January 2012

For the first time, India has gone a full year without a new polio case, the World Health Organization announced last week.

The last case, the only one in 2011, was of an 18-month-old girl in West Bengal State whose sudden paralysis was confirmed as polio on Jan. 13. There were 42 known cases in 2010.

Polio eradication officials described a year without new cases as a “game-changer” and a “milestone” because India was for decades one of the biggest centers of the disease.

All from the NYT article. I…can’t think of anything bad about this at all! Don’t help me.

Fantastic news. The recall for Walker in Wisconsin needed about 550,000 signatures; a couple of hours ago about 1 million were turned in; in addition the recalls against 4 Republican state senators, including Scott Fitzgerald, the Republican Senate leader (about 30% over what was needed in his case) have gathered more signatures than needed. Signatures will be challenged, no doubt, but its unlikely that challenges will be successful. Prediction: once the Dems get a candidate this will be the most vicious, highest spending, election in Wisconsin history. I’ll provide links for non millionaire out of staters to help counterbalance the contributions of multi millionaire out of staters when the time comes.

In an attempt to demonstrate their credentials as the takers of “tough decisions”, British Labour leader Ed Miliband (whom I backed as leader) and his shadow Chancellor Ed Balls have been telling the world that a future Labour government can’t guarantee to reverse Tory public expenditure cuts, and favour a public sector pay freeze, and even pay cuts for public sector workers (to save jobs, apparently). Well it is a funny world where a sign of your toughness is your willingness to pander to the right-wing commentariat. Of course I understand that a future Labour government will have to cope with the world it inherits and that difficult choices will have to be made. But in the interim, people are fighting to stop the coalition from vandalising Britain’s public services and punishing the poorest and most vulnerable. Faced with Miliband and Balls “signalling” (or whatever), those negotiating to defend workers will be told by their managements that “even” the Labour leadership concede the necessity for cuts and concessions. This simply cuts the ground from under the feet of trade unionists and campaigners. It also validates Tory policies in the eyes of large parts of the electorate. Well they’ve made their choice and I’ve made mine. It is a small one, and Ed and Ed won’t even notice, but I have left the party.

I hoisted this from comments…because I can. (Although you should read comment 101 by Jenna Moran in the previous thread as well.) Also, because people often covertly stipulate that men could “amass resources from which to provide for children” on the veldt, and I’d really like to see that…ah…fleshed out a little more because piles of rotting food≠sexy times, unless YOU’RE MOLE! Well, I suppose moles are more plausibly relevant than spiders; at least they’re mammals about whom Kafka has written depressing stories. Oh wait, by that logic cockroaches are back in. Sort of. Whatever. Also, I apologize in advance for the profanity which is going to get CT banned from the Panera Bread wifi and which we were wont to employ in the past only when complaining in the most vehement terms about torture. Now that CT has gone downhill and isn’t a serious academic blog anymore what with the lady-posting about all the lady-topics that only affect ladies, such as human reproduction, I’m just busting out with profanity all over the place. If this is causing anyone any actual problems please contact me.

One thing one might wish to consider is what the actual economic/social conditions were like back in the Environment of Early Adaptation? Well, the real answer is that we have no idea, but a not totally implausible answer is that the most similar existing societies are those who live in relatively small bands of hunter-gatherers, such as the !Kung, and (apparently) less ¡exciting! tribes in the Amazon. In such tribes everyone has notably more leisure time than in agricultural societies, though of course their reproduction rate is much, much lower.

Generally, the gathering (mostly done by women) provides 80% of the average adults’ calories and the hunting (mostly done by men) 20%. That’s on average, and the protein is obviously important, so… Now, being the all-that best hunter in the tribe can convince lots of laydeez to have sex with you. Is this because they want your resources? No, because every motherfucking-body shares the food, Holmes. Shares the motherfucking food. They don’t want your resources—-though they probably wouldn’t say no to you getting the oysters off that roast wild turkey for them. They want your hot body. Why are you so good at hunting? You’re in the pink. A fine physical specimen, keen of eye, etc.

Now, if you, hypothetical armchair evolutionary psychologist, are very, very good, I might allow you to construct a loooong chain of argument by analogy, in which being the best hunter=social capital, and monetary capital today=social capital. Note, however, that you will be forced to leave out all the bits about “providing” for the offspring and so forth, and be left with something more along the lines of birds that do stupid dances to garner sexual attention, and the great engines of modern capital will turn out to be the baroque construction of a thousand bower-birds working at cross-purposes. Which, granted, not totally implausible.

“No but food’s important,” I hear armchair evolutionary psychologist cry. Yes. Food. Totes important. We’re all together on this one. So maybe fucking the best hunter does get you (as female hunter-gatherer) a bit of extra food. (Note that everyone’s far from starving or they could just put in a little more time looking for food, which they do not, because they’d rather hang around poking the fire with a sharp stick or creating oral epics.) Then maybe you’d want the best hunter to think your kid was his so your kid would get extra food too. But life is short, and being the best hunter doesn’t last forever, maybe you better fuck that likely young up-and-comer with the blue feather in his hair. And then again, truth be told, strength isn’t everything, and that guy who used to be the best hunter a few years back knows a trick or two, if things were to get rough, might be useful. You know what you should really do here? Fuck every last member of the tribe who isn’t your dad or your brother, and convince each and every one of them that he is your special little schnookie-boo, and separately at various times of the day give each of them a blushing, downcast look which indicates he is the still point of your turning world.

And that explains why women are all total sluts to this very day, and why people who think that the veldt predisposes women to sleep with old men who have lots of money appear to have forgotten about the perishability of food items, and the non-utility/replaceability of almost all other items, and the fact that there was no money then. The End.

P.S. My husband came up with the “ad hominid” formulation and deserves full credit.

Oi, this is so dumb and irritating that I pretty seriously considered not writing about it at all, in part because I worry the comments thread will develop a fetor of glib ev-psych nonsense. Uplift the human race, people, and surprise me with your intelligent thoughtfulness and concern for the feelings of other commenters. Who, I would like you to note, are actual human beings. Ya Rly!

Moving on, Slate has proffered for your attention an article by one Mark Regnerus, if that is his name. It is entitled thusly: “Sex is Cheap: Why Young Men Have the Upper Hand in Bed, Even When They’re Failing in Life.” I’m actually concerned that the stupid is going to burn my screen, and that readers of the article should perhaps be provided with an old-timey screensaver to avoid this. Flying toasters, say.
[click to continue…]

Guardian obit here. Whenever I have written about mysteries on CT, Henry has put in a word for Reginald Hill. Quite rightly: by the late eighties Hill was one of the 3 or 4 best mystery writers in the English language, and, of that group, the most effortlessly enjoyable (the others?: James, Barnard, and, until he died, Symons. Go on, tell me I’m wrong). He is most famous for his Dalziel and Pascoe books, mainly for the combination of complex plotting, interesting delightful characters, and many very comedic moments. The first 5 or 6 are fairly straightforward whodunnit/police procedurals (with the exception of Deadheads which defies one of the central conventions of the whodunnit), but one reason Hill became so good is that he experimented, frequently, in the novels, with style, format, and, increasingly often, convention. Most of his non-series books (his other series about Joe Sixmith, a black detective in Luton, was much more relentlessly humorous) were written in the 70s and early 80’s, often under pseudonyms (he has published under at least 4 names, maybe more), before he got to be really good. But the last two were brilliant, especially The Woodcutter, which is riveting, as good as any of the Dalziel/Pascoe books.

Or as good as any so far. Honestly, I was expecting him to live another 15 years at least, yielding 5 or 6 more, so was sickened when I read my mum’s email this morning, which started “No more Dalziel..”. But, according the wiki page, there is one more to come, which this amazon.co.uk page seems to confirm. So, one more to come.

Last Wednesday I attended an event at LSE (under the auspices of the New Economics Foundation) exploring the idea of working-time reduction with an eventual goal of moving to a normal working week of 21 hours. Various people asked me to write up the event, so that’s what I’m doing, though I claim no special expertise in the surrounding economics and social science. The lectures were filmed, so I expect that they’ll be up somewhere to watch soon, which will make my comments superfluous. Tom Walker of Ecological Headstand was also present, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see some remarks from him there soon.
[click to continue…]

Hear hear! What a wonderful short interview with Sanjay Reddy by Perry Mehrling from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET):

Reddy defends the position that economics is a profoundly value-entangled science, and that “Good theory is theory which illuminates the world, and good theory cannot start from a-priori premises which are disconnected from the world. Good theory has to start in part from observation from the world.”

I agree with every word Reddy says, but am a bit puzzled why Mehrling sees Reddy’s position as ‘a strong position’. In my view, if it is regarded (by economists?) as a ‘strong position’, that is just because economics has so forcefully tried to distance itself from any evaluative or otherwise ethical concerns; but in truth, economics has never been value-free, it has only fooled itself that it could be so. I’m really glad that Reddy is contributing to a better understanding of economics as value-entangled. Can’t wait to read the result of his INET project, “a book making a broad case for the resurrection of normative reasoning in economics”.

John Sides “posts some results”:http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/01/13/does-mitt-romney-have-a-wealth-problem/ suggesting that while voters mostly understand that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are rich, they are more likely to think that Mitt Romney doesn’t care about their interests because he is rich, than Barack Obama.

bq. The better one thinks “personally wealthy” describes Romney, the better one thinks that “cares about the wealthy” describes him (the correlation is 0.60). But the same correlation for Obama is much smaller (0.18). People’s perception that Obama is personally wealth[y] does not translate as strongly into the perception that he cares about the wealthy. Moreover, people who perceive that Obama cares about the wealthy are actually a bit MORE likely to perceive that he cares about “people like me,” the poor, and the middle class. The correlations are not always large, but they are positive—e.g., the correlation between believing Obama cares about the wealthy and cares about “people like me” is 0.19.

This obviously has implications for the kind of ‘how the 2012 US presidential elections are likely to play out’ questions that we usually don’t have much to say about here at CT (our partial reticence doing its little bit to cancel out the volubility on this topic in the rest of the political blogosphere). But there is a more interesting general point – _should_ people think that the Democrats are more likely than the Republicans to be biased in favor of the rich.

Interestingly, this survey suggests that public opinion sort-of accords with what evidence we have. Larry Bartels has carried out research on the US Senate (which for a variety of reasons makes it easier to do useful comparisons than e.g. with presidents). And his findings suggest the following. First – if you look at a set of politically salient issues, senators from both parties are totally unresponsive to the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution. Second, that Republicans don’t care about the views of voters in the middle of the income distribution either, while Democrats do care significantly. Third, that Republicans care almost three times as much as Democrats about the views of those in the top third of the distribution. Overall, senators tend to be much more responsive to the opinions of better off people than of middle income people, and don’t care at all about the bottom third. These measures are of course somewhat crude – if one had better data, one could subdivide the population further (top 10%, top 1%), and perhaps find an even more striking relationship.

Doesn’t it though? It looks horrible. The interface is badly designed. Keyboard short cuts do unexpected things like e.g. make your email disappear irrevocably. And while you can temporarily revert back to the old look, they make it clear that they are going to impose the new one on everyone soon, like it or not. Finally, if you do revert to the old style, a ‘switch to the new look’ pop-up keeps on coming up on the lower right hand of the screen, persistently nudging you to accept your destiny like a demented jack-in-the-box from a Thaler/Sunstein scripted horror movie.

It used to be that Google claimed that their motto was ‘don’t be evil.’ Now it appears to be ‘I’m sorry, but we have to be evil to compete with Facebook.’ It was bad enough when they got rid of the social features from Google Reader (which worked _very nicely_ to allow you to see what other people with interesting tastes were looking at), because they wanted to force everyone over to Google Plus. And don’t get me started on the new social search stuff. But crippling Gmail is going too far.

I invite readers who (a) have similar sentiments, and (b) have their own blogs to write posts with the word “gmail” hyperlinked to this post, in order to see whether we can get a bit of a googlebomb going. If nothing else, it would be an interesting experiment in algorithmic politics. Google claim that they can do nothing to help Santorum wipe himself clean of Santorum. But would they tweak their algorithm if their own product were the target? It would be interesting to see.

I have been meaning to blog about this for ages, though it’s sort of a personal reflection which I might have put on my personal blog had it not gone into a hibernation pod until we reach Alpha Centauri on our photon sail ship. At some point, let’s see, must have been…August 2010 or so, our younger daughter Violet, then 6, decided she was actually Calvin, and therefore a boy. Thus, her precious special stuffed animal Saki, probably the single least tiger-like toy in the universe, was Hobbes. She was in a phase of reading–well, being read to–a LOT of Calvin and Hobbes, which constantly reduced her to paroxysms of laughter. She is one of the laughingest children ever, so this isn’t hard, but her love of Calvin and Hobbes was special.

So, she insisted we all call her Calvin, and call Saki “Hobbes.” And refused to wear any of her dresses or skirts or girly T-shirts. And then a few months later she insisted she needed a boy’s haircut, and a boy bathing suit, and also boy underwear. Our reaction was to say: OK, as you like. I cut my children’s hair anyway (and my own!), so that was no problem. Her schoolmates and teacher were very supportive, calling her Calvin; she turned in all her homework and tests as Calvin. She still had girl friends, though; when I asked her if she wanted to play with the boys at school or have them over she rolled her eyes and said, “Mom, they’re all morons.” She also still played with her dolls, but more with Lego, and more Super Mario (both Wii–Super Mario Galaxy!–and Nintendo hand-held).
[click to continue…]

“This column”:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-11/europe-learns-from-u-s-so-why-not-vice-versa-commentary-by-clive-crook.html by Clive Crook today:

bq. Democrats therefore find themselves having to deny the obvious. Obama wants to make the country more like Europe? Ridiculous. A straw man. But it isn’t ridiculous. What’s ridiculous is the idea that Republicans take for granted and squirming Democrats tacitly endorse — that making the U.S. more like Europe would be a disaster. … The biggest step the U.S. needed to take in Europe’s direction, and the longest overdue, was health-care reform. The Affordable Care Act is a start. … Obviously, political cultures differ in deep ways, so there will never be One True Capitalism, right for everybody. … Still, Europe’s biggest economies all reflect a social- democratic tradition that puts more emphasis on collective provision and the guiding hand of government than seems natural in the U.S. The American political tradition stresses the rights and responsibilities of individuals; it exalts private enterprise and almost celebrates risk. These are choices that countries should be free to make.

bq. … Europe’s politicians looked at the U.S. and decided they needed, among other things, more American incentives and more American creative destruction. … They said so explicitly: Unlike their U.S. counterparts, they weren’t embarrassed to point to the other model. … On the other hand, Europe can teach the U.S. a thing or two about social insurance — and not just in health care, the most egregious failure of the American economic model. Help for the unemployed has traditionally been ungenerous in the U.S. … Republicans might also ask whether America is living up to the merit-society ideal. … In America, land of opportunity, if you are born poor, your chances of staying poor are higher than in Europe. The trade-off between economic vitality and economic security cannot be eliminated. But its terms can be improved in the U.S. and Europe, if each pays closer attention to the other.

presents a “striking contrast with this one”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/03/11/let-us-rally-to-protect-the-delicate-flower-of-rugged-individualism/ from three years ago.

bq. Where has France gone too far, in the view of an American liberal? … Presumably, liberals approve of the universal health care, the generous and extensive welfare state, the comprehensive worker protections, the stricter regulation, the vastly more-generous subsidies for higher education, the stronger unions, the higher taxes, and especially the higher taxes on the rich. … Perhaps some liberals privately long to make the United States over in the image of France, but the great majority, I imagine, are more interested in taking the things they regard as best in the European economic model—all the things I just listed—and combining those “socially enlightened” policies with the traditional economic virtues of the United States. Take French social policies and welfare-state institutions and add them to the American work ethic, spirit of self-reliance, and appetite for change. Et voila, the best of both worlds. Color me skeptical. Culture shapes institutions and vice versa. Culture—that bundle of traits of self-reliance, self-determination, innovation, and striving for success—underpins the American exception. … In ordinary times, this culture makes it hard for a government to push the United States in a European direction … it would be an error to assume that the policy transformation that some liberals long for—and which Obama, if his budget is any guide, appears to be aiming for—would leave America’s unusual cultural traits unaffected. … the American exception is alive and well, and that it is more than likely the secret of this country’s awesome success. … I would need to think long and hard before casting it for “transformation.” Repairs here and improvements there, of course, but transformation? It would be a shame to see America revert to the Western European norm.

NB that I am noting, not criticizing, this apparent change of heart. People have different attitudes to returning prodigals. Except in the case of continued rank hypocrisy, I’m by and large in favor of killing the fatted calf (or at the least, keeping it nicely plump in the hopeful anticipation that the change will stick).