate loonies.

On the other hand, breaks of this kind often lead to interesting intellectual evolution. There is, I think, room for a version of liberalism/social democracy that is appreciative of the virtues of markets (and market-based policy instruments like emissions trading schemes) as social contrivances, and sceptical of top-down planning and regulation, without accepting normative claims about the income distribution generated by markets. Former libertarians like Jim Henley have had some interesting things to say along these lines, and it would be good to have some similar perspectives

(a bit more to come when i have time)

For quite some time, the US and the leading EU countries have been fairly comparable in terms of output per hour worked. The US has had higher output per person for two reasons: a relatively high employment/population ratio and very high average hours worked per person. The first of these is important because it raises the possibility that EU countries performing well on productivity measures are benefiting from the “Thatcher effect” . If low-skilled workers are excluded from employment, for example by restrictive macro policy, as in Thatcher’s case, or by labor market sclerosis, as claimed by critics of European institutions, then productivity measures are artificially boosted.

This issue is now moot. As a result of the crisis, the US employment/population ratio has dropped sharply, to the point where the US is now little different from the EU. The difference in GDP per person between the US and leading European countries is driven primarily by differences in average hours worked by employed people.

To get the data on this, I’ve had to combine Eurostat and OECD info (always a little problematic, but neither had all the info I wanted).

From Eurostat, the E/P ratio (total employment/pop 15-64) for the euro area was 58.5 in 1997 and rose to 64.8 by 2009 (France 64.2 , Germany 70.0). Over the same period, the US ratio has fallen from 73.5 to 67.6, with the bulk of the decline in the last couple of years. The remaining difference is entirely due to the higher US employment-population ratio for women – the ratios for men are virtually identical.

Turning to the OECD for information on productivity and GDP per capita, these tables shows that relative to the euro area as a whole, the US still has a substantial lead in productivity (about 15 per cent). But for the leading European economies, like France, Germany and the Netherlands, the productivity gap is below 10 per cent, which is well within the margin of error associated with PPP conversions[1]. Particularly for the latter two, the big difference is in annual average hours worked (1681 for the US, 1390 for Germany, 1378 for the Netherlands). The difference in average hours almost entirely explains the gap in GDP per person between Germany and the US, and more than explains the gap for the Netherlands.

As is well known, Europeans tend to offset their lower hours of paid work by doing more household labor. Taking this into account properly would diminish the gap in both directions – relative to the US, European hours of work would rise, and so would output per person.

I was hoping for a good exposition of this from Peter Baldwin whose book The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe are Alike has a promising title (I haven’t read it yet). Unfortunately, he only gets half of the story, saying

Americans work 23 percent more than Germans in the marketplace. However, once we factor in household labor, the drudgery that allows us to function in the world, the difference in total work drops to 12 percent. And interestingly, the figures for time actually spent at leisure are almost precisely the same for the two nations.

That Americans work 12 percent more than Germans seems to be the hard kernel that emerges from the statistics. Considering that for that 12 percent investment the American G.N.P. per capita is 32 percent higher than the German, this seems a defensible trade-off. Perhaps Americans have collectively decided to work somewhat harder to be substantially better off.

Coming to my own take on all this, it seems that the European and US systems yield roughly equal productivity, and roughly equal labor market performance (as measured by E/P ratios). Higher European taxes mean more and better public services (at the cost of reduced private consumption) and they are also (along with social preferences) reflected in lower hours of work and more household labor. I know which looks more appealing to me, but there’s no obvious way of saying which is best.

Rather more clear-cut is the price paid by the US in terms of greater inequality. Compared to the European case, and to the US in the past, the top percentiles of US households collect a much larger share of total income, and there doesn’t seem to be any net economic payoff for this.

fn1. (Very wonkish note) Although PPP numbers are often treated as if they are are raw facts, they are index numbers which are fundamentally imprecise (even if the underlying data is perfectly accurate, which it isn’t). From work I did with Steve Dowrick in the 1990s, I estimate the difference between upper and lower bounds at around 10 per cent. It’s likely that any bias in PPP numbers favors the US. That’s because they are a generalized kind of Laspeyres index, and (as I understand it) the base data is derived largely from Europe.