Okay, this is too easy to pass up.

The WaPo reports that Teva Pharmaceuticals has applied to the FDA to sell Plan B over the counter. W00t! No more worrying about when the pharmacy closed or whether or not the pharmacist is gonna pull some conscience-clause bullshit on you, shy teenagers with broken condoms or forgotten birth control pills can sneak it into a shopping basket disguised with a magazine just like they do their tampons, things will be just a little easier from here on out.

BUT NO NOT SO FAST, MISSY.

<blockquote>“When anybody can buy an emergency contraceptive like this over the counter, you open the door for all sorts of abuse, and especially so when it comes to child abuse and child exploitation,” said Janice Crouse of Concerned Women of America.</blockquote>

Yes! If children who are being raped  or forced into prostitution prevent themselves from getting pregnant, then they are destroying valuable evidence, and that would be wrong. Or at least I assume that’s the reasoning here; surely Ms. Crouse doesn’t think that potential child rapists hold themselves back only for fear of not being able to force-feed their victims Plan B after raping them. Does she?

She’s also concerned that over-the-counter Plan B will make it harder for parents to be, um, “involved” with their children. Poor choice of words there, but let’s ignore it.

<blockquote>”When you are talking about selling something like this over the counter, you are opening up a can of worms when it comes to parental involvement in their children’s lives.”</blockquote>

Again, this is a TOTALLY VALID objection. It’s vitally important that parents have the power to force their underage children to bear them grandchildren, or at least to make them have to get an abortion rather than preventing the pregnancy in the first place.

Ah, but wait.

<blockquote>“It’s not a drug that prevents life — it’s a drug that destroys life,” said Jeanne Monahan of the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group. “If we define life as beginning at fertilization or conception, then this drug can be an abortifacient.”</blockquote>

This is my favorite part of the whole article. Let’s redefine “life” so that we can classify things as abortifacients! I’ll start:

If we define life as beginning at the moment a man first sets eyes on a woman, then not putting out for every dude on the street is an abortifacient.

If we define it as beginning the moment the ring is on her finger, then every business trip is an abortifacient.

If we define it as beginning with ovulation, then menstruation is an abortifacient! MENSTRUAL PADS MUST BE PRESCRIPTION ONLY.

Your turn!

Those of you who don’t already “know” me might well be wondering “who the hell is this bitch?” Or actually probably not: CT readers aren’t known for being vulgarians, I don’t think, unlike many of the commenters at the Chronicle (dear god, poor Clare). Thank god I haven’t read the Chronicle in years.

If you had been thinking that, though, it would be a reasonable question, inasmuch as I am, in the world of academe, absolutely no one. (Which frees me from having to read the Chronicle, among other perks.) I left the ivory tower something like five years ago–I no longer remember, exactly–for the exalted position of housewife and PTO mom (did you know that the PTA is a national organization that collects dues, which means that a lot of school parent-teacher orgs now call themselves PTOs? I didn’t). That was fun, and I got to do a lot of teaching because my kid’s public school was kinda run like a co-op and required ridiculous amounts of parental involement, so I developed lesson plans for reading and writing and chemistry and put together a PTO library of sorts and did all sorts of other things, as PTO moms do.

Now, though, said kid, who unlike me shall remain pseudonymous, is in a “regular” middle school, meaning that I’m not actually allowed on campus during the day at all (!). So mama needs to get a job. Adjuncting is Right Out, as is getting a credential and teaching K-12 in California; I’m bored, but not insane. So my shiny new 2012 iteration is gonna be freelancing: I’m thinking academicish editing and hopefully the odd opinion piece somewhere.

Which means I’d been mulling over this whole “writing and being public again” thing lately, when lo, John Q. asked me “hey, would you be interested in writing at CT ever?” And I said, “you know what? Yes, that might be kind of fun.”

So here I am.

There is a certain irony in appearing on an academic(ish) blog as myself only now that I’m no longer an academic. Talk about imposter syndrome. Which maybe I will at some point, who knows.

Until then, though, you can expect me to talk about education, definitely: both higher and k-12. Academic and general writing on- and offline, probably. Popular feminism, most definitely. Politics and culture, inevitably. The weirdness of transitioning from “academic” to “entrepeneur,” as my business workshop kept calling us, no doubt (has anyone besides me ever noticed how insufferably pretentious both those titles are, especially when self-administered?). And if you’re really really lucky, cat videos.

Feel free to toss me links, topics, or photos of your kittens.

We at Crooked Timber are very happy to welcome the latest addition to our crew, Tedra Osell. Tedra was one of the pioneers of academic blogging when she founded the much-missed BitchPhD blog back in (I think 2004), and now writes for Inside Higher Education at Mama PhD. Her joining us is the result of a happy coincidence of wants – we were talking about how much the site could benefit from someone like Tedra (in fact, specifically from Tedra herself), just as she was posting about a return to blogging. I won’t try to describe Tedra’s previous work, let alone predict her contributions here, but I’m confident they will be well worth reading.

Somehow I got on the AEI mailing list, so I get email. In this case, an announcement of an upcoming (Dec. 12) event. “Liberalism and Mass Culture: Fear and Loathing of the Middle Class,” a Bradley Lecture by Fred Siegel. (This Fred Siegel. He’s apparently working on a book about “The Inner Life of American Liberalism”. But the AEI site seems to be down at the moment, so you’ll have to check back later for event details.) I’ve got a good feeling about this one:

There are (at least) three foundational myths of contemporary liberalism. One is that John Kennedy’s assassination was instigated by the rank intolerance and hatred of the American people. A second is that of “upsouth”: the assertion that Northern racism was and is every bit as pervasive, if more subtle, than that of the Old South. The third is that the American popular culture of the 1950s was stifling not only in its “Donald Duck” banality but also in a subtle form of fascism that constituted a danger to the Republic. In this view, the excesses of the 1960s were a struggle to free America’s brain-damaged automatons from their captivity at the hands of the lords of mass culture.

At this AEI event, Fred Siegel will address this third myth. For all the bile directed at the 1950s, it was the high point of American popular culture, a period when many in the vast middle class hoped to elevate their tastes. The attack on mass culture, a mix of Marxant theorizing and aristocratic instincts, paved the way for a new form of status competition based on supposedly elevated consumer and cultural preferences.

Part of me likes best the faux-scrupulosity of the parenthetical “at least”, utterly undone by the second paragraph revelation that the first paragraph was two-thirds grumping around and he’s not even going to talk about the Kennedy assassination. (I have written abstracts in my time, but it has never occurred to me to start one, in effect: ‘Damn kids, get off my lawn!’ But, now that I think about it, there’s really no reason why an abstract should not be angrily digressive. Why not?) Part of me loves the idea that somewhere, someone is writing a book about how the inner life of American liberalism is, I guess, Theodor Adorno. That’s thinking outside the box, innerly-speaking. Part of me loves the image of all these liberals whispering ‘upsouth’ to each other constantly, in that knowing way.

OK, I guess he could be winding up to take a swing at Dwight Macdonald. But does Dwight Macdonald talk about Donald Duck, in particular?

I’m re-reading Samuel Scheffler’s paper “Immigration and the Significance of Culture”, _Philosophy and Public Affairs_ 2007. From the footnotes, the list of “races” into which the US immigration authorities divided humanity in 1914:

bq. African (black), Armenian, Bohemian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Cuban, Dalmatian, Dutch, East Indian, English, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Herzogovinian, Irish, Italian (North), Italian (South), Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Magyar, Mexican, Montenegrin, Moravian, Pacific Islander, Polish, Portuguese, Roumanian, Russian, Ruthenian (Russniak), Scandinavian (Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes), Scotch, Servian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Spanish-American, Syrian, Turkish, Welsh, West Indian.

Via DeLong and Econospeak, I found my way to Gregory Mankiw’s self-exculpation in the New York Times. Mankiw quotes Keynes drawing a contrast between method and empirical conclusions:

bq. The theory of economics does not furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to policy. It is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique for thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions.

Hard not to be struck by a parallel with Lukacs’s opening passage from History and Class Consciousness:

bq. Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto – without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment. Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or ‘improve’ it have led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism.

I’ve never had sympathy for what Lukacs says here, and don’t know the context for the Keynes quote. But I’m struck by the way that both Mankiw and Lukacs implicitly endorse the idea that they can just keep on keeping on, whatever happens in the actual world.

3 Quarks Daily are holding a competition for “best blogpost in politics and the social sciences”:http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/11/stephen-m-walt-to-judge-3rd-annual-3qd-politics-social-science-prize.html, with Stephen Walt judging, and a $1,000 prize for the winner. Details below. Feel free to nominate one of our posts if you feel so moved; but feel more free again to nominate posts by less-well known blogs or bloggers, which could do with a bit of attention.

bq. As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open, and will end at 11:59 pm EST on December 3, 2011. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Professor Walt.

While you have to ask carefully if you want family-planning advice from Siri, owners of Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones may be facing other problems. According to this report in Wired, Trevor Eckhart, a security researcher in Connecticut, has found that third-party performance- and usage-monitoring software installed by default on millions of Android-based handsets sees every user action and—possibly, because I’m not sure based on the video whether this part has been demonstrated—logs and transmits it to the software maker, Carrier IQ. A video made by Eckhart (see below) shows the Carrier IQ process seeing Eckhart’s Google search of “hello world.” David Kravets’ Wired Story continues:

That’s despite Eckhart using the HTTPS version of Google which is supposed to hide searches from those who would want to spy by intercepting the traffic between a user and Google. Cringe as the video shows the software logging each number as Eckhart fingers the dialer. “Every button you press in the dialer before you call,” he says on the video, “it already gets sent off to the IQ application.” From there, the data — including the content of text messages — is sent to Carrier IQ’s servers, in secret.

This is frankly astonishing if it turns out to be true. Carrier IQ’s own website proudly announces, via a rolling counter on its front page, that it is installed on over 141 million phones. If they are logging and especially sending any data of this sort of granularity back to Carrier IQ’s servers routinely—text messages, web searches, numbers dialed—it’s hard to see how this won’t be an enormous scandal. You may recall Apple’s Locationgate scandal earlier this year, when it was found that iPhones were locally caching fairly coarse-grained location data based on cell-tower proximity (though not sending that data back to Apple). This seems orders of magnitude more severe than that—real tinfoil-hat stuff.

A Carrier IQ press release from earlier this month denies that their software is logging or transmitting keystrokes or user actions in this sort of detail:

Carrier IQ delivers Mobile Intelligence on the performance of mobile devices and networks to assist operators and device manufacturers in delivering high quality products and services to their customers. We do this by counting and measuring operational information in mobile devices – feature phones, smartphones and tablets. This information is used by our customers as a mission critical tool to improve the quality of the network, understand device issues and ultimately improve the user experience. Our software is embedded by device manufacturers along with other diagnostic tools and software prior to shipment. While we look at many aspects of a device’s performance, we are counting and summarizing performance, not recording keystrokes or providing tracking tools. The metrics and tools we derive are not designed to deliver such information, nor do we have any intention of developing such tools. The information gathered by Carrier IQ is done for the exclusive use of that customer, and Carrier IQ does not sell personal subscriber information to 3 parties. The information derived from devices is encrypted and secured within our customer’s network or in our audited and customer-approved facilities.

This denial was explicitly reiterated by the company in a release retracting a cease-and-desist letter to Eckhart that it had issued in response to some of his earlier work.

The video does appears to show that, at a minimum, Carrier IQ’s software has access to the user’s searches, text messages, and other keystrokes. (Skip to 8:40 or so for the guts of the demonstration.) The real question now is determining what the application does with that sort of access—how much of the user’s behavior is actually logged, at what level of detail that logging happens, and what is subsequently transmitted anywhere. This is what’s still not clear to me from the video. Automatic third-party access to all user actions, even if there is subsequent picking-and-choosing about what to log and what to send, seems bad enough in the absence of explicit permission from the user. And of course if Carrier IQ’s software turned out to actually be transmitting much or all of what it saw—well it’s hard to see how that would be legal. So I await further developments with interest.

I copied the heading of Megan Carpentier’s original story word-for-word, because it’s hard to capture the issue better in a sentence than she did. (Tx @zephoria.)

In related news, take a look at Mike Ananny’s piece in the Atlantic last Spring about The Curious Connection Between Apps for Gay Men and Sex Offenders. Also, Ted Striphas talks more generally about the idea of “algorithmic culture” and “algorithmic literacies” here. Over a decade ago I wrote a few papers about the power of portals (remember that term?) and search engines to channel user attention, it’s fascinating- and rather disturbing at times – to watch the evolution of that issue.

A few weeks ago, Philippe Van Parijs’s new book Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World was released by his publisher. Since he’s coming to my university to give a lecture on the topic of the book at the end of January, I’ve set up an online reading group on this book over at my Faculty’s blog. Feel free to join – we’ll move about one chapter a week and will start with the first one next Monday, December 5th.

Let’s imagine that we lived in an alternative universe where some of the more noxious nineteenth century pseudo-science regarding ‘inverts’ and same-sex attraction had survived into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Let us further stipulate that the editor of a nominally liberal opinion magazine “had published”:http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2005/10/moral_courage.html one purported effort to ‘prove’ via statistics that same-sex attraction was a form of communicable psychosis, which invariably resulted in national degeneracy when it was allowed to persist. One of this essay’s co-authors had “chased sissies”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/01/should-i-believe-this.html in his youth, but claimed he had not realized that this was homophobic; he also had occasion to observe the lack of “real men”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/01/07/nos-ancetres-les-galles/ on the streets of Paris, and to deplore the resulting sapping of virility in the French national character. His efforts, and the efforts “of”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Jensen “fellow”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn “researchers”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton (all of the latter funded by and/or directly involved with the “Institute for the Suppression of Homosexual Filth”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund) succeeded in creating a significant public controversy. Some public commentators embraced the same-sex-attraction-as-psychosis argument because they were, themselves, homophobes, others more plausibly because they were “incompetent”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/546.html, or because they enjoyed being contrarians, or both. This, despite the fact that the statistical arguments on which these extreme claims depended were “demonstrably”:http://www.powells.com/biblio?PID=27627&cgi=product&isbn=0-387-94986-0 bogus.

Now, let us suppose that the same editor who helped release this tide of noxious homophobia in the first place still played a significant role in American public debate, and still refused to recognize that he might, actually, be wrong on the facts. Whenever “people pointed out”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/19/eternal-recurrence/ that these claims were statistically bogus, he refused to engage, instead treating “cogent statistical criticisms”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/21/missing-the-g-spot/ as yet another reiteration of the “left-liberal view”:http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/10/genetics-and-race/224378/. While continuing to maintain that the “data” on fag-psychosis “need addressing”:http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/11/race-and-iq/223451/, he resolutely refused to actually address the harsh statistical critiques of how this data had been analyzed, perhaps because he didn’t actually understand “these”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html “critiques”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html. Instead, he continued to “worry”:http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/11/the-study-of-intelligence-ctd-1.html that “political correctness” and “squeamishness” had stifled the study of whether gay people were, in fact, psychotic and could communicate their psychosis to others. This was a discussion that was “worth airing “a decade and a half ago” and it “was surely worth airing today.” Indeed, the topic was “fascinating in and of itself.” However, as the editor observed, those who sympathized with his own position found that the “chilling effect” of public disapproval, had gotten even worse, and was “playing havoc” with the careers of those interested in investigating the very important question of whether teh gay was a form of criminal insanity.

I wonder, if we lived in such a world, what Andrew Sullivan would think of that editor?

Scott Page is offering a “free graded course”:http://www.modelthinker-class.org/ on ‘thinking with models.’

We live in a complex world with diverse people, firms, and governments whose behaviors aggregate to produce novel, unexpected phenomena. We see political uprisings, market crashes, and a never ending array of social trends. How do we make sense of it?

Models. Evidence shows that people who think with models consistently outperform those who don’t. And, moreover people who think with lots of models outperform people who use only one.

Why do models make us better thinkers?

Models help us to better organize information – to make sense of that fire hose or hairball of data (choose your metaphor) available on the Internet. Models improve our abilities to make accurate forecasts. They help us make better decisions and adopt more effective strategies. They even can improve our ability to design institutions and procedures.

In this class, I present a starter kit of models: I start with models of tipping points. I move on to cover models explain the wisdom of crowds, models that show why some countries are rich and some are poor, and models that help unpack the strategic decisions of firm and politicians.

I really recommend this to CT readers. Scott is one of the people pioneering the study of complex systems in the social sciences. My review of his book, _The Difference_ is “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/06/27/review-scott-e-page-the-difference/, and I imagine that studying with him will be a lot of fun. There are a number of other courses (listed at the bottom of the page for Scott’s course) that also look very interesting.

My review-essay of David Marquand’s book on Europe (Powells, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691141592/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=0691141592 (deprecated))is up at the _Nation_ (paywalled version “here”:http://www.thenation.com/article/164749/zoned-european-union , unpaywalled PDF “here”:http://henryfarrell.net/farrell.pdf). It pulls the usual US review-essay trick of being as much about the arguments of the reviewer as of the author (however, since Marquand and I agree on the major issues, it should be less annoying than it sometimes is). I use Marquand’s book to talk about the ways in which technocracy has become the EU’s default mode of policy-making, and the political problems that this creates. Paul Krugman “wrote”:http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/crat-me-no-techno-continued/ a couple of weeks ago that:

bq. It’s a dubious idea to supplant democratic governance with allegedly non-political management even in the best of times. But to assign authority to unelected men whose actual record suggests that they govern based on prejudices rather than analysis is even worse.

and then went on to write a “column”:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/opinion/boring-cruel-euro-romantics.html about the incompetence of the current shower of technocrats. My piece is about the other part of this argument – the sorry consequences of “supplanting democratic governance” with “allegedly non-political management.”

bq. _The End of the West_ was written before the deficit crisis (HF – it actually was finished at the beginning of the crisis – this is an editing artefact which made it through). Nonetheless, it provides a crisp and relevant analysis of the difficult choices that Europe faces. As Marquand says, the current crisis involves the “revenge of politics over economism.” Europe is caught in a “no-man’s-land between federalism and confederalism — and between democracy and technocracy.” Because they could not get the politics right, European leaders left the politics out, hoping that the usual gradual accretion of policymaking authority would provide an acceptable substitute.

bq. This was a grievous mistake. Yet the EU’s efforts to fix it have been as riddled with hedges as was the original arrangement for economic and monetary union. Europe’s richer states want the deficit problem to go away, but they are not ready to make the necessary fundamental political commitments. They have tried to obscure this lack of commitment in various ways, but the illusion is wearing thin. More hedging will not work. Markets need the certainty of politically credible guarantees if they are to be genuinely reassured. Politically credible guarantees require that European governments come clean with their citizens about the need for new arrangements.

(Thanks to Eric Rauchway for a great and apposite “Keynes quote”:http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2011/10/25/what-if-and-so-what/ which I repurposed for the review).

are very common among a certain class of economist. “This”:http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2011/11/26/revealed-preferences-for-climate/ from climate-not-quite-skeptic-but-sneaking-regarder-of-same Richard Tol, is rather special, and deserves particular attention. I quote it in its entirety.

Eight academic economists have left Dublin in recent months or will leave shortly. That may seem like a small number, but there are only 200 or so academic economists in the country. They all have moved / will move to warmer places: Stirling (2.0K warmer on average than Dublin), Brighton (2.2K), Oxford (2.2K), Canberra (3.4), Melbourne (5.3K) and Lisbon (7.0K). Dublin economists thus disregard the opinion of the European Union that a climate change of 2.0K is dangerous.

Between 1998 and 2009, intra-union migration has been towards warmer places. The average migrant in the EU experienced a warming of 0.6K. The average masks a wide spread. About 10% of migrants stayed in roughly the same climate, 17% experienced a cooling of 2K or less, and 16% a cooling of more than 2K. 24% experienced a warming of less than 2K, and 33% a warming of more than 2K. 450,000 people opted to live in a climate that is more that 5K warmer than what they were used to.

Obviously, one cannot compare the individual impact of moving to a warmer climate with the impact of global warming, but at the same time it is clear that both Dublin economists specifically and intra-European migrants generally do not object to a warmer environment.

City climate data from World Guides. Country climate data from the Climate Research Unit. Migration data from EuroStat, for Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland, Sweden, United Kingdom.

Update: In comments, Richard Tol says that the piece was intended to be tongue in cheek. He has changed the tag on the original post to say this (although he has not noted this change anywhere on the post or in comments).