by Chris Bertram on October 21, 2003
“Iain Murray links”:http://www.iainmurray.org/MT/archives/000381.html to a “police-sponsored report”:http://www.operationscorpion.org.uk/design_out_crime/policing_urbanism.htm claiming that housing estates built on “new urbanist” principles are more vulnerable to crime than private estates built in cul-de-sac format incorporating the notion of “defensible space.” Interesting stuff, especially since many of the ideas that inform the new urbanism are very influential with both local authority planners and amenity societies. I’m a little sceptical when too much is claimed for design. Just like carpenters thinking that a hammer and a nail is the answer to all problems, architects like to put everything down to design (I’m sure I’ve stolen that line from Colin Ward). And I’d like to know more about the other factors distinguishing the two environments studied in the report. But this certainly warrants further attention.
UPDATE: I’ll try to say more in a few days. But a more careful look at the police document suggests that this isn’t a matter of comparing the experience of similar communities but rather a “projection” of data some of which is derived from experience of estates from an earlier period which (according to the police) incorporate “similar” design features.
On the design front, I understand that the police SBD philosophy frowns on features like recessed porches and collonades (good for hiding) leaving us with the a general flattening of building surfaces. Attractive? I don’t think so.
Do “conservatives”:http://www.iainmurray.org/MT/archives/000381.html and “libertarians”:http://nataliesolent.blogspot.com/2003_10_19_nataliesolent_archive.html#106672975377523361 really want their urban spaces designed according to a police approved philosophy? Really? Do the urban environments people like, such as Bath, Venice, Florence, …. (fill in your preferred name) conform to Secured By Design principles? As I said, more when I’ve got a moment…
by Daniel on October 21, 2003
Presumably the Gentile AntiSemitism Police will be all over this latest from Krugman, in which (as Chris did yesterday), he takes time out from saying that Mahathir Mohammed is a Very Bad Person [1] to have a think about Islamic politics. To be honest, I think Krugman’s case is pretty weak; I don’t think that the US has offered “unconditional support” to Ariel Sharon [2] and I don’t believe that anti-Semitic rhetoric would be any less of a crowd-pleaser in Malaysia if they didn’t. Christ, Krugman’s to the left of me on this one; I feel all funny. But it’s interesting, not least because Krugman did a lot of consultancy work in Malaysia around the last time Mahathir was ranting about Jewish speculators [3] and knows whereof he speaks.
[1] Which he isn’t; he’s an authoritarian and a bigot for sure, but by the standards of the region, he’s pretty good.
[2] Also an authoritarian and a bigot, and probably a war criminal to boot, but probably once more a mistake to blame him personally for ethnic and economic forces which would still be there whoever was in charge.
[3] Although his actual support for Mahathir in 1998 was a lot more lukewarm than he implies; he floated the idea of capital controls and deserves credit for that, but was actually much more ambivalent about the specific Mahathir plan. Note from the article too that his analysis of “crony capitalism” is much more nuanced these days.
by Henry Farrell on October 21, 2003
I’ve just finished reading Bruce Schneier’s _Beyond Fear_, which I recommend to anyone who’s interested in security issues after 9/11. Schneier’s a famous cryptographer – if you’ve read _Cryptonomicon_, you’ll be familiar with his “Solitaire”:http://www.schneier.com/solitaire.html code – but over the last few years he’s become more and more interested in the human side of security systems. And this is where _Beyond Fear_ excels – it describes in clear, everyday language how we should think about security in the modern world and why even the most sophisticated (especially the most sophisticated) security systems are likely sometimes to fail.
[click to continue…]
by Kieran Healy on October 21, 2003
I picked up a copy of The Money Game over the weekend in a second-hand bookshop in Melbourne. It’s a minor classic in the literature on the stock market, so naturally I hadn’t heard of it until a few months ago when Daniel mentioned it in a comments thread. The book is thirty five years old and it shows. It’s also very good. That shows, too.
The Money Game is assiduously laid-back in tone. The author — the cover says “Adam Smith,” but the back page tells you it’s journalist and fund manager George Goodman — tries hard to impress you with tales of the big money-shufflers he hangs out with, while working hard not to sound too impressed himself. He comes from the right schools, belongs to the right clubs and is comfortably networked with the right people. In matters of lifestyle, taste and fashion he lives bemusedly at the cutting edge of conventional wisdom. Adam Smith isn’t the right name for him at all. It’s more as though Richard Cantillon were being spiritually channeled by George Plimpton, or possibly Austin Powers. Much of the time he sounds a lot like this paragraph, and he clearly knows a great deal about how stock markets really work.
[click to continue…]
by Chris Bertram on October 20, 2003
OpenDemocracy has “an interview with anti-Straussian Shadia Drury”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-3-77-1542.jsp . Drury’s obsession with Strauss seems to have been about as damaging to her good sense and judgement as that of the pro-Straussians has been to theirs. Hence the following absurd rheorical question:
bq. How could an admirer of Plato and Nietzsche be a liberal democrat?
How could an intelligent person of _any_ political persuasion _not_ admire Plato and Nietzsche?
by Chris Bertram on October 19, 2003
Unsurprisingly “Mahathir Mohamad’s speech”:http://www.oicsummit2003.org.my/speech_03.php to the Islamic summit has met with outrage in the blogosphere. And quite right too, since his remarks about the Jews are pretty vile. But there’s a kernel of interest in what the bigot has to say. He’s worried about the historical transformation of Islam’s fortunes. After all, as he says:
bq. The early Muslims produced great mathematicians and scientists, scholars, physicians and astronomers etc. and they excelled in all the fields of knowledge of their times, besides studying and practising their own religion of Islam. As a result the Muslims were able to develop and extract wealth from their lands and through their world trade, able to strengthen their defences, protect their people and give them the Islamic way of life, Addin, as prescribed by Islam. At the time the Europeans of the Middle Ages were still superstitious and backward, the enlightened Muslims had already built a great Muslim civilisation, respected and powerful, more than able to compete with the rest of the world and able to protect the ummah from foreign aggression. The Europeans had to kneel at the feet of Muslim scholars in order to access their own scholastic heritage.
But that was then, and this is now. And as Mahathir notices and regrets, the Islamic world has been in a pretty miserable intellectual and cultural condition since the Ottomans. He’s obsessed with the contrast between Muslims and Jews. He may not be right that Jews rule the world, but he is right to notice their extraordinary achievements, and especially their intellectual achievements, and the contrast with the miserable contribution of modern Islam.
[click to continue…]
by Kieran Healy on October 19, 2003
We go into Trotters on Lygon St (highly recommended, by the way). It’s busy, there’s only one free table, and the middle-aged guy next to it has to tidy up the paper he’s annotating so we can sit down. I’m chatting away to my (American) other half, possibly about the talk she gave at Melbourne Uni yesterday. Messy paper guy gets slightly agitated. He takes a few more notes, rummages in his bag and produces a copy of Why Do People Hate America?, apparently on general principle. It doesn’t seem relevant to his note-taking. He leaves it on display on our side of the table. He doesn’t make eye-contact.
by Henry Farrell on October 17, 2003
Via “William Sjostrom”:http://www.atlanticblog.com/archives/001196.html#001196, this rather remarkable “specimen of codswallop”:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004152 from Gary Becker, Edward Lazear and Kevin Murphy. These gathered luminaries argue in the Opinion Journal that cutting taxes has a double pay-off. It starves the beast, making cuts in welfare state spending more likely, and it also encourages workers to invest in “human capital,” i.e. job skills.
bq. The evidence is clear: Cutting taxes will have beneficial effects. Tax cuts will keep government spending in check and will provide the incentives necessary to produce a highly skilled, productive work force that enables high economic growth and rising standards of living.
This claim rests on some rather heroic assumptions which I won’t go into. It’s also, very possibly, self-contradictory; you can make quite a strong case that the two effects interfere with each other. Torben Iversen and David Soskice provide some decent “evidence”:http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~iversen/PDFfiles/SocialPreferences.pdf to suggest that people with high levels of specific skills actually want a beefy welfare state. More pertinently, where people don’t have such a welfare state, they may have a strong incentive to “avoid investing”:http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~iversen/VofCchapter.pdf in job-specific skills. If this result holds, then the benefits of tax cuts for human capital formation are _not_ clear at all. Starving the welfare state will deplete valuable forms of human capital.
[click to continue…]
by Ted on October 17, 2003
If you look up “self-indulgent blog post” in the dictionary, you’ll find the following. You’re all excused from reading it.
[click to continue…]
by Chris Bertram on October 17, 2003
I’ve just started, as part of a reading group, Michael Otsuka’s “Libertarianism Without Inequality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199243956/junius-20 . Otsuka is a political philosopher at University College, London, and well published in journals like _Philosophy and Public Affairs_ , so I’m expecting this to be an important contribution to the literature on self-ownership and justice. We’ve covered chapter one so far, in which Otsuka outlines his claim that robust self-ownership is compatible with equality, understood along the lines of Richard Arneson’s equal opportunity for welfare rather than Dworkinian equality of resources. What I say here is therefore highly provisional, probably involves misunderstandings, and probably gets an adequate answer from Otsuka later in the book. But anyone else who has _either read the book, or is reading it_ should feel free to post comments (we’re doing about a chapter a week and I hope to post some remarks on each chapter as we read).
[click to continue…]
by Ted on October 16, 2003
by Daniel on October 16, 2003
Starting a new occasional series, I’ll be keeping a look out for particularly egregious examples of breathless and/or mendacious “Globalisation” pieces from neo-liberal commentators. This isn’t to say that the antiglobo side doesn’t also talk a load of bollocks; it often does. But there’s already a cottage industry going keeping tabs on them, and immanent criticism of the neoliberal agenda is more up my alley.
[click to continue…]
by Ted on October 16, 2003
Via Atrios, this is not a joke.
Concerned about the appearance of disarray and feuding within his administration as well as growing resistance to his policies in Iraq, President Bush – living up to his recent declaration that he is in charge – told his top officials to “stop the leaks” to the media, or else.
News of Bush’s order leaked almost immediately.
Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he “didn’t want to see any stories” quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.
UPDATE: This is not a joke, either.
by Daniel on October 16, 2003
Little Green Footballs, having a go at the Guardian for … the quality of vicious oaf they tolerate on their comments board. It’s enough to make a cat laugh.
UPDATE: Tim Blair‘s apparently joined the echo chamber on this one, so that cat’s going to be pretty amused for a while.
Final update: The Guardian deleted the thread in question. Fair enough, but my cat’s already knocked off work for the day.
by Chris Bertram on October 16, 2003
I’m always on the lookout for media references to Rousseau, even if they usually perpetuate the “noble savage” myth. For some reason, I especially liked this “write-up of US tv show Tarzan”:http://tv.zap2it.com/tveditorial/tve_main/1,1002,274%7C83718%7C1%7C,00.html :
bq. In his 1755 “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men,” French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated, “Man in his natural state was born essentially good and free of all prejudices.”
bq. In a summer when Bravo’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” has attempted to tweeze, wax, massage, redecorate and redress man in his natural state in the hopes of making something more civilized out of him, Rousseau’s “noble savage” seems in danger of being replaced by the urbane metrosexual.