April 2004

David Bernstein feels he “doesn’t have enough”:http://volokh.com/2004_04_18_volokh_archive.html#108246863843005786 to read:

bq. I find it a bit odd that I’ve been blogging for the VC for almost a year but have not made it on to any publisher’s review copy lists … a smart university press (or even trade press) would put me on their list for review copies of law books, or at least some subset of law books. … I just find it interesting that book publishers have been so slow to recognize a new medium through which they can publicize their wares.

As it happens, we have almost been drowned by blog-based publicity for books. “The”:http://volokh.com/2003_10_05_volokh_archive.html#106582889309170254 “only”:http://volokh.com/2003_10_05_volokh_archive.html#106563477335982255 “thing”:http://volokh.com/2003_10_05_volokh_archive.html#10656538526880754 “is”:http://volokh.com/2003_10_05_volokh_archive.html#10656538526880754 “it”:http://volokh.com/2003_09_21_volokh_archive.html#106450848270473629 “somehow”:http://volokh.com/2003_10_05_volokh_archive.html#106553138229092263 “or”:http://volokh.com/2003_10_05_volokh_archive.html#106547755115976868 “other”:http://volokh.com/2003_10_05_volokh_archive.html#106555866011950443 “always”:http://volokh.com/2003_09_21_volokh_archive.html#106441717295055075 “seemed”:http://volokh.com/2003_09_21_volokh_archive.html#106427893234426462 “to”:http://volokh.com/2003_10_05_volokh_archive.html#106563450112693960 “be”:http://volokh.com/2003_10_05_volokh_archive.html#106555866011950443 “promoting”:http://volokh.com/2003_10_26_volokh_archive.html#106741121432737373 “the”:http://volokh.com/2003_10_19_volokh_archive.html#106660114558552134 “same”:http://volokh.com/2003_10_19_volokh_archive.html#106713811667575301 “book”:http://volokh.com/2003_10_19_volokh_archive.html#106657556477010526.

It’s the fate of market innovators to be undercut by new entrants. As noted by Henry, Bill Tozier has hit on the idea of auctioning co-authorship rights, including the acquisition of an Erdös number of 5. As of this posting, the Ebay high bid stands at $US 31.

But Bill has apparently failed to learn the lessons of the dotcom era. The first is to patent everything. As far as I can tell, Bill has failed to file for a business methods patent on his idea, leaving it open to new entrants to imitate him, or even to patent the idea themselves.

The second is that the best way to undercut the competition is to give your product away. Following on this lesson, I’ve decided to set my co-authorship price (including *free* Erdös number of 4) at zero. That’s right, potential co-authors! Send your paper to me with a space for my name on the front page, after yours[1]. SEND NO MONEY! If I like it, I’ll insert my official stamp, and send it off to an appropriate journal. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier!

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Want to lower your “Erdös Number”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001720.html in a hurry? “Bill Tozier”:http://williamtozier.com/slurry is flogging off the “right to co-author”:http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3189039958 a scientific paper with him on eBay. An undoubted bargain for social scientists, humanities types and others with high Erdös counts. Given Bill’s chops in complex systems and agent-based modelling, I’m half tempted to bid myself.

Still, prospective bidders should note his strict _caveat emptor_.

bq. However, the seller retains the right to refuse (and publicly ridicule) proposals for research in non-scientific fields, such as “Intelligent Design”. Such kooks need not apply.

I really enjoy seeing friends take up blogging because I find it helps us keep connected and it usually means more interesting reading. (I guess one could see that as a bad thing, but I’m working on honing my time-management skills.) The latest arrival is Liliputian Lilith who is a friend from graduate school. She, like me, grew up in Hungary interspersed with years in the U.S. thanks to our academic parents who rarely stayed put for more than a few years. Related to other Timberites’ experience (and I suspect many readers’) are her thoughts about the choice some of us make to live in a country other than the one in which we grew up. She has only been blogging for a few days but already has interesting posts about “mother-books” and air travel, cities, Barbie and beauty queens, and the origin of the Hungarians (related to this post on CT earlier). Today she took on John Holbo’s recent comments about Academic blogging and literary studies. Welcome to blog writing, LL! (I know you’ve been a reader for a while.;)

I trust you agree with me that advertising is a fascinating subject, for it concerns essentially the nature of the beast. Yet reading its entrails is so tricky. Tonight a passage from David Ogilvy‘s Confessions of an Advertising Man, first published in 1963. In a chapter entitled “Should Advertising Be Abolished?”:

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I’ve just finished Neal Stephenson’s “The Confusion”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060523867/henryfarrell-20, the second volume in a projected trilogy. It’s a lot of fun, albeit a bit more sporadic than the first – a little patchy in the usual fashion of the middle volumes of trilogies where nothing is resolved. Stephenson’s intentions for the trilogy are becoming clearer. He’s making an argument about the historical sources of modernity. In the first volume as I read it, the “key passage”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000910.html asks about the nature of the whirlwind, the invisible force not only impelling social and economic change, but also transforming our understanding of who we are, and our place in the universe. In “The Confusion,” Stephenson begins to articulate his answer to this question, when he places Jack Shaftoe in an alley in Cairo, which is perhaps the oldest marketplace in the world.

bq. For this alley was the womb at the center of the Mother of the World, the place where it had all started. The _Messe_ of Linz and the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig and the Damplatz of Amsterdam were its young impetuous grandchildren. Like the eye of the hurricane, the alley was dead calm; but around it, he knew, revolved the global maelstrom of liquid silver. Here, there were no Dukes and no Vagabonds; every man was the same, as in the moment before he was born.

For Stephenson, as for many economic historians, the invisible whirlwind is the market. It acts as a Universal Solvent, dissolving social bonds, and uniting an unlikely congeries of characters (including a Vagabond, a Dutch captain, an Armenian, a crypto-Jew, an Electress and a pirate-queen) in the pursuit of wealth. It works further alchemy as King Solomon’s gold and the wellsprings of credit become one and the same thing. The creation of complex financial markets conjures money from thin air, just as alchemists sought to transform lead into gold.

Stephenson’s history is, quite literally, a Whig one – the Whigs and merchants who seek to uproot the rotten pilings of the feudal order are the heroes of his narrative. This has clear costs in terms of historical veracity – Stephenson glosses over the “corruption”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394730860/henryfarrell-20 endemic in Whig politics. Yet he continues to succeed in carrying off the difficult task of taking economic history seriously while maintaining an entertaining narrative. Recommended.

Following up the links on Eszter’s last post, I discovered that she shares with me an Erdos number of 3 (Eszter via Aronov and O’Rourke, mine via Fishburn and Wakker). This is pretty good for social science academics.

We thought this was worth a CT post, and came up with another issue. Although Movable Type and other systems encourage group blogging, they don’t, as far as I’m aware, allow for jointly authored posts. This is of particular interest since it’s at least arguable that a joint post would count as co-authorship for Erdos number purposes (this comes back to the question, frequently discussed on this blog, of whether and how blog contributions should be listed on vitas). But more generally, it would seem as if joint posts would be worthwhile for at least some purposes.

The Erdos number site asserts that numbers as high as 15 have been found, but that nearly everyone with a finite Erdos number is below 8. This seems about right, though mean, median and modal numbers must grow over time.

* Listening to “Appetite for Destruction“. I wasn’t much of a metalhead, but it’s still a terrific album. It’s noteworthy that in a genre known for showboating drummers and extended drum solos, their drummer is the very opposite of a showboat. (A “tugboat”, maybe?)

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Adam Kotsko comments in a thread about “smoking in public”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001710.html:

bq. All the various smoking bans are simply further evidence of the repressive nature of postmodern biopolitics.

Which is fair enough. But my first thought was that I might prefer the repressive _methods_ of postmodern biopolitics to those of, say, modern or feudal biopolitics. I’m just saying.

An interesting topic of bar-room discussion at the Mid-West – the peculiar psychology of rejection at elite universities. Several of the top universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton etc) are notorious for how rarely they give tenure to assistant professors in the social sciences and humanities. Smart young people come to the university as assistant profs, teach for several years, are refused tenure _en bloc_, and depart for other jobs, usually at less prestigious institutions. The tenured professors in these places have usually come from outside – they’re nearly all recruited at a senior level from other universities (sometimes including former rejectees who have done well in the meantime). This creates a very strange atmosphere among junior faculty – they all know that the odds are against them getting tenure, hope that they will be among the rare exceptions, and point with admiration to the few who have managed to buck the system. What’s even more intriguing is the story of those professors who get rejected by an elite university and expelled into the outer darkness, but are then invited back to tenured jobs in the same place a few years later. Anecdotal evidence over beer suggests that a surprisingly large percentage of them accept the offer from the place that rejected them, even when they have other, more attractive offers from equally prestigious universities. If there’s a psychological mechanism to explain this, it’s one that goes against my expectations – _ex ante_, I would have predicted that people would take some pleasure in rejecting offers from places that had previously rejected them. Revenge, after all, is a dish that’s best served cold. Instead, quite a number of people seem to have a different set of motivations. So what’s going on?

Prince Bandar enjoys easy access to the Oval Office. His family and the Bush family are close. And Woodward told 60 Minutes that Bandar has promised the president that Saudi Arabia will lower oil prices in the months before the election – to ensure the U.S. economy is strong on election day.

60 Minutes, “Woodward Shares War Secrets”, 4/18/04

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We all had a bit of a giggle at the foolish anti-war sloganeers who insinuated that the Iraq invasion was done simply to try and get lower oil prices. So it’s a bit of a shock to find out that one of the things the White House bargained for before the war was “lower oil prices”:http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aDtL66T_rvqY&refer=us in the run-up to the election.

The issues involved here seem to be simply scandalous. A foreign, and for all intents and purposes hostile, government is informed of our war plans before the Secretary of State is. And when that government agrees to help, the help is delivered in the form of partisan assistance in the electoral cycle, rather than say military support that might lead to fewer of our troops being killed. So you’d expect the liberal media to be jumping all over the story. And with the new fancy 24 hour news cycle, 16 hours after the story breaks would be like plenty of time to do that. So it’s again a bit of a shock to find how “little coverage”:http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&filter=0&filter=0&filter=0&filter=0&filter=0&q=%22Bandar+bin+Sultan%22+Woodward+oil+price&btnG=Search+News the story is getting. Only 21 stories worldwide, only 9 of them in America, and the vast bulk of them wire stories. (Including some from those lefty news outlets Bloomberg and Forbes.) Yep, that liberal media.

Back in December I wrote:

“[…] the proposed “Policy Analysis Market” (which claims on its website that it’s going to launch in March; sadly there is no currently existing futures market which allows me to bet that it won’t)

Historical note; it didn’t.

BTW, for those who care about that sort of thing, while we’ve expressed plenty of scepticism over the marginal value of election betting numbers in the past, they are probably no worse than polling numbers and available with greater frequency. Bush is currently more or less holding steady on IEM, but weakening on Tradesports. Note that these two figures are not directly comparable, as the IEM contract is for vote share while the Tradesports one is “winner take all”.

The second of BBC Radio 3’s philosophers and places series aired last night, with a broadcast on Nietzsche and Basel (which you can “listen to on the web here”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3_aod.shtml?sundayfeat ). Not as good as the previous week on Rousseau (or so I thought) but still interesting. I hadn’t appreciated what a fearsome teaching routine poor Nietzsche had to undergo, 7am lectures six days a week plus teaching Greek at the local grammar school! Roger Scruton featured prominently on the programme, immediately after Radio 5 had been discussing “his advocacy of squirrel-eating”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1191383,00.html . (One text message suggested that feeding Scruton to the squirrels would be a better idea.)