Crooked Timber

You can see how desperate I am for help by the use of the second word in the title of this post, which I’ve resisted until now.

I have offered to present a talk to a large conference audience in Adelaide, and intended to do it by videoconference, following several successful (and cheap!) presentations to seminar-size groups. But the conference of organizers have been quoted a cost of thousands of dollars to present the videoconference session. There are some obvious cheap alternatives like a pre-record, but I’d like to avoid these if possible. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could deliver a videoconference presentation, at reasonable cost to a large audience in a venue that isn’t specifically set up for this?

Among the depressing pieces of news from London this week (depressing except for opponents of organised sport, who have, more or less, been guaranteed that the 2012 Olympics will be a lot of fun)—a BNP candidate, Mr Richard Barnbrook, was elected to the Greater London Assembly. So, how should he be treated?

One option is what you might call the Vidal Sassoon treatment. This involves gathering together large numbers of trained killers and street-fighters, physically busting up meetings, and brutalising fascists whenever one bumps into them. In this documentary (still online, and well worth a listen), one member of the 43 Group recalls encountering one of the ideologues of the British Fascists on a bus, holding onto the bars, and kicking him off with the full force of his body. (A TV documentary is on youtube here, here, and here).

» Continue reading “The Vidal Sassoon Treatment..”

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.

It’s beginning to look as if the voters of London have taken it upon themselves to abolish the post of Mayor land themselves with Boris Johnson. A remarkable move: reject a manifestly competent (if not especially likeable) incumbent, and a manifestly decent challenger (who, in addition to being gay, is related to Hugh Paddick!), for… well, Boris Johnson. (See Martin O’ Neill for invective—I’m too bemused and detached myself). If this comes to pass, I would say that it should be the one positive note of the day for Gordon Brown. Ken Livingstone’s mayoralty was too independent from Labour for them to get any credit for anything he did well; whereas David Cameron has tied his flag to Boris’s mast. The post of Mayor has far too little power really to do London a lot of good, but it has enough to do it a lot of harm, and there’s every chance that a Johnson mayoralty will oblige, and the Tories will suffer. If this comes to pass, Cameron, not Brown, should be disappointed.

My colleague Lane Kenworthy is profiled this week at normblog. Lane’s blog, Consider the Evidence, is well worth your time.

Many of his friends. colleagues and former students were present at a wonderful performance from Jerry Cohen (G.A. Cohen) yesterday. Jerry is retiring as Chichele Professor and gave his valedictory lecture. Here Jerry recreates Isaiah Berlin explaining the influence of the altogether neglected Samuel von Pooped on the totally forgotten Herman von Supine.

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.)

Among the outcomes produced by a market economy, real wages are arguably the most important single variable for most people. With inflation rising around the world, and sensitive prices like those of food and petroleum going up a lot, most people’s living standards depend mainly on whether wages grow faster than prices. I got a couple of pieces of info on this today, which illustrate the difference between data and anecdote.
» Continue reading “Data and anecdotes.”

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!.”

Synopsis: yes.

I promised this post in comments to Chris’s on Blackburn’s myths below, where I took my life in my hands and disagreed with John. I think that actually, there probably is “a general skill called management which works in any and all domains”, and, just to raise the tariff and secure gold medal position for myself in the Steven Landsburg Memorial Mindless Contrariolympiad, I’ll also defend the proposition that this skill is pretty closely related to what they teach on MBA courses. But first a couple of remarks on Blackburn’s own “Myth of Management“.

In his very definition, Blackburn pretty much gives it away; he says that “[the myth of management] claims that people can be managed like warehouses and airports”. What does this even mean? How do you manage a warehouse or an airport if it’s impossible to manage people? If he had said “like machines” or even “like factories”, then it might have been comprehensible, but a warehouse which doesn’t have any people working in it is just a shed full of stuff and doesn’t require any management because no deliveries or shipments are being made. And an airport without people is just a warehouse for planes. Warehousing and transport are two very labour-intensive industries.
» Continue reading “Is there a general skill of “management”?.”

Just ten days or so ago Henry wrote that Chuck Tilly had won the SSRC’s Hirschman Prize, and linked to a classic paper of his. Tilly died this morning. He had been battling cancer for several years.

Tilly was a comparative and historical sociologist, an analyst of social movements, a social theorist, a political sociologist, a methodological innovator—none of these labels quite capture the scope of his work. I think of him as someone who was interested in the general problem of understanding social change, and he attacked it with tremendous, unflagging energy. Here is one of his own self-descriptions:

Among Tilly’s negative distinctions he prizes 1) never having held office in a professional association, 2) never having chaired a university department or served as a dean, 3) never having been an associate professor, 4) rejection every single time he has been screened as a prospective juror. He had also hoped never to publish a book with a subtitle, but subtitles somehow slipped into two of his co-authored books.

I saw him speak on several occasions and met him a few times, too. I particularly remember him giving the Mel Tumin lecture at Princeton, and a great chat I had with him in his office at Columbia. He was a small, wiry man who always seemed to be smiling and, like a true Weberian charismatic figure, he seemed able to transmit some of his own brio to you as he talked.

Riddle me this; how, in a world of competition and trade rules, does OPEC exist? I’ve been asking this question for years, and never gotten a proper answer. My faith in free trade may be shaken.

It reminds me of how, as a teenager, I spent several years asking catechism teachers ‘if I am forgiven my sins in confession, then what is there to talk about on judgment day?’. Result; I’m a practicing Catholic who hasn’t been to confession since I was 17.

But seriously, do WTO rules bend the space-time continuum to let OPEC members continue their cartel-building, export-controlling ways? How is OPEC accommodated in the world of sort-of free trade? I’m not looking for the realpolitik answer. That’s pretty obvious. But what is the legal and institutional answer to this question?

Yesterday, Algeria’s energy minister and current OPEC president said oil may hit $200 a barrel and there’s little OPEC can do about it. As if oil prices are as immutable as the weather. He went on to say increasing output wouldn’t lower prices currently high prices because these are the result of the weak dollar and global instability. Which is some equally bizarre reasoning. Even if you accept situation X is caused by variables Y and Z, doesn’t mean that it can’t be changed by adjusting some other variable. (Whether or not there is a duty of those in control of that variable to adjust it is another question – though the assertion that Saudi Arabia has cut production by 2 million barrels a day in the last 3 years undercuts OPEC’s disinterest claim.)

What’s going on at the level in between OPEC’s realpolitik and disingenuous P.R. claims? Is there such a level of legal or institutional discourse with other countries or institutions? I feel there’s a stratum of interaction missing in the way OPEC is reported on in the news. In the middle bit between its externally focused bully power and its self-serving rhetoric, are there rules that constrain OPEC in its outside relations? (Clearly, internal struggles between producers generate their own constraints and coordination problems – I’m thinking of Robert Bates’ fascinating work on coffee producers.) How does OPEC get along…?