I snagged another good comics history recently. A History of American Graphic Humor, vol. 2: 1865-1938 (1938), by William Murrel. (You could get it through Abebooks; but I bought the last cheap copy. Sorry.) They sure liked to make fun of Oscar Wilde, back in the day. [click to continue…]

Following up this post, here’s the way to do the scan-and-OCR thing (if you are a mac user). [click to continue…]

Given recent “ambiguous FTC mutterings”:http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/ad-group-ftc-blog-rules-unfairly-muzzle-online-media.ars, it is probably no bad thing that I make it clear that I receive lots of free copies of forthcoming books (partly because of CT; partly because I help out the Book Salon people at FireDogLake), and that any reviews I do are likely as not of books that I have gotten for nothing. When I first decided to write this post a few days ago, I was going to talk about all the things that I’d like to get for free but don’t, starting with good f/sf books (nearly everything I get is non-fiction) and in particular _Unseen Academicals_, then moving rapidly through ever more preposterous requests for technology (the new Barnes and Noble e-reader looks quite interesting; I would _happily_ review one of the new Macs with the 27 inch screens), and finishing with the frankly unethical/completely implausible – books that didn’t exist but that I promised to review favorably if only the authors in question would get their arses in gear and produce them. I figured that I’d be prepared to trash my integrity for a complete and definitive edition of _Bloom County_, or indeed for an ARC of _A Dance With Dragons_ (my come-on – “George R.R. Martin Is Not My Bitch”:http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html – but _I’ll be his_ if only he gets it finished). But then I saw (via Laura) that “Volume I”:http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/59885/ of the complete _Bloom County_ has just come out _without any inducements whatsoever_ on my part. Can this be taken as a sign from the Fates that the GRRM logjam too is about to break …

There’s been a lot of discussion of Ayn Rand the last few days, because of the new (and very-interesting sounding) “biography”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195324870?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0195324870. Personally, I could never stand her work, not because of the libertarian philosophy (I like me mid-period Heinlein just fine), but the excruciatingly bad writing. If Chris Hayes is right, she finally has a worthy successor. Ladies, gentlemen, I give you Ralph Nader and “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us”:http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/Only-the-Super-Rich-Can-Save-Us/ba-p/1582.

As a novel it is a dismal affair: gracelessly written, ploddingly plotted, and long. Oh God so long. And as a political tract it advances a conception of politics both grossly condescending and depressingly elitist. Democracy, Nader seems to say, could be ours: if only the oligarchs would get behind it. The basic plot goes like this. Moved by pity to travel to New Orleans in the wake of Katrina to oversee relief efforts, Warren Buffett encounters one desperately poor and grateful recipient of his charity who announces, “Only the super-rich can save us.” This gets Buffett thinking, and he proceeds to convene a top secret meeting in a Maui resort. There he gathers an eclectic group of the super-rich: Paul Newman, George Soros, Bill Gates Sr., Ted Turner, Barry Diller, Peter Lewis (owner of Progressive Insurance), and, somewhat randomly, Yoko Ono, among others, to create a “people’s revolt of the rich.”

This is apparently not a satire. But it does raise the question of whether there are any genuinely good, genuinely political novels out there. Since we’re coming up on the weekend, I’ll throw this out as an open thread (I have a few nominations myself, but don’t want to bias the sample). Have at it.

I wrote a “review”:http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408555 a couple of weeks ago of Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger’s “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/biblio/9780691138619, Amazon)

Information technology has grown so entwined with our lives that it is easy to overlook the marvels flowering forth from it. … But if Viktor Mayer-Schonberger is right, these technologies may grow to entangle and choke us. They create a kind of external memory, recording our actions and interactions in digital video footage and thousands upon thousands of digital photographs. … Mayer-Schonberger argues that these developments challenge how we organise society and how we understand ourselves. … At its heart, his case against digital memory is humanist. He worries that it will not only change the way we organise society, but it will damage our identities. Identity and memory interact in complicated ways. Our ability to forget may be as important to our social relationships as our ability to remember. To forgive may be to forget; when we forgive someone for serious transgressions we in effect forget how angry we once were at them. … Delete argues that digital memory has the capacity both to trap us in the past and to damage our trust in our own memories.

I probably should have linked to it before, but didn’t, because I wanted to combine the link with a short review of Tyler Cowen’s recent book “Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World” (Powells, Amazon) As I mention in the review, Tyler’s book presents a very interesting contrast to Viktor’s. What Tyler sees as evidence of individual empowerment, Viktor sees as as a serious threat to personal identity. Viktor fears that technologies will undermine our sense of self, and our ability to remake ourselves in order to respond to a changing social environment. Tyler sees new technologies as valuable precisely _because_ they allow us to remake ourselves and our identities, creating our own ‘economies’ (here, I think he is harking back to the Greek origins of the term) or internally ordered environments by picking and choosing “small cultural bits” and assembling them according to our own personal hierarchies.
[click to continue…]

In response to some comments, I’ve written a little bit about the representative agent assumption in Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Models. I argue that, given the underlying DSGE assumptions, you won’t get very much extra by including heterogeneous agents.

But, I intend to say in the “Where next” section, it seems likely that heterogeneous and boundedly rational individuals, interacting in imperfect and incomplete markets will generate ’emergent’ macro outcomes that are not obvious from the micro foundations. Of course, this is going to be a prospectus for a theory, not the theory itself.

In the meantime, comments on my snippet would be much appreciated.

Update Looking at the responses, I think just about everyone has missed the point, which suggests that maybe I didn’t make it very well.

I’m not saying that heterogeneity doesn’t matter, but that introducing (tractable) heterogeneity into a DSGE model isn’t likely to yield radically different predictions about macroeconomic outcomes. If that’s correct, then if you think DSGE models work well (for some evaluative procedure), you can be relaxed about using representative agents. And if you don’t think DSGE models work well, the representative agent assumption isn’t the problem, or at least it isn’t the only problem.

Since my statement of the situation didn’t help much, I’ll present it as a question instead. Can anyone point me to a DSGE-style model that derives strongly non-classical results from the introduction of heterogeneity? Or, failing that, does anyone have a convincing argument that such results should emerge?

I’m aware of course that, in general, anything can happen with aggregation across heterogeneous agents, so I’m not much interested in arguments for agnosticism starting from that point. End update

[click to continue…]

“Gideon Rachman”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2009/10/the-goldstone-report-and-international-law/

I thought the FT leader on the Goldstone report got it about right. The report on Israel’s assault on Gaza is a serious bit of work and it’s fairly desperate to try to discredit it by calling its author a “self-hating Jew”. The bigger problem lies with the UN Human Rights Council … And lying behind that, is a still bigger problem with the very idea of impartial international law. … I asked whether international law really deserved the same status as domestic law? After all, the very basis of justice in a nation-state is equality before the law – anybody who commits a murder should be arrested and prosecuted, no matter how powerful they are. But this basic principle does not apply in the international arena. Almost all the people hauled before the ICC have been African leaders; and the UN special tribunal on the former Yugoslavia (where Goldstone was chief prosecutor) only got to prosecute the likes of Milosevic because Serbia was defeated in a war. … The trouble is that … the system of international law that we currently have is as much about power in the international system, as about human rights or the law.

[click to continue…]

I like to think that I know a little bit about contrarianism. So I’m disturbed to see that people who are making roughly infinity more money than me out of the practice aren’t sticking to the unwritten rules of the game.
[click to continue…]

“From Hansard”:http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm091020/debtext/91020-0006.htm , in the context of the impending UK postal strike:

bq. Mr. Peter Atkinson (Hexham) (Con): Does the Minister have any idea how many postal workers, particularly in London, have second jobs? It is the threat— [ Interruption. ] It is the threat that they might have to work a full shift for which they are paid that is adding to the militancy. [ Interruption. ]

Second jobs? Leaving work without working a full shift? I can well see that British MPs would be outraged by such practices. Here’s to the success of Billy Hayes and the CWU!

Another section from my book-in-progress. The book-so-far can be viewed here.
[click to continue…]

I have a coincidence to report. This morning, right before Kieran’s post went up, I was scanning (see this post, concerning my new hobby) selections from Russell Lynes’ classic essay “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow”, the inspiration for the Life chart on brows. Here is how Lynes tells the story in a (1979) afterword to his book, The Tastemakers: The Shaping of American Popular Taste [amazon], which is an out-of-print minor classic, if you ask me. [click to continue…]

From a 1949 issue of Life Magazine, your guide to the “three basic categories of a new U.S. social structure — and the high brows have the whip hand”. With the rise of the cultural omnivore still well off in the distance, this is your must-have guide for the vagaries of mainstream culture in postwar America. Click for a larger version.

It’s good if people ask for advice, but it’s not ideal if they ask for it too late. For example, when students ask me the year they are going on the job market how they should start thinking about the process, my first reaction (although I don’t say it since there is no point in stressing out the person at that stage) is that they should have started preparing years ago. Similarly, the year one is going up for tenure is not the right time to start wondering who could be on one’s list of tenure letter writers. Yet all too often this is precisely what happens, people don’t realize that some preparation over the years would have been extremely valuable if not crucial when approaching such important milestones in one’s academic career.

To help academics think about some of these matters, I have started a career advice column called Ph.Do over at Inside Higher Ed. In the first piece, More than Merit, I explain the reasons for the column. In the second, The Conference Scene, I discuss how to think about when and which conferences to attend. In the third, Conference Do’s and Don’t’s, I talk about how to maximize going to meetings without derailing one’s career. Any guesses as to which friend I refer to regarding the advice about dinners?

Future pieces will cover lots of topics ranging from collaborative work to making oneself marketable in several disciplines, applying for awards and fellowships and more. I welcome suggestions for what to address in upcoming pieces. Some of the ideas I have for future writing is already very much inspired by conversations we’ve had here on CT in the past.

I don’t think IHE has RSS feeds for specific columns, but for Twitter users, I’ve set up an account here and I’m also keeping this page updated with links although I haven’t set up a feed for it yet.

My still-in-progress book (outline here) will have a chapter on privatisation. That reminded me of some thoughts on school privatisation and for-profit education that I thought might be of interest here. The near-total failure of the for-profit education ventures that proliferated in the 1990s is striking and to some extent mysterious. In part, I suspect that the whole enterprise (at least as regards school education) was based on a misdiagnosis of the problems of the public school system, focusing on organizational factors, rather than the more intractable effects of steadily growing inequality. The limited success of the charter schools movement would point in that direction. But I argue below (from a piece I wrote for Campus Review in Australia a couple of years ago) that there are more fundamental problems with the for-profit approach. Your thoughts appreciated.

[click to continue…]