August 2004

I realize some blogs have already covered this, but just in case people missed it, the American Museum of the Moving Image has an interesting online exhibition about presidential compaign commercials since 1952. You can watch all the ads online, which are organized by year, type of commercial and issue. They also have a section on Web ads. A propos the Museum and campaigns, Richard Gere had a related comment at the end of the Museum’s tribute to him in April: “Never trust anyone who believes that God is exclusively on their side. [- — long pause – –] Especially when that man is the President.” [Hat tip for URL: my friend Jeff whose site is currently down so no links.]

I’m preparing an introductory course on game theory at the moment, and selecting readings for the week on communication and games of limited information. One of the key contributors to this literature is Joseph Farrell (no relation) who has done seminal work on how “cheap talk” (costless communication) may affect rational actors’ behaviour when it conveys useful information about an actor’s type. He also shows that “babbling equilibria” are always possible, in which actors’ communication conveys no information about their type whatsoever, and is consequently always ignored by others. This seems to be a rather abstruse argument with little real world relevance – but I reckon that one nice way to bring it home to my students is to point to how it helps explain DC taxi-cabs. In many (perhaps most) cities, cabs use their cab-sign to signal whether they are available or not. A lighted cab-sign indicates that the taxi-cab is free; an unlighted sign indicates that the cab is occupied. Washington DC, for some reason, is different. As far as I can tell, whether or not a cab’s sign is lighted bears no relationship to whether it is occupied. Thus, after some initial confusion, newcomers learn to ignore whether the cab has a lighted sign or not, instead squinting as best they can into the interior, to see whether they can spot any passengers. This is about as close to a babbling equilibrium as one may reasonably expect to find in the real world. How this came about in DC, and not in other American cities, is anyone’s guess.

In an effort to demonstrate that blogging is not detrimental to one’s health, uhm, career that is, I am happy to let you know that Chris Bertram is no longer “Senior Lecturer in Philosophy” but “Reader in Social and Political Philosophy” at the University of Bristol. From now on, when you imagine him writing blog posts, feel free to add a special purple robe to the image. Congrats, Chris!

I have it on excellent authority that small kittens have done literally dozens of impossibly cute things in Iraq, yesterday alone. But are we going to read about that in the so-called paper of record? No, it’s all “there was this coordinated attack on Christian churches”, and “militants kill Turkish hostage; trucking group withdraws from Iraq over safety concerns.” As Tacitus blogger Bird Dog rightly asks, “Which is actually more newsworthy, something we hear about every day (terrorist bombings) or previously unheard of signs that Iraqis are stepping forth and taking steps to restore their country?” Signs like that one time in Mosul, when the kitten pretended to stalk and pounce on that dented beer cap, like it was a mouse or something, and everybody laughed. Remember that? Right before the mortar attack, remember?

I bought a copy of “Transformer”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000001U3K/junius-20 the other day. I was fourteen when it first came out in December 1972, and I probably paid about the same amount of money back then (£5), or maybe the year after. 1972 is a long time ago — thirty-two years — but Transformer is clearly an album that lives on this side of a temporal watershed. If a song with the lyrical content of “Walk on the Wild Side” had been made ten years earlier, it probably wouldn’t have received much exposure, and certainly wouldn’t have been in the record collections of fourteen-year-olds (invisibly shaping their perception of sexual possibility and acceptability). But if it is an album from _now_, rather than _then_, it is still stiking how close it was to _then_. In Britain the Sexual Offences Act had been passed only five years before. _Five years_ . Not that the following years have been ones of seamless progress, what with “Section 28”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28 and that.

To check on some of the dates, I looked at this “gay rights timeline”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_rights_timeline . Shocking — so shocking — to read entries like the following

bq. * 1945 – Upon the liberation of concentration camps by Allied forces, those interned for homosexuality are not freed, but required to serve out the full term of their sentences under Paragraph 175

Unimaginable. And yet closer in time to 1972 than we are. Remember that next time you hear a commentator deploring the influence of the 1960s.

“Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/archives/001764.html reports that “Sidney Morgenbesser”:http://www.columbia.edu/cu/philosophy/ has died at the age of 92 [Sorry, that’s what NPR said, the right age is 82]. NPR have “an audio tribute with Arthur Danto”:http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3810783 . I’ll post links to obituaries as they appear. There was a rash of Morgenbesser anecdotes posted a while back, the best place to start is probably with “this post at Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/05/more_sydney_sto.html and follow the links back. My favourite:

bq. Question:”Why is there something rather than nothing?”
Morgenbesser: “Even if there were nothing you’d still be complaining!”

Obits: “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/obituaries/04morgenbesser.html , “New York Sun”:http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getmailfiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2004/08/03&ID=Ar01400 , “Columbia News”:http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/04/08/sidneyMorgenbesser.html ,

I’m usually about the ninetieth person to get these things (thanks to the pal who emailed it to me), but this one is quite funny:

The Central Intelligence Agency is committed to protecting your privacy and will collect no personal information about you unless you choose to provide that information to us.

Bit of a new departure for the CIA, innit?

There’s “an article in today’s Guardian by John Laughland”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1273982,00.html , warning us that the Tony Blair’s humanitarian concern about Darfur is just a cloak to mask his desire to launch another oil-resource grabbing war. Of course, the facts should speak for themselves, but I’m not above a bit of _ad hominem_ , especially when it comes to wondering where the Guardian gets its op-ed contributors from these days. Thanks to Google, it is possible to read “an earlier Guardian article denouncing the Spectator as bonkers”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,711616,00.html , partly on the grounds of a John Laughland interview with Jean-Marie Le Pen, that same, “highly sympathetic interview”:http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/laughland1.html , a “review by the Virtual Stoa’s Chris Brooke of a book by Laughland”:http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/show_article.php?aid=134 (“read the whole thing”), and Laughland’s views on “Zimbabwe”:http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/3-18-2002-14883.asp , “Slobodan Milosevic”:http://www.icdsm.org/more/Laughland1007.htm (one representative piece, google for more if you like), “John Kerry”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,9328751,00.html (more of a warmonger than Bush), “Blair and the Euro”:http://www.antiwar.com/orig/laughland16.html , and “Cyprus”:http://www.bhhrg.org/pressDetails.asp?ArticleID=13 . Readers may find that Laughland’s views on this issue or that coincide with their own, but, taken in the round, a certain picture emerges. (UPDATE: “This Laughland article”:http://www.bhhrg.org/pressDetails.asp?ArticleID=19 , about recent events in Georgia, is a particularly fine example of his work. Scroll down for his speculations about why Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić remain at liberty!)

I’m just back from a week in the Bay Area, with limited web access – “John H”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002258.html mentions a friendly argument that we had last year over China Mieville and the economics of fantasy. My two posts on the subject are on my old blog, which is a bit difficult to access these days – for those (if any) who are interested in the topic, I’ve posted them below the fold. I note that I’ve mellowed a bit on the topic in the meantime, partly in response to criticisms from PNH and others.

[click to continue…]

“Hunt Stilwell”:http://schemata.typepad.com/ has let me know via email that the “Netflix fallacy”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002236.html that I talked about last week seems to replicate a very interesting experiment on the psychology of intertemporal decision-making. His email (with permission, and some light editing) is reproduced under the fold.

[click to continue…]

I had rather taken my eye off the ball, but was informed by a pal this week that a charge of civil fraud has been confirmed in a US Court against Andrei Shleifer and one of his assistants for investing in Russian companies while they were running the Harvard Institute for International Development’s project in Russia, contrary to their agreement with USAID not to do so. To be honest, it all looks pretty sleazy stuff, and not at all good for the international reputation of the American economics profession (Shleifer was a recent John Bates Clark medal winner).

On the other hand, I find it quite difficult to get wrapped up in moral outrage over this particular charge; the actual charge on which Shleifer and Hay were found to have committed civil fraud was that they acted in concert with Hay’s girlfriend to set up a mutual fund company and try to become the Fidelity of Russia. Which strikes me as a pretty silly idea at the time, but hardly on a par with Pol Pot.

On the other hand, it appears that nobody at the HIID is going to jail (or even being seriously criticised) for the genuine crime that was committed by that institute during the 1980s; their partisanship of Anatoly Chubais and the disastrous privatisation program associated with that government (here’s a potted summary by FAIR of why you should care, and my own analysis of why it was such a bad idea). This, in my opinion (which I hope to flesh out a bit next week) was a crime which does bear serious comparison with some of the middle-ranking atrocities of the last century. And of course, nobody cares, because such is the nature of things. JK Galbraith has a book out this week called “The Economics of Innocent Fraud”, in which he suggests that innocent frauds perpetrated by people acting in good faith are in general far more damaging than culpable frauds perpetrated by people who know what they are doing. It looks like l’affaire Shleifer is proving once more that even at 96 years of age, he’s got more marbles than most of the rest of us put together.

Herve Gaymard. Remember the name of this philistine, moron, horrific Gaullist placeman and all-around fils de putain. I suspect that if the revolution comes and some semblance of humanity, civilisation and decency is restored to the moral cesspool that we see around us, your grandchildren will be encouraged to ceremonially burn him in effigy once a year, on a ritual fire made of oak chips. You might also want to make a note of the name of Denis Verdier, who revisionist historians of fify years’ hence may even suggest deserves more of the blame than the hated Gaymard.

[click to continue…]