June 2007

“Linda Hirshman”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/openuniversity?pid=111777 pronounces from on high on how opinionators in the Mommy Wars should use data:

What’s the difference between our decisions to publish? Well, Morgan Steiner knew about the studies that showed the opposite of what she was saying. Not quibbles at the margin; the opposite conclusions. She even cited the author of one of them in her article. Her distinction was risible and easily falsified. But more to the point, her report was not only factually unreliable, it was also dangerous. Her “good news” could lead women on the fence to quit, thinking they could always go back. Back, yes, but not back to the future.

Good for Linda! But it reminds me that CT never linked to this “Linda Hirshman thread”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&year=2007&base_name=post_2671 in which she gets comprehensively pwned by Mark Schmitt for herself abusing data in the cause of a convenient story. Mark sums it up (rather more politely than I would have done) “thus”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&year=2007&base_name=post_2671#comment-2229788.

Linda, on one more point — you say: “the Don’t Know argument, btw, had you bothered to look, has been definitively refuted by Luskin and Bullock, whom I cite for that point in my post. You know you can learn a lot from reading your adversary’s writing before you respond” …So because of my own dedication to actual facts, I made my way through this paper. Lo and behold, just a single mention of gender in the entire paper! … This is not a “definitive rebuttal” in any sense — they concede the point. … I hadn’t previously questioned your three paragraphs on the data, but I’m beginning to think that you have simply strip-mined the academic literature for evidence that proves your point, rather than evaluated it seriously..

To which Linda’s “devastating comeback”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&year=2007&base_name=post_2671#comment-2231272 is:

Mark, we’re even boring me. Have a nice weekend.

If I’d ever misused data that badly, and been caught at it, I think I’d have wanted to disappear into a hole for a year or two. I certainly wouldn’t start pronouncing anathemas on my opponents for ignoring inconvenient evidence (a sin to be sure, but a rather more venial one than the one that I myself would have been guilty of). But then, I’m not Linda Hirshman.

Emerson (not our John) writes:

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

But, in honor of this panel from Tales of Woodsman Pete, with full particulars [highly recommended!] …

… I thought I would recommend a few good comics about people with powers. [click to continue…]

I’m confused. According to the many media reports, the UCU, successor to the AUT and NATFE and the main trade union representing British academics, “has voted to reinstitute the boycott of Israeli universities”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/worldwide/story/0,,2091769,00.html that the AUT finally rejected last year. But in fact, _as far as I can tell_ , the UCU Congress has done no such thing. Rather it has passed some rather wooly pro-Palestinian resolutions and has ordered its executive to promote discussion of the boycott at branches over the next year or so. The practical effect of this in the world is at best close to zero. In fact it is almost certainly negative: no-one actually gets boycotted but the worst elements of the Israeli right (and the likes of Alan Dershowitz) get a renewed opportunity to portray themselves as victims.

Aside from the general stupidity of the boycott campaign (well “summed-up”:http://unspeak.net/exclusion-wall/ by Steven Poole last year), it promises to consume a lot of energy in fruitless arguments that go nowhere. Last time this happened “I stood up on my hind legs at my local AUT branch and opposed the pro-boycott motion”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/03/ariel-sharon-and-the-aut-boycott/ . I’ll vote against it again this time, when the opportunity presents itself. I have to say though, that I’m a lot less motivated to oppose the boycotters than I was. They are just as wrong as they ever were, but I’ve been sufficiently disgusted by Israeli conduct over the past year (especially in Lebanon) not to feel all that much enthusiasm for making a big effort. And then there’s the fact that when I did speak up against the boycott I received a load of offensive email. Normally, you’d expect to get such email from the people on the other side, telling you what a horrible sellout you’ve been. But I didn’t receive a single bit of hostile email from a pro-Palestinian persepective. Rather, I got a good deal from Likudniks and their American friends who mistakenly assumed that if I opposed the boycott I must share their vile perspective on Arabs generally and Palestinians in particular. (No thanks. Go away! I don’t want email from people like you.)

“Martha Nussbaum’s article in Dissent”:http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=811 puts the case against the boycott pretty well. However there’s one pro-boycott argument that she doesn’t address and which I’ve not heard a good reply to. It doesn’t, for me, outweigh the arguments against, but I do think it weakens the often-put “double standards” argument that anti-Israel measures unfairly discriminate against Israel since there are far worse countries in the world. (This is often accompanied by the further claim that because Israel is picked out whilst other countries are worse, the motive of the boycotters must be sinister and is probably anti-semitic.) The argument is this: that the Israeli perpetrators of injustice are far more vulnerable to outside pressure than, say, the Chinese or the Russians are. Measures taken against Israel therefore stand a better chance of being effective. The Russian treatment of the Chechens or the Chinese treatment of the Tibetans may indeed be worse than the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. But we can take action _now_ to force the Israelis to negotiate and to end the injustice of the occupation, whereas we cannot act with similar prospect of success against Russia or China. Obviously that argument depends on a number of facts about the way the world is. And those facts are highly contestable. But it doesn’t depend (to the contrary!) on any claim that Israel is uniquely or even especially evil or unjust.

… is a term from chess meaning compulsion to move. Most of the time, it’s an advantage to have the next move, but there are situations, particularly in the endgame when you’d much rather it was the other player’s turn.

So it has been with climate change, at least for some players in the game. The big divide in the negotiations for the Kyoto protocol was between the more developed countries, which had created the problem and continued to produce most emissions of greenhouse gases, and the less developed, which were the main source of likely future growth. The agreement reached was that the developed countries would make the first round of cuts, reducing emissions below 1990 levels* by 2012, after which a more comprehensive agreement would require contributions from everyone.

As soon as the Bush Administration was elected though, it denounced this as unfair and said the US would do nothing unless China and India moved first. The Howard government, until then a fairly enthusiastic proponent of Kyoto, immediately echoed the Bush line. Meanwhile, not surprisingly, China and India stuck to the agreement they’d signed and ratified.

The resulting standoff suited lots of people. Most obviously, while the Bushies were denouncing the unfair advantages given to China and India, they were also pushing as hard as they could to ensure that they and other developing countries did nothing that would facilitate a post-Kyoto agreement. And of course plenty of people in China and India were happy enough not to have to take any hard decisions on the topic.

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I know I speak as a Mac user and thus by definition in thrall to the Steve Jobs RDF — though I am not in the market for a phone right now — but looking at these new commercials, it does seem as though the iPhone is going to be a license for Apple to print money. When was the last time you saw a cellphone ad that just went through some of the things the phone could do? And what phone on the market does these things in remotely as integrated and elegant a fashion? It seems like the main unknown is the physical stuff: will it scratch, will the screen get greasy, and all that.

One of the perks of refereeing books for university presses is that you get to pick some books in lieu of money. I try to get stuff that I can’t really justify buying, such as interesting but expensive scholarly books from well outside my field. Which explains why I’ve been reading G.E.M de Ste. Croix’s Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy, a posthumously edited collection of papers. (Ste. Croix’s Big Red Book, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, is terrific, by the way, and rather cheaper.) One of the essays is a classic paper from 1963 on Christian persecution under the Romans. From it, I learned this:
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Josh Cherniss, Harvard grad student and an old friend of Crooked Timber, tells me of an interesting sounding initiative at Harvard for a grad student conference in political theory.

Details below the fold.
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We’ve just had an issue with some spam showing up on the site. Not the run-of-the-mill comment-based sort. It was hidden in a block of html enclosed in a tag. Weirdly, and this is the disturbing bit, it appeared as a block of HTML appended to our index.php file, which really shouldn’t happen at all. The result was that WordPress would render CT pages and then this bit of spam text would be right at the bottom of the html, outside the body tags, etc, as the index.php file closed out.

The permissions on the index.php file are right and our WP installation is up to date. There doesn’t seem to be anything else amiss, and apart from it appearing in a very strange place it seems like automated rather than handcrafted spam. (Another odd thing was that some of the spam links pointed to some personal pages hosted by washington.edu, but I didn’t follow the links.) Unfortunately I don’t know how long the spam has been there. What happened to us is approximately the same as what happened to this guy on the WP support forum, but there wasn’t any helpful followup from that thread. Has anyone encountered this issue before?

We had a scare last year; our eldest was warned that she might need very expensive orthodondistry in order to be able to be a fully-paid up participant in the ideology of perfect teeth. We had a narrow escape — or, at least, a stay of execution, as she is only to be monitored for the next year or so. But at some point the fight will loom; do we spend a fortune on something that we’ll be told is medically valuable by someone whose living is made by contributing to wasteful positional competition. If only everyone had imperfect looking teeth, no-one would care.

But dentists really do matter.
As Anne Alstott reminds us, a large swathe of American children never see an orthodontist, because they never get to see the dentist who might refer them, and with tragic results:

Earlier this year, Deamonte Driver, a 12-year-old boy living in Maryland, died after he got a tooth infection that led to a brain infection. Deamonte had never had routine dental care.The problem wasn’t that he was among America’s 47 million uninsured. He was covered by Medicaid, the federal health-insurance program for the poor, which includes dental care for kids. But Medicaid reimbursement rates for dentists in Maryland—as in many states—are set at such low rates that few dentists accept Medicaid patients.

Driver’s tragedy is only the most extreme consequence of poor access to dentists. Ask any teacher in an elementary school with lots of low income kids, and she’ll tell you stories of kids in prolonged and sometimes intense pain during the schoolday; public money being thrown away on teaching kids who can’t concentrate because they don’t get proper dental care. Anyway,
read the whole thing.

to _Methodenstreit: The Extended Blogospheric Remix_. First, as a few commenters here and there have noted, Herb Gintis’s review of a Post-Autistic Economics reader has disappeared from Amazon. I’ve been in contact with Gintis, who not only didn’t take it down himself, but is rather annoyed at its disappearance. I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing it below the fold for the sake of posterity. Second, I see that an “Econ prof” claims in correspondence with “Ezra Klein”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/05/more_on_heterod.html that “Aklerlof, Stiglitz, etc. all got published very easily.” For Akerlof at least, this “isn’t true”:http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/articles/akerlof/.

I received my first rejection letter from _The American Economic Review_. The editor explained that the Review did not publish papers on subjects of such triviality. In a case, perhaps, of life reproducing art, no referee reports were included. … again rejected on the grounds that the _The Review_ [i.e. _The Review of Economic Studies_ – hf] did not publish papers on topics of such triviality. … The next rejection was more interesting. I sent “Lemons” to the _Journal of Political Economy,_ which sent me two referee reports, carefully argued as to why I was incorrect. After all, eggs of different grades were sorted and sold (I do not believe that this is just my memory confusing it with my original perception of the egg-grader model), as were other agricultural commodities. If this paper was correct, then no goods could be traded (an exaggeration of the claims of the paper). Besides — and this was the killer — if this paper was correct, economics would be different. I may have despaired, but I did not give up. I sent the paper off to the _Quarterly Journal of Economics,_ where it was accepted. I had had such a hard time getting this article published, that I was quite surprised, on a trip to England in the fall of 1973, to discover that, not only had it been read, but even with considerable enthusiasm.

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Following up on a couple of recent posts, I thought it might be useful for me to explain why I don’t think of myself as a ‘heterodox’ economist or even find the concept particularly useful. Although I’m clearly to the left of most people in the economics profession (including a fair number who would call themselves heterodox) I’m happy to identify myself with the mainstream research program in economics.

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Jeff Randall in an article tellingly entitled “It’s not racist to worry about immigration”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=GC4DUTALG01A3QFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/opinion/2007/06/01/do0101.xml&posted=true&_requestid=6551 in the Telegraph:

bq. Never mind arguments over race, diversity and multi-culturalism, England (where most immigrants want to settle) is horribly crowded. With 50 million people, it is the fourth-most densely populated country in the world, excluding city states such as Hong Kong and Dubai.

The trouble with this sort of claim is obvious. If England (density: 388.7 /km²) counts as a country then all kinds of other non-sovereign-state units ought to be included in the sample — New Jersey (438/km²) perhaps, or Puerto Rico (434 /km²), or the Palestinian Territories (615 /km²). But if sovereign states (apart from city states) _are_ the relevant unit, then the UK (243 /km²) comes in behind “rather a lot of places”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density .