July 2008

So I’m listening to this Peter Beinart/Jonah Goldberg bloggingheads exchange on patriotism and, round about minute 8:00 Goldberg grumbles about the rhetoric of progress and ‘parliament of man’ and all that. Then:

Barack Obama talks about making America better by remaking it, by reinventing it. The aesthetics of his campaign are about a revolution. Well, it seems to me that if you believe this country needs a revolution, if you believe that it needs to be remade, then your love for it isn’t that profound.

Has the man never celebrated the 4th of July? What does he think the fireworks are supposed to represent? His mom told him it’s just a pretty light show (she didn’t want her young son to think revolution is a good thing) and he never thought to ask again when he grew up?

Why did the founding fathers hate America? [click to continue…]

One of the benefits of a blog like CT is that non-specialists can always ask specialists to explain stuff. Here’s Martin Wolf, “writing in the Financial Times”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/69ebb588-4ead-11dd-ba7c-000077b07658.html about Britain’s housing bust:

bq. If economists differ on whether house prices are now reasonable, they differ still more on whether a house-price collapse must spell ruin for the economy. A decline in prices brought about by a big boost to supply ought to be beneficial. *Even a correction in a bubble should not bring pain: for owner-occupiers, the lower value of their houses is offset by the lower implicit cost of renting them from themselves.* [My emphasis] Moreover, the losses of those cashing out of the market are offset by the gains of those buying into it. This is why it is mad to applaud ever-rising prices.

So what on earth does he mean? If I were feeling pain (which I’m not because I’m not going to sell my house any time soon), how would my agonies be offset by a reduction in the implicit cost of something that isn’t actually happening? Enlighten me please.

I have a Bloggingheads dialogue with Eric Posner up, where among other things, we talk about the “origins of the netroots”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/12432?in=00:04:20.5&out=00:09:44.5. The (not very original, I suspect) theory that I put forward in the dialogue is that this wasn’t the result of any necessary affinity between the left and the Internet, but instead a historical accident, resulting from the emergence of a new medium at a moment when US progressives were (a) extraordinarily frustrated with the Iraq war, and (b) deeply disenchanted with the traditional means through which they might have found expression of their views in happier times (TV and purportedly ‘left’ newspapers like the _New York Times_; the Democratic party). This is less a political science judgement than a semi-journalistic one – I haven’t done enough specific research to really do more than articulate my best guess as to what happened. I am interested in working more on this in a more serious way at some stage though, and would love to both people’s views (preferably good disagreements with my argument) and any evidence for or against that they can think of. More generally, there is a lot of work to be done updating the social movement literature to deal with these new Internet mediated movements – at the very least, there are a few dissertations in it.

Matt Yglesias “gets political spam from Airtran”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/paging_paul_krugman.php

AirTran got ahold of my email address somehow or other over the years and sends me occasional doses of spam. Normally, it’s to promote some deal or something. But now they’re giving me rants against the evils of oil speculators

But it turns out that this is part of a much larger campaign. Cue “Zephyr Teachout:”:http://www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/27220/united_delta_american_southwest_the_airlines_move_in_on_moveon

I got an email this morning from United, asking me to go to a petition site, which asks me to enter my zip code and send a note to my MOC to “Stop Oil Speculation” and lower energy costs. Tracy Russo reports she got the same email from Northwest. The entire coalition list is at the bottom of this post, and includes the Petroleum Marketers Association of America and Agricultural Retailers association, as well as Delta, Continental, US Air, American, Airtran…

I don’t think this is big news in the good way, mind you–its important because it signals that corporations are willing to use their massive databases to try to leverage political will in Washington. I’m sure this isn’t the first of its kind, but its the first of such a scale that its caught my attention (I’m happy to be rebutted in the comments). We’re talking tens of millions of emails (possibly nearing a hundred million? Jose Antonio Vargas, can you find out?) if all the airlines’ lists are involved. This is clearly just the beginning, and its a crude one–a few years from now you’ll see more organizing, including international organizing, to leverage corporate databases to influence policies that help corporate wealth.

This is an interesting challenge to Clay’s account of how the politics of group formation is changing (all the more so as one of his “key examples of group empowerment”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/04/here-comes-ever.html is airline customers who are annoyed at their treatment. I think that Clay’s fundamental claim – that the transaction costs that have hitherto often blocked group formation have been lowered dramatically – is both important and indisputably correct. But this doesn’t necessarily have a levelling effect on power relations, as Clay sometimes seems to suggest when he talks about mobilized consumer groups, protesters etc.

My impression is that we still don’t have good concepts for figuring out the consequences of lowered transaction costs of group formation and communication, partly because we are fighting a set of tired arguments between techno-evangelists (Glenn Reynolds’ dreadful _An Army of Davids_ standing in for multitudes here), and techno pessimists (Andrew Keen, Sven Birkets and other guardians of traditional hierarchies) about whether the Internet is a generally empowering or disempowering phenomenon. It’s neither, of course, and it’s in the detail of which _particular_ groups get empowered and disempowered, and under which circumstances, that the interesting questions lie. I’d be very interested in Clay’s views about how to move forward in this direction (or in another, of course, if he thinks I’m wrong)

After reading this piece on self-plagiarism in the Times Higher Ed Supplement, I couldn’t think of any better response than to reprint verbatim this piece from 2005 (now with a new improved 2008 publication date), including a self-link to a piece which is simultaneously self-referential and self-plagiarising.

It’s over the fold:

[click to continue…]

Nationalization, that is. In this piece on doomsday scenarios for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (H/T Calculated Risk) the cutely named and quasi-private mortgage packagers and guarantors, Katie Benner says

So what might it look like if the government had to lend a hand? Outright nationalization is an unlikely option given that neither the current administration nor the presidential candidates could afford to support such a move in an election year.

but goes on to imply that the likely alternatives could be far more costly, citing a Standard & Poors estimate of a trillion dollar cost to taxpayers, and possible loss of the US government’s AAA rating. Agency ratings aren’ t reliable indicators, but the US government has been in the category of issuers who are assumed to be exempt from scrutiny. A change in this status would be a huge problem for a big debtor like the US.

Either a bailout or a nationalization of Fannie and Freddie would make the Northern Rock fiasco in the UK pale into insignificance. The Northern Rock case shows that a policy towards financial enterprises in which both failure and nationalization are regarded as unthinkable cannot be sustained. The shareholders of these companies have been happy to accept the higher returns associated with an implicit government guarantee and they should pay the price when the guarantee is needed.

Another question about relevant social science literature, before they revoke my posting privileges:

I spent a lot of time talking to BigCos and people in the Gummint who are evaluating social software. Evaluating Open Source tools poses a problem for them, because they are cheap, simple to set up, and easy to use. These characteristics  defeat the normal IT evaluation process, which is supposed to start with an RFP, take the Office of the CIO 9 months to review the available features, and another 6 months of deployment and training. Free, easy, and good confuses them, and ‘Just try it and see how it goes’ is actively upsetting.

Part of the problem is price signaling — how could a free weblog tool, say, be better than this Very Expensive Content Management System? Part of the problem is feature creep — how could more features not be better? Part of the problem is the imperative for control — the stupider you think your employees are, the more features you will need to constrain their ability to act. Part of the problem is trusting vendors more than your own IT staff, and so on.

And, in the way of these things, the overall effect of this is an unspoken institutional commitment to the expensive and mediocre, simply because alternatives that may be cheap but good are assumed not to exist, and because there are tight social bonds with the vendors who sold them the last round of expensive stuff.

I bring this up because one of my former students, a very smart guy who used to work for the Gummint and now consults for same, is observing this same thing in his current work, and I wonder if anyone has studied this problem — not just price signaling, but the whole constellation of organizational behavior that makes evaluating Open Source tools in comparison with closed source so problematic?

Here’s “a sentence”:http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11670314 from a leader in _The Economist_ :

bq. If Mr Brown had fattened the public finances during the good times, *as he should have done* [emphasis added] , then this [mounting a fiscal rescue package] would be no bad thing.

Now what Brown actually did during the good times was to invest in public services that had been underinvested in for decades: fixing the roof whilst the sun was shining. Maybe some of that money was unwisely spent (I don’t doubt it). Here’s what I’m interested in: did the _Economist_ call, back then, for the use of tax revenues to “fatten the public finances”? Or did they favour lower taxes?

Having handed in my tenure file, and gotten my book accepted (yay!), I’m now, for the first time in years, in a place where I can think about doing some really serious reading outside the topics of my research, while I wait for the results to come in on the first, and do copy preparation on the second. So I’m in the market for good books about American politics, society, and history to fill in some of the holes in my knowledge of same as a non-US native. What I’m looking for are interesting, intellectually rich, accounts of American politics, preferably with a minimum of boosterism. Less Doris Kearns Goodwin then, than _The Boys on the Bus._ I’m interested both in academic books with a general appeal and good popular histories with intellectual bite. I’m also happy to entertain suggestions for good fiction that touches on these subjects – first on my list is Peter Mathiessen’s “Shadow Country”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FShadow-Country-Modern-Library-Matthiessen%2Fdp%2F0679640193%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1215537418%26sr%3D8-1&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 (I read one of the books that it’s based on, _Killing Mr. Watson_, years ago, and loved it). So please submit recommendations in comments. Up before I start on this list, I hope, my reviews of John McGowan on American liberalism and Dan Solove on reputation and the Internet.

I just finished Gregory Gibson’s “Hubert’s Freaks”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0151012334/junius-20 (subtitle “the rare book dealer, the Times Square talker and the lost photos of Diane Arbus”). It was one of those strange books which sounds interesting but then has you thinking you made a mistake in starting, but suddenly hooks you and has you reading to the end. Gibson tells three intertwined stories: first, that of Bob Langmuir, a neurotic Philadelphia-based antiquarian book-and-miscallaneous-stuff; second, more briefly, that of Diane Arbus, her career, her photographs, suicide and posthumous rise to cult status; and, uniting the other two, Hubert’s Museum, a Times Square freak show (complete with bogus African tribespeople, amputees, tattooed men &c.). Arbus had become involved with the people at Hubert’s in the 1960, and especially with the black couple known as Charlie and Woogie who ran the place, and had taken a whole bunch of pictures there. It is these pictures that Langmuir discovers chez another dealer, amid a pile of other paraphenalia. Part of Gibson’s story is Langmuir coming to terms with what he has, and then struggling to get the difficult (to understate the case considerably) Arbus estate to authenticate the material so that he can bring the pictures to market. But Langmuir is also an archivist of African-American history and he is fascinated by the people at Hubert’s and by the comprehensive phonetically-spelled diaries that Charlie kept for most of his life. Gibson does an excellent job of stitching the various narratives together and using them to evoke a strange and marginal side of America. In passing he gives us some interesting insights into how the market for art photography got started (a combination of scarcity of other art objects giving rise to a need for new outlets for the connoiseur’s passion and institutional hype from curators like John Szarkowski at MoMa and critics like Sontag).

(When I bought the book on a recommendation, I hadn’t realised that it had only recently come out. In fact the story is still short of a denoument as Okie, the Nigerian dealer from whom Langmuir bought the trunk, is suing on the grounds that he was somehow illicitly deprived of valuable items. Since _caveat vendor_ would seem to be to relevant principle for trades between dealers, and since Langmuir did the work of recognising the Arbus material and then establishing authenticity, it is hard to believe the Okie has a case. But where (possibly) millions of dollars are at stake, it is probably worth him trying it on. Pending resolution, the Hubert’s archive can’t be sold.)

I didn’t know him, although I did know and love his novels – Patrick Nielsen Hayden knew man and work both, and has “more of substance”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010413.html#010413 to say than I ever could. John Clute “reviewed”:http://www.scifi.com/sfw/books/column/sfw18985.html his most recent book a couple of weeks ago, and quoted a poem that he published in the _Paris Review,_ “The Moon on the Crest of the New-Fallen Snow.” I liked it a lot.

Pain

Has its place—and pity, too—but it is not here.
Here all is calm and cold and luminous.
The snow has smoothed over the tracks of the deer.

On the basis of not paying particularly close attention but listening to what Australian friends had to say, I’d formed a generally positive impression of Australian PM Kevin Rudd. Now I see that Rudd has been stupid enough to “weigh”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7492579.stm into “a controversy”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23979363-601,00.html about the artistic depiction of child nudity with the following comment:

bq. “Frankly, I can’t stand this stuff …. We’re talking about the innocence of little children here. A little child cannot answer for themselves about whether they wish to be depicted in this way.”

I can’t wait for the Australian government’s prosposals for banning the appearance of child actors in soap operas and TV advertising on similar “couldn’t consent to thus being depicted” grounds!

The image in question can be seen “here”:http://www.artmonthly.org.au/ . (Perfectly safe for work in my opinion, but what do I know.) Chillingly, “Officials have said they will review the magazine’s public funding.” Of course there may be questions about whether art magazines should be publicly funded at all, but if they are to be, then this seems an crazy reason to withdraw the case.

(Incidentally, a relative of mine works with someone who was on the front cover of Led Zeppelin’s _Houses of the Holy_, no doubt the Australian Childhood Foundation would have been up in arms about that too on the grounds of possible “psychological effects in later years” — there don’t seem to be any.)

“Matt Yglesias”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/contingency_irony_patriotism.php on patriotism:

American liberals and American conservatives are both Americans so our American patriotism is very similar. We just have different ideas about politics. Specifically, I would say that liberals do a better job of recognizing that much as we may love America there’s something arbitrary about it — we’re just so happen to be Americans whereas other people are Canadians or Mexicans or French or Russian or what have you. The conservative view is more like those Bill Simmons columns where not only is he extolling the virtues of this or that Boston sports team or moment, but he seems to genuinely not understand why other people don’t see it that way. But of course Simmons is from Boston and others of us aren’t.

By coincidence, this is something I’ve been thinking about the last few days (as I’m not a political theorist, I offer no guarantees whatsoever that my thoughts on the topic are original, or that they haven’t already been comprehensively refuted by someone somewhere). My best guess approximation is that even if we accept that patriotism/loyalty-to-our-sports-team or whatever is in some absolute sense _contingent_ (if we grew up elsewhere, we would be patriotic about a different country, or root for a different sports team) it doesn’t imply that there is something wrong or silly about being patriotic. Here, a good analogy might be with our love for our children. That I have one child, and not another is contingent, given the realities of biology, on a very improbable event – that two particular cells fused together (the odds against a particular combination of cells being chosen are surely in the order of billions to one). Yet once I have a child, my love for that child isn’t in the least invalidated by the contingency of the event, even if I know in some abstract sense that I would equally love another child that might have been conceived if a different pair of cells had combined. Moreover, we would think that there was something very strange about somebody who wanted to revisit that moment of combination and choose a different outcome.

I’m not sure how far the analogy can be pushed, and I am sure that there are other good arguments against patriotism (George Kateb’s book on the topic has been sitting unread on my shelf the last couple of years, causing me occasional moments of guilt). But it gets at a slightly different critique of certain kinds of vainglorious patriotism than the one that Matt presents. Nearly all parents are quietly sure that while all children are wonderful, _their_ children are the most wonderful of all. But equally so, most people find parents who insist on blowing their childrens’ trumpets, insisting on their unique skills, intelligence etc to be both silly and obnoxious. Perhaps we should have the same attitude towards the more overblown forms of braggart patriotism.

Update: “Siva”:http://mediamatters.org/altercation/200807030006#2 has some interesting thoughts on patriotism as a second generation immigrant.