My mission, should I choose to accept it – and I have – is to talk about the Merchant Princes novels. For anyone who’s reading this without having read the full Stross collection, the MP novels concern a group of related individuals – the Clan – from an alternate universe, the Gruinmarkt, with a more or less medieval society, who have the ability to world-walk between that universe and our own. They use their base in their home world to make money in our world by smuggling drugs where the DEA can’t go, and are rich and powerful at home because of the high-tech goodies they can bring back from America. The protagonist, a thirtysomething tech journalist named Miriam Beckstein, has been raised in our world – but unknown to herself, she’s actually the child of a countess in the other world. Many complications ensue.
From the monthly archives:
January 2009
This is where anyone who wants to discuss the Laundry series, Glasshouse or anything else that got missed out in the book event can have their say.
BBC Radio 2 has a fascinating interview with Bruce Springsteen about songwriting (and other stuff, including a nice sampling from the new album) here. (It starts about a minute in.)
I’m a bit bemused by the bemusement. Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman are both running round tearing their hair out about the fact that half of the economics faculty at Chicago appear to be saying demonstrably wrong things about the Obama stimulus policy, and specifically to be reinventing mistakes that everyone thought had been put to rest in the Keynesian debates of the 1940s and 50s. What, O what, would Milton Friedman have said, if he were alive to see this travesty?
Well, call me a cynic, but I am not at all sure that BdeL and PK, two mainstream Keynesians from a different intellectual tradition entirely, can be so sure that they are right and Milton Friedman’s acolytes, former colleagues, former students, close friends and intellectual heirs are wrong about what is the way to carry on Milton Friedman’s intellectual legacy in an environment where a Democratic government is proposing an increase in the federal budget for purposes of fiscal stimulus.
Producing more or less mendacious intellectual smokescreens for policies which favour the interests of very rich men is not an incidental side effect of Chicago School libertarianism. It isn’t some sort of industrial pollution – it’s the product. If and when the Milton Friedman Institute is endowed and operating, it will be people like John Cochrane who staff it, and it will be arguments like this that, when push comes to shove, it produces. The Cossacks work for the Czar. They have always worked for the Czar.
So, should the University of Chicago economics department be razed to the ground and its foundations sowed with salt? Well, Brad at least has recommended this treatment for the Washington Post for what appear to me to be much lesser crimes, but I would be inclined to be more merciful. Taking my cue from Jehovah in the Old Testament, I would be prepared to spare the Chicago School if one innocent man could be found there. So basically, unless and until James Heckman comes out with a stinker on the stimulus package, I say let it survive.
A friend sent me a link to this Chronicle story about women choosing not to go into academia for family-related reasons. Leiter linked to it last week and invited a discussion (which is very heavily Philosophy-focussed, for obvious reasons) specifically about whether to have children during Graduate School. The men in the thread are generally very positive about starting a family in graduate school, but that is consistent with the findings that there is a correlation between male career success in academia and their having children, whereas the reverse is true for women. My friend also pointed out that many of the men in the discussion have wives who started out in graduate school and left (reasons not usually given).
There’s a follow-up article by Mary Ann Mason today at the Chronicle. She says that:
The number of young women who want to pursue careers in academic research declines by 30 percent over the course of their doctoral study, and the number of men by 20 percent. In explaining their decision, men are more likely to report that they do not like unrelenting work hours. One male student in the survey complained that he was “fed up with the narrow-mindedness of supposedly intelligent people who are largely workaholic and expect others to be so as well.” But most women give up on academic-research careers for family concerns. As one woman in the survey said, “I could not have come to graduate school more motivated to be a research-oriented professor. Now I feel that can only be a career possibility if I am willing to sacrifice having children.”
I’ve mentioned Nancy Rosenblum’s _On the Side of the Angels_ a few times here; for those who are interested, Jacob Levy has organized a “seminar”:http://jacobtlevy.blogspot.com/search/label/Rosenblum-symposium that will be hosting responses to the book from Jacob, Melissa Schwartzberg, Maria, Marin, Andrew Rehfeld, Patrick Dineen, Nadia Urbinati and me (some are up there; others, including Rosenblum’s responses, will be posted over the next day or two). I will also be contributing to an entirely separate seminar on the book at _Cato Unbound._ Jacob mentions in his introductory post that CT helped pioneer this way of discussing books (nb the word ‘helped;’ doubtless there are others out there who had the same idea) – it’s nice to see that it is beginning to take off among academics more generally. While I don’t think that blogs and similar forms of online publication will ever replace conventional journals, I could see them replacing traditional academic book reviews, given their advantages of speed, dialogic component etc.
I’ve been out of the blogosphere for the last week or so; one of the things that I would have written about if I had been around are the persistent and well sourced rumours (see e.g. “Scott’s post at _IHE_”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/blogs/intellectual_affairs_the_blog/shutting_down_the_washington_post_book_world ) that the _Washington Post_ is considering shutting down their weekly _Book World_ supplement. Editor Marcus Brauchli (whom, if rumor is to be believed, is pushing the change) has prominently failed to deny the reports, merely stating that “We are absolutely committed to book reviews and coverage of literature, publishing and ideas in The Post” (which I suspect, if decoded, translates to something like “we may still stick in the odd book review as filler when we’re running low on Paris Hilton stories”). The closure of _Book World_ is something I’d take personally; when I first came to DC in the 1990s, it was a surprise and a delight to see pieces that took, say, John Crowley seriously, interspersed with the more usual reviews of biographies, political books and so on. And Michael Dirda should be declared a Living Treasure. I understand that this decision isn’t set in stone – if you want to tell the Washington Post that this is a bad idea, you can do so “here”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/opinions/feedback/index.html#tellusBox. _WP_ subscribers are especially encouraged to make their feelings known.
John Crowley’s piece on Thomas Disch, which I blogged about previously, is now “available online”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR34.1/crowley.php. Also of interest is _Ghost Ship_, one of Disch’s last poems, which Crowley quotes in its totality, and which is surely one of the few poetical treatments of an online comment section.
There must be many other such derelicts—
orphaned, abandoned, adrift for whatever reason—
but few have kept flying before the winds
of cyberspace so briskly as Drunk Driver
(the name of the site). Anonymous (the author)
signed his last entry years ago, and more years passed
before the Comments began to accrete
like barnacles on the hull of a ship
and then in ever-bifurcating chains
on each other. The old hulk became
the refuge of a certain shy sort
of visitor, like those trucks along the waterfront
haunted by lonely souls who could not bear
eye-witness encounters. They could leave
their missives in the crevices of this latter-day
Wailing Wall, returning at intervals
to see if someone had replied, clicking
their way down from the original message—
_April 4. Another gray day. Can’t find the energy to get the laundry down to the laundry room. The sciatica just won’t go away._
—through the meanders and branchings
of the encrusted messages, the tenders
of love for a beloved who would never know herself
to have been desired, the cries of despair,
the silly whimsies and failed jokes, to where
the thread had last been snapped,
only to discover that no, no one had answered
the question posed. Because,
no doubt, there was no answer.
Is there an “answer” to the war
wherever the latest war is going on?
If one could get under the ship
and see all those barnacles clinging
to the keel, what a sight it would be.
Talk about biodiversity! But on deck,
so sad, always the same three skeletons,
the playing card nailed to the mast,
frayed and fluttering weakly, like some huge insect
the gods will not allow to die.
The speed with which bank nationalisation has risen to the top of the policy agenda has found the economics profession largely unprepared. The literature on property rights that developed in the 1970s produced a range of arguments in favour of private as opposed to public ownership which had at least some influence on the widespread adoption of privatisation policies in the 1980s and 1990s. Although subsequent theoretical and empirical developments, such as the discovery of the equity premium puzzle and developments in agency theory cast doubt on the claims of the original literature, the profession as a whole had moved on, and showed little interest in revisiting the issues. The situation was a bit different in Australia.
As Joshua Gans observes,
the main contributions have come from Australian economists who did this research a decade ago only to be told by international journals that as privatisation had occurred everywhere by then, no one was interested in the conditions under which government ownership would be preferable.
and notes “I guess that view is wrong.” Unsurprisingly, I was among those who tried, with limited success, to interest the international profession in this question.
As Joshua’s post suggests, there’s a feeling here that Australia tends to get the short end of the stick in the economics profession. Australia has made some notable contributions to economic thought, with relatively limited recognition. Examples include the work of Trevor Swan (arguably the most significant economist never to win a Nobel prize), Colin Clark on national accounting, and before that the “Australian case for protection” developed by the Brigden Commission and later formalised as the Stolper-Samuelson theorem. In the 1970s, the “Gregory thesis” was an independent analysis of what became known internationally as “Dutch disease”. As these examples suggest, we tend to suffer a bit from being on the far side of the planet from the main centres of activity in the profession.
The comments threads are already buzzing with anticipation so I’m very happy to announce that our long-awaited Charles Stross Book Event will be published here in the next few days. It features Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Ken MacLeod and of course Charlie Stross himself, along with CT regulars. Keep a lookout, and be ready with comments on your favorite Stross work.
There’s been a “serious”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/01/the_best_jobs_and_the_worst.html “debate”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/01/ivory_tower_sexytime.html at the “other place where I blog”:https://www.crookedtimber.org over whether academia in general, and political science in particular is a sexy profession. I’m glad to say that we actually have Real Social Scientific Data1 that we can bring to bear on this topic. In 2006, James Felton, Peter T. Koper, John Mitchell and Michael Stinson “conducted research”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=918283 that sought to establish, _inter alia_ how perceived hotness of professors affected their RateMyProfessors evaluations for teaching quality. As part of this exercise, Felton et al. ranked (Table 2 in their paper) the relative hotness quotients of 36 different academic disciplines. My estimable colleague John Sides prepared a nice graph of the Felton et al. data (see below).
Three important research findings leap out from this picture.
First – that academic disciplines are, without exception, more ‘not’ than ‘hot.’ When adjusted positive and negative hotness scores are totted up against each other, no discipline does better than – 0.062 (Languages). Thus, the main hypothesis of “Careerbuilder et al. 2009”:http://msn.careerbuilder.com/Article/MSN-1737-Job-Info-and-Trends-10-Sexy-Careers-You-Never-Thought-Of/?sc_extcmp=JS_1737_hotmail1&SiteId=cbmsnhm41737&ArticleID=1737>1=23000&cbRecursionCnt=1&cbsid=3af4ed160fc34141a4e6546d5cc61da3-284680908-R9-4 is decisively refuted.
Second, the above proviso aside, political scientists are pretty damn hot in comparative terms. We rank as number 5, trailing only languages, law, religion and criminal justice. From eyeballing the data, it looks as though there is a minor discontinuity right after political science, where the hotness lurches down a notch, and another, more significant one between psychology (at number 10) and finance (at number 11).
Third, economists are, without any jot, tittle, scintilla or iota of doubt or ambiguity, the notties rather than the hotties of the social sciences (coming 30th out of 36). Tough luck, John. Sociologists are sixth (heh), philosophers come in at number 9 (which is a perfectly respectable score, I suppose), and English professors are middlin’, at number 12 in the ranking.
(An earlier version of this post appeared at “The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org)
1 Real Social Scientific Data is a term of art here, meaning ‘statistics that are sufficiently entertaining and gratifying2 that I really don’t want to look at them too hard.’ This understanding of data is very commonly applied in the public sphere of learned debate although it is, perhaps surprisingly, rarely spelled out in explicit terms. I note in passing that some commenter at the Monkey Cage wants to control for differences in sex ratios between professors and students and similar irrelevant persnickets. All I want to say to this pedant (whom I suspect to be a jealous chemistry professor or denizen of a similarly low-ranked discipline) is _political science is number 5! Suck on it._
2 In a collective rather than individual sense (I don’t imagine that I’m pulling my discipline’s score up).
Disclaimer: oddly, given my interests, I’ve never read much G.A. Cohen before picking up Rescuing Justice and Equality for this little event. (I understand his friends call him ‘Gerry’, but I won’t presume, on such slight acquaintance.) This matters only because my reading of the book is still preliminary and a bit scattershot. I’m not sure I get it. Also, I typed this post out like a maniac, just for the exercise of it. Also, I’m writing this post without access to my Rawls books, which I forgot to bring home, so I can’t quote. Well, I’m sorry about that. So stuff I say that is just plain wrong should be corrected in comments, without anger if you please. And we’ll just do our best, shall we? Also, I’m about to go on vacation for a few days, but I promised to participate. Also, I’m about to embark on an internet-free weekend getaway. Hence will not be very helpful in comments myself. Best I can do.) [click to continue…]
As promised, this is the first in a series of weekly postings on G.A. Cohen’s new _Rescuing Justice and Equality_. I say “new”, but much of the book isn’t all that new at all and consists of the republication of older material with which the political philosophy community is already familiar. I should also mention that there’s a conference on the book in Oxford on Friday and Saturday, which I’ll be attending, so my contribution in future weeks will, no doubt, be enriched by that. But for now it has not been.
As James Surowiecki points out here, my views on what’s entailed in bank nationalisation differ significantly from those of Paul Krugman. [1] Krugman, like quite a few other advocates of nationalisation, has in mind models like the Resolution Trust Corporation and the Swedish nationalizations of the 1990s, where the government took insolvent institutions into temporary public ownership, liquidated the bad assets and returned them to the private sector. These solutions worked well because the global financial system as a whole was solvent and liquid, even though some sectors (US S&Ls, Swedish banks) were not.
What’s needed in the present case is not only to fix the problems of individual banks, problems on a much bigger scale than have been seen before (even in the leadup to the Great Depression, the financial sector played a smaller role in the economy than in the recent bubble), but to reconstruct a failed global financial system. It’s kind of like rewiring an electrical system in near-meltdown, while keeping the power on (this is possible, but tricky and dangerous). The job is likely to be much slower than the rescues mentioned above, and the institutions that emerge from it will be very different from those that went in.
But, contra Surowiecki this time, this only strengthens the argument for nationalisation. Financial restructuring is going to be a huge challenge, involving both a radical redesign of national regulations and the construction of an almost completely new global financial architecture. To attempt this task while leaving the banks under the control of discredited managers nominally responsible to shareholders whose equity has, in the absence of massive transfers from taxpayers, been wiped out by bad debts, seems like doing live electrical work while wearing a blindfold and standing in a pool of water.
fn1. Krugman is well-known for being right when lots of others have been wrong, so take this into account in assessing the arguments.
Chief Justice Roberts misplaces an adverb; Obama realizes this, pauses to give him the opportunity to correct the error; Roberts realizes what he has said, corrects himself; Obama nods to acknowledge the correction, smiles, and repeats what Roberts originally said rather than drag things out further.
The text in the Constitution is, “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”