August 2004

This is a _colour_ photograph of Lake Windermere last Thursday afternoon! Fortunately there were other things to do and among them was a visit to “Blackwell”:http://www.blackwell.org.uk/index.shtml , the masterpiece of Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott. It is a wonderful example of the Arts and Crafts Style, brilliantly conceived and stunningly decorated. It also incorporates work by other leading designers of the period, most notably William de Morgan. It is, I think, worth a very long drive to visit. We also caught the “Sickert and Freud exhibitions”:http://www.abbothall.org.uk/exhibitions/exhibitions.shtml at Abbot House in Kendal before a much sunnier trip up to Scotland. Normal blogging will resume shortly.

George Bush:

“I can’t be more plain about it,” Bush said. “I hope my opponent joins me in condemning these activities of the 527s (political groups that sponsor to ads). I think they’re bad for the system.”

Uggabugga links to a list of 527s and asks, “Why does the Bush campaign object to ads that the Oregon Grocery Association might run? What are they doing that is objectionable?”

Sorry to keep harping on this, but it’s pretty incredible that a serious candidate would talk like this. I doubt that five people in a hundred would agree with Bush’s position if it was presented in a cooler-headed context. The right of people to organize and speak out is right at the heart of the First Amendment.

And yet, this has been Bush’s talking point: ban all the ads from unregulated groups. The Sierra Club. The Club for Growth. The League of Conservation Voters. GOPAC. The National Association of Realtors. They’re all bad for the system, and none of them should be allowed to advertise at all. Bush thinks that the government should have this kind of power; he claims that he thought that he had already banned these groups from speaking.

Incredible.

Greg Mankiw’s “Op-Ed”:http://nytimes.com/2004/08/22/opinion/22mank.html made me feel much better, no matter “what”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000023.html Brad DeLong “thinks”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000020.html.

This morning I cut myself while shaving. It was just a “superficial wound”:http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040822/D84KGLT00.html, but as I was coming out of the bathroom the doorbell rang and there was this army officer in full dress uniform at the door. He presented me with a Purple Heart. I expressed some surprise but he just said “Standard medal-issuing “procedure”:http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2004/08/22/big_lies_for_bush?mode=PF, Sir,” adding that his job had been made much easier by “the new Homeland Security Surveillance Cameras.” I asked him did he want to come in for a cup of coffee, but he said he had to run down to Number 27 to award a Silver Star to a woman who’d just caught the pancake-batter bowl before it went all over the kitchen floor.

I found this story of globalisation and soft power at charlotte street, via bertramonline. As bertram says, you can’t make this kind of thing up.

I had a look at related issues in this piece

I know it’s hard to fire people who work for the government and all, but why does Teresa LePore still have a job?

Palm Beach County has introduced an absentee ballot that requires voters to indicate their choices by connecting broken arrows, sparking criticism that it is even more confusing than the infamous “butterfly ballot” used in the 2000 election.

Theresa LePore, the elections supervisor who approved the 2000 butterfly ballot, opted for a ballot design for the Aug. 31 primary that asks voters to draw lines joining two ends of an arrow. LePore said she selected the ballot after tests showed it was easier for voters.

Jesse at pandagon has more.

A note in todays Washington Post describes a very interesting experiment:

Peter Gordon, a behavioral scientist at Columbia University, conducted an unusual set of experiments with seven adults of the 200-member Piraha tribe of Amazonian Indians in Brazil.

The tribe’s counting system consists of three words — one that means “roughly one,” one that means “a small quantity” and one that means “many.”

Gordon asked the Piraha subjects to perform various tasks in which performance would be greatly enhanced by the ability to count. These included laying out the same number of nuts or sticks that he had laid out; distinguishing two boxes whose only difference was the number of fish drawn on their tops; and knowing when a tin can was empty after watching the researcher put nuts into the can and then withdraw them one by one.

Gordon found that the Piraha were essentially incapable of following or accounting for more than three objects. When a task involved larger numbers — even five or six — the subjects’ answers were little more than guesses, even though they clearly understood the tests and were working hard on them.

He attributed this surprising finding to the fact the Piraha “have no privileged name for the singular quantity” — in other words, no one, no notion of an integer.

“The present study represents a rare and perhaps unique case for strong linguistic determinism” — the idea that language determines thought — Gordon wrote.

John D. Barrow explores similar ideas in his lively book Pi in the Sky: Counting, Thinking and Being. The most surprising thing, to me, is not the poor performance of the Piraha on these tests, given their linguistic disadvantage. Rather, I am amazed that anyone could get through life, particularly a no-doubt difficult struggle for existence in the jungles of the Amazon, with such a piss-poor numbering system. Perhaps the category “roughly one” has some unique areas of application which I am unable to appreciate. And it is by no means inconsistent with my strongly Platonic beliefs about numbers that it might take humans a long time to discover the existence of these supernatural, world-ordering entities. But the advantages of being able to count properly, even up to ten or twenty, seem so overwhelming, and the principles involved so obvious, that I am astonished anyone can get by without them.

A few sites of interest around the blogosphere (and beyond) in the upcoming weeks:

Kenneth Quinn has an interesting piece in WaPo about whether 9/11 was supposed to be 9/18 according to original plans. For me this is interesting because it sheds some light on the preposterous rumors that surfaced after the attacks about some Jewish conspiracy regarding the events. September 18, 2001 was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which means that many/most Jews would not have been at work that day and would have averted the attacks. The rumor that spread had to do with about 4,000 Jews being saved thanks to having been told ahead of time about the tragedy and having stayed home to avoid it.

One serious concern I have always had about people’s inclination to even come close to considering those rumors legitimate is the idea that Jews live such a completely isolated life (not to mention one without any moral obligations) that they have no non-Jewish friends or family, nor would they have any civic obligations to worry about were they to obtain any information concerning such an event ahead of time. After all, only in such a scenario would it make sense for anyone to think that these informed Jews would, without blinking an eye, just quietly stay away from such a tragedy without alerting anyone outside of their supposed super-isolated circles. (News flash: social networks don’t work that way.) The idea that there could be people this naïve and clueless about the world is seriously disturbing. But those rumors circulated quite far and wide even in non-fundamentalist circles, it seems. And that is scary.[1] Of course, the idea that anyone would have a list of Jews to call up and warn in the first place is quite silly in and of itself.

Read Quinn’s piece to see how he came up with the 9/18 idea based on all sorts of info tidbits including this rumor and details from the 9/11 commision report. (Hat tip: Harry’s Place. Go to Bugmenot if you do not have a WaPo login.)

fn1. On occasion, emails show up in my inbox regarding conspiracies targeted at other groups such as Arabs or Muslims. Such messages are just as disturbing and naïve. I hope no one will see my outrage regarding this issue as an invitation to send me equally ill-informed messages about people grouped according to whatever one single demographic variable.

I was surprised in the discussion of Anne Alstott’s No Exit to find so much enthusiasm for means-tested benefits which, I suppose, reveals more about me and the company I keep than about anything else. I am not completely opposed to means-testing: in some areas of policy, for example funding higher education, I think it can be an effective tool for benefiting the less advantaged. And sometimes it is, given the political constraints, the best that you can do in lousy circumstances. But as a general matter universal benefits are better, and more egalitarian, than means-tested benefits. I was going to write up a lecturely account of why, after that discussion, but fortunately got distracted by summery things like making Bakewell Tarts and hanging out with my kids. And a good thing too, because Shlomi Segall has subsequently published a nice brief account of the general reasons why people like me prefer universal benefits. I’ll add one thing that Segall does not emphasize: the perverse incentives of means-testing. So, for example, the UK government’s decision to rely on the means-tested Income Guarantee Support as a top-up for the state pension introduces a disincentive to save for those nearing retirement age who think they might need it; and the old AFDC in the US reduced dollar-for-dollar as recipients earned income; recipients faced an effective marginal tax rate of 100% which even lefties like me can see might be a disincentive to work. But Segall makes the rest of the case briefly, and has thereby saved me a lot of work (which I was evidently too lazy to do anyway).

I was looking at the latest US trade figures from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and thought, rather unoriginally, that this is an unsustainable trend. Despite the decline in the value of the US dollar against most major currencies[1], the US balance of trade in goods and services hit a record deficit of $55 billion (annualised, this would be about 6 per cent of Gross Domestic Product) in June. The deficit has grown fairly steadily, and this trend shows no obvious signs of reversal, at least unless oil prices fall sharply.

This naturally, and still rather unoriginally, led me to the aphorism, attributed to Herbert Stein “If a trend can’t be sustained forever it won’t be”. Sustained large deficits on goods and services eventually imply unbounded growth in indebtedness, and exploding current account deficits[2], as compound interest works its magic. So, if the current account deficit is to be stabilised relative to GDP, trade in goods and services must sooner or later return to balance or (if the real interest rate is higher than the rate of economic growth) surplus

But forever is a long time. Before worrying about trends that can’t be sustained forever, it is worth thinking about how long they can be sustained, and what the adjustment process will be.

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David Adesnik posts “here”:http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2004_08_15_oxblog_archive.html#109306453754409344 and “here”:http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2004_08_15_oxblog_archive.html#109306102432801244 about the whole Swift Boat Veterans thing. The posts are funny:

I still haven’t gotten to the heart of the matter, which is who is telling the truth, the Vets or the Times. … While it is hard to trust anyone’s memories of events that happened thirty-five years ago, it is extremely hard to trust such memories when they’re coming form individuals who had different memories of the same events quite recently … contemporary records confirm Kerry’s account and Louis Letson, the army doctor who says Kerry lied, admits that “I guess you’ll have to take my word for it” … According to Larry Thurlow, one of the Swift Vets who witnessed the events in question, there was no enemy fire. However, the WaPo recently got a hold of the citation for Thurlow’s Bronze Star (which he won during the same battle). In it, there are multiple reference to enemy fire. … As I said before, *I haven’t come to any firm conclusions about the Swift Vets accusation. My mind is still open* and I’ll be happy to look at further evidence. But so far, things are looking pretty good for John F. Kerry.

Amazing. In his “earlier post”:http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2004_08_15_oxblog_archive.html#109306102432801244 David even chastises those politically naive people who complain that the Ads are being funded by unscrupulous rich Republicans:

But more importantly, who do you expect to fund anti-Kerry attack ads? The College Republicans? No, of course not. It’s going to be rich and well-connected GOP backers who take it on themselves to be the President’s hatchet men.

Sooo, the charges contradict the contemporary written records, they contradict previous statements by the SBV people praising Kerry’s conduct, and hard-headed political observers like Oxblog know the only reason we’re hearing any of these guys is that they’re being financed by “hatchet men” for the Bush campaign. But don’t expect us to make up our mind in favor of Kerry! For exit-strategy purposes, David’s conceding that “things are looking pretty good” for Kerry but still, this is not the time to “come to any firm conclusions.”

Look, if you don’t like Kerry or have no confidence in the New York Times as a news source, or don’t see anything wrong with unsupportable hatchet-jobs, let’s just come out and say it, OK? But honestly — the kind of faux “open-mindedness” that refuses to draw warranted conclusions from the evidence is better left to “the Tortoise and Achilles”:http://www.fecundity.com/pmagnus/achilles.html.

General elections are probably[1] imminent in Australia. Both the campaign and the outcome will be tied more closely to events in the United States than is usual, for two reasons. First, the current Australian government has been easily the most reliable supporter of the Bush Administration anywhere in the developed world (and probably anywhere in the world), even if no-one much outside Australia has noticed. It’s one of the few governments not to have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and John Howard was the first to answer Bush and Blair in the call for troops in Iraq. With election campaigns likely to run in parallel, what’s good (bad) for Bush is good (bad) for Howard, and, to a much lesser extent, vice versa. If Howard waits until November and Bush loses, his whole foreign policy will lose its rationale. If Howard were to lose office in October, the parallel with Spain would be obvious, and damaging for Bush, though no doubt it would be no more than one day’s bad headlines.

The other potentially big issue involving the US is the so-called Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the US.

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“Alan reports”:http://www.schussman.com/article/815/headphones-down that

bq. Students in the incoming Class of 2008 at Duke University each “get a brand-new iPod”:http://www.chronicle.duke.edu/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/08/20/412620dfa7d23, to be used, says the university’s IT wonks, as part of a project exploring innovative classroom technologies.

I’m thinking of using an iPod in my graduate seminar this semester. The idea is that the students divide into groups and then buy me an iPod and, um, that’s it. Perhaps also items from my Amazon wish list, for the advanced ones.

As it happens, I do know of a student at Arizona who used an mp3 player as an innovative classroom technology: he was noticed wearing headphones during his final exam and it turned out he’d recorded himself speaking the answers to likely exam questions.