December 2006

We’ve posted before here about the “horridness of Christmas Music”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/12/06/most-annoying-christmas-record. Ian McDonald has the “antidote”:http://ianmcdonald.livejournal.com/52744.html.

captainlucy makes the blinding discovery that Christmas muzak can be made bearable by inserting the word ‘Sex’ for ‘Christmas’.

‘I wish it could be sex everyday…’ etc etc.

It can also be made deeply disturbing, vide the first line from ‘Do they know it’s Christmas…

I’ve been away without ordered leave from the blogosphere for the last couple of weeks – the joys of end-of-semester committee crunch and grading. But two things that I’ve wanted to link to:

“Greg Bloom”:http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/12/3/231739/424 has another series of posts on the ways in which the Fund for Public Interest Research has resisted unionization efforts. The way in which many purportedly lefty organizations refuse to let their workers bargain for decent conditions is pretty shameful.

Alexander Mueller, fresh from porting over Susanna Clarke has translated the China Mieville seminar “into German too”:http://molochronik.antville.org/stories/1528809/. Great stuff.

Finally, I’ve been meaning for a while to link to this “Nir Rosen piece”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR31.6/rosen.html, which is the best and most detailed on the ground discussion that I’ve seen of Iraq’s descent into civil war. I see via “TPM Muckraker”:http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002155.php that Rosen is venturing into the blogosphere.

Last night I mentioned to my wife — a reference librarian at the Library of Congress whose areas of concentration include e-commerce and information technology — that the BBC website had just run a story headlined “Blogging ‘set to peak next year.”” Here it is.

Her response to this was a sound (one I cannot quite transcribe) conveying a subtle blend of disbelief, disgust, and world-weariness. It was not at all a matter of pro-blog parti pris; rather, it reflected a deeply informed disdain for the methods and presumptions usually involved in making such predictions. As usual, I payed close attention to her opinion in the matter. (Reference librarians have amazing powers.)
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Next time you want to link to a New York Times article on your blog or want to bookmark it for future reference, you no longer have to rely on a bookmarklet to generate a permanent link. On each article page, there is now a Share link that reveals links to some sites plus the possibility of obtaining a permanent link to the piece.

The automatic link options are to Digg, Facebook and Newswine. What curious choices. I would love to know what went into those decisions, possible deals or whatnot. Digg users seem mostly interested in tech news so while it may make sense to have a quick link to that service on science and technology pieces, it doesn’t make sense on other sections of the NYTimes site. The idea suggested on The Mu Life about different links depending on the part of the site makes sense. And where are quick links to Reddit, Netscape, Yahoo My Web and del.icio.us, just to name a few. Has the Facebook user demographic changed significantly in recent months away from college students? If not (and I haven’t heard of any such significant changes) then why assume that users of that system would be most likely to want to bookmark and share NYTimes articles?

In any case, the good news is that they had the sense to create a permalink option that you can use to add the page to the social bookmarking site of your choice, which would be del.icio.us in my case thanks to its automated post-to-blog feature.

In the spirit of supporting the long tail, I thought I’d link to a few nifty items you likely won’t find in stores, but that are just as worthy as many of the items that are backed by big marketing budgets.

I found the booklet “Why Mommy is a Democrat” one day by clicking on a sponsored link in GMail (the line just above the message area). I liked the idea of communicating a message of this sort to little kids so I ordered a copy. I like the way the author and illustrator approached the topic. The idea of self-publishing something of this sort is also interesting. I purposefully use the word booklet instead of book despite the information on the site. The “book” feels more like a booklet. That doesn’t detract from its value. I mention it in the interest of realistic expectations. Cost: $10 including shipping in North America (with some possible savings for bulk orders).

On a different note, I highly recommend the California Soups and Salads 2006-07 Academic Calendar by Susan Beach. It covers September, 2006-December, 2007. Each month comes with a very inviting photo of a wonderful soup or salad dish plus its recipe on the side. Susan is our resident chef here at the Center and is an amazing cook. This could be a great gift for a myriad of people. Cost: $10 including shipping.

Moving on, I found the jams and jellies maker McKenzie’s Own at a summer fair last year and thought their products were divine. I bought two spreads: Mom’s Horseradish Spread and the White Chocolate Raspberry Spread. Both were great. Cost: $6.50 each plus $6.00 shipping.

I only have experience with online ordering regarding the first product, the others I bought in person. Full disclosure: I have no financial interest in promoting these products, I bought them and liked them, that’s all there is to it. I do know Susan personally though.

The site Etsy hosts lots of independent sellers although some of the products there tend to be on the expensive side. Lulu lets people self-publish books, calendar, etc. Of course, one can also find independents on ebay and on various corners of the Web. But what are those corners? Do share your favorites, I’m always curious to find the hidden gems.

This is second in the Gift guide series. Next week: giving through donations.

Homecoming is, for me, always an invitation to unnatural acts – specifically, reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page. (Hey. Dad’s a subscriber.) For example, this Bret Stephens piece (Dec. 12), “Honor Killing” [maybe a web link, but I’m not seeing it]:

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that in America morals count for a lot while honor counts for relatively little. Reading the lamentable report of the Iraq Study Group, it shows.

The operative word in the ISG report is “should,” which is what grammarians call a defective verb. The report easily contains more than a 100 shoulds, varying tonally from hectoring to plaintive to nitpicking …

By contrast the word “honor” appears just once: “We also honour the many Iraqis who have sacrificed on behalf of their country,” writes ISG co-chairman James Baker and Lee Hamilton, who also put in a kind word for our Coalition allies.

But honor isn’t simply a sentimental verb. It is a decisive principle of action in all foreign policy, never more so than in the honor-obsessed Middle East. It is not about good intentions, wisdom or virtue, but about appearances and perception. “Honor acts solely for the public eye,” wrote Tocqueville. In practice, it means standing by one’s friends and defying one’s enemies, whatever the price. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War Richard Nixon ordered the military resupply of Israel in its hour of need not because he was sympathetic to Jews – he wasn’t – but because he understood that the U.S. could not be seen to let a client down. Nine months later, he was accorded a ticker-tape parade through the streets of Cairo.

Then Stephens accuses the authors of the report of failing ‘the test of honor’ by conceding, with their first sentence, that “the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.” Then it actually gets worse. (And, obviously, we could back up and point out that there are problems with reducing honor to ‘help your friends, hurt your enemies’. This confusion, I’ll wager, has more than a little to do with the man’s bizarre allergy to ‘should’, in a document that is supposed to recommend a course of action.) But let’s go back to the Tocqueville quote. It’s actually interesting to read how the quoted passage continues: [click to continue…]

What seems to me a very curious story about Christian groups being drummed out of the student union at Exeter University, is reported here and here. Comment from the Archbishop of Cantebury here. It seems that funding has been withheld because they require members to confirm that they are Christians. I suppose this could be reasonable — the student leaders say that they only want to fund groups that are open to anybody. But who wants to join a Christian Union other than Christians? If I remember correctly the Socialist group I belonged to at college was self-financing, but I’ve no idea whether we could have gotten access to funds if we’d wanted to. We’d certainly have resisted being open to Tories…but its not clear why they’d have joined. And the demand that they change their name because it is misleading (apparently the authorities think that “Christian Union” might mislead potential members into thinking that they are joining an ecumenical group of theists, agnostics, and atheists, whereas it seems obvious that the “Church of England Union” would be the moniker for that group) seems completely bizarre. I hereby demand that the Labour and Conservative parties change their names on the same grounds! The Christians are threatening legal action, and although my instinct is that they must surely be in the right, at least as a matter of reasonableness if not actual law, I do wonder if there is something going on here that isn’t being represented in the stories. I found the online student newspaper of the Exeter students, which is not much more illuminating (apart from the fact that it carries an interview with Noel Edmonds, which is revealing about something). Does anyone know what is going on here?

My old friend John Palattella is taking over as poetry editor at The Nation. The news brings to mind an image of him surrounded (menaced, even) by large sacks full of envelopes containing manuscripts that are very earnest indeed. The announcement from the editors notes that, as critic, John has shown “sensitivity to form, historical erudition, and a refusal of the provincial dogmas that so often balkanize the small world of poetry.” Quite right, and it will be interesting to see how he translates personal sensibility into editorial policy.

The fact that I am mentioning this has nothing at all to do with the considerable progress this past year on Nikolai!, my epic about Bukharin, composed entirely in limericks.

Aha, via “Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2006/12/the_averaged_am.html I see that a book I’ve been waiting for has just been published. Sarah Igo’s The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public is a study of the history of quantitative social research in America, documenting how Americans came to think of themselves as the subjects of social science, and how the categories of survey research got embedded in our culture. From the publisher:

bq. Igo argues that modern surveys, from the Middletown studies to the Gallup Poll and the Kinsey Reports, projected new visions of the nation: authoritative accounts of majorities and minorities, the mainstream and the marginal. They also infiltrated the lives of those who opened their doors to pollsters, or measured their habits and beliefs against statistics culled from strangers. Survey data underwrote categories as abstract as “the average American” and as intimate as the sexual self. With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation. Tracing how ordinary people argued about and adapted to a public awash in aggregate data, she reveals how survey techniques and findings became the vocabulary of mass society–and essential to understanding who we, as modern Americans, think we are.

I knew Sarah in grad school and heard her present parts of the project once or twice. It seemed to me then that she was going to write an absolutely first-class book. Apparently it’s just won the Social Science History Association’s President’s book award, so it looks like I was right.

This is the first year that we’ve contributed to the local NPR affiliate. I listen to NPR a fair bit, and so does my wife, but, unlike her, I’d happily do without it myself. It enhances my life, but not in a way that I value enough that I would pay if they turned it into a subscription-only service (she made the contribution, then, obviously).

I probably spend a similar amount of time listening to BBC7. On my new website I mention that it could have been dreamed up just for me – the best of BBC radio’s irresponsibly depleted archives, and an old school friend of mine is their best presenter; a joy. I’d be embarrassed to admit how much I’d be willing to pay if they made it subscription-only.

So, what if some super-national governmental agency decided to charge me to pay for the enjoyment I get from NPR and BBC7? Would I have a reasonable complaint against it? Just to put one issue aside – I wouldn’t complain, in either case. But I think I would have a complaint in one case and not in the other. I’d have a complaint in the case of NPR because my relationship to NPR is like that of the shoemaker to the elves. They do something nice for me, which I enjoy, but I didn’t ask for it, and if I’d been offered the choice between paying for it or not getting it at all, I’d have chosen the latter. But BBC7 is quite different; not only do I plan around it, but if I’d had the choice between paying for it and not getting it I’d have chosen the former (at an embarrassingly high price).

So, I don’t think I’ve any complaint if they charge me for BBC7 but I do if they charge me for NPR. To say this is different from saying that the people who, in fact, pay for BBC7 and NPR, have a complaint against me if I don’t contribute. Suppose (counterfactually, but to keep the focus where I want it to be) that both are paid for entirely voluntarily by people who are producing them just for themselves and I only get the benefit from them because they don’t know how to exclude non-contributors. If the contributors are securing what they want at a price they are voluntarily paying, it might be a bit oafish of me to consume it without contributing when I could, but it is hard for me to see that I am doing something unjust to them. So my intuition is that even though there is no injustice when I do not contribute to the production costs of BBC7, there is no injustice, either, when I am forced to contribute as much as or less than I would have voluntarily contributed in order to secure access if that were the only way of doing it.

Am I right about this? I’m sure that David Schmidtz says something about it in The Limits of Government, and even surer that Tyler Cowen does in his wonderful In Praise of Commercial Culture, but some bugger walked off with my copies of both! And I’m impatient to hear your thoughts.

I’ll write a follow-up post explaining what this post is really about in a week or so.

In November, voters in Ohio passed Issue 5, which more or less prohibits smoking in public places. There are exceptions, but not many; they are spelled out without much wiggle room. A friend who teaches in a small city there tells me it’s a relief to be able to go out for dinner now in a restaurant that doesn’t smell like old ashtrays. But he also had to write a letter to a local newspaper complaining about the editorializing in their coverage of Issue 5. The headline for a news article read something like “Freedom Abolished in Ohio.”

Well, it turns out that was just the tip of one great big iceberg of crazy. In a letter to the Toledo Blade appearing on Sunday, one John T. Kleeberger, of Metamora, identifies “the ominous parallels” (to use what I believe may be the term of art for such exercises).
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Having lived to a greater age than nearly all of his thousands of victims, and having succeeded in evading justice, the butcher Pinochet is “dead at last”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6167237.stm .

Belle and I are preparing to fly home to the old country. A while back some of you asked about good comics for kids. It so happens I have a couple fine choices I am preparing to dispense on the long plane flight: Owly comics, by Andy Runton. At the author’s site you can preview lots of stuff. It’s very charming and suitable for anyone over the age of 2. No words. Just pictures of worms and birds and the occasional squirrel. So, for example, over a 10 page spread, Owly rescues Wormy from drowning in a puddle and nurses him back to health. Then the two set off to find Wormy’s parents. (That from The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer. You can preview it.) Here’s an amazon link.

Brad DeLong carries on the discussion about discounting and the Stern Review, responding to a critique by Partha Dasgupta that has already been the subject of heated discussion. As Brad says, all Dasgupta’s assumptions are reasonable, and his formal analysis is correct

But … The problem I see lies in a perfect storm of interactions:

This brings me to one of my favorite subjects: the equity premium puzzle and its implications, in this case for the Stern Review. I’ll try and explain in some detail over the page, but for those who prefer it, I’ll self-apply the DD condenser and report

Shorter JQ: It’s OK to use the real bond rate for discounting while maintaining high sensitivity to risk and inequality.

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