March 2006

Philippe Van Parijs has made some “correspondence with John Rawls concerning the Law of Peoples“:http://www.uclouvain.be/10166.html available on-line. The final two paragraphs of the Rawls letter are remarkable for their explicit anti-capitalism, a sentiment that is not so clearly expressed elsewhere in his work.

From “BBC News”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/ just now:
I suppose it means the same thing, to all intensive porpoises.

The current issue of _PS: Political Science and Politics_ has a “symposium”:http://www.apsanet.org/section_651.cfm on inequality and American democracy, collecting together various responses to the “report”:http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/taskforcereport.pdf and book issued on the topic by the American Political Science Association’s taskforce. There’s a lot of valuable commentary and empirical data in there; also well worth reading are the accompanying critical papers on “inequality and American governance”:http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/governancememo.pdf and “inequality and public policy”:http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/feedbackmemo.pdf. A lot of meat in there, including the below graph drawn from Larry Bartels’ “paper”:http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/PSJan06Bartels.pdf . It shows income growth by income level under Democratic and Republican administrations from 1948 to 2001. The solid line shows how families at the 20th percentile (lowest), the 40th percentile etc have done under Democratic adminstrations, the dotted line how they’ve done under Republicans. The difference is startlingly obvious. Under Democratic administrations, growth has been fairly egalitarian, ranging from 2.6% average growth for the poor at the 20th percentile to 2.1% for the rich at the 95th percentile. Under Republican administrations, the rich have done about as well as under Democratic administrations, but the poor at the 20th percentile have only seen .6% income growth. As Bartels says:

bq. Are partisan differences in the economic fortunes of American families really this stark? The arithmetic calculations from the Census Bureau data are straightforward. Their political significance can only be gainsaid by supposing that the apparent pattern is the result of a massive historical coincidence. Elsewhere, I have provided extensive checks on the robustness of the partisan disparity evident in Figure 2, including comparisons based on alternative economic units, time periods, and income definitions, statistical controls for historical trends, nonparametric tests, and the like ( “Bartels 2004”:http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/income.pdf ). It seems hard to escape the conclusion that, over the past half-century, Republican presidents have been consistently bad for the economic health of middle-class and poor people.

!http://www.henryfarrell.net/bartels.jpg!

You may have to be a pretty particular breed* to appreciate the following, but I can’t be the only one in the CT crowd. I found this Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character quiz quite entertaining. I scored 33 and while it is probably a sign of something positive that I didn’t score higher, I was still a bit disappointed. My point range gets the following recommendation: “As your doctor, I recommend moving out of your parents’ basement.” The whole thing is quite amusing, try it. Don’t look at the score chart until you’ve taken the quiz, you don’t want to spoil that part of the fun.

[*] The original post said “bread”, which should explain some of the comments.

The University of Michigan Press is putting together a volume called The Best of Technology Writing 2006. The editorial team is soliciting suggestions for pieces, including blog posts.

[W]e’re asking readers to nominate their favorite tech-oriented articles, essays, and blog posts from the previous year. The competition is open to any and every technology topic–biotech, information technology, gadgetry, tech policy, Silicon Valley, and software engineering are all fair game. But the pieces that have the best chances of inclusion in the anthology will conform to these three simple guidelines:

1. They’ll be engagingly written for a mass audience; if the article requires a doctorate to appreciate, it’s probably not up our alley. Preference will be given to narrative features and profiles, “Big Think” op-eds that make sense, investigative journalism, sharp art and design criticism, intelligent policy analysis, and heartfelt personal essays.

2. They’ll be no longer than 5,000 words.

3. They’ll explore how technological progress is reshaping our world.

The resulting publication will be available both in book form and online.

Hop on over to digitalculture.org for more information and to submit your nominations.

As was pointed out in the comments to my karate post, the observation that most traditions are invented is getting somewhat traditional itself, going back as it does to the exposure of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery.

So maybe it’s time to turn all this around, and make the point that we are now living in a society that’s far more tradition-bound than that of the 19th Century, and in some respects more so than at any time since at least the Middle Ages.

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I watch a lot of kids TV with my two girls. A lot. Like, you, hypothetical bourgeois CT reader, think I am a bad parent type of a lot. This is in part a consequence of a happy development: 24-hour cable channels offering ad-free, age-appropriate kids shows. To say that these shows are better than the ones I watched when I was young doesn’t begin to bridge the vast chasm which looms between the Higglytown Heroes and Jem and The Holograms (which remains, however, totally outrageous. And in fairness I watched that show when I was much older than my kids are now. Which is all the more embarassing, really.) But one’s mind tends to wander when a previously viewed episode of Stanley comes on. (Warning: an instrumental version of the Stanley theme song will play. Interestingly, the original version played on the show is performed by the BahaMen, of “Who Let The Dogs Out” fame. Or, perhaps more accurately, not interestingly.)

So, I have been wondering about the gender politics of these shows. Let’s take the new offering: Little Einsteins. This show has obviously been put together by a crack team of well-meaning educational consultants. The opening credits for the show have the Little Einsteins explaining that the music from this epsiode is by Camille Saint-Saëns, and the images are provided by Paul Gaugin and Hokusai. But they refer to him as Katsushika Hokusai. On the kids show. That’s not even really his first name, it’s some kind of toponym, but whatever. It’s not like I’m totally ignorant about Ukiyo-E, but I had never heard this before. It’s a very random thing for 4-year-olds to know.

The Little Einsteins have to navigate around the problems they encounter by referring to a map on which the directions are encoded as various musical themes. So then they offer (phantom) choices to the viewer, à la Dora The Explorer: was this a crescendo? No, the music got quieter! And so on. So, the cast: there are two boys and two girls. One boy is black, the other white. One of the girls is asian-ish, and the other white. This is all fine and dandy. But who is the captain of the team? The white boy. Why? No, really why? (Or on Stanley, sure, he’s got some little black twin sidekicks, but when you get right down to it it’s all about Stanley and his British fish (also male.)) Now, there are also shows with female leads, such as Dora and Jojo’s Circus. (Though in the former case they’ve had to come up with Diego, even more boring than Dora herself. And all her friends are boys except Issa the useless iguana.)

No, the thing I don’t understand with Little Einsteins is, since it’s an absolute given that the creators had all kinds of earnest meetings about the ethnicity of the characters etc., what was the motivation to just revert to ordinary filmic conventions and make the white boy the leader? I sort of imagine them feeling, well, me made enough concessions in putting the asian chick in, so… Finally, if the Little Einsteins ever get in any real trouble that little black guy is toast. (This just reminds me of watching Final Fantasy. When the one big black marine sacrificed his life for the white guy and his magic scientist girlfriend I thought “even a digitally animated brother can’t catch a break.” Although the most egregious example ever was in that movie Mimic about scientist Mira Sorvino inventing giant bugs. The noble black subway worker who just met these people 10 minutes ago sacrifices himself by going out to lure giant bugs to eat him alive, and he does so by banging a sledgehammer on the subway tracks while singing old Negro spirituals, I shit you not.)

A bit of nonsense from “Philip”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-03-13-babybust_x.htm “Longman”:http://foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3376 by way of “Daniel Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002631.html, about how conservatives are going to out-reproduce liberals:

It’s a pattern found throughout the world, and it augers a far more conservative future — one in which patriarchy and other traditional values make a comeback … Childlessness and small families are increasingly the norm today among progressive secularists. As a consequence, an increasing share of all children born into the world are descended from a share of the population whose conservative values have led them to raise large families. … This dynamic helps explain the gradual drift of American culture toward religious fundamentalism and social conservatism. Among states that voted for President Bush in 2004, the average fertility rate is more than 11% higher than the rate of states for Sen. John Kerry. … Tomorrow’s children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents’ values, as often happens. But when they look for fellow secularists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born.

There are several standard objections to this kind of line. One is that it’s always been with us: someone’s always worried that group x are breeding like flies. (Indeed, Longman even quotes Oswald Spengler on the decline of civilization by way of reproductive enervation.) A second is that it ignores the dynamics of rebellion against one’s parents. Longman tries to avoid this one by saying that prospective liberal rebels from conservative families will have no secularist “fellow-travelers” to back them up, but why should they need them in the first place? Third, the terms “conservative” and “liberal” are moving targets. Even assuming all the kids of conservative parents grow up relatively conservative, does this mean they’ll hold the same substantive views as their forebears? Insofar as there has been any drift in generally shared ideas, it seems to have been in the direction of adopting views that would have been considered liberal or radical in previous generations, not ones that would have been thought conservative or reactionary. Finally, as Simmel and Durkheim pointed out, in modern societies more people means more differentiation, more differentiation means more social roles, and roles are the raw material that you make individual identities from. If Salt Lake City continues to grow and fill with young people, increased heterogeneity (on all kinds of dimensions) is more or less inevitable — even more so if these new people are geographically mobile and well-educated. That doesn’t tell you which political views are likely to thrive or die out or change, but it should make you skeptical of the idea that a stable set of political preferences is likely to become dominant just because one group is having a lot of children.

On the other hand, it would be pretty funny if Longman were right and conservative christianity became dominant in the U.S. for essentially Darwinian reasons of reproductive success and relative fitness.

My school’s men’s basketball team won the America East Conference tournament and this Friday will play against the University of Connecticut in the NCAA tournament. We only moved into division 1 in 1999 – we were in division 3 when I arrived in 1994 – and two years ago the basketball team had a record of 5-23. I think this is the first time any SUNY school has ever gone to the tournament.

One report says that “Albany could receive as much as $800,000 for its first NCAA game, money the school has to share with other members of the America East Conference.” I have no idea how much of that will stay at Albany. But surely, by far the greatest benefit will be the publicity of making it to the tournament. How many people this week are looking over the brackets in their office pool and seeing the name “Albany” for the first time? I am sure that applications will jump. I’ve seen it happen before – when my brother decided to go to Colgate.

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports has released their analysis (pdf) of graduation rates of the teams participating in the tournament. They report a few different measures, but the bottom line is that compared to last year, significantly more teams are graduating at least 50% of their student athletes within 6 years. (It’s unclear whether this is a genuine improvement or just the luck of the draw.) The bad news is that there is a large gap between graduation rates of black and white student athletes. Still, the Institute commends NCAA President Myles Brand and points out that “African-American student-athletes are doing better historically.” Further: “African-American basketball players graduate at a higher rate than African-American males who are not student-athletes.” (By itself, of course, this could be a half-empty / half-full kind of observation.) The report doesn’t give data for making a general comparison, but at my school student athletes graduate (pdf) at a higher rate than the general population.

“Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/03/income_inequali.html quotes “Paul Krugman”:http://krugman.page.nytimes.com/b/a/251584.htm on income inequality in America. (Note the Krugman link is behind the TimesSelect firewall.)

One of the truly strange features about discussions of inequality is the way people shy away from talking about the extent to which the gains from rising inequality have gone to a tiny, wealthy elite … A few days ago Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post — a good guy, and sensible — wrote about income inequality. As I did in my column just a few days earlier, “Feeling No Pain,” he emphasized the “retrospective income” distribution data released by the I.R.S. (Paper at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04asastr.pdf. Tables at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04asastr.xls.) As he pointed out, those data show that the share of income received by the top 10 percent of taxpayers rose from 33 percent in 1979 to 44 percent in 2003 … But Pearlstein stops there, leaving the impression that everyone in the top 10 percent was a big winner. In fact, there was hardly any rise in the share of income going to people between the 90th and 95th percentiles: almost all the gain went to the top 5 percent. And most of the gain went to a very small elite. The income share of the top 1 percent went from 9.6 to 17.5 percent, accounting for more than 70 percent of the top decile’s gain. The income share of the top 0.25 percent went from 4.9 to 10.5, accounting for a bit more than half the total gain.

Today “this story about income inequality in Australia”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/so-it-emisem-the-rich-what-gets-the-pleasure/2006/03/14/1142098463260.html was on the front page of The Age online.

Appearing to contradict claims that Australia is now a more egalitarian society, research by the Australian National University and Oxford University has concluded that the richest 1 per cent of the population has almost doubled its share of national wealth. The report, by ANU economist Andrew Leigh and Oxford’s Sir Anthony Atkinson, found that the wealthiest 1 per cent of Australians now took 9 per cent of national income, compared with a 5 per cent share in 1980.

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… of whom I am one, are starting to growl again.

The cenral tenet of interest rate bearishness is that if interest rates are low enough to generate negative savings, as is the case in the US and Australia, they are too low to be sustained. The counterargument, put most forcefully by Ben Bernanke is that someone must be willing to lend at these low interest rates, and this lending must reflect a “global savings glut”. Bears respond that the supposed glut does not reflect savings by households or business, but is really a liquidity glut created by expansionary monetary policy around the world, which must eventually come to an end, or be dissipated in inflation.

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Whenever a politician who has done something really bad, whether it is the result of a terrible misjudgement (the kindest gloss on Blair and Bush) or worse (Clinton), and fails even to resign, I can’t help thinking of Profumo, and wondering what he thinks.

No longer.

(Via Chris Brooke, who asks whether Profumo is the last surviving war time MP. Apparently not — but he was the last survivor who voted in the Chamberlain ousting, and on the right side, which counts for a lot.)

Orin Kerr has “partly detached himself”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_03_12-2006_03_18.shtml#1141972931 from the “Volokh Conspiracy”:http://www.volokh.com/ and now has a “new blog of his own”:http://orinkerr.com/, which will focus mostly on legal analysis “with an emphasis on current legal debates and a broader perspective on the legal academy and the legal profession.” The opening in the ideological “vacancy chain”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_labor_Markets_/_Vacancy_Chains created by this move will, I think, come to be occupied by Randy Barnett.

A while back I noted the “disquieting resemblance”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/01/02/separated-at-birth between the Emperor Gorg (of “Fraggle Rock”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0009RQSSW/kieranhealysw-20/104-7889918-1956712) and L. Ron Hubbard (present whereabouts unknown). Now my sources have alerted me to “this clip”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sH42MMepT4&search=muppet from the short-lived “Muppets Tonight”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muppets_Tonight. The premise of the clip is a look back at “The Kermit Frog Club,” like the Mickey Mouse Club but with Kermit as the object of devotion and guest Cindy Crawford in the Annette Funicello role. (The MMC is outside the range of my pop culture: I have no idea what I’m talking about here.) Anyway, of interest are the muppet Frogsketeers, whose names are emblazoned on their shirts: along with Cindy, there’s Newt, Stu, and … L. Ron. Now that I look at the screenshot again, Newt’s crop of hair is also somewhat “evocative”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich.