I started to write a snarky post about this “Richard Cohen”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/14/AR2008011402083.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 article and then gave up. It’s too bad a piece to warrant flipness. Cohen finds out (he doesn’t say how, but this has been circulating around the “nastier right wing websites”:http://www.newsmax.com/kessler/obama_wright_farrakhan/2008/01/14/64332.html for a little while) that a magazine associated with Barack Obama’s church in Chicago, and run by his pastor, honoured Louis Farrakhan last year. He then insists that Barack Obama immediately express his outrage. [click to continue…]

The “BBC reports”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7186007.stm that a change may be in the offing in Britain’s policies on cadaveric organ donation:

Gordon Brown says he wants a national debate on whether to change the system of organ donation. He believes thousands of lives would be saved if everyone was automatically placed on the donor register. It would mean that, unless people opted out of the register or family members objected, hospitals would be allowed to use their organs for transplants. But some critics say the state should not automatically decide what happens to people’s bodies after they die. Currently there are more than 8,000 people waiting for organ transplants in the UK – a figure which rises by about 8% a year. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, the prime minister said a system of “presumed consent” could make a huge difference. … The system already operates in several other European countries and has boosted the number of organs available for transplant.

My view is that Gordon Brown is wrong, but not for the reasons you might think.

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Thanks to recent developments in the Democratic primaries, trivialization of Martin Luther King’s legacy is off to an all-time early start this year. But Christopher Phelps has just published an excellent overview of recent historical work on MLK that knocks some of the ceremonial tinsel off — the better to see the real figure, who would never get a word in edgewise today.

The latest volume from the King Papers Project, for example

comprises King’s sermons from 1948 to 1963, which remind us of King’s immersion in the black Baptist church and of the wide range of theological sources and social criticism he drew upon. For King, Christianity was the social gospel. His outlook was astonishingly radical, especially for the McCarthy era. In a college paper entitled “Will Capitalism Survive?” King held that “capitalism has seen its best days in America, and not only in America, but in the entire world.” He concluded a 1953 sermon by asking his congregation to decide “whom ye shall serve, the god of money or the eternal God of the universe.” He opposed communism as materialistic, but argued that only an end to colonialism, imperialism, and racism, an egalitarian program of social equality, fellowship, and love, could serve as its alternative. In a 1952 letter responding to Coretta’s gift to him of a copy of Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward (“There is still hope for the future … ,” she inscribed on its flyleaf), King wrote, “I would certainly welcome the day to come when there will be a nationalization of industry.”

The volume’s assiduous editorial annotation permits us to locate King in lived dialogue. We discover, for example, that his 1952 sermon on “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity,” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, prompted a letter of retort from Melvin H. Watson, a Morehouse College professor and Ebenezer congregant, who attempted to set King straight on the virtues of Stalin. Watson, a holdover from the Communist-led Popular Front, helps us place King’s democratic radicalism in bold relief while providing a concrete illustration of how black communities retained a strong left-wing presence even after the 1940s.

The whole article is available online from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Looking over the passage just quoted, I had a flashback to various hopeless arguments with Chron copyeditors — for it is singularly absurd not to have capitalized the “c” in Phelps’s line mentioning that King “opposed communism as materialistic.”

The international Communist movement (corporate world headquarters in Moscow, later with rival franchise based in Peking) was indeed materialistic, yes. But would King have opposed communism, tout court? “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”?

I doubt that very much: “And all that believed were together, and had all things in common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” (Acts 2:44-45)

A bit of random surfing just took me over to “Ken Worpole’s site”:http://www.worpole.net/ , where I was very pleased to learn that his wonderful book of essays “Dockers and Detectives”:http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/dockers_and_detectives_warpole_ken_i019459.aspx has been republished by Five Leaves Publications (Verso did the first edition, back in 1983). _Dockers and Detectives_ is one of those rare books that not only entertains and informs you, but also opens up new paths of literary discovery. I think that I’d probably have got round to Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain without Worpole, but not as quickly and without seeing their influence on French existentialism. I’m not so sure I would have discovered Alexander Baron’s _From the City, From the Plough_ or Stuart Hood’s wartime memoir _Pebbles From My Skull_, though. Worpole discusses both in his chapter on the popular literature of the Second World War, along with other works such as Rex Warner’s dystopian _The Aerodrome_. Recommended.

Weather-permitting I’ll be giving a talk called “Putting Educational Equality in its Place” at the University of Toronto on Monday. IT looks as if it is a public talk, and I’ll even be using a powerpoint. More details here (Henry will be delighted to notice that the first name on the pdf of the text is his, not mine) I’m looking forward to it, partly because I’ll get to see frequent CT commenter Tom Hurka, who, rather cruelly, pointed out that I was going to be missing the chance to see Dave Cousins live by about 2 months. Well, its 28 years since I last saw him live, so a few more won’t make much difference. Still, some free Dave Cousins here.

Apparently I am on “mea culpa watch” from Tyler Cowen, Picture me at present pursing my lips and flapping my wrist in the international signal for “ooh! Get her!”. I have looked at the NEJM study, had a look at some of the online discussion of it, and I think that few of my friends and few of my enemies will be disappointed to learn that my response is not so much “mea culpa” as “pogue mahone”. In particular, see below the fold for a list of apologies not forthcoming, additional castigation, and new heretics who need to be squelched.
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The Economist Blog joins in the handwringing over the Theil piece that Henry linked to the other day.

bq. I often fantasise about how much nicer the world might be if more people grasped a few rudimentary principles about they workings of the social world. So I took this Foreign Policy article by Stefan Theil on the sorry state of economics education in Germany and France pretty hard. I desperately hope it’s not really this bad … Why does this matter? Because ideas matter … We rightly deplore the politicisation of the curriculum when it comes to “intelligent design” crackpottery. We should deplore politicised psuedoscience all the more when it so directly threatens the material well-being of a country’s people. If this is all as Mr Theil says it is, then the Germans and French really ought to be ashamed by the failure of their educational system to teach anything remotely approximating decent social science.

Given the sorry state of their economics, it’s amazing the French even manage to have an economy at all. And presumably it is by sheer chance that products of their disastrous education system often end up tenured in leading American economics departments, and write textbooks used to teach economics to Americans. I’m reminded of the concluding paragraph of this JPE paper by La Porta et al, which asked whether the relatively weaker protections of investors and creditors in civil-law countries like France, as opposed to the stronger protections in places like the U.S., had adverse consequences for corporate governance and economic growth. And, indeed, they found some of the predicted effects. On the other hand:

bq. Taken together, this evidence describes a link from the legal system to economic development. It is important to remember, however, that while the shortcomings of investor protection described in this paper appear to have adverse consequences for financial development and growth, they are unlikely to be an insurmountable bottleneck. France and Belgium, after all, are both very rich countries.

A new study estimates violence-related mortality in Iraq between 2003 and 2006:

Background Estimates of the death toll in Iraq from the time of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 until June 2006 have ranged from 47,668 (from the Iraq Body Count) to 601,027 (from a national survey). Results from the Iraq Family Health Survey (IFHS), which was conducted in 2006 and 2007, provide new evidence on mortality in Iraq.

Methods The IFHS is a nationally representative survey of 9345 households that collected information on deaths in the household since June 2001. We used multiple methods for estimating the level of underreporting and compared reported rates of death with those from other sources.

Results Interviewers visited 89.4% of 1086 household clusters during the study period; the household response rate was 96.2%. From January 2002 through June 2006, there were 1325 reported deaths. After adjustment for missing clusters, the overall rate of death per 1000 person-years was 5.31 (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.89 to 5.77); the estimated rate of violence-related death was 1.09 (95% CI, 0.81 to 1.50). When underreporting was taken into account, the rate of violence-related death was estimated to be 1.67 (95% uncertainty range, 1.24 to 2.30). This rate translates into an estimated number of violent deaths of 151,000 (95% uncertainty range, 104,000 to 223,000) from March 2003 through June 2006.

Conclusions Violence is a leading cause of death for Iraqi adults and was the main cause of death in men between the ages of 15 and 59 years during the first 3 years after the 2003 invasion. Although the estimated range is substantially lower than a recent survey-based estimate, it nonetheless points to a massive death toll, only one of the many health and human consequences of an ongoing humanitarian crisis.

150,000 violent deaths in three years is a lot. You’ll recall that the _Lancet_ study estimated about 655,000 excess deaths, which is a lot more. The two numbers aren’t directly comparable because excess deaths due to violence are only one component of all excess deaths (e.g., from preventable disease or other causes attributable to the war). Deaths due to violence rose from a very small 0.1 per 1000 person years in the pre-invasion period to about 1.1 per 1000py afterwards, or 1.67 adjusting for estimated underreporting. This is where the authors get their 151,000 number. The overall death rate rose from about 3.2 per 1000 person years to about 6, an increase of just over 2.8. Depending on whether you use the raw or adjusted estimated rate of violent death this would work out to an overall excess death total of just under 400,000 or just over 250,000. (But this is just a back-of-the-envelope calculation, as the overall death rate isn’t reported.)

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In “the interview with G.A. Cohen”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/02/ga-cohen-interview/ that Jon linked to last week, Cohen closes by saying that in the long run political philosophy has an enormous impact on society. He gives as an example Mill’s liberty principle, which he sees as having been implemented a hundred years later; he concludes that ideas of contemporary political philosophers, such as Rawls and Nozick, have “enormous social effect”. We should just not want to see results within a few years, but rather look at a longer time scale.

I am sceptical about this optimism. At the very least, the “enormous” should be replaced with “some” social effect. Surely some political philosophy has some social effect; but in my judgement, it is especially the work of those philosophers who either are also well-informed about empirical matters and those who are willing and able to translate their insights for a broader public of citizens and policy makers, and who are effectively going into debate with citizens, are having most chance of having any effect. So I think the impact of scholars like Amartya Sen and Philippe Van Parijs will be much bigger, both in the short and the long run, then the Cohen-school of political philosophy. The higher the level of abstraction, the more ‘technical’ and (let’s face it) unaccessible the writing style, the more ideal-theoretical the work, the more based on hypothetical models and simplifying-assumptions-based reasoning, and the less informed by at least some empirical knowledge, the less the impact of a particular piece of political philosophy. Moreover, even the most socially relevant of political philosophy has probably only a modest effect in comparison with the impact of charismatic intellectuals, social activists or politicians. In short, I think Cohen & Co are way too optimistic about the societal and political relevance of their work, though of course I’m happy to be proven wrong.

Interesting interview on Dutch television yesterday – with “Andre Krouwel”:http://english.fsw.vu.nl/Organization/index.cfm/home_file.cfm/fileid/8734A856-DA20-27A6-825C47E17FFFDDE0/subsectionid/8734A0E5-F625-E3F6-7A547D82FF33EC56, a professor in political science from the Free University in Amsterdam who has designed “an electoral compass for the USA presidential elections”:http://www.electoralcompass.com/. The Electoral compass has been very popular for recent Dutch elections: by answering questions about the substance of the electoral debate, the programme compares your views with those of the candidates. Questions concern a range of issues, such as health care, pension reform, environmental policies, and so forth – and, unique to the US compass, questions on gun control, the death penalty and Iraq. In 2007 Krouwel and his colleagues designed an electoral compass for the Belgian Federal elections; and now they have designed one for the US elections. According to “their website”:http://www5.kieskompas.nl/, they are now also designing an electoral compass for the 2008 Spanish elections.

If you answer the 36 questions, your answers are compared with those of the candidates, and the compass tells you which politician has the closest views to yours (or rather, vice versa). It was interesting to note that the democratic candidates are all closely situated to each other on the compass, whereas there is much more internal diversity within the republican camp. I filled out the questions, and the compass revealed that my views are closest to those of Edwards. Yet it may well be that if I would have had the right to vote, I wouldn’t want to lose the historical chance to vote for a female or black American president, even if on substance, my views apparently are slightly closer to the views of Edwards (but then, Clinton and Edwards seem to be very close to each other on the compass). I’m curious to read whether you felt the outcome of the test was what you expected, and also whether the questions cover the most important issues that are being discussed (or should be discussed) in the US electoral debate.

My mate “Jim Johnson”:http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2008/01/against-bi-partisanship.html has a very nice post on the problems with bipartisanship.

In terms of consequences, why should we endorse bi-partisanship? That is a fundamentally _anti-democratic_ response. Here I am persuaded by argument by political theorists who, following Joseph Schumpeter (whose conception of democracy is, despite common caricatures, neither a ‘realist’ nor ‘minimalist’), insist that robust competition is crucial to a healthy democracy. For instance, Ian Shapiro* suggests that competition has two salutary effects: (i) it allows voters to throw out incumbents (known more appropriately as ‘the bastards’) and (ii) it pressures the opposition to solicit as wide a range of constituencies as they are able. Given these effects, Shapiro suggests quite pointedly:

bq. If competition for power is the lifeblood of democracy, then the search for bi-partisan consensus … is really anticompetitive collusion in restraint of democracy. Why is it that people do not challenge legislation that has bi-partisan backing, or other forms of bi-partisan agreement on these grounds? …

… Among the crucial empirical observations about partisan polarization in the U.S. is that it reflects the economic bifurcation (in terms of wealth and income mal-distribution) among the population. Because the poor participate at relatively low levels, and because many recent immigrants remain unnaturalized (hence disenfranchised), the constituency for a real alternative to right-wing policies remains politically inchoate. The solution to political polarization is to attack economic inequality, to resist anti-immigration policies, and so forth. That might, in fact, require Democrats to stop their headlong rush to mimic Republicans and prompt them to seek to forge broader and deeper alliances between constituencies that do not now see one another as allies. But that would require the Dems to be political rather than play the bi-partisan game. What we need is more robust competition.

This “piece”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3f03314e-bd3e-11dc-b7e6-0000779fd2ac.html by Stefan Theil in the _FT_ today on the biases of French and German high school economics textbooks is pretty bad, but it turns out to consist of edited extracts from an “even worse essay”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4095 that he’s published in _Foreign Policy._ [click to continue…]

Jeremy is not the only one working on his Northwestern courses. I am putting the finishing touches on my junior writing seminar syllabus when I glance over at Yahoo! Music and see this (on 80s music random play):

This is generally amusing given the topic of my course (“Adolescents’ Digital Media Uses, Skills and Participations”), but it’s additionally funny since I was just adding an article to the syllabus that appeared in the journal The Information Society.

One of the commenters to my post below suggested that Mike Huckabee was unlikely to do well among Catholics. “Philip Klinkner”:http://polysigh.blogspot.com/2008/01/huckabee-and-catholics.html (who is really blogging interesting stuff on the races) has some county-level data from Iowa suggesting that this is true.

!http://www.henryfarrell.net/klinkner1.jpg!
GOP caucus results (counties won by Huckabee in blue; by Romney in red)

!http://www.henryfarrell.net/klinkner2.jpg!
Distribution of Catholics in Iowa (the redder the county, the more Catholics)

An eyeballing of the graph suggests that the parts of the state where Huckabee had most trouble were indeed, more often than not, those places where there were more Catholics. Klinkner runs a regression testing how percentage of population religious, percentage of population Catholic, percentage of population evangelical, and percentage of population rural affected voting for Huckabee, and finds that the coefficient for Catholicism is negative, high, and statistically significant.

Update see “here”:http://polysigh.blogspot.com/2008/01/huckabee-and-catholics-again.html for Klinkner’s response to some of the methodological criticisms.