Stephen Pollard is often worth reading on education, though almost always wrong. Take his “latest post”:http://www.stephenpollard.net/001180.html (and article from Fabian Review) in which he attacks the British left’s skepticism about specialist schools. I’m on record as being skeptical about the particular version of specialization Pollard attacks, and also as favoring abolition of private and selective schools in the UK (not in the US), another position he attacks. I am also, unlike most people with my politics, a strong supporter of parental choice. But Pollard is not, it seems. He says that we should fund ‘whatever parents, not bureaucrats or politicians, want’. But he also wants schools (run, let me tell you, by government-funded bureaucrats) to be able to select students. So whose choice is decisive in where a kid goes to school? Not the parent’s choice, but the bureaucrat’s.
From the monthly archives:
September 2003
Shameless plug: a group I work with at the University of Virginia law school is hosting a “panel”:http://www.law.virginia.edu/lawweb/lawweb2.nsf/pages/lev2calc?OpenDocument&Fr1=zzzlawnotes2.law.virginia.edu/lawweb/event1.nsf/WABW&Fr2=/home2002/frames/lf_News.htm on “Women in the Judiciary” later today. Two federal appellate judges and a justice from the “Virginia Supreme Court”:http://www.courts.state.va.us/scv/home.html will take questions for about an hour and half. Dahlia Lithwick (to whom this slightly “scary”:http://www.blueblanket.net/Dahlia/dahlia.html fan blog is devoted) kindly agreed to moderate.
Preparing for the panel, I came across some interesting–though not terribly surprising–demographic information on women in the U.S. federal judiciary. The Federal Judiciary Center has a nice “database”:http://www.fjc.gov/newweb/jnetweb.nsf/fjc_history?OpenFrameSet (look for the Federal Judges Biographical Database) that lets you search for information about federal judges using about a dozen different variables, including who nominated them and when. I ran a search on “Nominating President” and “Gender” and got these results:
It’s a bright day for the rainbow of opponents who lobbied all summer against the excesses of the European software patenting directive. News.com reports that the European Parliament voted yesterday to pass the extremely unpopular software patent directive. The European Parliament could have thrown out the directive, but instead lumbered it with some amendments that may make it too difficult to implement in the member states. Though the result is messy, the EP’s vote has allowed common sense (and the conclusions of independent research) to prevail. It strikes a blow against oligopoly and tries to keep the way open for truly competitive innovation. (see some economists dismiss as daft the idea that software patenting creates economic growth.)
This directive should have been a relatively straightforward housekeeping exercise in making sure patents are enforced in all EU countries. But it opened another front in the war to extend intellectual property rights protection to every half-decent or half-baked idea any Dilbert can come up with.
Aside from the immediate analysis of the directive and its aftermath, there is some more food for thought; firstly, the benefit, if any, for the US in pressing for these extensions, and secondly, the contempt with which the Commission has treated the European Parliament.
I was thinking over some of the responses to my discussion of “sufficientarianism” below, and noticing how common is a certain type of right-wing response to facts about the plight of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our societies. To whit:
bq. It isn’t true.
or
bq. It may be true, but it doesn’t matter.
or
bq. It’s true, and it matters, but doing something about it would (a) have the perverse effect of making that thing worse, or (b) make something else worse. etc etc.
Thomas Friedman’s piece today on the link between Cancun and the war on terror is a little flip, a little glib, but basically on the money.
Reminds me of Will’s monologue in Good Will Hunting on why not to join the NSA …
(though of course Friedman’s less sharp, less funny and also, sadly, not Matt Damon).
My favorite spoof of movie cliches is right here, but the good people at Fametracker are having some fun with them in this discussion thread.
Highlights from the comments:
Will Baude at Crescat Sententia has been running a series of online interviews with various bloggers. And the subject of the latest interview is me. Here’s the interview. If you want more blogger Q&As, previous blogger interviews (including Lawrence Solum, Matthew Yglesias and several permanent or temporary Conspirators) are prominently featured in the Crescat Sententia sidebar. I’d like to say that everything I say there about Crooked Timber is official CT party policy, but that would be, at the very least, a lie.
True to form, she’s jumped in already, but I wanted to welcome Eszter Hargittai as the latest member of the CT catnet. Eszter is a sociologist, is newly ensconced at Northwestern, was an office-mate of mine for a while in graduate school, has far too many publications for someone who just started their job last week, and has an Erdõs number of three.
I followed a link from tbogg today over to Donald “Poor and Stupid” Luskin’s website. In big letters on the left, it says:
“THE CONSPIRACY TO KEEP YOU POOR AND STUPID BY DONALD L. LUSKIN
THE WEBLOG OF THE BOOK: How Big Government, Big Business, Big Media, and Big Academia Block Your Road to Financial Freedom– and Tell You It’s For Your Own Good”
Underneath, it has a quote, which I reproduce in full:
“…straight contrary-to-fact statements embarassing, and damaging to their own credibility…”
— Brad DeLong
This doesn’t link to anything.
Despite some worries that Hurricane Isabel may wash away TPRC, it was held this past weekend in Arlington, VA and lived up to its reputation as a wonderful meeting for those interested in various communications policy issues. It is the only conference I have attended consistently without fail since I first showed up there five years ago. It is always held in the DC area to ensure a good turnout from government representatives (or I’m assuming that’s a reason for its location).
It’s a good conference for the following reasons:
1. high quality of papers (this year’s acceptance rate was around 25%)
2. a relatively small and friendly group that has been getting together for years but is also very open to meeting new participants
3. a great mix of people from government (mostly the FCC but others as well), the private sector (fewer reps now than a couple of years ago) and academia (mostly economists and legal scholars but various other social scientists and some others as well)
Not surprisingly, the issue of media deregulation came up throughout the conference. There was a lunch-time debate between Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project and Randolph May of the Progress & Freedom Foundation about this. A point Andy Schwartzman kept bringing up was that now with the availability of so much information on the Internet, there should be less concern about what is available via other media.
Eugene Volokh “sez”:http://volokh.com/2003_09_21_volokh_archive.html#106437620610467368
bq. Work? Blogging? Sleep? Or _Quicksilver_? I say _Quicksilver_.
_Quicksilver_ junkies will want to know about the Quicksilver “Wiki”:http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml that Neal Stephenson has set up, which will allow people collectively to annotate the book, its characters, ideas, and whatever odd tangents they find interesting. Via “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106438136711313636.
“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000756.html and I are co-writing an academic paper on blogging and politics – if you’re a journalist, columnist, commentator, producer, or editor for a newspaper, magazine, or television station, we’d appreciate your help. We’d be grateful if you could take two minutes to send an email to ddrezner@hotmail.com with answers to the following five questions:
1) How many blogs do you read a day?
2) Please name the three blogs you read most frequently. [What if you read less than three? Then just name the ones you do read.]
3) Why do you read the blogs you read? In other words, what makes those blogs worth checking out on a regular basis?
4) Have you ever read something on a blog that affected your decision-making on what to air/publish? If the answer is yes, can you give an example?
5) How much influence do you think blogs have on political discourse? A lot, a little, or none at all?
All answers will be kept confidential unless you give us explicit permission to do otherwise in your email. Dan has also posted our “working definition”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000754.html of what a blog is – comments and suggestions gratefully appreciated.
Thanks!
There’s been much blogospherical and press comment about the recent report that capuchin monkeys have a built-in sense of fairness. In case anyone missed the story here’s “Adam Cohen’s summary in the New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/21/opinion/21SUN3.html?ex=1064721600&en=64f9933e4a7be38d&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE :
bq. Give a capuchin monkey a cucumber slice, and she will eagerly trade a small pebble for it. But when a second monkey, in an adjoining cage, receives a more-desirable grape for the same pebble, it changes everything. The first monkey will then reject her cucumber, and sometimes throw it out of the cage. Monkeys rarely refuse food, but in this case they appear to be pursuing an even higher value than eating: fairness.
bq. The capuchin monkey study, published last week in Nature, has generated a lot of interest for a scant three-page report buried in the journal’s letters section. There is, certainly, a risk of reading too much into the feeding habits of 10 research monkeys. But in a week when fairness was so evidently on the ropes — from the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancún, which poor nations walked out of in frustration, to the latest issue of Forbes, reporting that the richest 400 Americans are worth $955 billion — the capuchin monkeys offered a glimmer of hope from the primate gene pool.
I mentioned Caroline Bradley and Michael Froomkin’s “paper”:http://intel.si.umich.edu/tprc/papers/2003/240/VirtualReal.pdf on law in MMORPGs (massively multi-player online role-playing games) earlier today. Its argument is straightforward – these online communities offer a nice way to test legal scholars’ (and social scientists’) arguments about how different rules will affect behaviour and exchange. By looking at how this or that rule in an online game affects how players behave online, we can (with plenty of provisos and cautionary footnotes) reach interesting conclusions about social behaviour more generally.
My tuppence worth: one theory has already been ‘tested’ in this way; the argument that easing restrictions on weapons and their use will lead to a drop in violent crime. If you grant the assumption that MMORPGs are analogous to everyday life (a whopping assumption to be granting, I’ll admit), then the evidence is unequivocal. A society where each can use weapons against each without restriction is likely to deteriorate into Hobbesian anarchy. People will positively beg for a Leviathan to come in and put an end to the Warre of All against All.
Jim Henley has a good post about an excerpt from the new memoir of Mariane Pearl, widow of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl. (The book can be purchased here.)
Jim Henley’s analysis of the kidnapper’s emails is very good, but the excerpt itself is extraordinary. Mariane Pearl writes in the present tense, giving it an immediacy that makes it hard to read.
Every little detail—the type of camera used, the make of the weapon threatening Danny, the way words are used—is analyzed, and everyone has a theory. I let everybody play out his or her line because I want to get hooked by one. But through it all, I know this is my husband.
In the chatter, I hear Randall ask, “Do you recognize the wedding ring?”
“Yes,” I say. “It’s loose on his finger. It’s always been loose.”
The room falls silent.