October 2007

Suppose there were an Iranian cult combining Islamism and Stalinism, with a history of terrorist attacks, that had enjoyed friendly relations with Saddam’s regime, back when.

Why, that’s something that the American right would fund a special TV network just to denounce 24-7, isn’t it?

Not so fast. Daniel Pipes and Max Boot think the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) is just sadly misunderstood. Get the backstory at the Campaign for America’s Future.

Myself and the wife have been watching the second series of _Heroes_, which is finally beginning to pick up after a slow start (although the spunky cheerleader needs to lose the drippy boyfriend _immediately_ ). One of the subplots plays out, strangely enough, among the Cork criminal underclass, or at least the show producer’s idea of same. The accents of these purported Corkonian ne’er-do-wells are nothing short of atrocious. Perhaps it’s understandable that there’s nothing at all resembling an actual Cork accent to be found among them; that might be a bit much to inflict on unsuspecting American television viewers. But there’s not much in the way of _Irish_ accents, full stop. One fella who thinks that Irish people speak like Scotsmen with adenoids, another with standard mid-Atlantic intonations, and a British actress who at least seems to have heard Irish people talking once upon a time, even if her ability to imitate them slips in and out of focus. The nadir was reached when one of the actors pronounced “Slainte” as “slah-in-che” on this week’s show (all they needed to do to get this one right was to do a bloody “Google search”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=k6w&q=slainte+pronounce&btnG=Search). This is all quite unnecessary – I can testify from a considerable personal acquaintance that unemployed Real Irish Actors with Real Irish Accents are not a commodity in short supply.

That said, the problem goes both ways. We also recently saw the first episode of _Spooks_ (MI5 on this side of the Atlantic), a BBC production, which has an abortion clinic bomber whose purported Southern US accent had to be heard to be believed. My wife didn’t even realize that it was meant to be an American accent until I told her (a later episode’s subplot concerning the vast amounts of WTO cash subsidizing the Russian economy did little to add to my estimate of the show’s commitment to verisimilitude). So anyway, I thought that there might be some entertainment value in a thread on Bad TV/movie Accents that you have heard (and good ones too, if you like; the best Hollywood Irish accent by far that I’ve heard was Brad Pitt in _Snatch_ – it approached a kind of incomprehensible Platonic ideal of dense Midlands guttural).

A (slightly ponderous) documentary on a set of rare sound recordings of British and Irish POWs from World War I. First recordings are just after 10 minutes in. I liked the way the speed of the shellac recording is calibrated by matching an A note on the last groove to the A from a tuning fork. At 23″ or so there’s a recording of a man telling the parable of the Prodigal Son, where the difference between the ‘a’ in _father_ and the ‘a’ in _man_ is quite striking. At about 35″ there’s an nice example of the problems associated with interpreting material like this: another recording of the Prodigal Son story (a set text for the German academics who were interested in English accents) is played to a woman who knew the solider speaking, with interesting results.

The debate about IQ and race is rearing its ugly head again with James Watson’s “charming interview statements”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/17/nwatson117.xml about IQ and how while

there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal …”people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”‘

Thus, this “monster post”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html by Cosma Shalizi (a sequel to his earlier piece on heritability), discussing why _g_, the purported general factor of intelligence, is a statistical myth, is well timed, even if (as Cosma “notes elsewhere”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/524.html it’s not much more then yet another bloody iteration of the lessons that statisticians have been hammering home again and again for decades, but which don’t seem to have penetrated the public debate.

In primitive societies, or so Malinowski taught, myths serve as the legitimating charters of practices and institutions. Just so here: the myth of _g_ legitimates a vast enterprise of intelligence testing and theorizing. There should be no dispute that, when we lack specialized and valid instruments, general IQ tests can be better than nothing. Claims that they are anything more than such stop-gaps — that they are triumphs of psychological science, illuminating the workings of the mind; keys to the fates of individuals and peoples; sources of harsh truths which only a courageous few have the strength to bear; etc., etc., — such claims are at present entirely unjustified, though not, perhaps, unmotivated. They are supported only by the myth, and acceptance of the myth itself rests on what I can only call an astonishing methodological backwardness.

The bottom line is: The sooner we stop paying attention to _g,_ the sooner we can devote our energies to understanding the mind.

Health warning – a little statistics required to follow the argument, albeit no more then you’re likely to have gotten in your first grad school class on multiple regresssion in the social sciences (about which last Cosma also has some unkind words to impart in passing).

Following up my post on consumption and living standards in the US, there was a fair bit of discussion of what’s been happening to leisure. Juliet Schor and others have argued that the long-term trend towards reduced hours of work and more leisure reversed some time in the 1970s, and people have been working harder since then. A study by Aguair and Hurst (the final QJE article is subscription-only, but I found a preliminary version here) has been widely quoted as proving the opposite (here, for example, by Tyler Cowen) and the abstract seems to support this interpretation, saying “We find that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked between 1965 and 2003.”

However the data periods don’t exactly match up. It turns out that, using any of the definitions of leisure considered by Aguair and Hurst, the majority of the increase in leisure time took place between 1965 and 1975, and most measures show little change since 1985.

There’s an important gender/family dimension too. On Aguair and Hurst measures 1 and 2 (which exclude child care), leisure time for women peaked in 1985 or 1993 and has declined since then, while leisure time for men has been increased marginally since 1985.

So that readers can make their own comparisons, I’ve extracted the relevant table, which is over the fold. I’d say it matches Schor’s story (increasing leisure until the late 70s followed by a decline) at least as well as that suggested by the authors (“dramatic” long-term increases in leisure)

There’s lots more data in the Aguiar and Hirst paper and one point worth noting is that the trend in the distribution of leisure time is the opposite of that in income. High income, high education people have experienced a significant decline in leisure relative to those with low income and low education. That somewhat offsets the growth in income inequality over the same period. Also, combined with the gender pattern I already mentioned, it almost certainly means that educated women have, on average, less leisure than in the late 1970s.

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Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz have an “article”:http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2007.32.2.7 in the new _International Security_ declaring that liberal internationalism is dead.

The prevailing wisdom is that the Bush administration’s assertive unilateralism, its aversion to international institutions, and its zealous efforts to spread democracy in the Middle East represent a temporary departure from the United States’ traditional foreign policy. … Indeed, influential think tanks and foreign policy groups are already churning out action plans for reviving liberal internationalism. …We challenge this view and contend instead that the Bush administration’s brand of international engagement, far from being an aberration, represents a turning point in the historical trajectory of U.S. foreign policy. It is a symptom, as much as a cause, of the unraveling of the liberal internationalist compact that guided the United States for much of the second half of the twentieth century.

The polarization of the United States has dealt a severe blow to the bipartisan compact between power and cooperation. Instead of adhering to the vital center, the country’s elected officials, along with the public, are backing away from the liberal internationalist compact, supporting either U.S. power or international cooperation, but rarely both. … Prominent voices from across the political spectrum have called for the restoration of a robust bipartisan center that can put U.S. grand strategy back on track. … These exhortations are in vain. The halcyon era of liberal internationalism is over; the bipartisan compact between power and partnership has been effectively dismantled.

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One of the striking features of US economic data is that, at least on its face, it shows that most measures of median income (wage rates, household incomes and so on) haven’t changed much in recent decades. Here’s a fairly typical example, reporting that American men in their 30s have, on average, lower wages than their fathers did at the same age. Median household income did a bit better in the decades after 1970, because of greater labour force participation by women, but hasn’t shown any any clear increase since about 2000. Average household size may have decreased a little bit, but the effect is not large. In summary, the general evidence is that the average (median) American depending on labour income hasn’t seen a significant improvement in real income for a long time.

That doesn’t seem to square with casual observation suggesting that consumption of most things by most people has gone up. Of course, savings have declined, but that can scarcely be the whole story. An obvious implication of declining incomes is that, if consumption of some things has gone up, consumption of others must have gone down. This is all the more so, given that there are new items of consumption (computers, for example) that didn’t even exist a few decades go, leaving less for expenditure on goods and services that were available then.

So, I’m always on the lookout for examples suggesting that consumption of some category of good or service has declined in real, quality adjusted terms.

Here’s one example I’ve found. According to the NYT, Americans have worse teeth now than a decade ago.

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Tom Chatfield at _Prospect_ (UK) catches “something interesting”:http://blog.prospectblogs.com/2007/10/17/the-blogging-scholarship-enigma/ for those, like me, who have gotten emails asking us to promote a $10,000 scholarship for blogging undergraduates.

a shortlist of web-savvy American students have spent the last few months competing for a $10,000 blogging scholarship to help with tuition fees—just one part of a scheme conceived by the American philanthropist Daniel Kovach, whose Daniel Kovach Scholarship Foundation also offers cash awards to female and minority students, web designers, political bloggers and majors in library and information sciences. … But is it also too good to be true? A cynic might suggest that the advertising revenue Kovach stands to gain from entrants directing everyone they know towards him quite possibly outweighs the money he is giving away. … The clincher, though, is an April article buried within CNN’s online Business 2.0 Magazine, which features Kovach as an example of the latest trend in internet revenue-gain: vacuuming up google links for ad revenue. This explains the bizarrely inclusive nature of his site’s listings: having discovered that people regularly search for scholarships for “twins,” “tall people,” and “left-handed people,” he added a section about each. “There are hardly any real scholarships,” Kovach explained, “but we’ll give the searcher any information they want.”

Perhaps this isn’t the complete explanation – $10,000 is a lot of money to spend on a $120,000 a year business. But it may make sense as a canny bit of social engineering – if lots of bloggers write posts linking to Kovachs’ site with the word ‘scholarship’ in them, Google will presumably pay attention, driving the site up the search engine rankings on the cheap, substantially increasing revenue streams.

Scott, over at IHE, alerts us to the “Islamophobofascist menace”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/10/17/mclemee

Not all Islamophobes are fanatics. Most, on the contrary, are decent people who just want to live in peace. Islamophobia forms only part of their identity. They grew up fearing Islam, and they still worry about it from time to time, especially during holidays and on certain anniversaries; but many would confess to doubt about just how Islamophobic they feel deep down inside. They may find themselves wondering, for example, if the Koran is really that much more bloodthirsty than the Jewish scriptures (Joshua 6 is plenty murderous) or the Christian (Matthew 10:34 is not exactly comforting).

Unfortunately a handful of troublemakers thrive among them, parasitically. They spew out hatred through Web sites. They seek to silence their critics, and to recruit impressionable young people. Perhaps it is unfair to confuse matters through calling the moderates and the militants by the same name. It would be more fitting to say that the latter are really Islamophobofascists.

Some might find the expression offensive. That is too bad. If we don’t resist Islamophobofascism now, its intolerance can only spread.

This is tongue in cheek, obviously, but his deadly serious description of them as “sleeper cells of malice and stupidity” is spot on.

From the improbable Kansas Cricket Association, here is a remarkable 4 minute explanation of the British Empire’s world’s greatest sport. (My Contemporary Moral Issues students might want to note that there will not be a question about this video on the midterm).

“Indeed.”:http://splinteredsunrise.wordpress.com/2007/10/16/bono-to-blight-dublin-skyline-with-giant-phallic-symbol/

Your chance to make predictions and explain who you’ll be rooting for and why. I’m hoping for an England win, but predict SA to win 32-12, with Wilkinson scoring all England’s points. Since I’m English, it isn’t hard to explain my sympathies, and the fact that “Bristol”:http://www.bristolrugby.co.uk/index.php hooker “Mark Regan”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Regan should playing for England and is an old boy of St Brendan’s 6th Form College (where my youngest went) more than completes the picture. I’m more intrigued about who the various Celts, Gaels, Aussies and Kiwis who write for or read CT will be backing. Normally, I’d expect an “anyone but England” policy, but, given “the dubious politics of SA rugby”:http://southafrica.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2007/05/26/rugby-race-and-nationalism-with-a-twist/ and England’s underdog status, there may be some surprises.

I’m absurdly pleased to see that Polish translation of my book Justice is now available (in Poland, that is). Of all the languages I would want my work to be translated into, Polish tops the list (Welsh is a close second). Half the kids in the school where I took my “O”-level got an extra “O”-level in Polish for free (because it was their home language) and that’s always made it seem exciting and important.

But I can’t speak or read a word of it. So there are two requests. Is this an excerpt? It looks like one to me, but I have no way of being sure. And, from the picture, it looks as if Zygmunt Bauman has provided an endorsement on the cover. That seems extremely unlikely; can anyone enlighten me?

“Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/10/leonid-hurwic-1.html on the Nobel prize going to the mechanism design crowd.

In other words, no incentive scheme, no matter how clever, can get people to tell the truth. Grove, Clarke, Tideman, and Tullock lurk in the hallways. Note that a second price auction (let everyone bid and the winner pays the price of the next highest bid) fails in terms of Paretian optimality. The government takes the second price bid from the winner, but what should it do with the money? Either the government wastes resources by destroying wealth, or it redistributes that wealth in some way but then the resulting redistribution in turn feeds back into bids and we can no longer derive truth-telling as optimal (but is this really a practical problem?; my fear is that the entire incentive-compatibility literature has never gotten at the real reason why we don’t run the entire economy as a second-price auction.)

One of my favourite papers of all time, Gary Miller and Thomas Hammond’s “Why Politics is More Fundamental Than Economics: Incentive Compatible Mechanisms are Not Credible,” “makes exactly this argument”:http://jtp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/1/5 (link to abstract: full paper is behind paywall for non-academics, unfortunately) using clear language and simple mathematics. It also makes clear (a) that the problem doesn’t vanish if the surplus goes to a private actor rather than government, hence suggesting that many private sector schemes to elicit information etc are similarly problematic, (b) that one plausible historical solution has been to elicit the creation of bureaucratic norms of professionalism that encourage administrators not to behave as selfish rational actors and (c ) that the surplus problem is, properly considered, where politics enters into the argument, and a way of getting at the real reasons why we don’t run the economy using these mechanisms.

Also notable is another paper that “Tyler links to”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/10/was-the-indian-.html on whether the Indian caste system was efficient or not. As Tyler notes politely, and Chris Hayes “more pungently”:http://www.chrishayes.org/blog/2007/oct/14/mainstream-economics/, this is a weirdly functionalist paper in the way that many economic analyses of institutions are weirdly functionalist. The professional deformity of the institutional economist is to seek explanations of institutional origins and change grounded in efficiency. In fairness, I should acknowledge that the professional deformation of the political scientist (and of many economic sociologists) is to seek explanations of institutions grounded in power and distributional questions, but it seems to me that this professional deformity gets things right _a lot more often_ (institutions that are genuinely grounded in the desire to promote collective efficiency are relatively rare, and the Indian caste system is rather obviously not one of these rare exceptions).

Update: see further “Jim Johnson”:http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2007/10/2007-nobel-prize-economics-mechanism.html for a more detailed account of how mechanism design “unintentionally …establishes the fundamental importance of _politics_”. On distribution v. efficiency, see also this very interesting “new _AJS_ article”:http://www.indiana.edu/~tbsoc/AJS%20article.pdf (via “OrgTheory”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2007/10/14/interests-and-the-creation-of-new-institutions/ ) which seeks to assess the merits of distributional and efficiency theories in explaining the origins of transnational private regulation. Finally, those looking for some (mathematically pretty hairy) intro materials on mechanism design theory should go to “Michael Greinecker”:http://yetanothersheep.blogspot.com/2007/10/readings-on-mechanism-design.html.