One interesting recent strand of research on justice and human well-being has been that inspired by Amartya Sen’s “capability” approach. There’s now an association dedicated to this, with Sen as its first President and Martha Nussbaum as President-elect. Details “here”:http://www.hd-ca.org/about.php .
From the monthly archives:
September 2004
I lived in New York City for four years, and visited several times a year for many year before and after. I never went into the World Trade Center. The Stock Exchange? Yes. Century 21’s downtown location, to fight over discontinued Helmut Lang skirts? Yes. I never went to Windows on the World and bought a drink. I could have afforded one drink. As in many skyscrapers, there were different elevators that went to different floors, local and express, like a vertical IRT. I never rode in them.
Perhaps it’s because I am afraid of heights? Some people are afraid of heights because they worry that they might fall. I am afraid of heights because I worry that I might jump. Some uncontrolled impulse might leap from my subconscious, fully formed, and send me vaulting over the railing before I realize what I’m doing. I’m sure there was a big barrier up there, though, on the roof. It would have been all right. I’ll never see it now, tourists with cameras, everything riffling in the wind, the city below like a horripliated skin shaken out onto the water, bristling with towers and water tanks.
Leaving aside the question of whether a sequel is a good idea in the first place, if anyone can give me a plausible argument why “Ocean’s Twelve”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/oceans_12/ is a better title than _Ocean’s Dozen_ then I’d like to hear it.
I recently got a new cell phone after being out of the U.S. for a year, and now I routinely have a problem with telemarketers. The odd part, though, is that the people who call me, whoever they are,[1] seem to have fused the two most irritating aspects of dealing with companies on the phone. Telemarketers are annoying because they phone you up unannounced and try to sell you stuff. Customer service departments are annoying because when _you_ phone _them_ up you get put on hold right away. The guys bugging me at the moment call me up and, when I answer, immediately say “All of our agents are currently busy serving other customers” or “For quality purposes this call may be monitored.” I don’t know what they say next, because I hang up. Which marketing genius dreamed up this approach, I wonder? Is it a common phenomenon? Is it a ruse to get me to stay on the phone for some reason? And how can I make them stop?
fn1. Nine times out of ten they have strong Indian accents.
I’ve just finished Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1582344167/henryfarrell-20 and can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s “being marketed”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/01/magazine/01CLARKE.html?ei=5090&en=2fea0b3cbfbd17d9&ex=1249099200&partner=rssuserland&pagewanted=print&position= as Harry Potter for grown-ups; the comparison is a little misleading (among children’s writers, Clarke is much closer to Dianna Wynne-Jones than to Rowling), but it captures the novel’s likely appeal to people who don’t usually read fantasy. _JSAMN_ lacks most of the usual apparatus of the genre (dragons, rings and what-have-you), but still has something of its flavour. It’s a sly, funny, intelligent novel, and in its own way, quite subversive.
There were the personal tragedies of 9/11 for the family and friends of those who died.. and then followed all the other tragedies. Michael Froomkin links to this disturbing film.
The New York TImes has a “horrific report on the extent of pollution in China”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/international/asia/12china.html?hp and on the people who are bearing the costs of growth:
bq. Less than a mile downstream from the waste outlet, Wang Haiqing watched his seven goats chew on weeds. Mr. Wang lived on the other side of the stream, in Wangguo, and said several neighbors had contracted cancer or other intestinal ailments. He said his goats vomited if they drank from the blackened water.
bq. To reach clean drinking water, he said villagers must dig wells 130 feet deep. Most cannot afford to do so.
bq. “It’s been so polluted by the MSG factory,” said Mr. Wang, 60. “It tastes metallic even after you boil it and skim the stuff off it. But it’s the only water we have to drink and to use for cooking.”
In the Fall of 2001 as I was coding and analyzing data for my dissertation on how people find content online, I realized that some Web sites had changed a few design elements after the events of 9/11. I put up a little Web page documenting some of these changes because I thought they were interesting and worth archiving. I wish I would have had time to find more.
There were some more direct links between 9/11 and my dissertation. One was logistical while the other brought it all up close and personal. I think about these issues sometimes, especially the latter, and thought today would be an appropriate day to share them.
Today’s NYT runs an archetypal David Brooks piece. The obligatory lame conceit is that the elite is divided into spreadsheet people (notably accountants) who vote Republican and paragraph people (notably academics) who vote Democrat.
Unusually though, Brooks seems to have some actual numbers to back his story, and they give pause for thought. The most striking is that:
If this is true, considering the state of US national finances under Bush, it speaks volumes about what has happened to the accounting profession in the last decade. Do the accountants supporting Bush really believe that he has a plan to cut the deficit in half or do they just think that accounts should show whatever the client wants them to show? I guess we learned the answer to that with Enron, but it’s useful to know that nothing has changed.Back in the early 1990’s, accountants gave mostly to Democrats, but now they give twice as much to the party of Lincoln.
I was pleased to see this paragraph from “Matthew Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/ipower_terror_p.html.
bq. As a journalist, I keenly feel the pain of the generalist. I find myself in Mead’s shoes all the time — needing to somehow touch on a range of material that I am perfectly aware I don’t understand nearly as well as those people who’ve spent years focusing in on it narrowly. I like to think that having studied philosophy as an undergraduate is a reasonably good preparation for such a task. Obviously, I never wind up writing an article about meta-ethics or the way structurally similar issues about reductionism pop up in diverse areas (insofar as I know a lot about anything, it’s these things), but what philosophy fundamentally teaches you about (especially as an undergraduate when you don’t really have the time to master any particular sub-area) is how to spot an unsound argument, irrespective of the topic of discussion. That’s a useful and generally applicable thing. And I think we’ll see it pop up again and again in this discussion.
I like to think that some of the specific things I teach in undergraduate classes have relevance to what my students go on to do, but ultimately I’d be happy if most of the students picked up just the kind of skills Matt is talking about. One of the side effects of philosophy being so abstract and disconnected from everyday considerations is that to do well at it, you have to be good at reasoning about unfamiliar topics. And in the modern economy that’s a very valuable skill.
The Cheney–eBay controversy is a welcome break from all the terrible things happening just at the moment (like most moments, I guess) and gives me a chance to reprise my favorite economic aphorism.
Gross Domestic Product is a lousy measure of how well a country is doing, because it’s Gross, Domestic and a Product.
By now you’ve probably read “this story”:http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0904/171981.html about what Dick Cheney said yesterday:
bq. Indicators measure the nation’s unemployment rate, consumer spending and other economic milestones, but Vice President Dick Cheney says it misses the hundreds of thousands who make money selling on eBay. “That’s a source that didn’t even exist 10 years ago,” Cheney told an audience in Ohio. “Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay.”
John Edwards “said this morning”:http://www.qctimes.com/internal.php?story_id=1034852&t=Business&c=31,1034852 that “If we only included bake sales and how much money kids make at lemonade stands, this economy would really be cooking.” I see three possible responses from Cheney.
* Say you’ve changed your mind and that women’s domestic labor _should_ be counted as part of the formal economy. Job-creation problem solved.
* Issue a “corrected transcript”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/09/index.html#003975 of the speech, with one of the following corrections: “Four hundred thousand“; “trading on eBay NASDAQ”; or “That’s a source that didn’t even exist 10 years ago I just pulled out of my ass right now, because I think you’re “all idiots”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/000761.html.”
* Glance out the window, turn to Scooter Libby and say, “Let them sell tchochkes.”
Kosuke Imai and Gary King have just published an “article”:http://gking.harvard.edu/files/ballots.pdf in _Perspectives on Politics_ that’s controversial – but quite important. King is a noted methodologist, who’s made very considerable strides in the application of models of ecological inference in the social sciences. On behalf of the _New York Times_, Imai and King applied their methodology to the disputed election results in Florida. The results are eye-opening.
(1) If overseas absentee ballots had not been counted illegally, there is a very small chance that Gore would have won the election outright. In Imai and King’s account (where they admit that there is some room for alternative interpretation), the chance that Gore actually should have won the election on this alone is around 0.2%.
(2) More to the point: if the recounted votes in Miami Dade and Palm Beach had not been rejected by Katherine Harris, Gore would have won with 82% probability. In Imai and King’s words
bq. To put it one way, the massive differences in probabilities from 0.002 to 0.82 for a Gore victory were due to the decisions made by Katherine Harris.
Finally, and most damningly, Imai and King find “strong and independent support” (albeit indirect) for the proposition that:
bq. the propensity of local election officials to violate the law and accept bad ballots was substantially greater in counties where Bush strategists believed there was more absentee ballot support for their candidate and tried to convince election officials to accept bad ballots.
One should note some caveats – ecological models are still as much art as science. Still, Imai and King have done their homework – they present a strong body of evidence to support the contention that Republican efforts to manipulate the count had a decisive impact in Florida in 2000.
I don’t have much time for Colin Powell, as a rule, but it’s only fair to note that his willingness to describe what’s happening in Sudan as genocide contrasts very favourably with the appalling behaviour of the Clinton administration over Rwanda. The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/international/africa/09CND-SUDA.html?ex=1252468800&en=a9110563b24686d2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland says that the term ‘genocide’ “was used by the Clinton administration to describe atrocities in Yugoslavia and Rwanda” – I don’t know that this is true. My very strong recollection is that Madeline Albright bent over backwards to avoid describing the murders in Rwanda as genocide, for fear that the UN Genocide Convention would be invoked. It was a quite disgusting episode in US foreign policy. As Philip Gourevitch “describes it”:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil/readings/french.html
bq. The desertion of Rwanda by the U.N. force … can be credited almost single-handedly to the United States. With the memory of the Somalia debacle still very fresh, the White House had just finished drafting a document called Presidential Decision Directive 25, which amounted to a checklist of reasons to avoid American involvement in U.N. peacekeeping missions. It hardly mattered that Dallaire’s call for an expanded force and mandate would not have required American troops, or that the mission was not properly peacekeeping, but genocide prevention. PDD 25 also contained what Washington policymakers call “language” urging that the United States should persuade others not to undertake the missions that it wished to avoid. In fact, the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the U.N., Madeleine Albright, opposed leaving even the skeleton crew of two hundred seventy in Rwanda. Albright went on to become Secretary of State, largely because of her reputation as a “daughter of Munich,” a Czech refugee from Nazism with no tolerance for appeasement and with a taste for projecting U.S. force abroad to bring rogue dictators and criminal states to heel. Her name is rarely associated with Rwanda, but ducking and pressuring others to duck, as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, was the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman.
ABout 25 years ago I was innocently listening to my radio very late at night, and heard the first episode of a strange science fiction show. I was one of the few thousand people who listened to all the first series. It was not a success, but, being the BBC, they made another series anyway. A couple of years later it was transcribed as a book and became a huge publishing phenomenon, and the author wrote several more books added on to the series. I refrained from reading them, on the grounds that books are just second-rate radio shows, and if it wasn’t dramatised it probably wasn’t worth reading. It never occurred to me that, if I refrained from reading them, I might, eventually, be able to hear them dramatised on the radio as they should be, and not have any inkling of the plot. Fantastic.