June 2010

Its a long time since the first installment, I know. At least I’m not embarrassed by having to post recommend another David Cohen book straightaway — that can wait till the third installment.

This recommendation is Tony Wagner’s book The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need–and What We Can Do About It The reason I read Wagner’s book has nothing to do with what I found so valuable about it. I was preparing a talk for teachers at a local high school on educational equity, and I knew that one of the teachers was obsessed with the “achievement gap” between American and foreign students, so wanted to learn more about it. And, indeed, Wagner is very clear about the kinds of things that our schools (and colleges) could be doing better for even our most advantaged students — in particular failing to create opportunities for higher order cognition, and structuring their learning to produce the traits and skills that will serve them well in a global economy. He includes a nice, and in my experience quite accurate, critique of the AP History exams (I don’t think my colleagues in English all agree with me, but AP English seems much better at eliciting the kind of curriculum in which students learn things that are valuable).

What grabbed me was none of that, but his description of the Change Leadership Group that he runs at Harvard.

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Laura McKenna has an interesting claim and “data point”:http://11d.typepad.com/files/blog-evolution—mckenna.pdf (PDF).

bq. However, the move from independent bloggers to paid staff members of important newspapers and interest groups had an impact on the old system of blogging. Perhaps because these newly professional bloggers felt pressured to distance themselves from their amateur roots, they stopped linking to independent bloggers. They were more likely to link to academic studies, foundation reports, newspaper articles, or live-blogged events.

bq. Matthew Yglesias is one of the superstar bloggers who went pro. … His new professional status has had an impact on his linkage patterns. In the last week of September of 2004, Yglesias wrote 30 posts with 31 hyperlinks on his independent blog. Fifteen of those links were to independent blogs, and the remaining sixteen links were to newspapers, websites, journals, or think tank studies. In the last week of September of 2009, he wrote 66 posts with 131 hyperlinks for his blog at the Center for American Progress. Only seven of 131 hyperlinks were to independent bloggers. The remaining 122 links primarily pointed readers to everything else, but primarily traditional newspapers and journals. Yglesias is writing a lot more, but referring to independent bloggers a lot less.

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Price Fishback’s paper suggesting that the US welfare state is bigger than Sweden’s and Denmark’s got a “lot”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/05/social-welfare-expenditures-in-the-united-states-and-the-nordic-countries.html “of”:http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/56094/wilkinson-fishback-u-s-and-scandinavia/reihan-salam “attention”:http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2010/05/25/americas-nordic-sized-welfare-state/ a few weeks back on the right side of the blogosphere. Since I outsource most of my thinking on statistical comparisons of the welfare state to Lane Kenworthy, I’ve been waiting for him to assess the argument. He “finally has”:http://lanekenworthy.net/2010/06/07/social-spending-and-poverty/.

bq. This looks like good news for the poor in the United States. Is it? Unfortunately, no. These adjustments change the story with respect to the aggregate quantity of resources spent on social protection in the three countries, but they have limited bearing on redistribution and on the living standards of the poor. … Begin with tax breaks. … . In the United States these disproportionately go to the affluent and the middle class. … Public transfer programs in Denmark and Sweden tend to be “universal” in design … To make them more affordable, the government claws back some of the benefit by taxing it as though it were regular income. All countries do this, including the United States, but the Nordic countries do it more extensively. So how well-off are the poor in the United States, with its “hidden welfare state,” compared to social-democratic Denmark and Sweden? One measure is average posttransfer-posttax (“disposable”) income among households in the bottom decile of the income distribution. Here are my calculations using the best available comparative data, from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). (The numbers are adjusted for household size. They refer to a household with a single adult. For a family of four, multiply by two.)

bq. Government services — medical care, child care, housing, transportation, and so on — reduce material hardship directly. They also free up income to be spent on other needs. The comparative data, though by no means perfect, are consistent with the hypothesis that public services help the poor more in the Nordic countries than in the United States.

bq. Helping the poor is not, of course, the only thing we want from social spending. But it surely is one thing.

Alan Dershowitz never disappoints, does he?

bq. It is a close question whether “civilians” who agree to participate in the breaking of a military blockade have become combatants. They are certainly something different from pure innocents, and perhaps they are also somewhat different from pure armed combatants.

I like that “perhaps”, as if it might turn out, after further legal cogitation by the professor, that torpedoing or bombing the convoy would be a legitimate act.

(Following on John’s installments, part <a href=https://crookedtimber.org/2010/05/03/the-oregon-petition-a-case-study-in-agnotology/> one</a>, part <a href=https://crookedtimber.org/2010/05/05/agnotology-followup/>two</a>, and part <a href=https://crookedtimber.org/2010/05/08/ignorance-is-strength/>three</a>.)

I’m not sure how I missed this — I think I was lost in the archives at the time.  But last month, right around the time everyone on CT was discussing <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology>agnotology</a>, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, came out “cautiously” in favor of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s demand that the University of Virginia turn over (as the <i>Washington Post</i> <a href=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/03/AR2010050304139.html>put it</a>) “all data and materials presented by former professor Michael Mann when he applied for five research grants from the university.” (That includes “all correspondence or e-mails between Mann and 39 other scientists since 1999” until Mann left Virginia for Penn State in 2005.) Wood <a href=http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=1315>writes</a>, citing renowned scientist and powerful logic machine operator John Hinderaker:

<blockquote>John Hinderaker’s point is well taken. No one has the right to take public funds just to make stuff up and pass it along as science. And “academic freedom” could well suffer a greater crisis of legitimacy from that kind of abuse than from the interference of meddling politicians.</blockquote>

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Perhaps, despite the sample of one and the obvious irrelevance of the opening anecdote (didn’t people miss important letters amid the junk mail back in the old days?), there is something to this NYT story about how the Internet is killing our attention span. But I can’t help imagining some grouchy old-timer saying something like “Damn cave paintings. In my day, we told stories about the sacred mammoth hunt, and you really had to use your imagination. Kids these days just want to stare at a wall all night. No wonder they can’t throw a spear straight”.

Andrew McCarthy’s book is apparently selling well! We’ll get to that.

But first: a couple weeks ago Jonah Goldberg did one of those diavlog thingies with David Frum. The occasion was Frum making accusations of ‘epistemic closure’ and Goldberg protesting that it’s all nonsense. The Jim Manzi/Mark Levin thing. The section we will be concerned with is this one. Only 9 minutes long, so you can watch it yourself. I’ve transcribed some highlights. (If anyone listens and notices I’ve mistranscribed or misleadingly paraphrased, please say so in comments.) [click to continue…]

A couple of years ago, I was in Rome for work. I never had the chica-boom, so to speak, to put in the following this taxi receipt for reimbursement.
Gotta love the patriarchy…

… so here’s something, part 2 of my ongoing boxing series, apparently.

Other fun stuff. While I await my copy of Kim Deitch’s new book, The Search for Smilin’ Ed [amazon], his dad’s first animated film was re-discovered a couple months ago: “Howdy Doody and His Magic Hat”.

And a good story to go with:

The catch to this opportunity was that all of us bright young hotshot UPA stars absolutely hated the Howdy Doody show, and felt that the puppet itself was gross—a ten on a kitsch scale of one to ten. We determined to “improve” the Howdy Doody character to the level of our hallowed UPA design standard. After all, we were already the toast of New York animation, raking in the prizes and publicity. We simply couldn’t lower ourselves to something so crude, even if the client was paying us to do just that. So we just blithely went ahead with transforming Howdy Doody in our own image.

Unfortunately, this God-like endeavor went down in flames. Kagran paid for the film, but “Buffalo Bob” Smith, Howdy Doody’s Daddy, hated what we had wrought, and ordered the negative destroyed. Our little pride and joy experiment was never shown publicly, and was never properly listed on the International Motion Picture Database. In plain language, it simply did not exist.

So far as I’m concerned, that’s the heart of liberalism: you take some red-blooded red state icon like Howdy Doody and you succumb to the unbearable temptation to ‘make it more like Europe’ – all ‘modern’, New York stiff and flat. And you emphasize that – hey, it’s just a hat. (Thus does the liberal strike at the heart of American exceptionalism.)

At any rate, I’d rather look at Howdy Doody (even without ears) than Glenn Reynolds.

Via “Jonathan Chait”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/75247/the-conservative-beauty-paradox-explained, _Right Wing News_ is “running a competition”:http://rightwingnews.com/2010/06/the-20-hottest-conservative-women-in-the-new-media-2010-edition/

bq. One of the most popular articles at RWN last year was, The 15 Hottest Conservative Women In The New Media. So, when you have a big hit, what could make more sense than doing a sequel?

It seems to me a wee bit unfair that all them healthy heterosexual Republican gals (and, for that matter, the five or six Log Cabin Republicans who have stuck it out despite all) can’t get in on the fun. So let me propose an alternative competition to find the Hottest Conservative Man In The New Media. And by one of those funny coincidences, the eight finalists for this much coveted award are the members of the “distinguished panel of judges” that _Right Wing News_ has chosen to adjudicate which of the laydeez is the smokingest.¹ Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

Glenn Reynolds

Jonah Goldberg

Andrew Malcolm

Dan Gainor

‘Van Helsing’ from Moonbattery (artist’s depiction)

Alfonzo Rachel

James Joyner (who is actually a good bloke imo who really ought to have known better)

And remember! You can only pick _one._

¹ It occurs to me that ditch-hurlers might want to point out in comments that I myself am not possessed of what used to be called matinee-idol good looks. This would be a wonderful way of missing the point, reinforcing it, or both.

Radio 7 is running this brilliant re-imagining of the origins, and simultaneously running some of these “early years” stories from B7 productions. The first beginnings story is only up for another 24 hours; you have longer to catch the rest. The Avon early years story is especially recommended.

A conference announcement that will be interesting to some of our ethics and political philosophy readers here, with more details here (pdf). Submission deadline is November 1, 2010, so plenty of time.

I’m working on a longish piece on how to pay for the global financial crisis, and it seems like a good idea to deal with some side issues separately. One of the standard post-crisis responses of governments, i has been to increase the age at which people become eligible for public old age pensions. This change is likely to flow through to other policies, for example by shaping the presumptions around the tax treatment of private retirement income.

I want to step away from these financial questions and ask the question: does it make sense, in general, for people to retire at older ages than in the past? For those who want the “shorter” version, my answer, on balance, is “Yes, at least in Australia”.

Update The qualification “at least in Australia” is more important than I initially thought. In particular (and surprisingly to me), the US has not had anything like the increase in conditional life expectancy seen in Oz – a gain of about 2 years since 1980 for the US compared to 6 for Oz (US source here, Oz here). Also, the Australian old age pension is flat rate (subject to a means test) and essentially the same as the disability support pension, which is the main source of support for people who are too old to work in physically demanding jobs. Again, it seems worth pointing out that the best solution here is to make the jobs better, by reducing working hours and improving conditions.

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