September 2003

One can’t be a blogger for long before being reminded of the sad truth that people tend to believe information that is congenial to their interests and disbelieve that which isn’t. The blogosphere, and the internet more generally, provides people with a ready made source of prejudice-confirming information. There’s a ready-made market then for sites like TechCentralStation that have the convenient look of authoritative sources but are actually largely written by bloggers of a libertarian and/or conservative cast of mind to provide easy, prejudice-congenial op-ed-like material.

I spent some time looking at TCS’s global warming pages at the weekend. These are largely devoted to debunking the view held by the majority of expert opinion that CO2 emissions have contributed substantially to global warming. It would, after all, be pretty convenient if conventional opinion turned out to be mistaken: I haven’t done a survey but I’d be willing to wager that an average member of TCS’s core demographic emits rather more carbon than typical human beings do.

[click to continue…]

Dan Drezner quotes Clive James to good effect on snarky literary reviews. James is the author of the poem “The Book of my Enemy has been Remaindered,” which captures the quintessence of literary schadenfreude that we get a whiff of when reading snarky reviews:

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book —
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

I just got the offprints for my most recently published article, as it happens a reply to the article mentioned by Brad DeLong last night in his theology post. It’s quite pretty too, since The Philosophical Quarterly put nice covers on their offprints.

This article was interesting from a blogging perspective for a few reasons. First, I got the idea for it from reading blogs. Second, I even cited the relatively well-known blog from which I got the idea. Third, the paper itself grew almost entirely out of some blog entries.

[click to continue…]

While we’re over at John Quiggin’s blog, we can add another example to his discussion of right-wing postmodernism. (Thanks to Kevin Drum for having the fortitude to read the Corner.)

John Quiggin gives a modest defence of existence theorems in economics, one of the three real vices of economists according to Deirdre McCloskey.

bq. Existence theorems, for McCloskey are the archetypal example of ‘blackboard economics’, mathematical games yielding purely qualitative results that can be overturned with modest changes in assumptions. They were the high point of mathematical economics in the 50s and 60s … There are a wide variety of ‘impossibility theorems’ demonstrating the non-existence of index numbers with various properties [an area of research interest for John]. Familiarity with such theorems can save a lot of pointless effort, and they are therefore worth looking for. But an impossibility theorem is just the negative form of an existence theorem (or, if you prefer, an existence theorem proves the impossibility of the corresponding impossibility theorem).

bq. This is a rather prosaic defence, that certainly does not justify the high status accorded to the kind of theory exemplified by existence theorems. But the argument can be pushed a bit further by considering the most famous impossibility theorem, that of Arrow who showed (roughly speaking) that no voting system having a set of seemingly desirable properties could work for all possible sets of voter preferences. This impossibility theorem precluded a lot of potential effort in designing ideal voting systems. [Emphasis added.]

This is a nice parallel. Actually, it’s so nice that it may prove more than John intended. (I absolve him of responsibility for what follows.)

[click to continue…]

The “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34457-2003Sep6.html reports today that

bq. The occupation of Iraq — once the home of the caliph, or universal leader, of Muslims — is a galvanizing symbol for radical Islamic groups. On Internet sites and in mosques across the Islamic world, thousands of potential fighters are hearing — and heeding — calls to go to Iraq to fight the infidel, according to European and Arab intelligence sources who have tracked some of the movements of the recruits.

Dunno how true this is – “Juan Cole”:http://www.juancole.com/2003_09_01_juancole_archive.html#106291558081416707 thinks that the Post is exaggerating wildly – but it got me to thinking about how the “flypaper” theory beloved of “Glenn Reynolds”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/010343.php and his crowd is based on a fundamental error of logic. If you look at it closely, it distinctly resembles a fundamental mistake that economists call the “lump of labour fallacy”:http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/samlson.htm.

Much bad economic punditry starts from the premise that there’s a ‘lump of labour’ – a fixed amount of work to be done in the economy. On this argument, if you want to reduce unemployment, you can do it by lowering people’s working hours, so that work is ‘freed up’ to be shared with the unemployed. Of course, this argument doesn’t hold water – the demand for labour isn’t a fixed constant in real economies. Instead, it varies, depending on a host of other factors (which themselves are likely to be affected, perhaps in perverse ways, by any ham-handed efforts to ‘share the jobs around’).

Similarly, the ‘flypaper’ theory implicitly assumes that there’s a fixed amount of al Qaeda terrorism sloshing around in the international system, so that it’s a good^1^ idea to divert it from the US to Iraq – more terrorists attacking troops in Iraq would mean less terrorists attacking the homeland. But there isn’t a fixed amount – instead, US actions in Iraq are almost certain to affect the ‘supply’ of al Qaeda terrorists. Indeed, the WP article suggests that the US occupation is leading to a substantial increase in the willingness of potential fighters to take up arms, so that the invasion isn’t just drawing existing al Qaeda combatants to Iraq; it’s creating new recruits.

The jury is still out on whether the Post is right or not on the facts – but it’s demonstrably true that the actions of the US (in invading Iraq, in how it behaves within Iraq) are going to affect terrorism on the supply-side. Pro-war types can still try to make the case that the US invasion is going to decrease terrorism in the long run (they have their work cut out for them), but ‘lump of terrorism’ theories like the flypaper argument are bogus, and should be treated with the ridicule that they deserve.

^1^ Of course, ‘Good’ here means ‘good for Americans,’ not ‘good for Iraqis.’

Geoffrey Nunberg has good column in TAP about the strange history of the word liberal in America. Maybe I should have expected the following data, but I was really stunned by how strong the race and class connotations of liberal have become over here.

bq. From a semantic point of view, this negative branding campaign has largely succeeded in changing the meaning of the word liberal itself. In major newspapers, for example, the phrases “middle-class liberals” and “middle-class Democrats” are used with about the same frequency. But the phrase “working-class liberals” is almost nonexistent; it’s outnumbered by “working-class Democrats” by about 30-to-1. And while “white liberals” is used about as frequently as “white Democrats,” the phrase “black Democrats” outnumbers “black liberals” by better than 15-to-1. The patterns are similar if you plug in “African American,” “Latino” and the like.

bq. By contrast, the press refers to working-class conservatives as frequently as it does to working-class Republicans — and far more frequently than it refers to working-class liberals. And there are five times as many references to black conservatives as to black liberals, though references to black Democrats vastly outnumber references to black Republicans. The implication is that unlike conservatives, liberals are rarely found among minorities or the working class. When those groups vote Democratic, it’s presumably out of narrow self-interest or traditional party loyalty rather than because of any underlying ideological commitment. From that point of view, the political attitudes that make someone a liberal are simply the outward expression of a particular social identity, no different from a predilection for granite countertops or bottled water. For all intents and purposes, liberal has become as much a referential term as Bolshevik was.

These days many academics, including I would guess most who read this blog, keep collections of their papers available on their websites. (If you’re interested in seeing some samples, Dave Chalmers keeps a fairly comprehensive list of people with online papers in philosophy.) In the last few years several issues about the relationship between posting something to a webpage and publishing it in a book or journal have become a little pressing.

There’s actually a tangle of inter-related questions here that could use sorting out. For one thing, there are both legal questions (about copyright) and moral questions (about whether such posting is stealing from editors who’ve agreed to publish things) about the practice. For another, the answers to those questions may be different for articles that have been published, or have been accepted but not published, or are as yet homeless. For another, it might make a difference whether the journal in question is electronic or dead tree. So there’s potentially ten or twelve different questions here.

[click to continue…]

“Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/003424.html#003424 posts on a story that I’ve been interested in the last few days; how some conservative Alabama Christians have come out in favor of higher, less regressive taxes in the state. This may be a flash in the pan; for one thing it’s unlikely that these Christians are going to be successful in persuading Alabama’s public to sign on to tax reform. But it’s potentially important nonetheless. Grover Norquist and his ilk have been uncannily successful in boiling down a rich and complex tradition of thought into a single, sloganistic programme of all tax-cuts, all of the time. It’s nice to see some principled conservatives reacting against this.

The “TAP article”:http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/08/wilkinson-f-08-28.html that Teresa cites to sees these Christians as reminiscent of Dorothy Day; I think that may be going a step too far. These people aren’t interested in substantial redistribution of wealth so much as in ensuring that the poor have the basic minimum of opportunities which will allow them to look after themselves; decent education, access to justice, perhaps some form of public health care. Still, a “superior moral justification for selfishness”:http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3335 it ain’t. I wish them luck.

I watched Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew yesterday. I’d been meaning to watch it after reading Jerry Cohen’s report of the effect it had had on him (see If You’re an Egalitarian How Come You’re So Rich?). I’m not a religious person, but the film did not disappoint. It is an extraordinarily sparse portrayal of the story, shot in black and white against the Italian countryside. The acting can’t account for the power of the film, because, there really isn’t any. The actors are all non-professionals and, mostly, they just stand around and look (there are many closeups on their faces). The camera often shakes, and the production values are crude. But Pasolini succeeds in creating something of great beauty and emotional power.

[click to continue…]

There’s no real need to comment on Michael Meacher’s ravings about 9/11, but the BBC report (as currently displayed – I’m sure they’ll fix it) contains the following:

bq. Mr Meacher told the Today programme he was a conspiracy theorist and said he was simply “in favour of giving people the facts”.

UPDATE: They’ve now inserted the “not”.

We all know that polls taken more than a year before the election are going to have virtually no predictive power. But this analysis caught my eye:

Some 41 percent of all registered voters say they will definitely vote against Bush; just 29 percent say they will definitely vote for him. So Bush must woo about seven in ten swing voters — not a difficult task for a popular incumbent, but far from a certainty.

Does it make sense to call him a “popular incumbent” in the sentence immediately after the one that says that 41% of likely voters will vote against him, and 29% will vote for him?

Tim Dunlop and Jonathon Delacour wonder if some languages are more pleasant to listen to than others, whether you understand them or not. This is certainly true from person to person. When I moved to the U.S., I sometimes found that things I complacently thought were due to my natural wit and charm were in fact explained by my speaking in a pleasant Irish accent. Conversely, these days I am routinely berated by almost everyone for having lost that accent after a mere six or seven years in America.

The more general proposition — that some languages are inherently better-sounding than others — is usually just a step back before taking a kick at the Germans. But Clive James, I think somewhere in his autobiography, makes an elegant case for Italian. As I remember, he quotes this bit from Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, III, 1-3):

Per me si va ne la città dolente,
per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
per me si va tra la perduta gente.

“Through me you pass to the city of woe / Through me you pass into eternal pain / Through me to amongst the lost people.”

Bitter words, James says, but because it’s Italian you still get to say “tra la.”

As a mere political scientist, I’m leery of going head to head with Eugene Volokh on the law, but I’m going to throw in my tuppence worth on his recent post on “Eric Rasmusen”:http://volokh.com/2003_08_31_volokh_archive.html#106278869634914297. Even if I’m wrong, I think there’s a useful argument to be had.

[click to continue…]