From the monthly archives:

August 2006

Credibility problems

by Henry Farrell on August 11, 2006

Matt Yglesias announces the institution of “Krauthammer Friday”:http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com/blog/yglesias/2006/aug/11/the_krauthammer_charade_part_i

bq. Charles Krauthammer’s columns are published on Fridays. Thus, I hereby proclaim a new recurring feature — the second Friday of every month, we’ll revisit the man’s January 18, 2006 column, “The Iran Charade, Part II” in which he confidently proclaimed — contrary to the judgment of every relevant intelligence agency — that “Iran is probably just months away” from a nuclear bomb.

But even better, to my mind, was Krauthammer’s confident judgement on Iraq WMDs back in “April 2003”:http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.274/transcript.asp.

bq. Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.

Indeed.

Capitalism and the poor

by Matt_Bishop on August 11, 2006

The best recent books about capitalism and the circumstances in which it helps poorer people escape their poverty are Hernando de Soto’s “Mystery of Capital” and Rajan and Zingales’ “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists”. I met with Fred Mishkin yesterday, who has convinced me that his new book – ” The Next Great Globalization: How Disadvantaged Nations Can Harness Their Financial Systems to Get Rich”
will be a worthy complement to these two.

Certainly, I suspect it will be a lot more insightful than the other globalisation book about to appear, Joseph Stiglitz’s “Making globalisation work”, the follow up to his anti-World Bank rant, “Globalisation and its Discontents”.

What I most like about de Soto’s work is its emphasis on the legal system, and the importance of it being accessible to the poor and supportive of their de facto property rights. The great strength of “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists” – a book that deserves to be much more widely read – is its focus on the problems that flow from the existence of an entrenched elite that writes the rules of capitalism to secure its own position, rather than to allow the bulk of the population to participate fully.

Mishkin, who says he will not be allowed to give interviews about his book under impressively strict conflict of interest rules once he becomes a governor of the Federal Reserve in a few weeks, takes the story one step further, arguing that opening a country up to international capital markets in the right way is crucial to growth. As he notes, so many countries have botched the process of joining the world financial system that many are tempted to conclude it is better not to try – Argentina being a recent example. But, says Mishkin, rightly I think, doing so sentences them to remaining a poor, low growth economy.

That is, above all, because to successfully open up to international financial markets, a country has to develop the right domestic institutions, including rule of law, central banks and good governance.

Mishkin is particularly worried about Latin America, where he fears a serious reversal of the process of building sound institutions. The outcome of the current Mexican stand-off may be particularly important – not because Calderon, the declared winner of the Presidential contest, is necessarily the better candidate (his closeness to powerful business interests may limit his capacity to be a reformer) but because if the loser, Lopez Obrador, succeeds through public protests in overturning the result, that would deal a death blow to the election commission, the establishment of which was a huge step forward for institution building in Mexico, a country not hitherto known for its strong independent institutions. Here’s hoping the election commission stands firm.

Flights of fancy

by Matt_Bishop on August 11, 2006

On reflection, maybe the ban on carry on luggage won’t be so bad: without a pc, let alone a phone, there need be no guilt about watching some movies on the seat-back video instead of working. My colleague who writes inflammatory editorials arguing for segmenting families with kids from other passengers, or charging higher prices for kids, because of the externalities they impose, will no doubt be delighted at the thought that a ban on baby food will deter more families from flying.

Another friend thinks the logical conclusion is to fly naked – but then he was a fan of the now-grounded Hooters Air. The reality would be less delightful than he imagines, I suspect, given the unbuff bodies that most of us would get to expose to our fellow fliers. On the other hand, I noticed during a previous flight in “a tad above steerage” that BA provides First Class passengers with a delightful pair of blue pyjamas. Perhaps this generosity could be extended to all classes, and terminals transformed into giant changing rooms?

Ellery Eells is dead

by Harry on August 11, 2006

My colleague Ellery Eells died this week. His health had been deteriorating for some time, and last Friday he slipped into a coma from which he did not recover.

When I came to Madison I knew Ellery’s work just well enough to be entirely intimidated by it — the combination of technical complexity with real philosophical depth was unnerving. But as a person he was whatever the reverse is of intimidating: kind, gentle, and shy. A sad loss for my department and for the profession, but most of all our hearts go out to his wife, Joanne, and his children.

Quality arguments

by Henry Farrell on August 11, 2006

“Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/08/the_libertarian.html at _Marginal Revolution_ today.

bq. The libertarian vice is to assume that the quality of government is fixed. … If the quality of government is fixed, the battle is then “government vs. market.” Not everyone will agree with libertarian views, but libertarians are comfortable on this terrain. … But sometimes governments do a pretty good job, even if you like me are generally skeptical of government. The Finnish government has supported superb architecture. The Swedes have made a good go at a welfare state. The Interstate Highway System in the U.S. was a high-return investment. … The libertarian approach treats government vs. market as the central question. Another approach, promoted by many liberals, tries to improve the quality of government. This endeavor does not seem more utopian than most libertarian proposals. The libertarian cannot reject it on the grounds of excess utopianism, even though much government will remain wasteful, stupid, and venal. More parts of government could in fact be much better, and to significant human benefit and yes that includes more human liberty in the libertarian sense of the word. Libertarians will admit this. But it does not play a significant role in their emotional framing of the world or in their allocation of emotional energies. They will insist, correctly, that we do not always wish to make government more efficient. Then they retreat to a mental model where the quality of government is fixed and we compare government to market.

When reading this post, it’s hard not to think of Albert Hirschman’s brilliant little book, _Exit, Voice and Loyalty_. Hirschman’s theoretical innovation is precisely to assume that quality (of organizations, of products etc) _isn’t_ fixed, and that there are different mechanisms through which we might imagine that quality would be improved. “Exit” – the threat of switching to a competing organization – is one such mechanism, and it’s one that libertarians will be very comfortable with, as it’s greatly enhanced by free markets or market-like competition under many circumstances. The other is voice – which refers to more directly political actions, of argument, protest, criticism etc, and which doesn’t seem to me nearly as congenial to libertarians, because it suggests that faulty organizations and governments can be made better without recourse to market mechanisms. Indeed, under some circumstances, increased opportunities for exit may reduce the ability of voice to bring through change. Authoritarian regimes frequently allow some critics to go into exile, for fear that they’d become rabble-rousers at home.

Which makes me curious. What do libertarians think about Hirschman’s arguments? Do they read him? Do they have a sophisticated response?

Update: Alex Tabarrok points me to an “old post”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/09/the_tragedy_of_.html of his, which rightly points out that under some circumstances exit and voice can be complements.

PowerPoint Corrupts the Point Absolutely

by John Holbo on August 11, 2006

Via Arms & Influence, a passage from that Thomas Ricks book [amazon] everyone has been reading (my copy isn’t here yet): [click to continue…]

Happy birthday

by Chris Bertram on August 11, 2006

The “IBM PC is 25-years-old today”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4780963.stm . Me, I resisted at the time, but I’m not sure I could have afforded one. I’m pretty such that the first personal computer I used was a “Commodore 64”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 in the early 80s, followed by an “Apple IIc”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIc when I worked at Verso around 1985 (I remember seeing “the first Mac”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K in a window by Liverpool Street Station at about the same time). Liking Macs but not being able to afford them meant that I invested in an “Atari 1040STFM”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_st in about 1987 which I used at home for about five years or so (lovely crystal clear b&w monitor). I also spent a good deal of time on “Amstrad PCWs”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW. When I arrived in Bristol (1989) my Department had one (1) “BBC Micro”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bbc_micro in the basement, and there was a great deal of resistance to my suggestion that we should all have pcs on our desks. Some time in the mid 1990s, we all got i386 based clones, and it has been all upgrades to Pentiums since. Except that I just got my “MacBook”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbook , and had a new “iMac”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imac delivered to my office.

More Side Effects of the GWOT

by Kieran Healy on August 11, 2006

By the time I got to Chicago yesterday my flight to Montreal had been cancelled and I got re-routed through Toronto. (One Canadian city is as good as another, eh?) My bag went on a mysterious and still-unfinished journey of their own. As a consequence, I did something I’m slightly ashamed to admit I rarely do these days: I read a novel. I picked up Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in Chicago and by the time I arrived in Montreal I had just finished it. The main protagonist is Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old boy whose father was killed in the World Trade Center, and the novel is told mostly from his point of view. When we’re not inside Oskar’s head, the voices of his grandmother and grandfather (who have complicated stories of their own) take over.

It’s a good novel. I was unconvinced by some aspects of each of the main characters, and I thought the central plot device could have been handled better. But at the same time, the book drew me in and I found parts of it quite moving. It is exceptionally difficult to write plausibly about the inner world of a child, if only because it’s so easy to forget what being a child is like. Foer’s strategy is to make Oskar irresistibly kinetic: high-energy, endlessly talkative, exceptionally smart, and independent to an almost absurd degree. It mostly works, except of course when the plot requires that Oscar not be as smart as all that. It would have been easy to have Oskar come off as a kind of miniature Woody Allen, neurotically roaming New York in search of something or other. But Foer manages to make you like him.

It strikes me that Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha would make for a good comparison with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Paddy is ten and Oskar is nine. They are both quite talkative. In different ways, bad things happen to both. Yet Paddy is ordinary and Oskar is one of a kind. Paddy lives a routine existence in late 1960s Dublin. Oskar is on the Upper West Side. Paddy’s parents fight. Oskar’s father was killed in a terrorist attack. I read Paddy Clarke when it came out (ten or more years ago I think), and remember being astonished by how well Doyle got the reader inside Paddy’s world, especially the way he showed how awful even ordinary domestic problems can seem when you are ten and don’t fully understand what is happening. I may be biased because it’s easier for me to identify with Paddy’s life and mode of speech, but I think Doyle meets the challenge of writing from a child’s point of view better than Foer. Perhaps Foer’s problem is that the weight of 9/11 is just too much for Oskar as a character to bear, just as within the novel it is too much for him as a person to manage.

Is territorial possession a form of property?

by Chris Bertram on August 11, 2006

I was reading a paper by Samuel Freeman the other day and came across a passage that I found arresting. I found it arresting because it asserted propositions that looked false to me. But Freeman is a very smart guy (and a very distinguished Rawls scholar) and I rather suspect that the points he’s alluding to are symptomatic of some very deep differences in philosophical opinion. They’re also of interest because Freeman’s denial that a state’s control of its territory is akin to property ranges him against both those who are more egalitarian than he is (Pogge and Tan in the passage quoted, but also those like Philippe Van Parijs who claim the existence of borders is sufficient to establish that there is a global basic structure) and Lockean libertarians. I reproduce the passage below together with some (possibly inept) reactions from me.

bq. The one significant practice or norm Rawls’s critics allude to which might at first appearance be regarded as a basic global institution is peoples’ recognition that nations have “ownership” or control of the land and natural resources in the territories they occupy. Pogge, K. C. Tan, and others see this example as justifying a need for a global distribution principle to regulate this practice, and decide how global resources are to be distributed. But it is a mistake to regard this norm as a basic institution, on a par with the institution of property. For control and jurisdiction over a territory by a people is sui generis: it is the condition of the possibility of the existence of a people and their exercising political jurisdiction. As such it is not a kind of property; for among other reasons, it does not have the incidences of property: it is not legally specified and enforced, nor is it alienable or exchangeable, but is held in trust in perpetuity for the benefit of a people. But more importantly, rather than being a kind of property, a people’s control of territory provides the necessary framework for the legal institution of property and other basic social institutions. Finally, peoples can and have controlled territories without norms of cooperation or even recognition by other peoples at all. Indeed this has been true of many countries for most of history; they have existed in a Hobbesian state of war. The point is not that there is anything just about this situation – on the contrary, it has been sustained by aggression and injustice for most of history – but that, unlike property and other basic social institutions, a people’s control of a territory is not cooperative or in any way institutional. It is then misleading to call a people’s control of a territory and recognition of others’ boundaries “property,” a “basic institution,” or part of a “global basic structure,” simply in hopes of showing an inconsistency in Rawls and smuggling in a global principle of distributive justice. (Samuel Freeman, “Distributive Justice and _The Law of Peoples_”, in Rex Martin and David A. Reidy (eds) “Rawls’s Law of People’s: A Realistic Utopia”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/1405135301/junius-20 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).)

The following points strike me as relevant:

[click to continue…]

More on air travel to Canada

by Eszter Hargittai on August 10, 2006

Airport security Kieran wasn’t the only one traveling internationally today for the ASA meetings. It was interesting to watch the myriad of items accumulating in the bins scattered alongside the security line. There seemed to be some interesting perfumes in there (well, at least the containers looked interesting), otherwise, just a bunch of half-empty water bottles, toothpaste, shaving cream and lotion. I wondered whether they would let you take an empty water bottle in, but I decided not to test the system. The wait was longer than usual, but still not impossible (this in the Premier check-in area though). I was also curious to see whether the hotel would be ready for the numerous people showing up without toothpaste. Having forgotten French for toothpaste, I mumbled something about brushing teeth, but before I could finish the sentence, the concierge handed me a small tube. Good for them. (Yes, of course I could’ve asked in English, but what’s the fun in that?)

Montreal welcomes the ASA As for getting through passport control, I continue to be unimpressed by Canadian immigration officials. After greeting the guy with a friendly Bonsoir I was asked why I was visiting. I mentioned the sociology meetings, which was only so obvious given that even the official greeting signs at the airport had the ASA written on them and at least half my flight was sociologists. (When I assumed about the couple standing next to me a minute earlier that they were here for the ASA they asked if it was that obvious. Isn’t it?) Anyway, the passport control guy got on the offensive to push me on “what about the sociology meetings”? What about them? I’m giving some talks. I wonder if he was that combative with the Americans. (Don’t bother getting on my case about how this doesn’t sound combative. It was, perhaps you had to be there.)

In any case, the city looks neat from my 23rd floor room. I look forward to exploring it this weekend.

Three Wishes

by Harry on August 10, 2006

We recently had the dubious pleasure of watching CNN in a hotel room — Bill Schneider was analysing poll figures concerning whether America should attempt to put a stop to the fighting in Lebanon. It reminded me why I maintain a boycott of stupid news, but it also supplied me with the third of my three wishes, each prompted by recent experiences.

My first wish was prompted by hearing an old radio outside braodcast report. The reporter was watching the Crystal Palace burning to the ground. After a few minutes he said “Well, I don’t have any more useful information, so perhaps you should give some other news”. My second was prompted by hearing the music playing in The Gap when I made a rare trip, accompanying a friend.

1. I wish I could hear a contemporary reporter on TV acknowledge that he has nothing more interesting to say.

2. I wish I could walk in to a regular store and hear Roy Harper singing “I Hate the White Man” followed by Kevin Coyne singing “Lunatic” (from what I still think is his greatest album). Or just either one would do.

3. I wish I could hear an analyst of a foreign policy opinion poll on the TV say “well, that’s what the distribution of opinion is among the public. But, youo know, this is a complicated and difficult matter, about which intellectually honest people who are well informed and have given it a good deal of thought, do not know with much certainty what should be done. So, really, the opinion of the British/French/American/Whateverian public isn’t worth paying any attention to, because almost everyone who answered this poll knows virtually nothing about the issue, and has given it even less thought”.

Just once, in each case, would be brilliant.

3 wishes then; the rule is that their realisation would not materially benefit or harm anyone you care about (other than, I suppose, Roy Harper and Kevin Coyne’s estate, in my case).

Queueing for Terror

by Kieran Healy on August 10, 2006

Well, I picked a good day to be taking an international flight. At least I’m not in the UK. Next time I travel, I’ll be sure to check to see whether “John has identified any empirical regularities”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/09/two-point-scales/ about my mode of transport and act accordingly. This is why economics is the queen of the social sciences.

Here in Tucson’s airport, people are pretty good-humored about it all. The TSA staff aren’t making any exceptions, though: while in line waiting to be screened, I saw an octogenarian in a wheelchair have her bottle of Chanel tossed in the bin.

I’m off to Montreal for the “American Sociological Association Meetings”:http://www.asanet.org, which naturally are being held in Canada this year, as part of an ongoing arrangement whereby the Canadian Sociological Society will meet next year in Australia, and the American Economics Association will have their meetings run by the Indian Society of Chemical Engineers. Be on the lookout for amusing articles in the newspaper picking out papers with embarrassing titles.

Anchors and Anchorettes

by Maria on August 10, 2006

Until a couple of weeks ago, I kept my television at the bottom of a cupboard. The idea was to waste no time watching tv when I should be studying. Now I watch the news every morning instead of reading improving literature. And it is starting to drive me up the bloody wall.

Whatever channel is on, it’s always the same set up; an older man and a younger woman tag-team the reporting, switching hyperactively from screens on either side, back to each other, and on to full-screen reports. Which is bearable, if patronising. Whenever the man is talking, the woman looks at him, listens, clearly engaged, nods slightly at the right bits, matches her facial expressions to his speech. It’s almost imperceptible, a simple empathic behaviour most women do when others speak. But every bloody time the woman opens her mouth, the man stares straight ahead, completely ignoring her, and only barely acknowledges her when it’s his turn to cut in.

I know, I know. This is how conversations go, whether in a private or professional settings. I can’t tell how many times I’ve seen women colleagues cut off by men in a group conversation. The men don’t seem to even notice they do it – it’s as if they have a divine right to speak at any moment. Yet when male colleagues are in full flight, we do our ‘active listening’, and send out all those signals which we think are supportive of their right to speak, and they probably think are just weak. Because they sure as hell almost never send them back.

There are several ways to respond to being cut off and talked over. Mostly I ignore it unless he’s a repeat offender. Then, I just keep talking. It makes the point that you were already talking and aren’t about to back out of the conversation. It injects a noise level and tension into the conversation that wasn’t there before and is frankly unpleasant – which is a fair way to spread the pain around, I think. Otherwise, of course, I just turn off the telly.

The end of carry on baggage

by Matt_Bishop on August 10, 2006

Fate is turning me into Crooked Timber’s airline correspondent. One moment I’m calling for the right to use my mobile phone in flight; the next I’m forced to contemplate having no carry on luggage on my flight. I presume that will be one of the consequences of the terror plot apparently uncovered in Britain, which, if there is anything to it (which, despite initial cynicism, there may well be), strongly suggests that however much is spent on pre-screening carry on baggage, there is no way to stop terrorists collectively carrying on enough ingredients to make a bomb in flight.

I am generally a hawk on terrorism, not least as a consequence of being in NY on 9/11. I hope I will be able to congratulate the British police on good work in this instance – and that they keep up that good work. But I wish I felt more confident that this is the case.

Of course, pre-emptive action is better than cleaning up afterwards, and proving that pre-emption actually was needed is inevitably difficult. But British politicians and the police, in particular, do seem sometimes to react in an especially heavy handed way when they pre-empt. (The killing of the Brazilian electrician last summer being the most glaring example.) If they have been tracking the current plot for some time, surely they could have phased in changes in check-in and pre-screening earlier, in ways that avoided the massive disruption to flights we have seen today. I find myself wondering if today’s disruption is deliberate, to send a message – though to whom, and what it is, I’m not sure.

There is surely also a need for some genuinely independent scrutiny of the police and government action with regard to alleged terrorist plots, especially given how few of the plot-arrest headlines actually seem to result in trials. That would make me more confident that something is going on here that is more than political grandstanding and career protection.

But the bigger point today, of course, is that rumours of terrorist plots, and actual plots, are going to remain a fact of life, the authorities have a huge and difficult responsibility that I do ot envy them, and we have only started to see how living with that fact is going to effect how we all go about our daily business. Dammit.

Latter Day presidential candidates

by Matt_Bishop on August 9, 2006

Had lunch with a Wall Street tycoon who has been sizeing up the likely candidates for the Republican presidential ticket in 2008. Other than John McCain, the current front-runner but no shoo-in, he thought Rudy Giuliani had no chance, Bill Frist too intense, Chuck Hagel statesmanlike, but burdened with a voting record, and George Allen a nice guy, but don’t get it, “George Bush lite”. One person impressed him a great deal: Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachussetts, who earlier in his career turned around Bain & Co and then made a success of the Winter Olympics in Utah.

The question that neither of us could answer – and nor apparently could Romney – is how Romney’s mormon faith will play in the primaries, where the hardcore christian right holds sway. My guess, based entirely on time spent with evangelical christians in Britain, is that it will not play well at all. Romney may be a pro-lifer (with a few caveats), but although evangelicals sometimes admire the missionary zeal of mormons, those I have met universally regard mormonism – with its indestructible undergarments, shunning of coffee and magic scripture-reading spectacles – as bonkers, and a cult, up there with or even worse than scientology. Perhaps it is viewed differently in America: does anyone know?

Still, it is the fastest growing religion in the world, apparently, so there may be some supportive voters out there for Mitt, whose sensible economic views may also appeal to centrist Republicans. Meanwhile, I am trying to figure out why I find HBO’s mormon polygamy show, “Big Love”, such compulsive viewing.