December 2006

For many of us, the hope has been that as same-sex marriage gains a foothold, it will seem less threatening and scary – more normal – to many people and opposition will temper. A data point from Canada:

Yesterday, the Canadian House of Commons voted to uphold same-sex marriage. According to the Global and Mail, “Prime Minister Stephen Harper has declared the contentious issue of same-sex marriage to be permanently closed…. The vote yesterday, which fulfilled a Conservative election promise, marked the sixth time since 2003 that the House of Commons has decided in favour of same-sex marriage.”

But what was striking to me was that opponents of same-sex marriage seemed simply to be going through the motions. According to the Washington Post: “The prime minister expended little visible effort to try to win the vote, and political commentators suggested that he simply wanted to put the issue behind him before another national election was called.”

A long article in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed covers the findings and recommendations in the MLA’s final report on tenure. Much of the same material is covered by The Chronicle of Higher Education here, I’d guess, but who knows? Short of selling blood — and quite a lot of it — I cannot afford to read anything they publish.
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Thanks, Chris. And thanks to the people who contributed to the excellent comment thread. Let me try to continue the discussion by attempting to clarify what I had in mind in the passage that Chris quotes.

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We CTers don’t agree about everything, and here’s a case in point. I was reading Jon’s excellent “Global Justice”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745630669/junius-20 the other day and was arrested by the following sentences:

bq. When we face the question of how state borders should be drawn, it would be utopian in the pejorative sense to consider carving up territories from an imaginary state of nature. That is not a problem we will ever face. Because the current world is already divided into states, the question we must face concerns the possibility of redrawing existing borders. (p. 89)

Here Jon is echoing, and, indeed, referencing, similar sentiments by other philosopher, including Allen Buchanan whose “Theories of Secession” I was reading about the same time. Of course I agree with them both that, as a practical problem, we’re never going to face the issue of justifying state acquisition of territory _ab initio_. But the task of political philosophy isn’t just to provide practical guidance, it is also to produce critical understanding, and, anyway, there’s the question of the moral attitude individuals ought to adopt to the territorial (and other) claims of states. States claim the moral right to coerce those within their territory, to prevent others from crossing their frontiers, to deport aliens etc etc. We may have to live with the territoriality of states as a fact of life, but depending on whether we think state claims are justified (or could be justified) we’ll think differently about the morality of people who try to cross borders and people who try to stop them (among other issues). We’ll also think differently about history. The rise of the modern state and the claim of states to jurisdiction (separately or communally) over the earth’s surface, has been at the expense of non-state forms of organization, of tribal peoples, of anarchists. Simply accepting the legitimacy of statist territorial claims shuts out the perspective of the losers in an disturbingly peremptory fashion.

One of the most annoying responses we get from our students is when we ask what (if anything) might justify some aspect of social life (income inequality, say) and they shrug and reply “That’s just the way the world is”. Maybe. And maybe it always will be. But that doesn’t mean we should shirk the task of justification. Of course there’s a difficulty here, because we often aspire to practicality. But utopianism _in the pejorative sense_ is surely theorizing that assumes crazy things about human nature (universal perfect altruism, for example). Discussing state jurisdiction isn’t like this. We have states _now_ but they aren’t a permanent feature of the human condition in the way that some psychological or physiological facts plausibly are.

(Recommendation: A. John Simmons, “On the Territorial Rights of States” , _Philosophical Issues_ 35(2001) (Supplement to _Nous_ ).)

One the day my child turned one, “TRex”:http://www.firedoglake.com/index.php?author=35 wrote about “Esten”:http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/12/06/late-nite-fdl-for-esten/, a three year old boy with leukemia, asking his readers to donate money for his treatment.

I am surprised about my increasing inability to read posts about children in pain, or children in miserable circumstances, without producing tears. Is it age? Or is it triggered by a growing awareness of how vulnerable children can be? Or a permanent change in my hormonal balanance due to childbearing or breastfeeding? Or is it the psychological effects of motherhood?

Whatever…. Hang in there, Esten!

Did you know?

On April 2, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany despite considerable public opposition. Just a few months after the United States entered the war, Secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, called the public mood a “delirium”. Sauerkraut became liberty cabbage, German Shepards became Alsatians and the city of Syracuse banned pinochle, a German card game. The press published calls for mass hangings of “disloyal German-Americans” and some clergymen compared Germans to cholera germs that must be annihilated. Despite this, naturalized Germans collected relief funds for the Red Cross and served in the U.S. Army.

They banned pinochle? (Wikipedia informs me it is etymologically derived from the German Binokel.) ‘Liberty cabbage’ puts that whole ‘freedom fries’ episode in perspective. At least we aren’t getting any dumber. I wonder whether some shrewd entrepreneur marketed pinochle decks under the badass tempting slogan ‘banned in Syracuse!’

For all you game theorists out there, Hammad Siddiqi (2006): The social norm of leaving the toilet seat down: A game theoretic analysis. Unpublished (available “here”:http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/856/ as PDF). Don’t bother with the obvious jokes about trembling hand equilibria – the author has made them already. Via “Mark Thoma”:http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/12/that_settles_it.html.

Andrew Sullivan posts a copy of this compilation of AT&T ads from 1993 predicting the future. They did a great job predicting what is today available to many. And remember, 1993 was the year when the first Windows-based browser was released helping along wide public access to the Web. But at that point little of this was obvious.

I wanted to find the video on YouTube directly. I didn’t realize you could just get to the specific YouTube page by clicking on the video window anywhere but the play button so I proceeded by searching for it on YouTube. I got one result (not the right one) for at&t 1993. A search for at&t ads didn’t give me this hit either.

At that point, I decided to just click on Share in the YouTube player (which annoyingly resizes my entire browser window) and tweak the URL from share to view to get to the page. That’s one way to do it (but again, clicking anywhere but the play button is probably the easiest if you already have the video of interest:). If you don’t have the specific video then it seems best to do a site-specific search for the video on Google as such: site:youtube.com at&t 1993. I wonder when YouTube search will be powered by Google given the acquisition.

UPDATE: I’m told by someone who seems to be a reliable source (but who wishes to remain anonymous) that this is something that they are, indeed, working on and it will be one of the first integrations as part of the acquisition.

‘Tis the season for buying gifts (lots of us have December birthdays*, you know). So I’m starting a discussion of various gift ideas. My plan is to post about items that I have bought myself and so can recommend with confidence. Alternatively, I may suggest some do-it-yourself projects on occasion.

I’ll start things off with the latter. Consider giving someone a personalized memory game made up of photos that would be of interest either because they portray people/places of interest to the person, or because they are simply great photos. More details on this here. Note, however, that creating multiple wallet-sized photos can get expensive quickly. If you’re short on cash, but have time, you may consider editing images that contain a pair of two images each and then simply getting the regular size photos of these. That way, you can get two pairs for 5-10c each instead of 99c each with a leftover pair.

Another idea is to use one of the many amusing tools from fd’s Flickr toys. You can create a funny motivation poster, a magazine cover, a movie poster, or lots of other things and get these printed out. Regular size photo print-outs are only about 10-20c so definitely on the cheap side. And note that despite the site’s name, these don’t require a Flickr account, you can upload a photo directly from your computer.

Photojojo has additional ideas. I am intrigued by their Fotoclips selling for $15 (including shipping), but I haven’t bought any of those nor have I ever tried them out so this is just a pointer, not a recommendation.

Of course, nowadays, you can get a photo printed on just about anything, but the above items are mainly do-it-yourself so fairly cheap and have that extra personal touch.

[*] No worries, I’m well aware of the comment “There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age eleven.” Nonetheless, if you care to contribute to my upcoming celebrations, I’m collecting photos of the number 3 from around the world. So email me one (or three for that matter) if you can. You could also post these on Flickr and just send me the link. (Yes, I know I can find tons of 3s on Flickr, but these would be from you to me.:)

This week I’m blogging only work-related things and from deep inside a hotel (which I’ve not left for days) on the outskirts of Sao Paulo. Sounds fun, eh?

ICANN staff are generally held to be defensive, secretive and to have a bunker mentality. So in a bid to be more open, or just to arouse some sympathy, we’re making an effort to blog our AGM. (Anyone can actually blog it, it’s just that staff are being encouraged to.) If you’re interested in how the meeting is going, e.g. issues, meeting reports, web references and local colour, please come to a site that lets people not in Sao Paulo to participate in the meeting. There are web chats, links to video, audio and real time transcription, and a blog. It’s called the ICANN Sao Paulo Participation Website.

It’s all been set up by journalist Kieren McCarthy, and the idea is for us to use this whole Internet thing a bit more to let people be part of how it’s actually run.

Although we’ve been on the same panel once before, Minnesota sociologist “Chris Uggen”:http://www.chrisuggen.com/ clearly travels on a “rougher conference circuit”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/2006/12/mickey.html than me.

A quick question about the Social Security debate last year that CT readers may be able to help me with. I remember some newspaper somewhere publishing an article in which un-named Democrats thanked bloggers like Josh Marshall for helping corral the mavericks during the Social Security debate. Does anyone remember where that article is? More generally, actual evidence on whether bloggers did or didn’t influence this debate would be helpful (I’m pretty sure that they did, but hard evidence on this is difficult to come by).

MSNBC prints a puff piece from Forbes on Richard Branson’s approach to charity – he’s been for it since September, apparently. “At Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative in New York, Branson pledged all proceeds from Virgin Group’s transportation divisions be donated to develop alternative fuel sources and alleviate global warming. His pledge amounts to about $3 billion over ten years.”

But get this: “Branson didn’t even believe in global warming until five years ago. Then he read Bjorn Lomborg’s, The Skeptical Environmentalist.”

Just imagine if he had been reading Quiggin’s posts – on his own website back to August, 2001, and here and here and here and here, for example. On the other hand, could it be that Lomborg served as the thin edge of the wedge and that Branson allowed himself to be convinced by the evidence only because the “solution” Lomborg presents is pretty much to wait until technology solves the problem? Regardless, and not to quibble about the definition of “charity” at work in the article, it’s certainly good that Branson is putting money toward developing alternative fuel sources.

In yet another round of the controversy over discounting in the Stern Report, Megan McArdle refers to Stern’s use of “a zero or very-near-zero discount rate”. Similarly Bjorn Lomborg refers to the discount rate as “extremely low” and Arnold Kling complains says that it’s a below-market rate.

So what is the discount rate we are talking about? Stern doesn’t pick a fixed rate but rather picks parameters that determine the discount rate in a given projection. The relevant parameters are the pure rate of time preference (delta) which Stern sets equal to 0.1 and the intertemporal elasticity of substitution (eta) which Stern sets equal to 1. The important parameter is eta, which reflects the fact that since people in the future will mostly be richer than us, additional consumption in the future is worth less than additional consumption now.

Given eta = 1, the discount rate is equal to the rate of growth of consumption per person, plus delta which is 0.1. A reasonable estimate for the growth rate is 2 per cent, so Stern would have a real discount rate of 2.1 per cent. Allowing for 2.5 per cent inflation that’s equal to a nominal rate of 4.6 per cent. The US 10-year bond rate, probably the most directly comparable market rate, is currently 4.44 per cent; a bit above its long-run average in real terms. So, Stern’s approach produces a discount rate a little above the real bond rate.

Arguments about discounting are unlikely to be settled any time soon. There’s a strong case for using bond rates as the basis for discounting the future. There are also strong arguments against, largely depending on how you adjust for risk. But to refer to the US bond rate as “near-zero” or “extremely low” seems implausible, and to say it’s below-market is a contradiction in terms. It seems as if these writers have confused the discount rate with the rate of pure time preferences.