From the monthly archives:
December 2003
Many thanks from everyone here at Crooked Timber to John Quiggin for being our guest for the week. You can read all of his CT posts on our newly-instituted Guest Blogger Archives, and of course be sure to make his own blog a regular read if it wasn’t already.
Incidentally, while setting up the guest archive I removed the calendar that used to live in the top left corner there. I did this on the sudden conviction that it served no useful purpose on a group blog that reliably has more than one post a day. But if the outcry from the calendar-loving public is strong enough I can of course restore it.
My week as inaugural guest blogger on Crooked Timber has come to an end. It was a lot of fun, with a (largely) new audience and a new way of blogging. I enjoyed the interplay with other members of the group, which is a kind of interaction subtly different from that of comments threads. I also started wondering about the unexplored territory between group blogs and online magazines like Salon and Slate, and whether there are technical improvements to blog software that would enable some of this territory to be colonized, but I didn’t get very far with this.
So thanks everyone for having me, and please come to visit.
I got an email this morning with some photos of the crowd waiting for the Winter solstice sunrise at Newgrange. I think Newgrange is one of the wonders of the world, so here’s a post of mine about it from this time last year.
Remembering the Eisenhower parody below had me leafing through the “Macdonald anthology”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0306802392/junius-20 and looking at some of my other favourites (and then googling to see if they are on the web anywhere) Pride of place goes to Paul Jennings’s “Report on Resistentialism”:http://www31.brinkster.com/yewtree/resources/resistentialism.htm which begins thus:
bq. It is the peculiar genius of the French to express their philosophical thought in aphorisms, sayings hard and tight as diamonds, each one the crystal centre of a whole constellation of ideas. Thus, the entire scheme of seventeenth century intellectual rationalism may be said to branch out from that single, pregnant saying of Descartes, ‘Cogito ergo sum’ – ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Resistentialism, the philosophy which has swept present-day France, runs true to this aphoristic form. Go into any of the little cafés or horlogeries on Paris’s Left Bank (make sure the Seine is flowing away from you, otherwise you’ll be on the Right Bank, where no one is ever seen) and sooner or later you will hear someone say, ‘Les choses sont contre nous.’ ‘Things are against us.’ This is the nearest English translation I can find for the basic concept of Resistentialism, the grim but enthralling philosophy now identified with bespectacled, betrousered, two-eyed Pierre-Marie Ventre.
Read the whole thing.
I have a guilty secret: I’m a PowerPoint user. Why do I use PowerPoint? Because it is an easy way to get text and graphics up on a screen to illustrate a lecture. I’m sure there are other and better ways of doing this, but don’t know what they are. I’ve been feeling bad about this since reading some of “Edward Tufte”:http://www.edwardtufte.com/ ‘s anti-PP writings, and my guilt and shame are compounded after reading “John Naughton’s attack on PP in todays’ Observer”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1110963,00.html . Sample quote:
bq. As an addiction of the white-collar classes, PowerPoint ranks second only in perniciousness to cocaine.
(Actually I have sometimes wondered whether my lectures would be improved by prior self-medication — a stiff drink perhaps — but have never run the experiment.)
Naughton links to Peter Norvig’s rendering of the “Gettysburg address in PowerPoint”:http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg — funny and effective.
Incidentally, this reminds me of Oliver Jensen’s “The Gettysburg Address in Eisenhowese” from Dwight Macdonald’s “Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm–And After”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0306802392/junius-20 which begins thus:
bq. I haven’t checked these figures, but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental set-up here in this country, I believe it covered certain Eastern areas, with this idea they were following up based on a sort of national independence arrangement and the program that every individual is just as good as every other individual. Well, now, of course, we are dealing with this big difference of opinion, civil disturbance you might say, although I don’t like to appear to take sides or name any individuals….
One of the most striking historical facts I’ve learned this year is that George Washington freed all his slaves in his will despite opposition from his family, including his wife Martha. It’s surprising and revealing that this fact has never been part of the standard account of Washington’s life.
It is also one of the facts leading me to an increasingly negative view of Thomas Jefferson. The parallel between Jefferson’s unacknowledged slave children by Sally Hemings and the more recent case of Strom Thurmond, on which Kieran has recently posted, is striking. (Jefferson was, quite literally, the first Southern Democrat). Until now, I’ve tended to vaguely excuse Jefferson’s actions here as a case of personal inability to resist the thinking of the times, but Washington’s example undermines this.
I think you can go from the personal to the political here as well. The course leading to the Civil War was set when the Northern States adopted emancipation around the time of the Revolution and the Southern states did not. Jefferson advocated gradual emancipation in Virginia at this time (1783), but he didn’t fight hard on the issue after this. Given Washington’s personal evolution on the issue, it seems plausible that a determined effort by Jefferson in the years after Washington’s death, during which he was president for eight years, could have achieved a peaceful end to slavery.
I’m in the odd position that my favourite ethical theory is one I regard as having been decisively refuted. The theory is a form of consequentialism that I used to think avoided all the problems with traditional forms of consequentialism. I now think it avoids all but one or two of those problems, but those are enough. Still, whenever I feel like letting out my inner amateur ethicist, I keep being drawn back to this theory.
An article in the New York Times reports that the (white) relatives of Strom Thurmond are all upset since (black) Essie Mae Washington-Williams told the world last week that Thurmond was her father. Her mother had been a teenage maid in Thurmond’s household when Strom was in his early twenties. The article doesn’t have much in the way of commentary, but it doesn’t have to because you just have to listen to them damn themselves out of their own mouths.
They say, variously, that the announcement “was like a blight on the family”; that “For the first time in my life, I felt shame;” that “My family always had help around the house. But it just seems Strom would have been above that” (?!); that the publicity was “embarrassing and awkward”; that if Washington-Williams had been white “it would be a whole other situation,” because criticism wouldn’t have been as harsh (you don’t say); that they “don’t know why this lady is doing this”; that she had better be “coming out for the right reasons”; and that anyways at least she was “humble,” if you know what I mean. Thurmond’s nephew, Barry Bishop, said “For something to be done so publicly … well, we’re just not comfortable dealing with things in that way.” You never spoke a truer word, Mr Bishop. Finally, Thurmond’s niece, Mary T. Thompkins Freeman, said she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to meet Washington-Williams just yet. “If I do, I’m not going to go with open arms,” Ms. Freeman said. “It’s too much to accept right now.” Yes, dear. This must be such a burden for you all.
“Nasi Lemak”:http://nasilemak.blogspot.com/2003_12_14_nasilemak_archive.html#107160604501240875 (a pseudonymous UK political scientist) talks in his blog about a disturbing phenomenon. Students applying for a Ph.D. usually need good letters of reference from well-known academics to get into the better programs. One of Nasi Lemak’s former students recently asked a professor at a top US research university for a reference letter, and was told to write a draft of the letter himself, which the professor would then edit and sign. Nasi Lemak did some asking around, and found a surprising number of people who seem to believe that this is acceptable practice.
In a couple of recent posts, Matt Yglesias has raised the question of how consequentialists should handle “other-regarding” preferences. He gives two examples. The first is about the possible execution of Saddam Hussein
My own take on the punishment issue leads to a somewhat paradoxical result. … If Iraqis would feel better with him executed, then go for it…
I like to think of this as a wise and sophisticated point of view, but the trouble is that my preferences depend on other people’s preferences. As long as not very many people agree with me, that’s fine, but if some huge portion of the world were to decide I was right, then you’d wind up with an unfortunate self-reference paradox. Sadly, consequentialist attitudes tend to have these kind of results and I think that if I were smarter I would dedicate my life to resolving the problems.
The second is about the preferences of people who are repulsed by overtly gay behavior. Matt concludes that their preferencesmust be counted, although they should be argued against.
This is an issue of considerable practical interest to resource and environmental economists, because of the popularity of stated preference methods for evaluating public goods such as environmental preservation. I find these methods problematic and one big problem is the treatment of other-regarding preferences.
This is why I have an article on the topic in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, (PDF and algebra alert). Not, I imagine the kind of journal that philosophers like Matt read with any regularity
Via Brad, I notice that what appears to have happened is that Iraq’s debt, so far from being forgiven by the French and Germans (shame really, just when I was looking forward to chastising American rightwingers for not giving credit where it was due), has been chucked into the Paris Club process. The what? Time for a mug’s guide, I think.
Just “feeding the baby” with a couple of links really …
Stuff from Maxspeak, Paul Krugman and Calpundit relevant to our own discussion of “Equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity”. Read them all. (If you want to that is, I mean it’s not like I’m ordering you to read any of them or even suggesting that you’ll be materially less well-informed if you don’t. I’m just sort of suggesting that they might be a little bit more interesting than what’s in the newspaper today)
Personally, I’ve always had a hard time taking this debate seriously. Specifically, I’ve never received (not for want of asking) a satisfactory answer from anyone who talks about “equality of opportunity” to the following two questions (also inspired by my time at business school, which I am coming to believe may have been less wasted than it seemed to be at the time)
1. What’s the point of doing anything if you’re not going to check whether it worked or not?
2. How do you find out whether a course of action worked or not, other than by the results?
I’m so glad that John Q. brought up the terrorism futures markets, because I’ve been dying to talk about them. The proposal to open a market in “terrorism futures” only lasted a day before it was retracted, and captured the imagination of many libertarians and libertarian-sympathizers. It was sharply criticized by Congressional Democrats, who felt that it was abhorent that the government would open a market that would allow terrorists to earn a monetary profit off of their terrorist actions. But there’s an answer to that:
“Why wouldn’t terrorists just hop online and start betting if they couldn’t either mislead American authorities about their plans or make money to fund more al Qaeda operations?” Wyden asked. Why not indeed? If terrorists were trying to use PAM to make money that “would mean that they are giving up information to gain money,” says Hanson. “In other words, we’re bribing them to tell us what they are going to do. That’s kind of like normal intelligence gathering when we bribe agents for information.”
I agree that the idea is fascinating, and it was probably retracted too soon. Nonetheless, I don’t see any way that it could work.
The idea that speculative markets can be used to forecast political events hit the headlines a while ago with the furore over terrorism futures. This idea is still around and the general claim that political events can be forecast by futures or betting markets is still being pushed hard. The main source of data is at the Iowa Electronic Markets, but there’s plenty more. Reader Jack Strocchi sent me this report on a study of Australian betting markets and elections.
As it happens, I’d already looked at this and come fairly rapidly to the conclusion that the betting markets weren’t much good, so I was struck by the money quote from author Justin Wolfers
The data suggests the Australian betting market is extraordinarily efficient. And why not? There’s a huge incentive for participants to do their homework, collect reliable information and make sure the price is right.”
Looking at the report and also the Iowa studies, the evidence in support of this claim still seems very weak to me. In 2001, for example,
The night before the election, Howard [the incumbent Liberal PM] was ahead in two of three major polls ….[on Centrebet] Howard was the favorite with odds of $1.55, suggesting a 64 percent probability of his winning the election,”
That is, on the crudest possible use of the polls, two out of three suggested a Howard win, giving odds almost identical to Centrebet. In fact, I doubt that any serious analyst would have given the Labor Opposition even a 25 per cent chance by election night.