August 2004

Whilst English speakers doughtily plough on with our archaic and tough spellings, and have to acquire a tolerance for the inconsistencies between British English and American English (to name but two), the German authorities have fought to implement a thorough spelling reform. But it seems that implementation faces a major hiccough as some of the major German newspapers have had second thoughts. Scott Martens gives “a rough but excellent account of developments”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000759.php and rationales over at Fistful of Euros. (In other news, I shall be travelling to Loughborough this weekend.)

I looked this one up for an argument in comments to Belle’s post below, and I’ve been laughing and crying ever since. It’s a useful way to think about the extent to which “trickle down” economics has worked for the poorest in society. As we all know because people who know we’ve read Rawls keep telling us, the poorest benefit from economic growth. How much do they benefit?

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What if…

WASHINGTON- In an unusual joint press conference, President Bush and Senator John Kerry announced the nomination of Rep. Christopher Cox of California to serve as director of the CIA. The joint nomination virtually ensures Cox’s confirmation, in a time of

“In this time of uncertainty, we need stability in our intelligence agencies. I promised to reform our intelligence, and I intend to keep that promise. That’s why I’ve been in communication with Senator Kerry to make sure that the new director of the CIA will be

Kerry echoed Bush’s call for unity and promised to support Cox’s nomination.

“My opponent and I have been explaining our different visions for America. However, our differences end at the water’s edge…”

If you don’t like Christopher Cox, pick someone else. The point is, Porter Goss is a poison pill where we can least afford one. There seems to be pretty widespread agreement that Porter Goss’s open partisanship makes it inevitable that he will be dismissed in the event of a Kerry victory. That’s not good.

Even if Goss is the best possible man for the job, he’s going to be paralyzed. If we’re sincerely expecting attacks, and we’re sincere about wanting to reform our intelligence, then we’ve got to have CIA leadership that can get to work regardless of which way the votes fall.

Maybe I’m daydreaming, but it seems like a great opportunity for statesmanship has been blown.

What the bloody hell is this all on about??? My Spanish is a bit ropey, but I have at least established to my own satisfaction that vheadline.com is correctly reporting a Venezuelan national press story, and VENPRES was reporting a story which El Mundo of Madrid did in fact carry (but isn’t available without paying). In this story, El Mundo is apparently reporting (and, btw, I’ve usually found the Spanish press pretty reliable on the few occasions I’ve had to rely on them) … the following assertions:

Update: thank heaven somebody bothered to check this one out

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“A very odd column by Christopher Hitchens”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2105032/fr/rss/ about Ahmed Chalabi, the CIA, and so forth. It finishes by hinting at a more critical position toward the Allawi government than some of Hitchens’s admirers have hitherto managed:

bq. As I write, the Allawi government in Baghdad is trying, with American support, a version of an “iron fist” policy in the Shiite cities of the south. (“Like all weak governments,” as Disraeli once said in another connection, “it resorts to strong measures.”) Chalabi, who has spent much of this year in Najaf, thinks that this is extremely unwise. We shall be testing all these propositions, and more, as the months go by.

“Steven Johnson”:http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/ has written “one of the smartest political essays”:http://extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20Six-Emergence.pdf that I’ve read in a long while, using a simplified version of complexity theory to explain why the Dean campaign went bad. Johnson argues that the Dean campaign was based on a simple positive feedback loop in which more volunteers and donations led to increased publicity, leading to yet more volunteers and donations _usw_. However, its radical decentralization and lack of complex communication meant that it wasn’t able to cope when the environment changed, and the feedback was interrupted, it couldn’t adapt. Like slime moulds and pheronome-induced ant trails, the Dean campaign was “great at conjuring up crowds … [b]ut … lousy at coping.”

Johnson suggests that other forms of emergent behaviour cope better with changes to the environment, but that they don’t scale very well. They’re probably not suited to large-scale national campaigns in complex polities like the US. This seems to me to be a useful corrective to some of the hype about new kinds of campaigning and fundraising. They are having important effects on politics – but it is unclear (at best) whether they can radically reshape politics at the national level. Johnson suggests that the political lessons of emergence apply more clearly and easily to Jane Jacobs style urbanism and local politics. It’s a fascinating little essay, which packs a lot of punch into seven pages. Go read.

From this morning’s papers, a bit more light shed on the questions I raised below. It appears that explanation c) (that the Sadrist forces have been recruiting since April) is at least part of the reason for the discrepancy. I would imagine that the two Londoners who have shown up in Najaf are not particularly representative of what’s been going on, but it makes a useful hook for newspapers, and us, to have a look at what’s going on.

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Two good things from Mark Schmitt (but you wouldn’t expect anything less, right?). There’s an “American Prospect Piece”:http://www.prospect.org/web/view-web.ww?id=8303 by him about the long-term effects of the congressional reforms of the 1950s and ’60s, and a “post about jobs with no sick leave”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2004/08/paid_sick_leave.html:

According to the brilliant analysts at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, sixty-six million workers, or 54% of the workforce, does not get a single paid sick day after a full year on the job.

That statistic, I think, is one of the best indicators of the two classes of the labor market, and how the divide is not so much about wages and income as about benefits and security. And those of us on the relatively secure side of the divide cannot really understand how different life is in a world where you don’t have any paid sick leave. I might think I understand what it is to earn low wages — $10,500/year, in my first job — but I’ve never had a job that didn’t offer sick days. Can’t even imagine it.

Jacob Hacker has a sort of “preview of his next book”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040816&s=hacker081604 in The New Republic, and I think he is most clearly saying the big thing that needs to be said about the economy: That the principal problem, the big thing that has changed, is not the number of jobs, the rate of growth, or income inequality. It’s the shift in risk from the government and corporations onto individuals. … [B]ut while some of us have been able to exchange the security of the past for greater economic opportunity, a majority of workers are absorbing more risk without accompanying reward.

We’ve “mentioned”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002059.html this phenomenon “before”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001213.html at CT, as has Daniel in some older posts about “pension schemes”:http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2002_12_15_d-squareddigest_archive.html#86124096.

From Mark Lynas’s “new blog on climate change”:http://www.marklynas.org/blog/ (hat-tip “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/08/11/important_new_blog_about_climate_change.php ) comes “this story”:http://www.iht.com/articles/531250.htm of the medieval village of “Heuersdorf”:http://www.heuersdorf.de/English1.html , in eastern Germany, which is threatened by strip-mining for lignite. God knows why anyone should mine dirty, horrible, acid-rain producing brown coal anyway, let alone demolish medieval churches to do so. This story needs wider circulation.

A strange and interesting article from the Washington Post, which highlights an urban subculture I know nothing about, despite having lived in D.C. for many years (not recently, though). The article is long, but the gist is this: there are about 30 high-end T-shirt and warm-up gear stores in D.C., each of which vies for its target audience with constantly changing styles and local spokesmen, from comedians to go-go bands. Apparently the trade started as a back-of-the-truck thing at clubs and concerts in the ’80’s, and grew into a big enterprise. The shirts usually sell at $100 each.

Around 1995, the style changed from silkscreens to elaborately embroidered shirts. And an enterprising Korean immigrant named Jung Kang began to sell his services, first as an embroiderer with unheard of turn-around time (he would deliver the shirts back the same day), then as a T-shirt producer as well. It seems like almost all the D.C. lines were using Kang. But then he got the idea to start his own shop, and his own line, called Visionz. He hired a popular local comedian as a spokesman, and hired local designers to come up with the T-shirt designs. And then he started selling the shirts for $30.

I think you can guess what happened next.

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Joseph Cirincione and Alexis Orton at the Carnegie Endowment have just put out a very useful short “analytic brief”:http://www.ceip.org/files/nonprolif/templates/Publications.asp?p=8&PublicationID=1595 on Iraq’s putative efforts to obtain uranium in Niger.

Their conclusion:

bq. The numbers tell us that Iraq’s alleged interest in Niger uranium – even if true – never represented an immediate or significant threat to the United States. Simple math and common sense confirm that the claim should never have appeared in administration statements as evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapon program.

“Tom W. Bell”:http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_agoraphilia_archive.html#109172158390376761 has a fun post analyzing surfing as a system of non-state enforced property rights. Surfers apparently have a very-well developed set of norms regarding who gets which wave. Bell, who is a hard-core libertarian, sees this as mostly reflecting surfers’ “profound respects for property rights.” Surfers, by his account, behave like Lockeans when divvying up the waves. However, there’s an alternative explanatory framework that does a better job, I reckon, of explaining what’s going on – Lin Ostrom’s “account”:http://www.cipec.org/research/institutional_analysis/w98-24.pdf of common pool resources, and the rules governing them.

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Both “Dan”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002305.html and “Matt Yglesias”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_08/004483.php provide us with empirical evidence that the number of insurgents in Iraq is snowballing. It’s a far cry from the ridiculous predictions of “Andrew Sullivan”:http://www.andrewsullivan.com/main_article.php?artnum=20030906 and “Glenn Reynolds”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/010642.php that jihadists from across the Arab world would get sucked into Iraq, leaving the US safer. Indeed, if the “Brookings people”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/10/opinion/10ohanlon.html?ex=1249876800&en=b821751f89ac4b78&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland are right, the number of foreign insurgents has grown only slightly since December, while the number of domestic insurgents has grown fourfold. Flypaper, my ass. This whole nonsensical theory was never more than _ex post_ wishful thinking masquerading as foreign policy analysis – as I “argued”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000463.html last year, it seemed to be based on the fallacious notion that there was a limited “lump of terrorism” floating around in the international system that could be absorbed by a conflict in Iraq. Instead, entirely predictably, we’re seeing what seems to be an enormous increase in recruitment to anti-American forces – an eightfold increase over the last fifteen months. The dynamic effects are swamping the constant ones. I don’t see how this can be anything but bad news.

Update: I’d forgotten that “Ted too”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000517.html posted on this eleven months ago.

bq. I’m going to make a prediction that I feel pretty good about: a year from now, no one will be very proud of the flypaper theory.

And I reckon that Robert Schwartz owes him $100 …

I’ve mentioned this book before, but now that it’s been published so I thought it worth mentioning again. “Egalitarian Capitalism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0871544512/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ is a new book by my new colleague “Lane Kenworthy”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lkenwor/, who’s just joined us at “Arizona”:http://fp.arizona.edu/soc/. It’s a comparative analysis of trends in income inequality and household pre- and post-tax transfers in sixteen wealthy capitalist democracies. Lane’s approach is to ask whether the data support the idea that there are tradeoffs between a low degree of inequality, on the one hand, and strong growth, high employment and growing incomes on the other. The short answer is “not really.” The longer answer has interesting discussions of which approaches work and which seem not to. It’s a good book: the argument, the writing, and the data analysis are accessible and easy to follow. As has often been said around here, policy and public debate in the United States hardly ever looks around to see how other countries organize the relationship between economy and society. Maybe the current climate provides an opportunity to change that: To see how equality is compatible with various measures of economic success, read the book. (To get a sense of how these countries compare to Neoconservative ideals, just continue to follow the news about Iraq.) You can “read the first chapter”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lkenwor/egalitariancapitalism.pdf to get a better sense of what the project is; “look at the cover”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lkenwor/egalitariancapitalism-cover.pdf; or just “buy it”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0871544512/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/.