Among the many fascinating contributions in the latest contribution to the popular literature on economics is a chapter defending the (mildly surprising) conclusion that having a black-sounding name like DeShawn is not a disadvantage in the US, once you take account of the class, education and family backgrounds variables typically associated with such a name. Having named their own baby Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner must be pretty confident on this point, and their high ranking on the New York Times bestseller list would appear to bear them out.
From the monthly archives:
May 2005
Steven Levitt’s work, as summarized in _Freakonomics_ and the original articles on which _Freakonomics_ draws, is eclectic in both subject matter and methodology. In the best sense of the word, it’s problem-driven research. Levitt has an extraordinary knack for finding interesting problems and interesting data that can be brought to bear on those problems. This is a large part of its attraction to the broader social science community – when you read something that Levitt has written or collaborated on, you get the sense of someone who is genuinely excited at discovering more about the ways in which the world works. His work is driven by curiosity, and it shows. As Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon says, an awful lot of academic work consists of “funereal parade[s] of yawn-enforcing facts,” that throw “pseudo-light” on “non-problems.” Not Levitt’s articles. Insofar as thirty-page chunks of social science can be fun, they’re fun.
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Economists should be forward rather than backward-looking, so I will consider Steve’s new paper — "Measuring the Impact of Crack Cocaine," co-authored with Roland Fryer, Paul Heaton, and Kevin M. Murphy.
What’s it like to be a so-called ‘populariser’ of economics after Levitt and Dubner’s _Freakonomics_ hits town? To be honest, the feeling of inferiority is depressing after a while. I recently spent a week alternating between assuring my publisher that my book would be just as exciting as Levitt’s, and assuring my editor at the _FT_ that my “profile”:http://www.timharford.com/favourites/oddnumbers.htm of Levitt would be as masterful as Dubner’s. The truth is that is that Levitt and Dubner have made the rest of us look like C-list econopundits.
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I’m not sure whether it says more about my own shortcomings, or the quality of these five commentaries above on Freakonomics, that I gained a great deal of self-awareness from reading them. It was a surprising reaction for me. There have been many published reviews of Freakonomics, and not one of them has given me the slightest insight into myself. Strangely, though, I felt like I understand my own motivations and goals better than I did a few hours ago. For me, that has always been one of the greatest benefits of inter-disciplinary interactions. Self-awareness is a scarce commodity, and a valuable one, so I am quite grateful for this remarkable gift that Tyler Cowen, Henry Farrell, Tim Harford, Kieran Healy, and John Quiggin have given me.
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The NYT has survivors’ accounts of the massacre in Uzbekistan. Meanwhile, on last night’s ABC News[1], I saw the commander of the US base in Uzbekistan interviewed. He said something like “The host country military are doing a wonderful job protecting the base and we have had no trouble from the disturbances”. That’s the same host country military that was murdering hundreds of its own people a few days earlier. I can’t find a link to this on Google news, so I’d be grateful to anyone who can point me to a transcript.
Bush’s friendly relations with the Uzbek dictator Karimov have been unshaken by this, and any stated opposition to Karimov’s use of torture and murder is meaningless: it’s an open secret that a good deal of it is being done on behalf of the Administration, as part of the policy of extraordinary rendition.
The blogospheric right has mostly been either silent or supportive, along with much of the pro-war left. But some cracks are emerging. Here’s a piece by Stephen Schwartz and William Kristol from the Weekly Standard. And on the pro-war left, there are some good pieces from Eric the Unread and Harry’s Place.
fn1. That’s the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the American network of the same acronym, but I assume they got the clip from one of the big international networks.
So I picked up the original Star Wars trilogy — or, at least, the re-masticated DVD version, “Greedo shoots first”:http://www.dvdanswers.com/sw1.html and all that — mostly out of curiosity. I hadn’t watched the first two in years and I’d never seen _Return of the Jedi_. I watched most of _The Empire Strikes Back_, which was pretty good, and ended up fast-forwarding through most of ROTJ. My God. Whole chunks of it were simply unwatchable. Just appalling. It’s notable that the first three films share almost all of the faults of the second three, right down to dubiously ethnic alien sidekicks. (Who the hell came up with Lando’s co-pilot, for instance?) This lends credence to the generational-imprint theory of their popularity. These negatives are offset by the freshness of _Star Wars_, the decent dramatic pacing of _Empire_, and the humor of both. But it’s hard not to think that what’s holding the whole edifice together are a couple of good characters (Vader, Yoda, maybe Solo) and some of the design elements: the fighters and ships, the lightsabers, the droids and a few other things. It certainly ain’t the leads, the dialogue, the direction, or the plots.
_Update_: On the other hand, were it not for Lucas we wouldn’t have things “like this”:http://www.withlouis.com/film/yoda/.
_Update 2_: OK, that last clip goes on a bit too long and there’s no real punchline. Try “this one”:http://www.amwmedia.com/downloads/lightsaber.mpg instead. Teh funny.
The Houston Bar Association has just published its judicial evaluation poll.
The poll, which is completed every two years, asked HBA members to rate judges “outstanding,” “acceptable” or “poor” in seven categories, including following the law, demonstrating impartiality, paying attention in court and using attorneys’ time efficiently. It also assigned them an overall rating. The poll included federal, state, county and municipal judges.
About 1,200 lawyers, 11 percent of the association’s membership, responded to the poll. Most judges were not rated by every attorney participating in the poll because lawyers were asked only to consider judges they have worked with directly.
You’ll never guess who was judged to be the worst Supreme Court Justice in Texas. Go on, try. (In her defense, the poll apparently asked nothing about Sunday School teaching.)
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.
My dear former colleague Andrew Harrison died last Saturday after suffering a cruel illness for the last three years. Andrew was a wonderful teacher, a kind and generous man and a distinguished thinker in aesthetics. I’ve posted some words about him written by Michael Welbourne to philos-l which you can read “here”:http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0505&L=philos-l&F=&S=&P=18637 . I know that a number of former students read CT. If you are among them and would like to know about funeral arrangements please email me privately.
ViaTimothy Noah at Slate, I learn that the NYT is going to start charging for access to its opinion columns. It’s not clear whether, and how, bloggers will be exempted from this – the NYT provides blog access to the archives (otherwise pay-per-view) through its RSS feeds
Speaking as a reader, I wouldn’t want to pay for the NYT Op-Ed page. The Editorials are worthy, but not very exciting. Of the columnists, only Krugman is consistently excellent, and most of his columns consist of necessary repetition of important truths well-informed readers are aware of, but most commentators are unwilling to harp on for fear of being called “shrill”. But Brad DeLong is equally good, takes a similar line, posts more frequently, and is free. Kristof, like the little girl in the rhyme, is very, very good when he’s good, but that’s not always. And Herbert is steadily good, if sometimes overly earnest. After that, there’s a long tail, with columns more often useful for mockery than for endorsement.
As a blogger, there’s no point in paying for something if you can’t link to it. That’s why the WSJ is so thoroughly marginalised in the blog world. So unless the NYT finds a way around this, they’ll be cutting themselves off from one of the most active parts of the public debate, and missing out on quite a few potential readers.
So when Newsweek publishes a story about the Koran being flushed away, it’s held responsible for riots in Afghanistan and Rumsfeld tells the press to watch what they say. When someone — presumably a soldier or other coalition official — leaks photos of Saddam in his underpants to the Sun, the President is confident that the photos will do “nothing to provoke any backlash”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/middleeast/20cnd-prexy.html?hp&ex=1116648000&en=f0b883a705779f5a&ei=5094&partner=homepage from insurgents. Now that’s a flexible theory of media influence.
11-year-old Katie Brownell, the only girl on her Little League team in upstate New York, “pitched a perfect game”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/19/nyregion/19perfect.html last Saturday, annihilating the opposing team “in an 11-0 shutout before a stunned crowd of about 100 parents and friends in the bleachers of the Oakfield Town Park.” Now, I am indifferent to baseball, but it has the virtue of being one of those sports that allow for the possibility of a well-defined “perfect game” of some sort. There are fewer of these sports than you might think — they’re generally confined to games where the player has to do something similar over and over again and never make a mistake. Watching a performance like that is quite a different experience from seeing a well-played football game or watching a track race where the winner does everything right. The tension builds in a different way. In the best cases, it takes some time for the crowd even to realize that something special might be on the cards. And of course in this case there’s the whole “who’s laughing now” angle, which I imagine some screenwriter somewhere is already bashing out a treatment of:
bq. Ms. Bischoff said her daughter had been an avid baseball player since she was about 6, and learned the game from two older brothers. But she said Katie’s first year as the only girl in the Little League was trying, and her teammates sometimes told her she should play softball with the other girls.
Google arrives at Yahoo! 1999.
[Image extracted from the Web Archive.]
For something that’s been around for so long (personalized portal pages) My Google isn’t offering much at this point. But how interesting that they have picked sites like Slashdot as one of only a dozen options to feature for now. I would like to see the behind-the-scenes of what led to these twelve particular items being featured. Some are quite obvious (e.g. redirection to Google movie searches or Google Maps), but others probably have to do with deals. Gosh, all this reminds me of my article in 2000 on the role of portals in channeling user attention online. I discuss the implications of the underlying commercial decisions in this piece.