March 2005

Like Sisyphus in Camus’ essay, I have come to the conclusion that myself and Tim Lambert only get involved in tackling the neverending wave of idiots who suddenly believe themselves to be statistical savants when reading[1] the Lancet study, because of the pleasure we get when from time to time they stop. This isn’t one of those times.

I think that Patient Zero of the current outbreak is the appalling Reynolds, who has apparently learned statistics over the last year (or at least, I distinctly remember him claiming to be “unable to say” whether John Lott was a hack or not, but here he is, talking stats with the best of them[2]). But for sheer asininity and bombast, you can’t beat Shannon Love (you may remember him as the architect of the “cluster sampling critique”, and if you don’t know what that is, good luck for you), who appears to be claiming that the Lancet team told lies on purpose in order to create propaganda for the Ba’ath party. As Tim says, this would be libellous if it were not so obviously stupid. Mr Love has decided to up the ante and “fisk” the whole report. I’m afraid that I was rather rude to him in his comments thread.

The arbiters of American journalistic standards are on our side now, so I suspect that we are fucked.

[1] I jest, of course. “Reading the study”! I crack me up.
[2] The best of them, to be honest, is still pretty bad.

I’ve been reading Todd Zywicki’s paper An Economic Analysis Of The Consumer Bankruptcy Crisis (1Mb PDF). Zywicki’s approach is to look at aggregate time-series data on a set of suggested causes of rising bankruptcy, suggest that the pattern for these time-series doesn’t match the observed increase in bankruptcy, The main point is, as he says,

Static or declining variables, such as unemployment, divorce, or health care costs, cannot explain a variable that is increasing in value, such as bankruptcy filing rates.

Hence, he says, the ‘traditional model’ of bankruptcy as a “last resort” outcome of financial distress is no longer valid. He therefore falls back on the residual hypothesis of changes in consumer behavior in the form of an increased willingness to resort to bankruptcy, possibly due to the rise of impersonal modes of lending and the decline of moral sanctions. Zywicki doesn’t mention the other obvious residual possibility: an exogenous increase in willingness to lend to high-risk borrowers, but symmetry suggests he ought to.

I don’t think Zywicki’s is the ideal research strategy (see below) but it has the advantage that anyone can play, armed only with Google. So let me point to a variable that has risen in the right way and could reasonably be expected to lead to rising rates of bankruptcy. That variable is the volatility of individual income, or, in simpler terms, the economic risk faced by the average person.

What this means is that the bankruptcy ‘crisis’ is an outcome of the general changes in the US economy over the past 30 years or so. If it weren’t for expanded credit and increased reliance on bankruptcy, the distress caused by growing inequality and income volatility would have been substantially greater. If bankruptcy laws are tightened, distress will increase. To put it simply, bankruptcy is the lesser of two evils.

I’m not getting continuations to work. There’s a full version at my blog.

Any maiden aunts who read CT possibly ought to skip this post, as it contains, in the interests of plain speaking on an issue where squeamishness might cost lives, one use of the “v-word“. I’m back on an old pedantic hobby-horse; the epidemiology of MRSA and the British political culture’s dangerous and annoying refusal to understand it properly. But this time, I have an actual policy suggestion.
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Via MyDD:

TALLAHASSEE: Republicans on the House Choice and Innovation Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to pass a bill that aims to stamp out “leftist totalitarianism” by “dictator professors” in the classrooms of Florida’s universities…

While promoting the bill Tuesday, Baxley said a university education should be more than “one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom,” as part of “a misuse of their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views.”

The bill sets a statewide standard that students cannot be punished for professing beliefs with which their professors disagree. Professors would also be advised to teach alternative “serious academic theories” that may disagree with their personal views.

According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities.

Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule” – for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class – would also be given the right to sue.

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I have no idea why people whose judgement I usually regard as sound consider Kevin MacNamara’s remarks to be in any way uncalled-for. As far as I can see, the Conservative Party’s new policy on gypsies is utterly odious; the Conservative Party themselves are not particularly similar to the Nazis, but their policy on Gypsy camps is sufficiently similar to be worthy of the analogy. Michael Howard (who created this problem in the first place by removing the obligation on local authorities to provide sites for Gypsies) has said, in public, that he intends to repeal or alter the “so-called” Human Rights Act in order to deprive Gypsies of their right to due legal process in challenging refusals to give planning consent for campsites on land that they have bought. This is scandalous. The Human Rights Act, among other things, guarantees due process for anyone who finds themselves having legal restrictions placed on their ability to do what they want with their property, or to have a home for themselves and their families in a community of their choice. In matters of planning disputes, Gypsies have rather more need for judicial review than most of us, because local authorities tend to racially discriminate against them. But what Michael Howard is saying is that he will alter the law so as to have the effect of removing this protection from Gypsies, because he wants non-Gypsies to be able to prevent Gypsies from living near them and regards this as more important than the public
policy issue.
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Kevin Drum recently wrote about the danger of the unceasing partisan war against the media:

If this continues, the eventual result will be an almost universal ability to ignore any news report you don’t like simply by claiming it’s the result of bias and therefore not to be trusted. This is unhealthy.

I’ve been noticing this for a while. It used to be limited to blog comment threads, more or less, but it’s been creeping up the food chain. Look at the way that popular right-wing bloggers talk about Seymour Hersh, for example. Nobel Prize-nominated blogger Tom Maguire from Just One Minute is one of the most intelligent, careful right-wing bloggers, but he’s not immune to it. See this uncharacteristic post.

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While writing up the last post, I went back to try to find a blistering review by Fred Halliday of Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers on Sand , which was published in International Affairs (of London) last year. I’d thought about blogging it then, but decided not to because it was behind a paywall and thus inaccessible to most of CT’s readers. However, by Googling, I have now discovered that Kramer has made the review available himself on his own website, pending his own response to it (which doesn’t seem to have appeared yet). While I strongly disagree with Kramer’s views as I understand them, I have to say that I find this rather impressive – it speaks well to Kramer’s commitment to debate that he’s willing to make a piece that’s quite harshly critical of his own work more widely available than it otherwise would be.

Should the US academy be trying harder to meet the needs of the intelligence services? That’s the question underlying David Glenn’s fascinating article in this week’s Chronicle. His piece analyzes the debates surrounding a new program in which CIA analysts are sent back to university to acquire specialized training in the social sciences. On the one hand, the program’s defenders point to the urgent need for a better understanding of the cultures and languages of the Middle East and Central Asia. On the other, critics argue that this could lead to CIA monitoring of what is taught in universities, to difficulties for US academic researchers abroad (who might be perceived as spooks in disguise), and to positive harm for those being studied in the foreign countries in question.
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I don’t know — and neither do you — if “Glenn Reynolds is trying to murder his wife”:http://instapundit.com/archives/021948.php (or if Bill Hobbs is trying to murder his) …. but I do know that I find it gratuitously offensive just to leave the possibility open, just hanging there, for rhetorical purposes. But, whatever … if they can dish it out, they can presumably take it. Read the whole thing.

Draft review of “Heat Wave: A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226443221/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, by Eric Klinenberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Forthcoming in “Imprints”:http://www.imprints.org.uk/.

In the middle of July of 1995, temperatures in Chicago rose to record heights as a mass of hot, humid air settled over the city. On Thursday the 16th, the high temperature was 106 degrees Fahrenheit, or just over 41 degrees centigrade. The humidity made it feel even hotter, more like 126 degrees (52 degrees centigrade). Chicago prides itself on being “the city that works,” but during the week of the 13th to the 20th, the city’s infrastructure, its administration and its people were tested to breaking point. Like the city’s buildings and roads, Chicago’s government, police force and hospitals buckled in the heat as they tried to deal with the crisis. In the end, epidemiologists found that there had been 739 excess deaths that week. “According to emergency workers, the task [of dealing with these deaths] was equivalent to having one fatal jetliner crash per day for three consecutive days” (p8). Eric Klinenberg describes and analyzes the effects of the heat wave in this ambitious book. His goal is to produce a “social autopsy” of the disaster by looking closely at the “social organs of the city” to “identify the conditions that contributed to the deaths of so many Chicago residents that July” (p11).

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My various thoughts on l’affaire Volokh are superannuated by now, but at least I can give a relevant reading recommendation. Terry Bisson’s short story, “The Old Rugged Cross,” was first published in Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s Starlight 3 anthology. It’s a re-imagining of Dismas, which speaks directly to punishment as spectacle and the desire to inflict as much torment as possible on the condemned. To say more would be to weaken its impact. I don’t think the story is online anywhere, or I’d link to it.

My favourite passage in Peter Griffiths’ book “The Economist’s Tale” is one where he ruminates on the nature of the job, and how it sometimes sends World Bank people a little bit batty.

“From time to time, I have to look a Minister in the eye and say something like; if you carry out this policy, I expect that 200,000 children will die in the city this year. However, as a result of the price mechanism put in place, I would expect that in four years’ time, 400,000 children of farmers will live who would otherwise have died. I do not have any conclusive evidence for this conclusion. The process by which I arrived at this estimate would
certainly not pass the peer review process of any Western economics journal. Nevertheless I strongly advise you to take this course of action. There is a kind of rush that comes with having this kind of power, and some people get addicted to it.

Since it would appear from this that the two insititutional hazards of the World Bank are a) arrogance and b) making big and important decisions based on not enough analysis, then you can sort of see how lots of people might think that Paul Wolfowitz, a man whose name does not exactly bring to mind the phrase “now there’s a humble chap who never makes absurdly optimistic projections with disastrous results”, would not be the right choice to lead it.

However, on careful consideration, I disagree (most of this already posted to the Progressive Economists’ Network, hullo lads, so subscribers to that list can stop reading and get on with finding more stuff for me to plagiarise on this blog).

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“n+1” magazine, which sent out its second issue a few days ago, is really very good indeed. It’s a nice mixture of politics and literature – a deliberate antidote in 248 pages to both the self-congratulatory coyness of McSweeneys and the ghastly sincerity of the Believer. The stand-out article in the current issue is Elif Batuman’s piece on Isaac Babel, which is shot through with small fragments of genius. It combines a finely judged assessment of Babel’s work, which makes you want to run out and read him (if, like me, you haven’t done so yet), with an exquisite and devastatingly funny deconstruction of the Babel industry in academia. I suspect that I’d get even more from it if I’d already read Babel’s stories. I especially liked this short passage on cultural identity and alienation (n.b. that Batuman’s point goes far beyond Jewish identity politics – the Irish have a more highly developed, if less historically justified, version of the same trope).

Tolstoy observed, “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and he was right: surely everyone on this earth, vale of tears that it is, is entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering. But in the end, I am too deeply invested in the idea that literature can render comprehensible another family’s unhappiness. For this reason, I once became impatient with a colleague I met at a conference in New York, who was insisting that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov’s “specifically Jewish alienation.”

“Indeed,” I finally said, “as a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew.”

He nodded. “So you see the problem.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t available on the WWW; you’ll have to go to your bookstore and buy yourself a copy of the magazine (or become a subscriber) if you want to read it – I’d recommend the latter if possible (it’s really a great little magazine).

Watching from the UK, the Terri Schiavo case makes the US look like a very weird and deeply troubled polity. All those homely and patronising sermons about “government of laws not of men &c”, and then the US Congress passes a law to deal with a particular case and to subvert a prior decision of the judiciary, just so that Republicans can grandstand to their Christian fundamentalist base (see “Obsidian Wings for the best commentary so far”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2005/03/terri_schiavo.html ). And all this signed into law by a President who, “when governor of Texas, approved a measure to switch off life support where people didn’t have the money to pay any more”:http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2005_03_20_digbysblog_archive.html#111134934659869241 . I note, by the way, that the so-called “right-to-life” brigade have been “pretty free”:http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/05_03_20_corner-archive.asp#058829 “with their use of”:http://www.therant.us/staff/guest/federer/the_court_ordered_death_of_terri_schiavo.htm “Nazi analogies”:http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/breaking_news/11134243.htm on this one. Since any Nazi-comparison (however casual) involving George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon, Daily Mail journalists or Abu Ghraib elicits instant howls of outrage from the British-based neocon cheerleaders, I expect we’ll be hearing from them shortly. Or not.