August 2011

Sometime in Spring, two years ago, my brother Henry received a hand-written letter from a woman in Ireland he’d neither met nor heard of. It was a letter of introduction. The person being introduced was Edward, “a decent, entertaining fellow. We have known him all our lives.”

A month or two later, I phoned to say I’d be arriving that evening from L.A. for a couple of weeks in the DC office. Henry pressed the letter into my hands as I arrived on the doorstep. He was rushing to the airport and thought I might have more time to take an interest.

The letter came via a circuitous route from a tenuous connection; Meg, Edward’s godfather’s wife who was also my mother’s friend Mary’s book club companion. It was prompted by a misunderstanding between a son who was monosyllabic about his social life and a mother who thus assumed he had none. It came from the peculiarly Anglo-Irish practice of proper letter-writing, and directly from that rare person who said ‘I must write them a letter’, and actually did. [click to continue…]

The National Interest has just run a piece I’ve written on the S&P downgrade. I had understood this was a conservative publication, but I tend to got lost in the varieties of US conservatism (and, for that matter, liberalism). Anyway, they seemed happy to run this as well as an earlier piece on Europe. A quick look at the website didn’t suggest I was in bad company – most of the foreign policy stuff was anti-war, and the other economic pieces were eclectic.

Is there an up-to-date guide for overseas visitors to the US scene? It’s nice to be called up from the Australian farm team, but I don’t want to end up in some glossy publication that turns out to be funded by LaRouche.

In March, I wrote about ICANN’s current leadership, and how it is costing the organization its key people and international reputation. I publicly addressed ICANN’s Board of Directors with my concerns during its San Francisco meeting, and was astonished by the level of support for my view. My aim was to make very public an issue that was deeply damaging to the organization behind closed doors and help make it impossible for the Board to continue to publicly ignore.

ICANN’s Board has now decided not to renew Rod Beckstrom’s contract as CEO when the deal expires in 2012.* There had been calls for Beckstrom to resign or be fired before the end of his contract, but I’m glad the Board is ensuring that the search for a new CEO is not rushed unnecessarily. Hasten slowly, as my grandmother used to say.

As many know, the Board’s new Chair, Dr. Steve Crocker, has spent considerable time over the past year or so on regular phone calls to Rod Beckstrom, not so much in coaching mode as providing a sounding board and voice of experience. That solid working relationship is a credit to both and will help to ease the transition to new leadership.

The Board has given itself time to think hard about a new CEO and make sure the decision is the right one. Presumably they will set up a search committee. I hope that committee can include or consult members of the Internet community. Here are some points the search committee might consider.

‘Multi-stakeholder’ is not a slogan. It’s ICANN’s DNA.

Rod’s most obvious legacy is a largely new, mostly American executive team with shallow ties to the global Internet naming and numbering community. They will need to work hard with the community to show they understand that ‘multi-stakeholder’ is more than a slogan, and that transparency and accountability are not optional. [click to continue…]

It’s rare to take on Paul Krugman in an argument and win, and I agree with him most of the time anyway (these two facts are correlated!). So, this is the first time, and will probably be the last, when I can claim a win in such an argument.

Krugman has long criticised the eurozone on the grounds that it is not an optimal currency area and that the European Central Bank must therefore pursue an unsatisfactory “one size fits all” policy, too contractionary for economies that are doing badly and too expansionary for those that are doing well. Back in February, I argued that in fact ECB policy was “One size fits nobody” and that even Germany was vulnerable to its contractionary effects.

The latest statistics suggest that German growth was already stalling then. Today, Krugman is also pointing to a “one size fits none” policy.

At this point, it’s time for a suit of clothes, and that means a new tailor. And, in that respect, the bad news may have a silver lining.

[click to continue…]

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing about whether the Civil War should be considered a tragedy or not (his take is emphatically on the ‘not’ side of the ledger). One way to think about this is to think about what would America have looked like if the Civil War hadn’t taken place? This is the kind of counter-factual that both philosophers and science-fiction writers use – and as it happens, there’s a fine and moving short story by the science fiction author Robert Charles Wilson on this topic, “This Peaceable Land: Or The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe.” (it’s first published in the Other Earths anthology, and also available in a couple of ‘Best of 2009’ round-up SF collections). The story takes place in an America where the Civil War was barely averted, and where the South saw a gradual depopulation of African Americans, hastened greatly by a kind of quiet Holocaust in which many of them were murdered as slavery ceased to be economically viable. The nub of the story is precisely the difficulty that white abolitionist liberals have in seeing that the war that was avoided may have been a lesser tragedy than the unheralded war that was not.

bq. “That is a decent white woman,” Ephraim said when he had heard the letter and given it some thought. … “But I don’t know what she’s so troubled about … This idea that there was no war. I suppose there wasn’t, if by war you mean the children of white men fighting the children of white men. But, sir, I have seen the guns, sir, and I have seen them used, sir, all my life – _all_ my life. And in my father’s time, and before him. Isn’t that war? And if it _is_ war, how can she say war was avoided? There were many casualties, sir, though their
names are not generally recorded; many graves, though not marked; and many battlefields, though not admitted to the history books.”

Or as Coates puts it:

bq. Taken together, the slave system was, itself, a Leviathan–a force with deep roots in the economic, social and political system of this country. From the black perspective it was the nation-state mobilized for more than two and half centuries as a war-machine against that which so many regard as the foundation of humanity, itself–the family. And I do not merely mean the biological nuclear family: The slave system subjected family, in all its permutations–adoptive, same-sex, parent-less, child-less–to consistent, if capricious, violence. If there is such a thing as an African-American people–and I believe there is–then it must be said that that for 250 years, that people lived in a state of war.

We exist. That’s the subtitle of a new blog, Disabled Philosophers, a blog which wants to make disabled philosophers more visible. I think this is a great thing to do. Do have a look, and if you feel you fit the description of a disabled philosopher, or a philosopher who cares for/shares their live with a disabled person, do consider submitting your description. I think bringing this out in the open will do a great service to all those who are struggling with these issues, or those who want to know more. In fact, I think a blog like this makes academia (and, by extension, the world) a little bit more humane, since it shows people as they are, not as we imagine them to be.

Since my older son was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at age 3, I read many books on autism. From those books I learnt that the chance that a sibling would also have/develop an ASD was about 5%, compared with the 1% chance for anyone in the population (that is, about 1% of children are officially diagnosed with autism, but I think one can seriously doubt whether that figure is not an underestimation due to under-diagnosis).

I always thought that this 5% figure was odd, since it didn’t correspond at all to my observation at the special-needs-daycare/school of my son or in online parent support groups or in accounts of families affected by ASDs that I read, where many parents report to have several children with an ASD. I noticed just way too many children who also had siblings with an ASD to make that figure of 5% correspond to reality. And now, there’s a study just published in Pediatrics, confirming my observation: if a parent has a child with autism, the chance of a sibling also developing an ASD is almost 20%. That’s what the authors found in a large American sample, and I don’t see any reason why it would be different for other parts of the world.

Not sure how that will change the way we look at autism (if it will make any difference at all), but I find it a striking (but not surprising) figure.

Michael Lewis’s recent article brings up again the question of why Germans bought so much toxic financial waste in the run-up to the financial crisis. It seems clear that his ‘because they’re all obsessed with shit’ theory isn’t any better an explanation than his Provo gangsters and fairy rings take on Irish economic disaster. But that still leaves an open question.Peter Frase takes one go at it here, first using Lewis’ earlier work to ding the ‘idiots’ theory of why the meltdown happened:

bq. One popular interpretation of the crisis, and of Lewis’s book, is that the explosion of sub-prime lending and securitization was the result of mass stupidity, and that huge numbers of people simply failed to understand or account for the incredible financial risks they were taking. This is basically the approach Ezra Klein takes when he quotes Larry Summers’ famous remark that “there are idiots” and concludes that the crisis was a consequence of human weakness and error in the context of a system with few regulatory restraints. … Yet idiocy does not stand up as a the central causal factor behind the crisis. For one thing, it seems odd that there would be such a concentration of idiocy in the most lucrative field of the American economy, one which has been leeching the brightest minds out of the rest of the society for decades. Moreover, it is necessary to explain not only the preponderance of idiots, but the tendency for their idiocy to work systematically _in the same direction._ … In academic finance, the technical term for idiots is “noise traders”, and they are thought to provide erratic and irrational actions that may destabilize markets but do not systematically move them in one particular direction. …

bq. Though the financial crisis produced a great deal of institutional calamity … the individual people responsible for the worst decisions of the last decade managed to greatly enrich themselves even as they nearly annihilated the global economy. … it’s undeniable that some of them, particularly toward the end, were getting high on their own supply, taking the the bogus triple-A ratings on toxic subprime garbage at face value even though they had an inside understanding of the con game they represented. …ultimately, these people–who in a just world would be penniless and serving extended prison terms–walked away with millions of dollars. There are plenty of apt descriptions for people like that, but “idiots” isn’t the one I would choose.

and then pointing out that even if everyone wasn’t an idiot, there did appear to be a heavy concentration of them in the investment arms of German banks.

bq. German institutional investors, or as they are called at one point, simply “Dusseldorf”. Lewis never really tries to explain their outsized appetite for murky subprime instruments. … In the language of the “varieties of capitalism” school of comparative political economy, Germany is what is known as a “coordinated market economy” or CME, whereas the U.S. is a “liberal market economy” or LME. The structure of the market in a CME is fundamentally different in that it relies heavily on coordination between firms, based on tight long-term inter-linkages and above all, trust. This contrasts with the more ruthlessly competitive ethic of the LME, in which formal contracts take the place of reciprocal trust relations. So German bankers and investors were a) relative novices at modern securities wizardry; b) steeped in a capitalist culture quite different from the dog-eat-dog rapacity of the American version.

The stylized story that is doing the rounds among comparative political economy of Europe people is a little different than this. It points to how the EU forced Germany to get rid of rules that favored its regional and local banks, obliging these banks to seek new investment opportunities outside the local and _Land_ businesses that had previously provided their bread and butter. And when they went international, they found many people who were willing to sell them unimpeachable investment opportunities, and little internal or external capacity to figure out when someone was trying to sell them a pup …

Here, the suggested problem is an organizational one as much as (or more than) a cultural one – banks which are geared to a certain kind of business, and which suddenly find themselves being pushed out of that market, are likely not to have built up the expertise that will allow them to prosper in new ones. What this explains (and the cultural explanation does not) is why it is that Deutsche Bank (which was far bigger) appears to have done conspicuously well out of the crisis, while its smaller compatriots have done very badly indeed. Of course, this isn’t to say that this theory is _right_ : political scientists often have a poorish enough understanding of what is happening in markets – but if there are better ones, or contradictory evidence for this one, I’d be interested to hear it.

NPR has an interview with Terry Pratchett about his early onset Alzheimer’s, his advocacy for assisted suicide, and his forthcoming Discworld novel, Snuff. There’s a short excerpt from it as well, which is pretty funny.

Another “Kevin Myers classic”:http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/kevin-myers-feral-rioters-all-have-one-thing-in-common-a-lack-of-father-figures-2844058.html, explaining that the London riots are a result of too many black immigrants and not enough patriarchy.

bq. They are clearly, and overwhelmingly, Afro-Caribbean, the descendants of immigrants, though such has been the utter British failure to integrate so much of the immigrant population that many have retained something of a Caribbean accent. Admittedly, not all of the rioters are “black”: clearly, some white youths have joined in. But where they have not got race is common, they probably have another feature that joins them: absent father-figures. … They have been raised without the presence of a male authority figure to impose familial order, and furthermore and most vitally, to promote the patriarchy.

The piece opens with an exhortation “that the duty of journalists is to tell the truth” and closes with two paragraphs where Myers congratulates himself at length for his lack of “cowardice,” and hints that he’ll take legal action against anyone who suggests that his … concerns … about the horrors of immigration, African indigents with massive erect cocks who have too many children etc etc are motivated by racism. Clearly, Mr. Myers fancies himself as a bold truth-teller – his recent column suggesting that todger-mutilating Jews shouldn’t make laws that interfere with Catholic social practices was framed in a “similar fashion”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/07/20/21012/.

And this brings us back to Jeffrey Goldberg, “who did American public debate”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/06/27/why-is-ireland-such-a-bastion-of-anti-israel-feeling/ the disservice of introducing it to Mr. Myers’ theories. Goldberg is not, unless I am very badly mistaken indeed, a bigot in the sense that Kevin Myers is a bigot. He nonetheless appears eager to believe claims about generic European anti-Semitism that are propagated by Mr. Myers, without checking into his sources. If I had made a gross and offensive claim that an entire country was a “bastion” of “anti-Israel hatred,” and then discovered that my source for this claim had the general worldview that Kevin Myers has, it would cause me to think about my journalistic practices, and likely to question whether my beliefs on this question were well-founded. Goldberg apparently takes a different approach.

I wished I had lived in the days of real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full splendor of the spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted and spoilt … When was the best time to see India? At what period would the study of the Brazilian savage have afforded the purest satisfaction, and revealed them in their least adulterated state? Would it have been better to arrive in Rio in the eighteenth century with Bougainville, or in the sixteenth with Léry and Thevet? – Claude Lévi-Strauss

Speaking of which, I watched Midnight In Paris on the plane, coming home from vacation, which seemed a fine occasion to watch such a film. It seems like a good idea for a film. But I don’t think it ended up being a good film. It’s too self-satisfied with the fact of it being a film with a good idea for what it’s going to be about. It kinda rests on its laurels before it even gets started. Owen Wilson is just walking around, giving a passable dramatic reading of his lines. All the actors playing the famous figures from the 20’s are having fun, but in a light sort of Hey Kathy Bates is pretending to be Gertrude Stein and Adrien Brody is having fun with his Dali accent kind of way. The direction was … fine. Paris looked like … Paris as filmed for a nice American Express ad or something like that. Competent evocation of a beautiful city. Is this what all Woody Allen movies have been like for the last 20 years? I really haven’t checked in for a while. Seems like lots of people really liked this movie. It was ok. Did you like it?

Matt Yglesias “notes Tim Lee’s editing rule”:http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/08/11/293442/breakfast-links-august-11-2011/ that you should never use the prefix ‘cyber’ unless you’re William Gibson. A cyber-rule aptly illustrated in the cyber-breach by “this particular cyber-contribution to cyber-knowledge”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/opinion/23iht-edbremmer23.html from Ian Bremmer and Parag Khanna.

bq. Cyberteeth bared

bq. 2010 was the year that removed all doubt that cybersecurity is now a geopolitical problem. … Yet WikiLeaks was far from the only big cyberstory in 2010. … We also learned that cyberattacks are no longer simply a weapon for petty criminals and teenagers. …In fact, WikiLeaks showed that a cyber-villain can prove just as elusive and decentralized as Al Qaeda. … Julian Assange, will probably have many days in court. If he is prosecuted in the United States, some will cast him as the world’s first cybermartyr. … will defend that freedom with more acts of cyberrevenge. … In the past, corporate willingness to provide the U.S. government with sensitive data hasn’t been hugely consequential for these firms, because they didn’t yet face a powerful cyberenemy capable of launching sophisticated attacks.

In fairness to the authors, they can’t be blamed for the “Cyberteeth” headline, which one can only imagine was a subtle act of revenge by whichever poor misfortunate bastard of a sub-editor had the grim task of polishing this cyberturd. The rest is all theirs though.

Since England was on fire (perhaps still is, in a certain sense) and the financial markets are in trouble, we may be forgetting that a human disaster is taking place in Eastern Africa, where millions of people are suffering from famines. A photo series in the New York Times makes visual how horrendous the situation is. These pictures are from Somalia, which is for a range of reasons probably the worst situation of all countries in the Horn of Africa where people are suffering from hunger, but that’s little consolation. I recall famines in Ethiopia and neighboring countries ever since my childhood, and it is depressing to see them returning again and again, leaving one to feel rather powerless about what, if anything, one can contribute to providing a sustainable solution to this.

Famines are horrible, and are made worse by war, lawlessness, bad or nonexisting governance, and population growth (there is some accessible background material at the BBC Africa sites). These aspects make it harder to think of solutions to prevent this from happening yet again in the future, but that is not the worry of people currently starving. They need food, water and medical care, and they need it now. But once these horrible pictures get off our screens again, and the people who are now starving are either buried or are trying to rebuild their lives, we should not forget returning to searching for a sustainable solution to global poverty reduction/elimination. Let’s invest more in that discussion here on CT (to be continued).

We had the first set of recall elections for the Wisconsin State Senate yesterday. 6 Republicans, all elected in 2008 (during the Obama general election) were up; the Dems needed to take 3 in order to flip the Senate. In the end, they got two (districts 18 and 32), which is roughly what they expected. There had been talk of them hoping for District 14, but that didn’t seem realistic to me. It is a natural swing district, but the Dem candidate was uninspiring, turned out to have numerous moving violations and had, rather unfortunately, been caught on tape saying that paying child support to his exwife was a low priority; and Luther Olsen, the incumbent, has a strong personal following among independents which, given his competence and affable personality, was going to be hard to shake. His gamble (that he would be more likely to hold on to office if he caved into the Governor than he was to ever hold a committee seat again if he resisted) paid off. The appalling Alberta Darling held on to her seat despite a (to me) surprisingly strong Democratic showing, and I suppose it is still just possible that the results will turn out to be dodgy, reliant as her majority was on the reporting of Waukesha County, whose clerk is not renowned for her carefulness. But it’s unlikely. And there are some reasons not to be cheerful: the defeat of Randy Hopper, whose private life has been moderately scandalous, and who does not seem to have been living in his district, should have been much easier than it was.

Two Democrats face recalls next Tuesday (the 16th). The recall effort against the Dem senators was basically an attempt to divert energy and resources from the Republican recalls, but, perhaps predictably, the Rep candidate for the 12th district, a teapartier, has attracted a lot of out of state money (the estimate for yesterday’s elections is that $30 million was spent on the 6 races). If you want to pledge your own in or out of state support for Jim Holperin, the more vulnerable of the two Dem incumbents, click here.

Where does this leave things? Well, if things go well next week, the Reps will have a 17 to 16 majority in the Senate, vulnerable on a day to day basis to Dale Schultz, the one Republican who voted against the collective bargaining law, and who has been enjoying being seen as an independent. Some are declaring victory: as John Nichols points out, these were gerrymandered Republican seats, which have been Republican for a long time, and, as I indicated, privately I heard from a number of Democrats that they would be amazed to get 3, and please to get 2. And there is a case for saying that the momentum has been surprisingly strong, given that the protests ended in March.

Still, I am not personally thrilled, despite having not had high expectations. The left is clearly still galvanised, but the right has maintained its strength well. Walker has pissed off a lot of constituencies, but there isn’t enough momentum at the moment to make it clear that a recall will work, let alone that an as yet unknown Democrat can beat him. A recall of the Governor would require the collection of 550k signatures in 60 days, and because of the rules around recall, that signature collecting process cannot begin till November. If Darling, or even more so Olsen, had been defeated, it would have been a lot easier to convince an electable Democrat (i.e. Russ Feingold [1]) to declare prior to a recall which, in turn, would have made a recall more likely to succeed. All in all: things are not good, but they are not as bad as they might have been.

If anyone can find me a good link for contributing to the No (thanks Steve) campaign on the Ohio Collective Bargaining Limit Repeal, I’ll post it later. Update: contribution page here.

[1] Several other Democrats are regularly mentioned as potential candidates, but I am not aware of any who are dying to run, and no good candidate (that is, any candidate I would be interested in seeing become Governor) already has the kind of name recognition that would make it easy to define themselves in the campaign as anything other than the antiWalker candidate.