August 2009

On the whole, a great book. A real pleasure to read. I’ve never read Scialabba’s stuff before (or I haven’t noticed his byline, to remember it). My loss. But better late than never.

What’s so great about Scialabba? Temperamentally, there is his gratifyingly steady exhibition of generous severity to his subjects. (I can’t imagine anyone could object to being drubbed so fairly. With the possible exception of Christopher Hitchens.) Stylistically, there is his facility for cramming breadth into small literary packets, without recourse to cheap space-saving devices. Intellectually, there is his forthright evenhandedness—his awareness of what other people think—that never forgets, or neglects to mention, what he thinks. (Everyone else is praising George as well, so I won’t lay it on thick. But no kidding. Good stuff.)

Full disclosure: I left my copy of his book in Maryland – but only after reading it completely – then wrote this post in New York, from stuff on his website, with the TV blaring in the background. And now I’m in Singapore, polishing up a little.

What are intellectuals good for?

The cover seems to suggest the answer might be: nothing. Nothing good. ‘We fool you,’ announce the symbol-manipulating professionals, snug between those who rule and those who shoot. But no. The correct answer is: several things, surely. Two, for starters. [click to continue…]

Over at my blog a couple of days ago, we were discussing Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, a book which I thought, when I reviewed it in 2002, was much below the standard of his earlier work, though no worse than the average book about the ‘nature-nurture’ controversy. In particular, I thought his discussion of war and violence was hopelessly confused, putting forward a Hobbesian view of violence as the product of rational self interest as if it was consistent with the genetic determinism that was the central theme of the rest of the book.

Now, via John Horgan at Slate, I’ve happened across this broadcast by Pinker at TED (which, by the way I’ve just discovered and is excellent). The broadcast has a transcript which is great for those of us who prefer reading to listening.

In this piece, Pinker appears to me to change sides almsot completely, from pessimist to optimist and from genetic determinist to social improver. Not only does he present evidence that war and violence are declining in relative importance, his explanation for this seems to be entirely consistent with the Standard Social Science Model he caricatured and debunked in The Blank Slate. He’s still got a sort of rational self-interest model in there, but now Hobbes is invoked, not for his ‘nasty, brutish and short’ state of nature, but for his argument that the Leviathan of social order will suppress violence to the benefit of all.

But even more striking is this:

[Co-operation] may also be powered by cosmopolitanism: by histories and journalism and memoirs and realistic fiction and travel and literacy, which allows you to project yourself into the lives of other people that formerly you may have treated as sub-human, and also to realize the accidental contingency of your own station in life; the sense that “there but for fortune go I.”

I agree entirely, but we seem to have come a long way from the African savannah here.

I’m enjoying our George Scialabba event, and I enjoyed George’s book. My contribution will be up tomorrow, or thereabouts. But I want to ask a separate question of our author: what has he changed his mind about? Which of these pieces look, to him, dated or short-sighted? I assume he declined to reprint anything he now thinks is just not worth reading anymore, but I suspect some of this stuff looks critically mixed in retrospect. [click to continue…]

George Scialabba wishes he could be as calmly appalled about our historical moment as Richard Rorty, but Christopher Lasch keeps haranguing him, shouting from an artisan commune on the Other Side that it is worse—much worse—than Bin Laden, Bush, and Jon and Kate plus Eight all rolled into one. Scialabba has been writing wittily and vexingly about modernity and its discontents for decades. And in _What Are Intellectuals Good For?_, a collection of his review essays, he demonstrates his astonishing erudition in considering and citing many thinkers besides Lasch and Rorty.
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Stanford, like many universities, maintains full employment for humanities professors by requiring new students to take their seminars. My heart burning with the pain of societal injustice, I chose the one on “Freedom, Equality, Difference.”

Most of the other students had no particular interest in the topic — they were just meeting the requirement. But a significant minority did: like me, they cared passionately about it. They were the conservatives, armed with endless citations on how affirmative action was undermining American meritocracy. The only other political attitude I noticed was a moderate centrism, the view espoused by the teacher, whose day job was studying Just War Theory.

It quickly became clear that I was the only person even remotely on the left. And it wasn’t simply that the others disagreed with me; they couldn’t even _understand_ me. I remember us discussing a scene in _Invisible Man_ where a factory worker brags he’s so indispensable that when he was out sick the boss drove to his house and begged him to come back, agreeing to put him in charge. When I suggested Ellison might be implying that labor, not management, ought to run workplaces, the other students (and the teacher) didn’t just disagree — they found the idea incomprehensible. How could you run a factory without managers? [click to continue…]

Writing a critique of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis in terms rigorous enough to stand up to scrutiny, but comprehensible to the average reader hasn’t been easy, and I still have a lot more work to do. But thanks to the help I’ve had from commenters here and at my blog, and from other readers, I hope to make a go of it. Now comes the hard bit: suggesting some alternatives, both in theory and policy. I’m not by any means satisfied with this draft. In particular, I need to go back and get a better linkage to the question “if the market price for assets is not the “right” price, what is?”. But, I thought I’d do better getting some help and criticisms now, rather than trying for some more polish first.

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Edmund Wilson’s printed note, a response to a student group asking him to do a reading, breathes of another world. He added in a handwritten scrawl that he doesn’t do “live readings either when I’m offered a very large fee.” And the printed card itself lists a bevy of activities that he declines. Unlike participants here and now – myself and the others – he doesn’t “contribute to or take part in symposiums or ‘panels’ of any kind,” “give interviews” or speeches. He is an ornery writer, devoted to his craft.
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In his brief but delightful introduction to <i>What Are Intellectuals Good For?</i>, Scott McLemee offers a précis of the Scialabbian moral/political universe: “Reconciling the skeptical pragmatism of Richard Rorty and the geopolitical worldview of Noam Chomsky is not a simple project.  Rarely do you find them treated as two sides of one ideological coin.  But that seems like a reasonably accurate description of Scialabba’s sense of the possible.  If he were to write a manifesto, it would probably call for more economic equality, the dismantling of the American military industrial complex, and the end of metaphysics.”  This does indeed sound reasonably accurate, and it serves as a reminder that McLemee is one of the few contemporary writers and reviewers who belongs in Scialabba’s league.  For regardless of whether one agrees with Scialabba’s judgments on matters moral and political (and, often enough, I don’t, even though I’d endorse that hypothetical manifesto in a heartbeat), one has to be impressed with Scialabba’s uncanny ability to <i>inhabit</i> the books and writers he reviews.  Scialabba’s work in <i>What Are Intellectuals Good For?</i> is remarkable for its range, yes, and his prose is notable for its precision and clarity.  But what’s most impressive, I think, is the scrupulousness fairness that Scialabba brings to the task of reviewing.  Almost every essay in this collection allows the reader some degree of imaginative sympathy with the books and writers under review, even when Scialabba himself turns out to be largely unsympathetic to the material he’s writing about.  That’s because Scialabba, like McLemee, always offers a reasonably accurate précis of the material he’s writing about before he gets around to taking issue with it.  It’s easy enough to do, of course, when you’re writing about someone who sees the world as you do; but George Scialabba does it as a matter of course.  I wish I could say the same of all reviewers; and though it’s a standard to which I hold my own review essays, I know very well that I’ve sometimes honored it in the breach.

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My friend Jo Wolff has “a column over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/03/students-university-dumbing-down section taking issue with Phil Willis MP, who chairs the Parliamentary Select Committee on Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills which just issued its report on “Students and Universities” (downloadable “here”:http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmdius.htm ). Jo is upset with Willis and his committee for two reasons: first, because they suggest that the marked increase in the proportions of First Class and 2.1 degrees is the result of grade inflation; second, because they were sceptical about whether a degree of the same class from different institutions are necessarily of equal value.

Jo’s response to the first “dumbing down” point is to cite the benign influence of the government quango the Quality Assurance Agency on teaching standards in Universities. I can’t actually work out if Jo’s QAA argument is sincere or an attempt at heavy irony. In any case, I wonder if he’s actually read what the report says about the QAA. It argues — surely correctly — that the QAA has been more focused on processes than on what happens in the classroom and that it has been quite easy for universities to tick the quality-assurance boxes whist actual teaching quality goes unexamined. That’s one part of the report that is surely right. At the time of “subject review” I think only about 1/19th of a department’s score was a result of classroom observation and the rest was attributable to a lengthy paper-trail which we all laboured for months to assemble. But whatever, Jo knows as well as I do that the incentive structure that government has put in place for higher education in the UK has not favoured quality of teaching but rather research. Teaching has been seriously underfunded and there has been little to no payoff in terms of career advancement open to good teachers. In the circumstances it really is hard to believe that the across-the-board improvement in student grades is the result of better teaching. (No doubt any increase in performance in the UCL philosophy department is attributable to better teaching, but Jo needs an argument for the sector as a whole!)

Jo’s response to the second point — cross-institution comparability of standards — is to say “so what?”. He may be right. But what infuriated the Select Committee was that they asked the question of university leaders and failed to get a clear answer. Rather they were faced with obfuscation and evasion. Perhaps if Jo had been interviewed he would have given the committee a clear, reasoned and satisfactory answer as to why it doesn’t really matter: the Vice Chancellors of Oxford and Oxford Brookes universities weren’t willing or able to do so.

From the _Shorter Oxford_ (old edition),

bq. _Corsned_ – in Old English law, the morsel of trial, a piece of bread consecrated by exorcism ( _panis conjuratus_ ) which an accused person was required to swallow as a trial of his guilt or innocence.

Consider this an open thread for the nomination of other words similarly obscure in usage and unusual in meaning that you’ve come across.

Lemme horn in on Quiggin territory here. I just flew home to Singapore from New York and read about a third of Justin Fox’s The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street [amazon] on the flight. (You can view my takeoff here.) Verdict: it’s good! Chapter 1 contains a lively portrait of Irving Fisher. He was, I have learned, a boldly quantitative economic pioneer who pronounced in print just before the crash of ’29 “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” He lost his personal fortune in the Great Depression. (So he’s a nice emblem for Fox’s book – quants come to practical grief when reality neglects to live up to ideal model standards.)

For his doctoral thesis [completed in 1893] he devised the most sophisticated mathematical treatment yet of economic equilibrium, and he also designed and built a contraption of interconnected water-filled cisterns that he described as “the physical analogue of the ideal economic market.” Many decades later, economist Paul Samuelson judged this work to be “the greatest doctoral dissertation in economics ever writter.” It launched Fisher into a leading role among the world’s still-sparse ranks of mathematical economists. (10)

I want to hear more about his bold, pre-20th Century design for a compucistern system. [click to continue…]

In my discussion of the efficient markets hypothesis, I’ve asserted at various times that if (strong or semi-strong) EMH holds, then the market price of an asset “the best possible estimate of the value of the asset” or, more simply, the “right” price. Quite a few commenters asked me to spell out what this means, and there was some useful discussion. This really is the central issue in evaluating the EMH, so I want both to get it right and to express myself as clearly as possible for non-specialist readers. There’s a draft over the fold. I await your brickbats and (hopefully) bouquets.

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Another section from the forthcoming book. Casting suggestions for the blockbuster movie will be gratefully accepted, along with more prosaic correction of errors, omissions, and of course, compliments. I’m trying to get a nice HTML version, but will see how it goes

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The Internets are buzzing with the latest survey showing, among other things, Republicans are split on the Birther issue with only 47 per cent accepting the claim that Obama was born in the US. That’s almost exactly equal to the 48 per cent who agree that global warming exists – it’s evident from the public debate that the overlap between Birthers and opponents of AGW is very high ).

But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that over 50 per cent of Republicans are conspiracy theorists who believe in a secret plot to impose a Kenyan-socialist dictatorship as part of the UN/IPCC system of world government. On the contrary, the proportion is only about 25 per cent (more in the South). As on the global warming issue, the balance of opinion within the Republican Party holds to the sensible “sceptical” position: the science isn’t settled, the birth records are unclear, sightings of black helicopters need further investigation and so on. That’s good to know.