February 2011

Stephen Walt writes a “quite odd post”:http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/02/15/can_ir_theory_predict_the_future_of_the_euro on realism, liberalism and the future of the euro.

bq. Over the past few months, however, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have been negotiating a joint proposal for deepening economic coordination within the EU (and especially the eurozone) in an attempt to solve some of the problems that produced the crisis in the first place. … Not only does this question have obvious implications for politics and economics in Europe itself, but it also raises some fundamental questions about IR theory and might even be a revealing test of “realist” vs. “liberal” perspectives on international relations more generally. Realists, … have been bearish about the EU and the euro since the financial crisis, arguing that European member states were more likely to pursue their individual national interests and to begin to step back from some of the integrative measures that the EU had adopted in recent years. … By contrast, “institutionalists”:http://www.newsweek.com/2009/07/31/europe-defies-the-skeptics.html, and EU-philes more generally, have suggested that the only way forward was to deepen political integration within Europe. … So what we have here is a nice test of two rival paradigms, and students of international politics should pay close attention to how this all plays out.

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Some observers have wondered why Ireland’s dramatic economic crash has not produced more visible anger. Where are the street riots, they ask. The Greeks, they say, do this sort of thing better, the Icelanders managed to rise up as one – what is wrong with us? The Irish banks are a vast financial black hole and taxpayers are looking at crushing liabilities stretching into the future. Unemployment is over 13%. For those in work, pay packets have shrunk yet again as new taxes and charges kick in. Many households carry huge debt. Emigration is making a return. The terms of the EU-IMF loan constrain the terms of economic debate: we are not a sovereign economic state. Yet everyday life looks like business as usual.

The election campaign is slightly surreal for this reason. Last night saw a US-style TV discussion involving the five main party leaders, all men and all wearing identikit business suits. The studio audience, picked by a PR company to represent undecided voters, was pained yet polite.

But these are surface impressions. Out there, as the parties well know, all the evidence indicates that the voters are merely biding their time, ‘waiting in the long grass’. This could be a realigning election, a shape-shifter for the Irish political system.

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We won’t know for some time yet whether we are living through a game-changing period in which a dominant economic paradigm is replaced by something else. We don’t yet know what the catchy label will be for it.

Yet some of our conventional notions about how states manage market expectations have already been upended in recent times. One of these concerns the politics of credible commitment, which doesn’t always work the way we think it should.

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I like it! The new Jim McCann authered/Janet Lee illustrated graphic … well, it’s too short to be a novel, Return of the Dapper Men [amazon]. Use ‘search inside’ to read the first pages, or view a slightly different selection at the publisher’s site. In the land of Anorev, time has stopped. Living below the surface are children, with no conception of adulthood. Above are machines, with no conception of why they function. (Which makes it sound like some Eloi/Morlock time-machine fable, but that isn’t it at all. Also, how are people doing things if time has ceased? Well, I don’t know. A sort of eternal present. There is only now, no tomorrow, no yesterdays.) Ayden, the boy who asks, and Zoe, the robot-girl who says nothing at all, are friends, and the key. Then time starts again, and 314 Dapper Men descend from the sky, like a Magritte painting. It is all very charming and surreal and doesn’t make any sense, except in an advantages and disadvantages of vermiculation for life, in a space-time worm sort of sense, sense.

As the introduction by Tim “Project Runway” Gunn makes clear, it’s in a fairytale line that includes Alice, The Wizard of Oz, Pinnochio. I would add: Hans Christian Andersen, E.T.A. Hoffman. This bit from Andersen’s “The Ice Queen”, for example, in which Gerda is uselessly interrogating the solipsistic and surreal-minded flowers about where Kay might be: [click to continue…]

Will Wilkinson has a post at The Economist, taking issue with Orrin Kerr, re: the Vinson decision.

Kerr:

The core problem, I think, is that Supreme Court doctrine has strayed far from the original meaning of the scope of federal power granted by the Constitution. Today’s constitutional doctrine permits a scope of federal power that is much broader than the original meaning of the Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper clause would allow. When interpreting the scope of federal power, then, you need to decide what you will follow: The original meaning or case precedents. As I read Judge Vinson’s opinion, he mixes the two. Judge Vinson jumps back and forth between purporting to apply Supreme Court precedents and purporting to interpret the Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper clause in light of its original meaning. Judge Vinson spends about half of the legal analysis on original meaning and about half of the legal analysis on precedent, and he seems to treat both as important.

Wilkinson:

I agree with Mr Kerr that the freshest, topmost layer of the body of constitutional interpretation built up over the ages by the myriad sages of the Supreme Court is at best tenuously connected with the meaning of the hallowed document ordinary Americans imagine to govern their republic. What I don’t understand is Mr Kerr’s objection to mixing respect for precedent and original meaning in rendering judgments about the “constitutionality” of legislation

This is a perfect illustration of what I was talking about in this post – and the rather invigorating thread that went with it. Originalism is incompatible with respect for precedent. Kerr is getting at this, but he isn’t as clear as he might be. If you just substitute ‘originalism’ in that first passage for ‘the original meaning’ it becomes clear. Wilkinson’s objection is met: obviously you can combine combine respect for original meaning with respect for precedent (that’s Will’s objection). But the philosophy that sees and advocates this practical possibility is the ‘living constitution’ view, nemesis of originalism. What you can’t do is combine originalism with respect for precedent, in coherent philosophical fashion. [click to continue…]

I’m in Melbourne for the conference of the Australian Agricultural & Resource Economics Society (in fact, I’m currently President-elect of the Society[1]. There have been a couple of great papers on long-term food supply from Phil Pardey and Tom Hertel. So, this seems like a good idea to write down some thoughts about (what ought to be, at any rate) the central issue of agricultural economics – whether the global food system can produce enough food for the world and deliver it to those who need it.

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“This”:http://thinkprogress.org/?p=143419 is perhaps unsurprising, but nonetheless interesting.

bq. According to e-mails obtained by ThinkProgress, the Chamber hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams. Hunton And Williams’ attorney Richard Wyatt, who once represented Food Lion in its infamous lawsuit against ABC News, was hired by the Chamber in October of last year. To assist the Chamber, Wyatt and his associates, John Woods and Bob Quackenboss, solicited a set of private security firms — HB Gary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis) — to develop tactics for damaging progressive groups and labor unions, in particular ThinkProgress, the labor coalition called Change to Win, the SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.

From the “PDF”:http://images2.americanprogress.org/ThinkProgress/ProposalForTheChamber.pdf

bq. US Chamber Watch is one of the most active members of the opposition to the US Chamber of Commerce (CoC). Unlike some groups, members of this organization are politically connected and well established, making the US Chamber Watch vulnerable to information operations that could embarrass the organization and those associated with it. … we need to discredit the organization through the following. … Paint US Chamber Watch as an operative of CtW and the unions … Craft a message to combat the messaging propaganda of US Chamber Watch. …Create a false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information, and monitor to see if US Chamber Watch acquires it. Afterward, present explicit evidence proving that such transactions never occurred. Also, create a fake insider persona and generate communications with CtW. Afterward, release the actual documents at a specified time and explain the activity as a CtW contrived operation. … Connect US Chamber Watch’s radical tactics to Velvet Revolution … If needed, create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.

The Chamber of Commerce “denies”:http://www.chamberpost.com/2011/02/more-baseless-attacks-on-the-chamber/ that it ever saw the document, or directly or indirectly hired the firm in question (which seems in fact to have been a number of firms, including Palantir Technology, which has been getting a lot of hype in cybersecurity circles over the last couple of years). This may be true, but I’ll be quite interested to see whether there is sufficient legal basis for the targeted organizations to sue the companies in question, and perhaps expand the lawsuit to the US Chamber of Commerce and its agents. In particular, I would be interested to see what further pertinent email communications might be uncovered if the potential plaintiffs manage to get discovery. There are perhaps some parallels to Dow and Sasol’s “corporate spying efforts”:http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/news-and-blogs/news/spygate/ against Greenpeace, where we may see some quite interesting materials indeed emerge as the case wends its way through the courts.

Update: also see “Glenn Greenwald”:http://www.salon.com/news/wikileaks/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2011/02/11/campaigns, who was targeted by the same people.

Am too busy writing a paper to blog, but if I were blogging, I’d be writing about …

(1) My happy discovery that George Scialabba’s website has an “Atom feed”:http://www.georgescialabba.net/mtgs/atom.xml, which is mentioned nowhere on the page, but which allows you to keep up with new Scialabba As It Arrives. Apparently, his website has been speaking xml all its life without knowing it …

(2) My “review”:http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=415096&c=2 of Evgeny Morozov’s “The Net Delusion”:ttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1586488740?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1586488740 (short version: when it’s good, it’s very, very good. And when it’s bad, it’s horrid). [UPDATE: Cosma Shalizi emails to tell me that one of my criticisms of Morozov – viz. that it is impossible to later disentangle individual voices from the roaring of a crowd – is in fact wrong).

(3) The “Reformcard”:http://reformcard.com/ effort to grade Irish political parties’ commitment to reform, whenever they get around to issuing manifestos. I will say that I am a little sceptical about the term ‘reform,’ which is frequently employed as a more or less direct euphemism for ‘cuts and marketization’ – I’ll be interested to see how it’s measured in practice.1 While Ireland could surely do with reform, it is likely to suffer far more ‘reform’ than could possibly be beneficial, regardless of who gets elected. Update 2: commentators tell me that the reforms that the site will emphasize are purely institutional ones.

(4) Scott McLemee’s “thoughts on international politics and zombies”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee323. As “xkcd”:http://xkcd.com/856/ pointed out recently, we’re all a little overexposed to zombies and other Internet trochees. So here’s a bit from Francis Spufford’s _Red Plenty_ (coming out in the US in a few months!) that freshens up (if that’s the right word) the metaphor nicely.

bq. But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on. That was Marx’s description, anyway. And what would be the alternative? The consciously arranged alternative? A dance of another nature, Emil presumed. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all.

1Far worse though, is ‘painful reform,’ which is invariably used as a term of approbation by those expecting to suffer _no pain whatsoever_ (and quite possibly anticipating substantial profits or consultancy fees) from the ‘reforms’ being tabled.

A useful bit of interactive data visualization for Emmanuel Saez’s time-series on historical trends in income growth and distribution in the United States. As you can see, between 1970 and 2008 people in the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution typically chose not to partake of annual increases in total income, presumably because of a tendency to prefer and thus self-select into lower-paying jobs, or possibly because of an innate dislike for the more complex mathematics (surrounding tax calculations, car payments, and budgeting generally) that is associated with earning more money.

Another film post: in teaching ‘philo and film’, I’m focusing mostly on sf, but branching into speculation in a more metaphysical sense, and spectacle in a more purely visual sense. One slightly oddball pick I’ve made is the Reinhardt/Dieterle A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) [amazon].

It was released on DVD for the first time last year and I really cannot recommend it highly enough for sheer entertainment value, and several other values as well. It’s not exactly a forgotten film, but this late arrival on the DVD scene is a symptom of some slippage between the cracks. Yet it’s got a great, big name cast. James Cagney as Bottom, the Weaver: [click to continue…]

I haven’t gotten around to contributing to the great Gender Divides thread. But Kevin Drum links to, and invites discussion of, a similarly striking data set about books and book reviews (presumably this set overlaps academia, but includes lots of non-academics). I would be curious to see a list of 5000 professions/jobs, from attorney to zookeeper, with gender breakdowns. I wonder what proportion of professions/jobs, in general, have a statistically highly significant gender skew (that isn’t explicable in some obvious way, e.g. NFL quarterbacks are all male.) To what degree do professions/jobs, in general, tend to become ‘gendered’, by whatever mechanism(s) that gendering may be engendered? It would be good to establish, as a baseline, whether, in exhibiting this striking range of gender imbalances, the academic disciplines ‘look like America’, as it were – i.e. a land in which a large number of professions tend to be strikingly ‘gendered’.

Or the Super Bowl. If you must.

Via Tyler Cowen comes a Michael Lewis thumbsucker about Ireland. Lewis is a great writer, but I do wonder whether he should have listened to his driver a bit less:

When I went looking for some Irish person to drive me around, the result was a fellow I will call Ian McRory (he asked me not to use his real name in this article), who is Irish, and a driver, but pretty clearly a lot of other things, too. Ian has what appears to be a military-grade navigational system, for instance, and surprising knowledge about abstruse and secretive matters. “I do some personal security, and things of that nature,” he says … and leaves it at that. Later, when I mention the name of a formerly rich Irish property developer, he says, casually, as if it were all in a day’s work, that he had let himself into the fellow’s vacation house and snapped photographs of the interior, “for a man I know who is thinking of buying it.” Ian turns out to have a good feel for what I, or anyone else, might find interesting in rural Ireland. He will say, for example, “Over there, that’s a pretty typical fairy ring,” and then explain, interestingly, that these circles of stones or mushrooms that occur in Irish fields are believed by local farmers to house mythical creatures. “Irish people actually believe in fairies?,” I ask, straining but failing to catch a glimpse of the typical fairy ring to which Ian has just pointed. “I mean, if you walked right up and asked him to his face, ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ most guys will deny it,” he replies. “But if you ask him to dig out the fairy ring on his property, he won’t do it. To my way of thinking, that’s believing.” And it is. It’s a tactical belief, a belief that exists because the upside to disbelief is too small, like the former Irish belief that Irish land prices would rise forever.

On the other hand, maybe it’s just as well that Ian McRory — real name, Paddy O’Whackery, or perhaps Liam Mac an Bréagadóir — was on hand to provide the legally required Leprechaun quota for the article, or Lewis would have been unable to get it published. Ian’s dark hints of connections to the Provos, or possibly Dublin gangland, is a nice touch, as are his “The thing about Irish people” musings later in the article.

Following up on a conversation with a friend in Philosophy, I took a quick look at the Survey of Earned Doctorates to see the breakdown by gender for Ph.Ds awarded in the United States in 2009. Some nice pictures: Percent female by Division (with Philosophy picked out); Percent female for selected disciplines; and a giant percent female for (almost) all disciplines, with Philosophy picked out for emphasis. The links go to PDFs.