May 2011

A few years back as part of the attack on climate science (and in particular the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph) Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) commissioned an assessment of the work of Michael Mann and others from Professor Edward Wegman of George Mason University, along with his former student Yasmin Said and some others. This included, not only Wegman’s supposedly independent assessment of the statistical methods used by Mann but a ‘social network analysis’ of the relationship between Mann and his co-authors, which purportedly showed that Mann’s network of co-authors dominated the climate science field. As I pointed out at the time, Wegman et al started the analysis with Mann at the centre, so the primary result was that Mann had written a paper with every one of his co-authors! Nevertheless, a version of the paper was published in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, in which Wegman took this analysis to the startling conclusion that senior academics should not collaborate with each other, but should instead work only with their students. Wegman follows his own advice in this respect, and now we can see why.

It’s just been announced that the paper is to be retracted on the grounds that it contains extensive plagiarism, much but not all of it from Wikipedia. Wegman’s response, showing the wisdom of his research strategy, is to blame his graduate student, who was not, however credited as an author. USA Today, which has taken the lead in following the Wegman plagiarism story, asked an actual expert to look at the paper and her reaction was about the same as my amateur assessment (Wegman and Said are also newcomers to the field, which may explain their heavy reliance on Wikipedia as a reference source).
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Lots of folks are bemused by Joly’s apparently critical statement that New York justice “doesn’t distinguish between the director of the I.M.F. and any other suspect.” Obviously there is a natural presumption in favor of equality. But the Times article also contains a video link to the full interview in which Joly’s own next words are something like, ‘this is the idea of equality before the law, but clearly for a director of the IMF …’ and then, clarity be damned, my ear is incapable of catching the bit that finishes the thought. What does she say?

UPDATE: Obviously feel free to discuss Joly’s ideas more generally. The argument against a perp walk, because it is inconsistent with presumption of innocence, is cogent. And obviously famous/powerful people like IMF directors are the people who risk losing their presumption of innocence in this way. So we have that rare case in which formal equality amounts to effective bias in favor of the weak and powerless. But it seems like a big mistake to say it is all just Big Apple barbarism – or, rather, Rome-style triumphalism, the defeated Gaul chief paraded in chains for the populace to see! The wealthy and powerful are not exactly without power and wealth, after all, so the prosecutor’s office, in a town full of rich, influential people, should ideally have effective general strategies they pursue, as a matter of course, to make sure they aren’t steamrollered by that. What do you think?

Somewhere between the end of my spring semester at Penn State on April 29 and the beginning of my month-long guest-teaching gig at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa (founded over a decade before that Johnny-come-lately Cornell in upstate New York) on May 2, I found some time to speak at <a href=”http://ellenwillis2011.blogspot.com/”>this totally awesome conference on the work of Ellen Willis</a>.  Just glad to be on the bill, you know.  Anyway, here’s a slightly expanded version of what I said that morning.  Why slightly expanded?  Because I’m including 15 percent more of Ellen Willis’s prose, which makes my remarks 15 percent better.  That is why.

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Fascinating article in the British paper the Independent about the US anti-immigrant border fence and the fact that in parts of Texas engineering considerations have put 50,000 acres of US territory on the Mexican side of the fence. For those who live in this pocket, life doesn’t sound much fun:

… this corner of south-eastern Texas had its barrier constructed on a levee that follows a straight line from half a mile to two miles north of the river, leaving Ms Taylor’s bungalow – along with the homes and land of dozens of her angry neighbours – marooned on the Mexican side. “My son-in-law likes to say that we live in a gated community,” she says, explaining that to even visit the shops she must pass through a gate watched over by border-patrol officers. “We’re in a sort of no man’s land. I try to laugh, but it’s hard: that fence hasn’t just spoiled our view, it’s spoiled our lives.”

(via @PhillCole on twitter, x-posted from the Territory and Justice blog, which I’m going to be breathing some new life into. )

There are plenty of reasons to be gloomy about the prospects of stabilising the global climate. The failure at Copenhagen (partly, but far from wholly, redressed in the subsequent meeting at Cancun) means that a binding international agreement, let alone an effective international trading scheme, is a long way off. The political right, at least in English-speaking countries, has deepened its commitment to anti-science delusionism. And (regardless of views on its merits) the prospect of a significant contribution from nuclear power has pretty much disappeared, at least for the next decade or so, following Fukushima and the failure of the US ‘nuclear renaissance’.

But there’s also some striking good news. Most important is the arrival of ‘peak gasoline’ in the US. US gasoline consumption peaked in 2006 and was about 8 per cent below the peak in 2010. Consumption per person has fallen more than 10 per cent.
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In case you were wondering who the go-to sources on l’affaire Strauss-Kahn are, at least according to Twitter:

The consequences of getting retweeted all over the place mostly involve being introduced to the range and sophistication of twitter spam and followbots.

I almost admire Ron Paul for sticking to his propertarian guns, even when he knows it’s going to cost him. All the same, I wish the next person who gets to play the Chris Matthews role could manage to make it cost him a bit more, maybe like so:

“Jim Crow was a legal institution but also a social institution. Both functioned to deprive African-Americans of what all Americans today would consider basic liberties. Your libertarian philosophy commits you to dismantling the legal institution, but also commits you to prohibiting legal dismantlement of the social side of Jim Crow. This means one difference between you, as a libertarian, and the liberals who supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is that you are, in at least one important sense, less committed to guaranteeing individual liberty. You hope everyone will be free, but your libertarianism actually forbids you from fully guaranteeing basic liberties, in the no-Jim-Crow sense all Americans now take for granted. Is that right?”

That’s too many words, but I think it does a better job of pre-empting Paul’s responses: one, protesting he’s no racist; two, just expressing optimism that the market would somehow have caused the social problems to disappear, if there were no legal Jim Crow; three, saying it’s ancient history. Of course, boxing in Ron Paul is not the most vital task of the hour, probably. But it would be good if libertarians – tea party types generally – had more of an uphill slog, due to the fact that the liberty they want to guarantee is not quite the liberty Americans tend to assume should be guaranteed.

“Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/05/the-sustainability-of-greece/

bq. I’m not intimately familiar with the details of Greek public finance, but it does occur to me that sage words I keep reading in the American press about how Europe’s leaders can’t just keep kicking the can down the road and need to deal with Greece’s basic insolvency strike me as unwarranted. In general, the capacity of large wealthy societies to allow festering problems to go un-addressed seems perennially underrated. … as I can remember people have been talking about how the United States needs to address entitlement spending and trade imbalances … Presumably at some point something will happen. But in practice we’ve managed a great deal of can-kicking, seem to have more can-kicking in us, and actually the public and the political elite alike are quite averse to the kind of steps that would address these issues. Is Greece so different?

On the economics of can-kicking, I think this is right. On the politics of can-kicking, not so much. The difference between the US and the European Union is that the US is a relatively robust political entity. Americans may vigorously dislike this or that aspect of their government, but their political arguments are mostly about what the US should do, or be, not whether the US should exist at all (even die-hard we-were-screwed-in-the-Northern-War-of-Aggression-ers mostly seem to think of themselves as patriots; Alaska and the commonwealth of Puerto Rico are the only parts of the US I can think of with significant secessionist movements). Europe is quite different. The EU’s legitimacy is relatively fragile. Very few people indeed think of themselves as more European than French or German. Even fewer feel that they have any strong allegiance e.g. to the European Council or the European Commission.

So my worry is straightforward. Greece is not so big a problem that it cannot be kicked down the road by the Europeans indefinitely. So too, Ireland and Portugal, and perhaps even (with more straining) Spain. But the specific _manner_ in which the can is being kicked down the road has consequences for European legitimacy. Greeks, Portuguese and Irish people don’t like being at the sharp end of imposed austerity. They have obvious villains to blame for it – the EU (in particular the ECB and the Commission) and the ‘Germans.’ But Germans, Dutch people etc don’t have much reason to like the EU these days either. For them, it is associated with a giant sucking noise pulling frugal German taxpayers’ savings into the gaping maw of Greek pensioners. Neither those on the receiving or those on the giving end of current policies is very happy. And both have good reason to associate their unhappiness with the EU. And the EU does not have much legitimacy to spare in any event.

I don’t think that this will lead to the collapse of the European Union. I do think that it is likely to result in very long-lasting institutional stagnation, if it continues. Ad hoc decisions, none of which seem unjustifiable at the time, may have long term fallout for European integration (for one: can we see Irish people voting through any new Treaty changes any time soon?). And kicking the can down the road at best does nothing to solve these problems (which I do not think are likely to go away of their own accord), while doing a lot to exacerbate them. NB though that this is my personal view – I suspect that at least one CTer disagrees, and is more optimistic.

For students of agnotology there is no more striking finding than the observation that many people, presented with evidence that undermines a strongly held belief, react as if that belief had been confirmed[1]. This seems to undermine any possibility that evidence will ever settle political disputes. And yet, evidence does seem to seep through in the end. Although belief in Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction persisted long after the absence of evidence had turned into clear evidence of absence, it faded away in the end (not that it has completely disappeared even now).

As a slightly more optimistic take on the experimental evidence, I offer the example of Santa Claus. Young children, presented with the suggestion that Santa isn’t real, blithely ignore it. Slightly older children, though, react in exactly the manner of the experimental subjects, reaffirming their belief in the Santa story and (of course) the associated presents. Later, of course, they accept the truth.

In some social contexts children are likely draw the obvious analogy between Santa and God, while in other contexts, the distinction between the two beliefs is maintained successfully. But regardless of context, there is an obvious risk, for those who would like their children to grow up as theists, in insisting too hard on the reality of Santa.

Similarly, I suspect that the apparent success of Republicans in believing six impossible things before breakfast, and in taking up new delusions as old ones are abandoned, may mask an underlying erosion of faith. Birtherism may morph into torturism without any obvious sign of stress, but at some level people must gradually become aware that their political beliefs are more like the faith that belief in Santa will bring presents and less like the belief that kicking a rock will give you a stubbed toe.

fn1. The general phenonomen of confirmation bias (paying attention to evidence that supports your belief and disregarding contradictory evidence) is well established. The first finding of reinforcement Nyhan and Riefler find that Democrats ignore contradictory evidence, while Republicans respond in the way I described. I can’t find the study that supported this. Nyhan and Riefler cite earlier research by Redlawski that I haven’t been able to find.

“Kindred Winecoff”:http://ipeatunc.blogspot.com/2011/05/there-will-be-politics.html doesn’t like Paul Krugman’s elite-focused account of politics (see also “Daniel Drezner”:http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/05/09/the_american_mass_public_as_unindicted_co_conspirator for a rather milder version).

bq. If Greenspan’s “with notably rare exceptions” deserves internet infamy, and it does, then surely Krugman’s less notable exceptions should too. As Drezner notes, Krugman’s examples — the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq war, mainly — were supported by majorities of the population. … What interests me about this isn’t that Krugman is playing fast and loose with his factual claims, or even stacking the deck in a blatantly partisan way. That’s par for his course. It’s that he thinks that a simple political explanation is just not feasible. Instead, some moral lesson is needed. If something bad happens, it must be because bad people are doing it. This is the political sophistication of a six year old. … Occam’s Razor can help us here. If there are tax cuts, maybe it’s because people wanted tax cuts. If there is Medicare Part D, maybe it’s because people wanted Medicare Part D. If there is a housing bubble, maybe it’s because public policy was skewed in ways that home ownership attractive, because that’s what people want. This might not work all the time, but as a first approximation this sort of thinking holds up fairly well. In the examples Krugman gives, it’s batting 1.000.

Um, getting away from the invective, not so much. I like much of Winecoff’s blogging on IPE, but the relevant political science here seems to me to support Krugman far more than it does Winecoff. International political economy scholarship (the field that Winecoff specializes in) tends to have an extremely stripped down, and bluntly unrealistic account of how policy is made. Typically, modelers in this field either assume that the “median voter” plays an important role in determining national preferences, or that various stylized economic interests (which they try to capture using Stolper-Samuelson, Ricardo-Viner and other approaches borrowed from economic theory) determine policy, perhaps as filtered through a very simple representation of legislative-executive relations.

However, actual work on how policy gets made suggests that this doesn’t work. On many important policy issues, the public has no preferences whatsoever. On others, it has preferences that largely maps onto partisan identifications rather than actual interests, and that reflect claims made by political elites (e.g. global warming). On others yet, the public has a set of contradictory preferences that politicians can pick and choose from. In some broad sense, public opinion _does_ provide a brake on elite policy making – but the boundaries are both relatively loose and weakly defined. Policy elites can get away with a hell of a lot if they want to.

The result is that the relevant literature on policy making (located largely within comparative political economy and a growing debate within American politics) argues that elites play a very strong role in creating policies. Take one of the issues where Winecoff argues that Krugman is wrong – the Bush tax cuts. Here, the arguments in the political science literature do not start from the proposition that these cuts were driven by public desire for lower taxes. Instead, they involve debate between those who “suggest”:http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1537592705050048 that the cuts were deliberately crafted in ways that distort public perceptions and those who “claim”:http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/bartels.pdf that this was unnecessary, since American public opinion on taxation is so inchoate as to give elites wide room for maneuver. More generally, in Andrea Campbell’s “words”:http://pas.sagepub.com/content/38/2/227.full.pdf,

bq. Tax policy, regulatory policy—the laws and rules that have been key in fueling the rising share of national income claimed by the very rich—are extraordinarily complex. The public has no idea what to think of these policies (one reason pollsters don’t ask about them—to do so would merely elicit “nonattitudes”). There is for example considerable confusion about the incidence of various taxes across income groups.

and

bq. One chief problem is that citizens simply don’t pay attention to such complex policies; another is that even if they did, they can’t figure out what their stances should be, and no one is helping them. Low salience and great ignorance make for a disastrous democratic brew.

A similar argument can be made about Medicare Part D. It is fair to say that the Medicare changes _began_ in a shift in partisan patterns of competition over issues. However, it surely didn’t end there. In Andrea Campbell and Kimberly Morgan’s “description”:http://lists.cas.usf.edu/pipermail/agephd/attachments/20080110/329f3dd1/attachment.pdf.

bq. The mobilization strategy of Republicans, and opening of the door to a major expansion of Medicare, also increased the activism and influence of organized interests. The collapse of bipartisan support for government cost controls in Medicare, coupled with the emergence of a budget surplus, eroded legislators’ discipline with regard to provider reimbursements. In addition, the determination of Republicans to enact a reform that relied heavily on private actors created an opening for those groups to extract benefits for themselves. For example, managed care companies could argue that they would not participate as insurance providers if reimbursement levels were not high enough, and employers could demand subsidies to assure their continued willingness to provide retiree drug benefits. All of this added to the cost of the bill. More generally, gaining the support of powerful interest groups was essential in passing a reform that was likely to garner little Democratic support and was viewed skeptically by more conservative Republicans.

I don’t know about the politics of housing policy – perhaps one can make a similar claim, perhaps not (political scientists, and political economists in particular have tended to overlook housing). But I suspect that one can. There is very wide variation in rates of home ownership across democracies. This may reflect differences in underlying preferences (maybe in an ideal world Germans don’t want to own their houses the same way that Americans do). But it also plausibly reflects huge differences e.g. in mortgage regulation which are largely driven by interest groups rather than voters themselves.

More generally, the point is clear. One can certainly make a reasonable case that electoral politics plays a more important role than Krugman acknowledges. But one cannot make a good case that policies of the kind that Winecoff describes are a simple reflection of public preferences. Or, at least, if one wants to make this case, one is going to have to make a detailed counter-case against a substantial body of research which seems to demonstrate the opposite. Elites play an extremely important role in US policy making, and to make an elite-centered argument is not to think like a six year old. It is to think in ways which accord with the relevant political science literature, as best as I know it.

Let me make it clear that I don’t want to bag on Winecoff in particular. He doesn’t like Krugman, and describes him in pretty harsh terms – but then Krugman’s own revealed preferences suggest that politesse is not a necessary condition for good debate. The problem here is a more general problem with the field of international political economy, which frankly (and I say this as someone who writes in the field and teaches it) has an extremely weak understanding of how policy is made. I’d like to see IPE and IR scholars and students being forced to read some of the relevant literature in comparative political economy. For example, Pepper Culpepper’s “Quiet Politics and Business Power”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521134137/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399349&creativeASIN=0521134137 has some very nice discussion of the interplay between interest group clout and electoral considerations in policy making processes. Books like this don’t make it onto IPE core syllabi, but they really, really should. And as long as they don’t, IPE scholars will continue to make claims which fit badly with what we know about national level policy making.

Obama’s interview yesterday evening is being “interpreted”:http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/05/obamas-message-for-human-rights-watchs-ken-roth/238566/ by Jeffrey Goldberg as an implicit rebuke to Kenneth Roth (or perhaps, at a pinch, to people like Kenneth Roth) who questioned whether the killing of Osama Bin Laden was, in fact, justice. Roth had tweeted

bq. Ban Ki-moon wrong on Osama bin Laden: It’s not justice for him to be killed even if justified; no trial, conviction.

Jonathan Chait professes himself “similarly bemused”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/87890/human-rights-watch-head-opposes-bin-laden-killing.

But what Roth was arguing is entirely clear and internally consistent. What _is_ unclear is the way that many commentators (including Obama) are conflating just in the sense of ‘just deserts,’ (or ‘he deserved to get it’) and justice in some procedural sense.
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David Hume was born 300 years ago today. His influence on philosophy is well recognized. His influence on the social sciences, rather less so. “Dan Sperber”:http://www.cognitionandculture.net/Dan-s-blog/david-hume-the-anthropologist.html proposes that readers of his blog celebrate this anniversary by selecting particularly relevant quotes. Sounds like a good idea – let me start the ball rolling by “stealing a particularly appropriate one from Cosma Shalizi”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/736.html.

NOTHING appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of EGYPT, or the emperor of ROME, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or prætorian bands, like men, by their opinion.

Opinion is of two kinds, to wit, opinion of INTEREST, and opinion of RIGHT. By opinion of interest, I chiefly understand the sense of the general advantage which is reaped from government; together with the persuasion, that the particular government, which is established, is equally advantageous with any other that could easily be settled. When this opinion prevails among the generality of a state, or among those who have the force in their hands, it gives great security to any government.

Right is of two kinds, right to POWER and right to PROPERTY. What prevalence opinion of the first kind has over mankind, may easily be understood, by observing the attachment which all nations have to their ancient government, and even to those names, which have had the sanction of antiquity. Antiquity always begets the opinion of right; and whatever disadvantageous sentiments we may entertain of mankind, they are always found to be prodigal both of blood and treasure in the maintenance of public justice. There is, indeed, no particular, in which, at first sight, there may appear a greater contradiction in the frame of the human mind than the present. When men act in a faction, they are apt, without shame or remorse, to neglect all the ties of honour and morality, in order to serve their party; and yet, when a faction is formed upon a point of right or principle, there is no occasion, where men discover a greater obstinacy, and a more determined sense of justice and equity. The same social disposition of mankind is the cause of these contradictory appearances.

It is sufficiently understood, that the opinion of right to property is of moment in all matters of government. A noted author has made property the foundation of all government; and most of our political writers seem inclined to follow him in that particular. This is carrying the matter too far; but still it must be owned, that the opinion of right to property has a great influence in this subject.

Upon these three opinions, therefore, of public interest, of right to power, and of right to property, are all governments founded, and all authority of the few over the many. There are indeed other principles, which add force to these, and determine, limit, or alter their operation; such as self-interest, fear, and affection: But still we may assert, that these other principles can have no influence alone, but suppose the antecedent influence of those opinions above-mentioned. They are, therefore, to be esteemed the secondary, not the original principles of government.

For, first, as to self-interest, by which I mean the expectation of particular rewards, distinct from the general protection which we receive from government, it is evident that the magistrate’s authority must be antecedently established, at least be hoped for, in order to produce this expectation. The prospect of reward may augment his authority with regard to some particular persons; but can never give birth to it, with regard to the public. Men naturally look for the greatest favours from their friends and acquaintance; and therefore, the hopes of any considerable number of the state would never center in any particular set of men, if these men had no other title to magistracy, and had no separate influence over the opinions of mankind. The same observation may be extended to the other two principles of fear and affection. No man would have any reason to fear the fury of a tyrant, if he had no authority over any but from fear; since, as a single man, his bodily force can reach but a small way, and all the farther power he possesses must be founded either on our own opinion, or on the presumed opinion of others. And though affection to wisdom and virtue in a sovereign extends very far, and has great influence; yet he must antecedently be supposed invested with a public character, otherwise the public esteem will serve him in no stead, nor will his virtue have any influence beyond a narrow sphere.

A Government may endure for several ages, though the balance of power, and the balance of property do not coincide. This chiefly happens, where any rank or order of the state has acquired a large share in the property; but from the original constitution of the government, has no share in the power. Under what pretence would any individual of that order assume authority in public affairs? As men are commonly much attached to their ancient government, it is not to be expected, that the public would ever favour such usurpations. But where the original constitution allows any share of power, though small, to an order of men, who possess a large share of the property, it is easy for them gradually to stretch their authority, and bring the balance of power to coincide with that of property.

I am happy to report that <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2011/04/29/hogging-part-ii-hog-harder/”>all my predictions</a> have turned out precisely as I expected: the Tampa Bay Lightning and Boston Bruins have swept their conference semifinal series, and enhanced interrogation techniques have led to the discovery and death of Osama bin Laden.

You may thank me in comments.

Despite having recently co-edited a book on Moretti’s work [free! free download, or buy the paper!], I haven’t yet commented on his Hamlet paper, which Kieran brought to our collective attention. Because I only just now got around to reading it, and sometimes it’s good practice to hold off until you do that, even though this is the internet and all.

First things first: if you can’t access the LRB version, there’s a free, longer version available from Moretti’s own lab.

Right, the whole thing reminds me of that memorable scene in the play in which Hamlet puts on a PPT presentation, representing social networks in The Marriage of Gonzago nudge nudge wink wink. (Apparently he’s been working on this stuff at school for years.) And Ophelia doesn’t really get it and Hamlet helpfully explains: “Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief.”

But seriously, folks. I like the paper, and I don’t like it. On the one hand, I wholeheartedly endorse this bit. Or at least I would very much like to be able to. [click to continue…]