February 2007

Alex at “The Yorkshire Ranter” has a go at the concept of “embodied energy“, which is currently quite fashionable in the “Environment” section of my newspaper. I have to say I agree with him.

Anyone who has ever got close even to the very fringes of Sraffian economics or the labour theory of value is bound to be suspicious of attempts to assign a “fundamental, objective” number to a physical object based on adding up dated inputs over the history of the process that produced it. Casting an eye over the research on embodied energy confirms me in this view to some extent; I get exactly the same bilious feeling as layer after layer of complexity gets added to the same basically insoluble problem.
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openDemocracy is doing a week long fundraising drive where donations received will be matched by, amongst others, John le Carre. Here‘s where they explain why openDemocracy is worth supporting. openDemocracy creates “a public space that is exemplary in its democratic virtues: open, participative, jointly created, high quality. This means not only continuing with the news magazine-style offering and forums, but also augmenting it with new options that will create high-quality joint creation on which we all can make a claim.” Now openDemocracy is making a claim in its readers.

Like they say; “Everything on openDemocracy is free to read and free to share. It’s not free to produce.” I read openDemocracy all the time. Time was, I’d stuff copies of the Economist into younger siblings’ backpacks. Recently, a younger sister who’s travelling around the world asked how she might become more informed about global politics. I didn’t hesitate in recommending openDemocracy. It presents a variety of views on the main issues of the day, and also from and about people and places you don’t hear of too often. So if you don’t read it already, take a look. And if you do read it, see if you can dig your hand into your pocket.

Just a reminder to Madisonians that the second installment of our discussions of The Good Childhood takes place tomorrow (Tuesday) night at the Central Library in Madison at 7. This week’s topic will be “The Good Childhood: Does it Exist?” Please come along if you can.
For interested non-Madisonians, a 2-hour long mp3 of the previous discussion is available here (I haven’t listened, because listening to myself talk when I’m not actually talking is very hard!), the text of Sally Schrag’s presentation is here. My presentation is not yet available online, but when it is it will be here. In a week or so I’ll try to present my thoughts here more formally.

Responding to my interview with Danny Postel about Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism, Lindsay Waters writes in an email note (quoted here by permission):

The situation he talks about is same one I know from talking to people about Rawls in US/UK versus the Maghreb and China. For my friends in West, Rawls is as evil as Bush. I don’t buy it, because I have talked to people who live under totally unliberal regimes.

(Yeah, well, never underestimate the lingering appeal in some quarters of the doctrine of social fascism, which led to such exciting results in 1933.)
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Australian news rarely makes it out of the sporting pages internationally (and we’re not looking too good there just now) so it’s pretty exciting for us to make into New York Times coverage of the presidential election campaign. The occasion is a statement by our prime minister, John Howard, to the effect that a vote for the Democrats, and in particular for Barack Obama, would be a vote for Al Qaeda*.

This is not the first time an Australian political leader has commented on the choices available to US electors. A few years ago, then Opposition leader Mark Latham described Bush as ‘incompetent and dangerous’, but this accurate observation did not seem to have much effect in the 2004 US election campaign and probably contributed to Latham’s defeat in the Australian election the same year.

Latham was well known as a loose cannon, and this kind of remark was in character, but Howard has generally been seen as the embodiment of cautious solidity. As far as US politics go, he’s generally been seen as an advocate of unconditional support for US policy, regardless of the political colour of the Administration. He’s been very happy to cash in on his close relationship with Bush, but he was quite keen enough for photo-ops with Clinton. So what possessed him to take a high-risk, low return line like this

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Hurray for BBC! The Beeb has lovingly created a downloadable version of Newsnight reports, interviews and discussions that can be watched for free. Reports are indexed by the following topics; domestic, world, business and economics, culture and entertainment, politics, and science and technology. The list of interviews is pretty mouth-watering, at least for someone like me who doesn’t own a television. And the discussions cover recent issues such as the anniversary of the Act of Union with Scotland, to a panel talking about the interview of Diana, Princess of Wales’ by Martin Bashir back in 1996. (Watching clips of that interview now, it’s hard to feel the sympathy I once did towards the manipulative gurnings of the Queen of Hearts.) It’s all Paxman, all the time. Heaven.

While I’m at it, there are endless downloadable goodies from BBC, including of course The Today Programme, which is celebrating John Humphreys’ 20 years by presenting a set of clips. This year’s Reith Lecturer is Jeffrey Sachs.

Although it’s a far from perfect institution, the BBC seems to take its public service obligations seriously. It’s really embraced downloading of its non externally copyrighted material. I would love to see the material fully searchable, rather than simply indexed. And it’s about time the BBC started putting its back catalogue of documentaries and dramas online. Surely, back in the days before expensive co-productions with HBO, the rights issues should have been trivial? If the BBC wants to win the argument for an increase in the licence fee next time around, opening up its archives would strengthen the case.

(Oh, and to any wing nuts who wish to comment along the lines of ‘hnnh, bbc, root of all evil’; go away and read a book.)

As of January 1st, 2007, I’ve been keeping track of all the books I read/start. This is mostly because by the time I get to the end of the year and want to make a satisfying round-up of what I’ve read, what I’d recommend or trash, I find I can’t remember more than half a dozen of them. Two years out of three, I’m between homes and most of my books are in storage again, so I can’t run a finger along the shelf to prompt a memory of the year’s reading. Also, in a spirit of self-improvement I started lots of non-fiction books and know myself well enough to realise that a reporting system may be the only thing that makes me finish them. And finally, because my partial training in history and the social sciences gives me faith that data collected even for subjective purposes can be revealing of unexpected things. We shall see. [click to continue…]

Here’s a bit from a “New Yorker piece”:http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/070219fa_fact_mayer on Joel Surnow, creator of the TV series _24_.

bq. Surnow’s rightward turn was encouraged by one of his best friends, Cyrus Nowrasteh, a hard-core conservative who, in 2006, wrote and produced “The Path to 9/11,” a controversial ABC miniseries that presented President Clinton as having largely ignored the threat posed by Al Qaeda. … Nowrasteh, the son of a deposed adviser to the Shah of Iran, grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, where, like Surnow, he was alienated by the radicalism around him. … Nowrasteh said that he and Surnow regard “24” as a kind of wish fulfillment for America. “Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business,” he said. “It’s a deep, dark ugly world out there. Maybe this is what Ollie North was trying to do. It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business—even kill people. Jack Bauer fulfills that fantasy.

It would be nice to have a secret government to take care of things. That’s certainly what the Shah of Iran thought. I remember reading a report of an interview from the late 1970s with the Shah. He was asked what he thought of the methods SAVAK used to obtain confessions. “They are getting better every day,” he replied.

I’ll mimic Chris’s announcement by mentioning that my old, erratic, permalink-less eyesore of a “blog” (if that was even the word for it) is dead, now that Arts Journal has offered to host something a bit more normally bloggy. It’s called Quick Study, and even has RSS feeds. It feels like I’m finally on the cutting edge of several years ago.

This is a note to former readers of my blog “Junius”, which I abandoned when we set up Crooked Timber back in 2003. Because of issues with the transition to the “new” (googlified) Blogger, I’ve deleted the site. I did save the archives first, though, and I may make these available from an new location if there’s any demand (and if I get round to it).

From the acknowledgements page of Christopher Howard’s _The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=christopher%20howard%20hidden%20welfare%20state&PID=29956 has cheap hardbacks).

No one in his right mind would choose to study and write about tax expenditures (better known as tax loopholes) knowing in advance that it entailed a ten year commitment. Investigating the ins and outs of the byzantine U.S. tax code is simply not its own reward, which is why many people pay lawyers and accountants good money to do it for them. If someone were going to study tax expenditures for longer than a day or two, he or she would need to come upon the topic by accident. Over time, that someone might develop a curious affection for tax expenditures, much as one does for a stray dog or cat that keeps hanging around the house. Even then, one would have to remind oneself constantly that studying tax expenditures was not the ultimate goal, but a means of saying something interesting about a larger issue, like U.S. social policy. At least that has been my experience.

I just took a cab to work, trying in vain to get to an interesting talk before it started, and got stuck in traffic. While stranded in a traffic jam somewhere around Connecticut and L I was somewhat bemused to see a whopping big advertisement on the back of the bus in front of me for The Hill‘s Pundit Blog. I tried to get a photo with my phone, but screwed it up. It made me feel pretty weird; it’s a very different blogosphere to the one that I started off in (I suspect the disconnect for the real old-timers is even bigger).

My archiving post got good results. If you want to cite a webpage (in an academic paper, say) and you want to do your best to ensure that the URL you provide will live – even if the page you link goes away – best practices would seem to be: submit the page to WebCite. It’s easy! I tried it. Also, if the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive knows about your page, that’s probably good enough as well. It’s interesting: neither of these archives really has extensive search capabilities. You wouldn’t use them to find something. But stuff is kept there. By contrast, google is for finding, but not for keeping.

Also, it turns out the Internet Archive has a great vintage trailer for one of my all time favorite films: The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T!

“Henry”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/07/ip-law-and-bird-flu/ remarks that “my mental model of Tyler [Cowen] often sit[s] on my shoulder while I blog, making polite and well reasoned libertarian criticisms of my arguments.” This follows on from Tyler’s “own advice”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/09/the_phantom_me.html to his grad students:

bq. You have a model of me, a pretty good one, and you know what I will object to and what will delight me. The Phantom Tyler Cowen objects, in your head, before the real Tyler Cowen has much of a chance. That is why the real Tyler Cowen is sometimes so silent.

_My_ mental model of Tyler Cowen says, “This sounds like a rationalization to me.” Meanwhile, “Brad DeLong asks”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/is_henry_farrel.html,

bq. Is Henry Farrell especially sane or especially insane?

for having a model of Tyler sitting on his shoulder making comments. My mental model of Brad DeLong says to my mental model of Tyler Cowen, “Why oh why are we ruled by this idiot?” My mental model of Eugene Volokh says, “This is much worth reading.” But my mental model of Orin Kerr replies, “My sense is that this is much ado about nothing.” My mental model of Bitch, Ph.D begins to object that she is not a brain on a stick before realizing that, being a mental model, in fact she is. Uniquely, my mental model of Dan Drezner has his own mental model of himself, which he refers to as “Ed.” Finally, my model of Cosma Shalizi has the unusual property of being smarter than I am. This ought to be impossible, but of course _I_ can’t understand its explanation of how this could be the case.