It is true that for the best books, there is no substitute for a book. I do not want to read Robert Caro’s blog posts if they will delay his final volume on Lyndon Johnson by so much as an hour. But for many books, a few blog posts, or an article, would work just fine, and the reader would save a lot of time in the process. And time has value.

I think you can push this argument further. I would estimate that about 80% of the non-academic non-fiction books that I do not find a complete waste of time (i.e. good books in politics, economics etc – I can’t speak to genres that I don’t know) are at least twice as long as they should be. They make an interesting point, and then they make it again, and again, padding it out with some quasi-relevant examples, and tacking on a conclusion about What It All Means which the author clearly doesn’t believe herself. The length of the average book reflects the economics of the print trade and educated guesses as to what book-buyers will actually pay for, much more than it does the actual intellectual content of the book itself. Length may also, of course, reflect some practical judgments concerning the book as a display object (I seem to remember Tyler Cowen somewhere suggesting that only a relatively small percentage of books bought are actually read ). Books which are, for example, extended versions of articles written for The Atlantic, The Public Interest or what have you are especially likely to be over-long for their topic – I don’t remember ever reading one of these books and feeling that I got substantial insights which were unavailable in the original article (in some cases it might have been useful to have a better sourced and slightly better fleshed out version of the original piece available somewhere, perhaps half the length again of the original piece, but there doesn’t appear to be a market for that).

All this may be changing as we move towards an electronic book publishing system. The economics of electronic text production are not the same as the economics of book production (as best as I understand either), and there aren’t the same pressures towards standardization of length. I suspect that people who would feel cheated if they paid ‘book’ price for a long essay (say around 20,000 words or so) will feel less so if they buy an electronic version. Ideally, we will end up in a world where people won’t feel obliged to pad out what are really essays to book length in order to get published and compensated. If I’m right, we will see a lot more essay-length publications than we used to. I suspect too that the effects will be non-symmetrical – that is that we will see an explosion in the number of very short books/essays, which will be somewhat cheaper than traditional books, but not very cheap, a moderate decrease in the number of ‘standard’ (say, 60,000-90,000 word length) books, and stability or decrease in the number of long books (books with 100,000+ words). Long books still cost a lot of money to edit. I also suspect that we will see traditional printed books become (a) more expensive, and (b) more beautiful – their main value will be as display items rather than use items. Of course, I have no direct experience of the publishing industry (except as author) and know that several of our commenters know more, and have strong opinions, so look forward to being corrected on any or all of the above …

For years, MMSD staff have advocated for their proposals and programming choices by arguing that they are research-based data driven best practices. At times, I have wondered whether the research selected has undergone critical review. That is, do the people selecting the research stop to ask whether the research is methodologically sound with verifiable results, much less whether it was conducted on populations or under conditions that are comparable to the Madison public school district.

I’ve also wondered at an understanding of research that ignores entire bodies of data or work that falls outside of the narrow educational research paradigm. (Prime examples of the latter case include the district’s unwillingness to consider the considerable body of research on how children learn to read that is carried out by cognitive psychologists, linguists, and communicative disorder researchers. But that’s another post.)

What follows is my longwinded response, which builds up to a plea for Districts (or groups of districts) and States to establish local versions of the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

Mathiak’s particular concern is that the only source concerning underrepresented minorities mentioned by name in a report on TAG developments is by Ruby Payne, who is not a researcher, and self-publishes. Whatever the merits of this particular instance of the worry, it is a shared worry for a reason. Educational research (broadly construed as it should be) is voluminous, to say the least, and even much of the best of it is not designed, or written, to be readily accessible to non-academics. Educational leaders, whether at the school or district level, are not trained in the consumption of educational research: in fact, they are not even presented with a great deal of it during their training, even for the purpose of learning what it says. Preparing them would be quite difficult, for a couple of reasons. First, education is beset by a culture of deference to ideological commitments, which makes it quite difficult to have some kinds of discussion in a way that is really sensitive to the evidence. Consider inclusion – the policy of including children with special educational needs in the regular classroom – which is, in some quarters, a matter of faith of such strength that evidence is really irrelevant. It is similarly difficult in some districts and schools to have an evidence-sensitive discussion of racial achievement gaps. When you do have the discussion, furthermore, it is not necessarily the discussion you think you are having! (The most unnerving conversation I had with a superintendent was one in which the superintendent told me that his district uses Ronald Ferguson’s work to design their policies around the racial achievement gap, which I would think was a pretty good idea had he not just told me, as truth, a whole bunch of claims that I had, the previous day, read a Ronald Ferguson essay disproving). Training leaders to conduct such discussions in these circumstances, in which some of them have, themselves, made the particular commitments of faith, is no easy task.

Second, as any reader of CT will know, peer review is no guarantee of quality. The best that peer review does is exclude the very worst and nuttiest research. Knowing the status ranking of peer review outlets helps a bit – my guess is that the average quality of research in very highly regarded journals is somewhat better than the average quality of research in moderately well regarded journals, but I doubt the difference is huge, and if what you are looking for is individual pieces of research you can easily go wrong.

Even without these problems, interpreting research is extremely difficult, and training practitioners to do it presents substantial challenges. What leaders want to know is what steps they should take in their circumstances to achieve the goals that they have set for themselves (or have been set for them). But the research never tells them the answer to that question. Studies using large datasets aggregate over many different schools and districts: knowing that some intervention has, on average, small positive or small negative effects, does not tell you whether it will have positive or negative effects in your circumstances. Studies that are more localized tell us something about what an intervention or change causes in those circumstances, which may or may not resemble one’s own. I spend a fair amount of time in the company of high quality educational researchers, many of whom have a lot of hand-on experience in schools, and they will tell you that they do not know exactly how to interpret their own research let alone that of others for practical purposes.

Let’s take a very specific example. Suppose your school has experienced demographic changes from 5% FRL population to a 35% FRL population, and is now trying to come to terms with the fact that your curriculum and habits of instruction do not serve the new population well. Suppose, further, that the feeder middle school which serves half of the FRL students is a disaster, so that they come in even less well-prepared than they might. Should you move toward a curriculum which quasi-tracks students, providing classes specifically designed for less well prepared students. Or should you direct your teachers to “differentiate within the classroom”: that is, expect students of all different levels of preparedness in the classroom, but to vary instruction depending on the level of the preparation each student has?

Well, the literature consists of a large body of studies, most of which are not experimental in nature. In other words, they compare tracking schools with non-tracking schools, rather than looking at the effects of the kind of change you are considering. Many studies do not look at the presence, or otherwise, of special education students. Reading the literature, it is impossible to conclude that tracking is generally better, or generally worse, for low income students than non-tracking. Even if it were possible, that would not decide what you should do. First, the effects on non-low-income students matter, both intrinsically, and because a healthy school and school district needs to retain the support of their parents. Second, even if differentiation generally benefitted low income students that would not mean t hat you should do it. Maybe tracking generally harms low income students because the lower tracks are assigned lower quality and less experienced teachers, but you have the dynamism and ability as a leader to assign stronger and more experienced teachers to those tracks. Maybe your school has an unusual demographic profile that makes differentiation harder than it generally is to do well. Maybe you lack the leadership skills or the professional development resources to get your teachers to differentiate effectively. These are judgments that even much more unambiguous set of findings than we in fact have would still call forth from the leaders.

None of this is to say that we should not be training our educational leaders better to interpret research – we absolutely should, and I applaud Mathiak for raising the issue in the sharp way that she has done. But it’s a tall order, and meeting it takes considerable institutional resources. I know of two models. The first, which people who had experience of it (I’m much too young) praise was the research department of the now-deceased Inner London Education Authority. I don’t know how it was established, but its mission was to do school based research and communicate with the schools about the results. I can never tell whether its champions are victims of some sort of golden age-ism, but some of the best UK researchers in education worked there at some point, and it was associated with the landmark 15,000 Hours study, which gave some account of what was actually happening while children attended school.

The second model is contemporary, and at last I get to the point of the post. The Consortium on Chicago School Research has been working closely with CPS for 20 years, doing research in and about the schools with a specific focus on improvement, and with a mandate to communicate very closely with the district and the schools about its findings and their policy relevance. This remarkable document explains the way the Consortium works, independent of, but in a close institutional relationship with, CPS (and they’ve just published Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago which everyone interested school reform will have to read).

Two things to note about the Consortium. First, it requires researchers who are high quality researchers but who are also willing to develop and exercise the very different skill-set of communicating that research in ways that enable policymakers and practitioners to make use of it. The incentives in academia are not to do the latter; it is more prestigious to be presenting at big academic conferences than to small groups of teachers and principals, and career success is easier if you make the geographical moves that make it especially difficult to develop the local knowledge and become well enough trusted in local networks that enables one to communicate effectively. Second, it maintains complete independence from the district, which enables it to be critical, but also, oddly, helps it to maintain the trust of principals and teachers who, if it were too close to the district, might regard it with the suspicion that naturally attaches to district initiatives and proclamations. The ILEA research department was embedded in ILEA, but my guess is that that worked only because education was, at the time, a less political issue than it is now, and because until the 1990s most English LEAs had much closer and more trusting relationships with their schools than most do now, and than most large-ish American districts do.

So, the plea. Get your school board members to look at what the Consortium does, and how it does it, and whether it represents a model that your district or, if your district is small, it and neighboring districts, could replicate.

[Not sure whether this counts as disclosure or name-dropping, but since I started writing this post (in early January), the Consortium has announced my friend and colleague Paul Goren as its new director.]

Let me quote the product description, by way of posing my question for the day:

Before giant robots, space ships, and masked super heroes filled the pages of Japanese comic books – known as manga – such characters were regularly seen on the streets of Japan in kamishibai stories. Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater tells the history of this fascinating and nearly vanished Japanese art form that paved the way for modern-day comic books, and is the missing link in the development of modern manga.

During the height of kamishibai in the 1930s, storytellers would travel to villages and set up their butais (miniature wooden prosceniums), through which illustrated boards were shown. The storytellers acted as entertainers and reporters, narrating tales that ranged from action-packed westerns, period pieces, traditional folk tales, and melodramas, to nightly news reporting on World War II. More than just explaining the pictures, a good storyteller would act out the parts of each character with different voices and facial expressions. Through extensive research and interviews, author Eric P. Nash pieces together the remarkable history of this art and its creators. With rare images reproduced for the first time from Japanese archives, including full-length kamishibai stories, combined with expert writing, this book is an essential guide to the origins of manga.

I’m a comics guy, so this is very interesting to me. Let’s think about it theoretically – in a McCloudish sequential visual art-ish way. Suppose you want to tell a story (tell anything) in pictures, and you want to get reasonable distribution. First, you can bring the people to you. Go monumental. Build something that lots of people can come and see on a regular basis. Paint the ceiling of your church, or carve your images into the walls of a public building/structure. This has been done at many times and in many places. It is a time-honored method for getting lots of people to see your sequential visual art. Second, you can make lots of copies that you distribute widely. This modern method works great as well. Third, you sort of split the difference. You make some copies, but not too many; and you make them large, but still portable. And you make the circuit with them, ‘performing’ for relatively small, paying audiences. Comics as traveling theater. Well, obviously the Japanese went that route for a time. Who else has? It seems odd to me that there aren’t more examples of this kind of thing. It’s seems a natural sort of middle ground to hit upon when you don’t have enough cash for a cathedral and no one has invented cheap enough printing yet (yes, I know there was cheap printing by the 30’s. I’m sure you get what I’m saying.) There’s puppet theater. Why not more of this ‘comics’ theater thing? Who did this before or besides the Japanese (or after)?

Obviously it doesn’t go just for sequential visual art. Any old picture that you wanted to share around might pose you this distribution dilemma. But the theater formula seems particularly winning, potentially. It also seems like the sort of thing that you could do even if you didn’t have, say, paper. Fabric. Wood. Lots of cultures have had access to basic materials that might have served, and that wouldn’t have been prohibitively expensive for small-time operators. So are there more examples of ‘comic’ theater, in the sequential visual art sense?

I’m still waiting for my copy, obviously. I don’t know much about the Japanese case yet. Maybe some of these larger questions are addressed in the book.

An alternative reading of our recent military past might suggest the following: first, that the political utility of force—the range of political problems where force possesses real relevance—is actually quite narrow; second, that definitive victory of the sort that yields a formal surrender ceremony at Appomattox or on the deck of an American warship tends to be a rarity; third, that ambiguous outcomes are much more probable, with those achieved at a cost far greater than even the most conscientious war planner is likely to anticipate; and fourth, that the prudent statesman therefore turns to force only as a last resort and only when the most vital national interests are at stake. Contra Kristol, force is an “instrument” in the same sense that a slot machine or a roulette wheel qualifies as an instrument.

To consider the long bloody chronicle of modern history, big wars and small ones alike, is to affirm the validity of these conclusions.

A couple of qualifications/quibbles.

First, it’s important to remember that, for a very long time, America’s standard experience of war was that of near-continuous advance towards victory. For everyone else involved, the Great War involved years of pointless slaughter, with thousands dying for every yard of mud gained or lost. The US entered late and its forces immediately turned the tide of battle. World War II was similar – by mid-1942, a few months after Pearl Harbor the Allies were advancing on every front.

Paradoxically, as these two cases indicate, the US faith in force reflects a long history of aversion to foreign wars, going back to the Founders. The US had its share of bellicose nationalists, but compared to nearly all previous states, where success in war with other states was taken as the primary measure of greatness, the US in the 19th century (at least up to about 1890) stands out for its pacific nature. But on the relatively rare occasions when the US went to war, it usually did so under (perceived and sometimes actual) conditions of necessity and with the unqualified commitment that entailed.[1]

In the second half of the 20th century, as Europe finally tired and sickened of war, the US went in the opposite direction, taking military power to be a standard instrument of national policy. Sixty years of failure have not shaken this new faith in force.

Bacevich points to a series of losses, or draws where the losses on all sides outweighed the gains – Korea, Vietnam, and both Iraq wars being the biggest.

Adopting criteria put forward by Max Boot, Bacevich counts only three unambiguous military victories for the US in the past 60 years, all over absurdly weak opponents: Johnson’s long forgotten invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, and Reagan in Grenada and Panama.

However, he wrongly dismisses Clinton’s interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, which (if you disregard long term implications) were clear successes. No significant cost in blood or treasure to the US, desirable political outcomes and humanitarian benefits sufficient that the inevitable civilian casualties were largely disregarded, as was the breach of international law involved in bypassing the Security Council on Kosovo.

These successful interventions (mostly opposed by neocons at the time) revived faith in military intervention that had been lost in Vietnam, and whose revival had been delayed by the disasters in Beirut and Mogadishu. Oddly enough, though, the lessons drawn by Colin Powell (use military power as a last resort, with overwhelming odds, well-defined objectives and clear conditions for a rapid exit) were ignored. Instead the lessons drawn were to ignore or circumvent international law, to count on easy victories and to work out the objectives once the victories had been won.

The results have been seen in Afghanistan, Iraq and through covert action and proxies, throughout the Middle East and beyond. Yet none of this has done much to dent the faith of the Foreign Policy Community, or the American elite in general, in the efficacy of military force. The public seems less enthusiastic, but there are few places were public opinion counts for less than in US foreign policy.

fn1. Some qualifications on this are obviously needed. First, the claim is not absolute but relative. The comparison is with attitudes in the US post-WWII, and with the European powers which waged imperial wars of conquest all around the world at the same time as fighting regular wars with each other, and Second, this relatively pacific attitude didn’t extend to the Native American population. Third, from around 1890 onwards, the US became more imperialist, particularly in South America.

So, I’m planning to add a bit to each chapter, pointing to examples of these ideas being revived. I’d appreciate good examples for the rest: Trickle Down, Micro-based Macro the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and Privatisation (of course, the Queensland government gives an example v close to home).

With unemployment still above 10 per cent in the US, budget deficits in the trillions, and bankruptcy and foreclosure taking place on a massive scale, you might think that the idea of the Great Moderation would be, not just dead, but buried once and for all. You would be wrong.

This zombie idea was never really killed and it is already climbing out of the grave. In a blog post entitled ‘Does the Great Recession really mean the end of the Great Moderation?’ Coibion and Gorodnichnenko answer this question with a resounding ‘No’ present a series of graphs on the variability of real GDP growth to support the conclusion that ‘we are experiencing a particularly severe business cycle that nonetheless pales in comparison to the volatility experienced in the 1970s.’?Such a claim looks convincing if you look only at the absolute variability of GDP. But that variability reflects the combined impact of a massive fiscal stimulus from the public sector

Not only have the components of GDP fluctuated wildly, but so have all sorts of other macroeconomic variables. Brad DeLong points out that the variance of the employment/population ratio has shown the biggest spike since at least the Korean War.

More fundamentally, the idea that we are still in a ‘Great Moderation’ in which stability is the result of good policy fails the laugh test. The story used to be that the ‘good public policy’ that gave us stability consisted of the judicious adjustment of interest rates in line with a Taylor rule based on inflation rates and output growth. The response to the Global Financial Crisis started out that way, but the policymakers rapidly threw the rulebook out the window. Interest rates were cut all the way to zero. Then huge amounts of liquidity were pumped into banks and Wall Street firms through ‘quantitative easing’ and opening of the discount window. Then there was the trillion dollar bailout of late 2008, and the massive fiscal stimulus package of 2009.

Many words could be used to describe these responses, but ‘judicious’ and ‘moderate’ would not be among them. It could plausibly said that, massive as they were, the responses were still inadequate. But that just goes to point up the magnitude of the crisis.

Why then would anyone make such a claim? The answer can be sought in the internal dynamics of the economics profession. The Great Moderation vanished in 2008 and 2009, but the academic industry built to analyze it did not. Research projects based on explaining, measuring and projecting the Great Moderation, were not abandoned, and the careers based on those projects could not be diverted quickly into other ends.

Coibion and Gorodnichnenko are proponents of the view that the Great Moderation was the product of good public policy. They are the authors of a forthcoming paper in the American Economic Review making precisely this case. The paper is theoretically elegant and uses some impressive econometrics, reflecting the years of work that go into the production of such a piece (the article is based on a 2008 working paper and uses data from 1969 to 2002. But, if the Great Moderation is indeed over, such a paper becomes an exercise in economic history, and the ‘good policy’ explanation is clearly false.

Unsurprisingly, then, Coibion and Gorodnichnenko are attracted to the opposite view. A crisis that had destroyed whole national economies, bankrupted economies, doubled the US unemployment rate and threatened to bring down the entire financial system becomes, in their telling of the story, a ‘transitory volatility blip in 2009’.

We will be hearing a lot more of this kind of thing in the future. But, if we are to avoid repeating the mistakes of the last couple of decades, we must first recognise them for what they are. The Great Moderation is a dead idea, and it should be buried once and for all.

The piece is good on the linkage between economics and inequality:

Bowles’ course was set in 1968, when he was an assistant professor at Harvard, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to his department looking for advice on the next stage of his social justice campaign. “We were just elated that we could use economics, which we had so painstakingly learned, to answer questions that Dr. King thought were important,” Bowles tells SFR. “We were also extremely angry that we were totally unable to answer the questions on the basis of having gotten a PhD at Harvard.”

… Most economists in 1968 thought of inequality as “somebody else’s problem,” Bowles tells SFR. “I actually was denied the right to teach a graduate course in inequality because it was said not to be economics.” It wasn’t always thus. “The founders of the discipline of economics, almost to a man—and they were only men—thought that the problem of distribution between classes—they used the word classes—was the key to understanding why nations grew or not,” Bowles says. What Bowles sees as the essence of his profession—problems of wealth distribution—the Friedmanites see as the road to hell.

Mainstream political science was no better, failing nearly entirely to investigate the sources of structural inequality in the US (there is still no coherent field of American political economy) . My sense is that both fields have improved significantly over the last several years – the causes and consequences of inequality is a significant focus of research – but they have a hell of a long way to go.

Nominet has been through the wars in the past couple of years, with the biggest battles provoked by domainers (bulk commercial buyers of domain name registrations) trying to take over the Board of what is essentially a public interest organisation. (Like all fights, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Kieren wrote about the power struggle last year.)DTI, now of course known as BERR, was alarmed and threatened to take it over altogether. A big part of the problem is that there’s a very low bar for voting rights – basically anyone who does bulk registration of names – and so turnout is low, meaning capture by self-interested groups is distressingly easy. The changes being proposed at the EGM would address this. But they need to be voted in…

So, to the probably tiny percentage of CT readers who are interested, please do head over to Nominet and inform yourself about these issues.

Full disclosure: Through my work with ICANN (where I finished up last month), I got to know some of the Nominet team and think they’re doing a good job in difficult circumstances.

How can you dismiss Buddhism so easily? It’s the fastest growing religion in the world.

In the West, Buddhism is the new predominant ideology. Things are so unstable and confusing that with one speculation you can lose billions of dollars in a minute. The only thing that can explain this is Buddhism which says that everything is an appearance. That’s why the Dalai Lama is so popular in Hollywood.

You have also been critical of Gandhi. You have called him violent. Why?

It’s crucial to see violence which is done repeatedly to keep the things the way they are. In that sense, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.

UPDATE: Apparently Zizek was misquoted. At any rate, one person who claims to have been present for the interview says so, and it seems plausible enough.

I’m a three-time (soon to be four-time) published author. When aspiring authors learn this, they invariably ask what word processor I use. It doesn’t fucking matter! I happen to write in Emacs. I also code in Emacs, which is a nice bonus. Other people write and code in vi. Other people write in Microsoft Word and code in TextMate+ or TextEdit or some fancy web-based collaborative editor like EtherPad or Google Wave. Whatever. Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening—really listening—to what people say about your writing. This is the golden age for aspiring writers. We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and—if you can manage to get anybody’s attention—get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed! And you’re asking me what word processor I use? Just fucking write, then publish, then write some more. One day your writing will get featured on a site like Reddit and you’ll go from 5 readers to 5000 in a matter of hours, and they’ll all tell you how much your writing sucks. And most of them will be right! Learn how to respond to constructive criticism and filter out the trolls, and you can write the next great American novel in edlin.

Bill Watterson, in his first interview in 15 or so years, on stopping:

Readers became friends with your characters, so understandably, they grieved—and are still grieving—when the strip ended. What would you like to tell them?

This isn’t as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say. It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason “Calvin and Hobbes” still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I’ve never regretted stopping when I did.

RYANAIR HAS appeared in the bottom 10 of an “ethical ranking” of 581 companies, based on environmental performance, corporate social responsibility and information provided to consumers. … Ryanair is ranked 575 on the latest list, just ahead of Occidental Petroleum, US tobacco company Phillip Morris and oil giant Chevron. At the bottom is Monsanto, chiefly known for genetically modified foods.

This isn’t interesting because the ranking has any validity (I suspect that the ranking process is even more arbitrary than the usual – the worst-ranked companies are too obviously the bottom feeders that you would expect to find there) but because I imagine that Ryanair will respond to this with a press release that marries bluster and belligerence with a certain sense of accomplishment. The company prides itself not only on being perceived as having no social conscience, but as having a reputation for screwing its customers as systematically and mercilessly as possible. Which other airline’s CEO would announce that he wanted to charge passengers to use the toilet as a publicity stunt? Clearly, Ryanair thinks that this reputation is a money spinner for them (it is quite deliberately cultivated), and they have indeed made quite a lot of money. But why (if they are right) would a reputation for shafting your customers be a commercial asset for a consumer-oriented business in a relatively competitive sector? The standard economic account doesn’t seem to provide much insight. Help me out here.

As a philosophy major at Rutgers University, Mr. O’Keefe came to believe that conservative-leaning students were being force-fed a diet of academic liberalism. As he put it at the time, they were “drowned in relativism, concepts of distributive justice and redistribution of wealth.”

Now, I do believe that he may have encountered the concepts of distributive justice and the redistribution of wealth in that department (that he finds this problematic is odd, since he seems to have committed himself to a career aimed at redistributing wealth in accordance with a partiuclar conception of distributive justice, but what can you do?). But I took a look at the faculty list, and cannot imagine who was drowning him in relativism (especially of the moral variety which is the kind that is hinted at). Not one of the normative philosophers in that department is a relativist and I imagine that most of them, like me and most of their colleagues, explain fairly clearly why most of what happens in their courses makes no sense unless relativism is false. I anticipate that some them read CT occasionally and can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d be surprised. Less honorable victims would consider suing. I’m surprised that someone with a libertarian economic tilt is willing to accept massive public subsidies to fund his education but feels no obligation to learn anything.

I guess I shouldn’t be too harsh. The only time I have been accused of political bias in my own teaching was on the day after the 2004 Presidential election. I received a vile, hate-filled, email message from a student (with a fake email address) which made reference to several comments I had made (none of them about contemporary politics) in the previous day’s class, and which blamed me and people like me for the re-election of the President. (Not the first piece of hate mail I’ve received, but the first since I became a professor). If the comments the student referred to, which any attentive student would have seen as outlining, though not endorsing, an extremely left-wing conception of distributive justice, had not been so clear, I suppose I should have been pleased that my own political views are not readily recognizable from my teaching.

Still, compared to the developed world in general, it seems obvious that the US is different in lots of ways: an outlier in terms of nationalism, military power, religiosity, working hours and inequality of outcomes and (in the opposite direction) in terms of government intervention, health outcomes and other measures typically associated with welfare states. Among these the outstanding differences arise from the fact that the US aspires, with some success, to be globally hegemonic in military terms and (with rather less success) in economic terms as well.

But, when you think about it, there is nothing exceptional here.

Almost every state of any significance in history has aspired to dominate its known world. In the last century, Britain, Germany, Russia and even France[1] aspired to this role, and right now Russia and China are keen to try. Religiosity, militarism, inequality, and governments that do little for their subjects are the norm rather than the exception. Long hours of hard work have been the lot of humankind at least since the arrival of agriculture.

The real exception to all of this is Europe[2]. The largest economic aggregate in world history, it has enough military power to repel any invader, but is deeply uninterested in using this power to any more glorious end. It grows by a process of reluctant accretion, controlled by ever more onerous admission requirements. In all of history, it would be hard to find anything comparable in terms of pacifism, godlessness, equality, leisure for the masses or public provision of services.[3]

Then the EU itself. There aren’t many historical parallels and those that I can think of (the US under the Articles of Confederation and the Commonwealth of Independent States, for example) were rapidly abandoned. It’s ungainly, unloved and bureaucratic, and yet it has persisted for 50+ years (nearly 60 if you count the ESC). The Great Powers of the 19th are now, with marginal exceptions, parts of this post-sovereign collective.

It’s for these reasons that American views of Europe resemble de Tocqueville in reverse. Something so unprecedented, and against the laws of nature, they think, cannot possibly survive, let alone prosper. And yet it does.

fn1. As pointed out in comments, the bloody failure of these attempts between 1914 and 1945 helped cure most European countries of belief in national greatness. But Russia, which suffered more than anywhere else, has seemingly gone the other way.

fn2. That’s not to deny, of course, that there are lots of differences within Europe. Nevertheless, on the criteria described above, almost any European state appears as an outlier in historical terms.

fn3. The other developed countries (Japan and the wealthier bits of East Asia, Aust/NZ, Canada and, to the extent it can be regarded as outside Europe, the UK, sit somewhere in between.

But there are clear senses in which it is not right that the U.S. is a center-right nation. For example, it’s at least odd to have a center-right nation that lacks a center-right. There aren’t that many Olympia Snowes around – not even Olympia Snowe herself, during this whole health care business. It’s not as though America is the country where, when you elect a guy like Obama, you have to beat the center-right off with a stick, compromise-wise, when the center-left is plainly crying out to meet somewhere in the middle.

I have my own thoughts about this, but I’ll just throw this out. How is it possible, and what does it mean, to have a center-right nation, ideologically and electorally, that lacks a center-right, ideologically and electorally?