I stole this idea from Cosma Shalizi, who got it from something else. Anyway, it’s basically an irregular sampling of economics things that interested me. Mainly post-Keynesian, econophysics or sociology of economics stuff, but if I see a good Austrian piece I’ll use it. Also a few things that aren’t really all that heterodox but struck me as good. I’m trying to put in a few bits that will interest fellow nerds and obsessives, and a bit of didactic stuff for the layman, so if any of it strikes you as incomprehensible and/or patronising, then I’ll hide behind the excuse that it probably wasn’t meant for you. Email suggestions very welcome.
From the monthly archives:
January 2004
Just by the by, and for those with more than a passing interest in the subject, here’s a draft of a rather opinionated survey article on privacy that I’ve just written for a UK think tank. Health warning; it’s over 2000 words. Plus side; I’ve tried to keep it reasonably chatty. Apologies to any commenters (if indeed there are any) – I’m off to Chamonix for two days of terror on the nursery slopes so won’t be checking back in until Monday.
– Ana Marie Cox, formerly of The Antic Muse, formerly of Suck.com, formerly of a lot of things, has a new political gossip site: Wonkette.
Ana Marie is an outstanding, witty writer who makes most of us look like we’re blogging in crayon. Long live the Wonkette.
– Michael Pine, of Off the Pine, is back to semi-regular posting on a new site. I was fond of Off the Pine before he gave it up, and I can’t imagine that he’s gotten any dumber.
– The Mr. T Experience, aka MTX, has a new album out called Yesterday Rules. It’s very good, and you should buy it. Full review shortly.
The “Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy” is organizing a conference with the nonsense title of “NOISETHEORYNOISE#1”:http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/CRMEP/events/noise.htm although NONSENSETHEORYNONSENSE might be more appropriate. The “theme” of the conference is described thus:
bq. Noise is an unprecedented harbinger of aesthetic radicality: no-one yet knows what it is or what it means. This non-significance is its strength rather than its weakness. Noise is ‘non-music’ not because it negates music but because it affirms a previously unimaginable continuum of sonic intensities in which music becomes incorporated as a mere material.
And further elaborations include:
bq. Where a ‘new aestheticism’ might present itself as a resistance to pragmatic instrumentality, postmodern academicism continues to adopt theory as ballast: works are mere pretexts for ostentatious displays of theoretical chic. But in what way could noise change the conditions of theoretical possibility, not to say intelligibility or even sensibility?
In what way indeed? Explanations on a postcard please …. (or in comments).
Not often I admit this, but this Spectator article makes a lot of the points I’ve been trying to make myself on this issue rather better than I did. I’m not sure myself about whether or not the military-industrial complex is a red herring (I think that the defence procurement industry is too small to be as important as most conspiracy researchers think it is), but the rest is dead on. Thanks to the chaps at Slugger O’Toole for the link.
By the way, while we’re on the subject of defence procurement, why is it that every Army surplus shop in the world appears to have rack after rack of German army surplus shirts? Is this the result of a monumental purchasing error by the German Army or something?
According to our log-analysis program, Crooked Timber received its 1,000,000th unique visit today; a nice milestone. I think it’s fair to say that none of us anticipated how well CT would do when we started it in July. Thank you all for reading us.
The discussion on the Caroline Payne story below reminds me of a fine old piece of doggerel attributed to James Tobin:
The poor complain
They always do
But that’s just idle chatter
Our system brings rewards to all
At least, all those who matter
Two interesting perspectives on literary theory and related pursuits; one from “Elaine Showalter”:http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i20/20b00901.htm ^1^ and one from “Scott McLemee”:http://www.mclemee.com/id4.html (scroll down to January 10).
Katherine at Obsidian Wings has several more excellent posts on the Maher Arar case. Here’s the editorial
We don’t know all the details or explanations, but we know that something terrible happened. Our government took a man from an airport in New York City and handed him over to Syria, where he was tortured for 10 months. I think I’ve made a decent case that he was probably innocent; that this was done with the knowledge and approval of fairly important government officials; and that this was not some freak accident or isolated occurrence. …
As Ted Barlow said last November, “I support the vigorous investigation and prosecution of terrorists and terrorist suspects. But if this isn’t over the line, then there is no line.” It is not acceptable to me for my country to send people to be tortured on scant evidence, or on evidence gained from other torture sessions.
Since whatever happens to Canadians can happen to Australians, and whatever can happen to Australians can happen to me, I have a selfish interest in taking this a bit seriously. (On that note, I saw in yesterday’s Washington Post that David Hicks has finally got to have one meeting with a lawyer. (Actually it’s three meetings with a military appointed lawyer according to this story.) After two years in custody. Hooray for due process!) Of course hideous behaviour by governments is hideous behaviour by governments whether the victims are people like me or not, but when they are it’s a little easier to feel appalled by it all.
Back on Arar, today it seems that Juliet O’Neill has (or perhaps will be) arrested over this story she wrote on Arar’s case. In more ficticious news the Feds have arrested Robert Novak for his role in leaking Valerie Plame’s name.
[I’ve moved the picture below the fold to save bandwidth]
Can we no longer hear about the “predictive power” of the Iowa Electronic Markets, please? They were bamboozled to exactly the same degree as the rest of us.
[UPDATE]: A couple of people in comments have pointed out that this market is for the nomination, not the Iowa Caucus itself. Fair point, but sadly, no. Either the Iowa Caucus is an important determinant of who gets the nomination, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, there shouldn’t have been anything like this sharp movement on the 19th. If it is important, then trading in these contracts ought to have reflected relative chances of winning in Iowa. Either way, big spikes like this on news days are not consistent with semistrong market efficiency. I’d also note that the Iowa Electronic Markets are strongly linked with Iowa University’s business school, so the Iowa caucus is their best chance of having local tacit knowledge. While we’re noting things, I’d make a few points on the alternative prediction methods. The Irish Independent’s online poll seems to have done at least as well as IEM if not a little better (fair enough, I don’t have a time series for this one), and BBC Newsnight ran a big feature on Kerry last week; they’d clearly picked up the buzz.
I was thinking of leaving my little rant about Colin McGinn somewhere where other Timberites might not get any blame for it, but since Chris mentioned it, I figure it’s worth reposting here. McGinn is a relatively famous British philosopher, now at Rutgers, who in the 1980s produced some influential material on the mind-body problem, although his more recent work has not attracted as much attention. For various reasons (including his meteoric rise through the profession, the accessibility of his theories, his wide ranging interests, and his willingness to produce harsh verdicts on other philosophers) he became fairly well-known in broader intellectual circles. And now he’s written an autobiography. This led to an interview in the Times of London. (Note this is now subscriber-only, but I’ve put most of the text on my site.) The most notable passage is:
“I won’t talk to my colleagues about philosophy. It is too boring to me,” he says.
But why?
“They are too stupid.”
Patrick Nielsen Hayden “says”:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/004559.html#004559 about this NYT “story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/magazine/18POOR.html?ex=1389762000&en=ac9ac775c3fc94c3&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
bq. State of the union. The great feminist science fiction author Joanna Russ once remarked to me, “Homophobia isn’t there to keep homosexuals in line. Homophobia is there to keep everyone else in line.”
bq. Caroline Payne is in her condition in order to keep the rest of us in line.
What he said. I feel angry and ashamed.
Update: via Kip of “Long Story Short Pier”:http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/ in comments, comes this “charming response”:http://www.iwf.org/inkwell/default.asp?archiveID=135 from the so-called “Independent Women’s Forum.”
bq. I must have a heart made of granite, but I just can’t feel sorry for Caroline Payne, the off-and-on welfare mother/credit-card binger who’s supposed to an example of our nation’s beleaguered working poor, the “millions at the bottom of the labor force who contribute to the country’s prosperity” but don’t get anything back, as writer David K. Shipler puts it in “A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class,” this week’s sob story in Sunday’s NYT magazine—in which Caroline whines about her $6.80-an-hour job at a convenience store.
bq. From the way I read Caroline’s saga, it’s prosperous America that’s been handing out tens of thousands of dollars worth of freebies to Caroline over the years (Shipley is coy about her age), and Caroline who’s given very little back. One big reason that Caroline hasn’t moved up the economic ladder looks pretty simple to me: She refuses to wear her (free, Medicaid-supplied) dentures (check the photo). Sorry, Caroline (and oh-so-politically correct Shipler, who remarks sarcastically that Caroline is “missing that radiant, tooth-filled smile that Americans have been taught to prize as highly as their right to vote”). This may sound harsh, but if you want a job that entails interacting with the public or supervising employees, you gotta have teeth. Ask George Washington
This doesn’t leave me angry or ashamed. It leaves me disgusted. There’s something vicious and depraved (in the strongest sense of the word) in the unwillingness of many US conservatives and libertarians to admit that people can get screwed by the market through no fault of their own. D-squared is fond of quoting Galbraith’s dictum that “the project of the conservative throughout the ages is the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness” – this seems appropriate here. I still think that a principled conservatism is possible in theory – I just don’t see much evidence of it in the US today. A little, but not much.
“This is getting ridiculous”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3416091.stm :
bq. A proposed ban on religious symbols in French state schools could include a ban on beards, according to the French education minister. Luc Ferry said the law, which will be debated in parliament next month, could ban headscarves, bandannas and beards if they are considered a sign of faith.
UPDATE: “According to Le Monde”:http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3224,36-349896,0.html , Ferry invoked Saussure’s principle of the “arbitrary nature of the sign” in defence of the policy. We’re not going to hear any think like _that_ from a minister in London or Washington any time soon!
Brian has “a post on his other blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002462.html which I think ought to get wider circulation: it is a discussion of and reproduction of a Times interview/profile of cuddly, charming, self-effacing philosopher Colin McGinn.
The story of the true origins of Monopoly, which I covered “here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001119.html the other day, gets “recounted in today’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1127421,00.html in the course of an article on the highly dubious game “Ghettopoly” of which the object is “to become the richest playa through stealing, cheating and fencing stolen properties.” Hasbro, the current owners (or should that be “owners”?) of the rights to Monopoly are threatening legal action.