Round-up

A few items that I’ve wanted to link to, but haven’t, thanks to grading pressures over the last few days.

The “Chronicle of Higher Education”:http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=uwq7gtjevc2bidh0g6sgv32h8q3ek33s on allegations of skulduggery in the world of poetry publishing.

Matt Yglesias “complains”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/05/um.html about economists’ tendency to look at problems as strategic bargaining situations, rather than as the products of history and path dependence. My rejoinder (stolen like much else from my mate Jack Knight) is that there is no reason that you can’t have both. Many informal social institutions, such as the woman taking the man’s name when she marries, can be seen as a sort of institutional curdling of power inequalities in bargaining games that have been repeated over a very long period. More to the point – Jack makes a very convincing argument that informal institutions are almost by necessity going to reflect power inequalities – only in those relatively unusual situations where people care more about coordinating with each other than about which solution they coordinate on (for example: deciding which side of the road to drive on), or where there aren’t substantial power asymmetries, can we expect the development of the simple efficiency-enhancing institutions that many economists assume to be the norm.

“Sploid”:http://www.sploid.com/news/2005/05/20/south-park-republicans-104411.php on South Park Republicans (via “Nick Gillespie”:http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2005/05/south_park_repu.shtml).

And “Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/05/philanthropy_le.html has lots of good links in re: the rise of conservatism and right-wing foundation money.