March 09, 2005

My five minutes of fame

Posted by John Quiggin

I just got off the phone from an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Of course, you’ll all be agog to read my views on bankruptcy reform, social security, the trade deficit, the impending crisis of capitalism, and so on. You’ll have to wait a little while, however. The topic of the interview was bunnies vs bilbies.

March 06, 2005

Never Mind the Trans Fat

Posted by Kieran

In O’Hare airport, the Starbucks sells Lemon Poopy Seed muffins. At least they’re honest about it. Makes you wonder what’s in the coffee.

March 03, 2005

Body Parts Sociology

Posted by Kieran

I have left the bitter Sonoran desert behind and am in balmy Chicago for a conference about body parts. Packing my suitcase, I realized that I’m going to have some trouble keeping my own body parts at a reasonable temperature: where are all those Winter clothes I used to own? Didn’t I live in New Jersey and Connecticut for years? So I just brought everything I had.

The conference should be interesting. Mainly lawyers and bioethics people, along with some economists. I am the token sociologist. I’ll be talking about some work I’m doing on organ procurement rates in seventeen OECD countries, so obviously I am on the panel titled “The Battle Between Bioethics and Religion.” As it happens, my friend John Evans wrote the book on the battle between bioethics and religion. The final score was Bioethics 3, Religion 1.

February 28, 2005

Not the kind of bottle I need

Posted by Kieran

Inside the top of the Jones Soda I just opened it says “Take Charge of Your Life and Decisions.” I’m wondering whether doing this is compatible with accepting advice from a soft-drink bottle.

February 26, 2005

Numa Numa New York Times

Posted by Kieran

The NYT has an article about Gary Brolsma, the Numa Numa guy. If you haven’t seen the video, go watch it and come back in a minute.

Now tell me what you think of the article’s summary of the story:

There was a time when embarrassing talents were a purely private matter … But with the Internet, humiliation - like everything else - has now gone public. … Here, then, is the cautionary tale of Gary Brolsma, 19, amateur videographer and guy from New Jersey, who made the grave mistake of placing on the Internet a brief clip of himself dancing along to a Romanian pop song. Even in the bathroom mirror, Mr. Brolsma’s performance could only be described as earnest but painful.

Utter bollocks. Mr Brolsma’s performance could only be described that way by someone with no capacity at all to recognize good comedy. The video is hilarious and, to anyone with eyes in their head, was supposed to be. It’s not earnest, it’s deadpan. I am sorry to say that Americans are renowned for their inability to grasp this distinction. Despite the article’s efforts to draw a parallel, it’s obviously a real performance, not a private bit of wish-fulfillment maliciously released into the wild like the Star Wars Kid video. The guy’s friends agree:

His friends say Mr. Brolsma has always had a creative side. He used to make satirical Prozac commercials on cassette tapes, for instance. He used to publish a newspaper with print so small you couldn’t read it with the naked eye. “He was always very out there - he’s always been ambitious,” said Frank Gallo, a former classmate. “And he’s a big guy, but he’s never been ashamed.” … “He’s been entertaining us for years.”

Sadly, the Times will not be diverted from its dumbass interpretation. It should come as no surprise that Brolsma “is distraught, embarrassed. His grandmother, Margaret Telkes, quoted him as saying, just the other day, ‘I want this to end.’” You would too, if you were getting shoehorned by the NYT into a “fat kid makes ass of self on internet” story:

The question remains why two million people would want to watch a doughy guy in glasses wave his arms around online to a Romanian pop song.

Because it’s funny, you gobshites! And it’s meant to be! I’d bet that if Brolsma weren’t overweight, the Times wouldn’t have had as hard a time seeing this.

February 10, 2005

My eyes! The goggles do nothing!

Posted by Kieran

Here’s a picture of a small part of Milford Sound, on New Zealand’s beautiful South Island. I took it when I was there about a year and a half ago. It was my laptop wallpaper for a while. All this is really apropos of nothing, but I can’t look at that tentacle mole any more. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.

January 30, 2005

All the blood in the world, and then some

Posted by Kieran

First let me say that this calculation is probably wrong. But one of Brad DeLong’s One Hundred Interesting Math Calculations asks How Much Blood is there in the World? (How much human blood, that is.) The answer assumes that the average person has about a gallon of blood in them, which is a tad low, I think — it’s more like 9.5 to 10.5 pints per person. But let’s keep it at a gallon. The answer is about 8 × 108 cubic feet of blood, which is less than you might think: as Brad says, “All the human blood in the world could be stuffed into a cube less than one-thousand feet on a side.”

But who can visualize a cube a thousand feet long on a side? As a person with a sociological interest in blood, I like the calculation, but I need to translate it into the standard SI unit of volume applicable to this case, namely the Olympic-size swimming pool. My goal is to do the conversion using only Google.

Brad gives us the 8 × 108 cubic feet number. An Olympic pool measures 50 × 20 x 2 meters, which gives us 2000 cubic meters or 2 × 106 liters. So we have a units problem. But Google knows that 2 × 106 liters is 528,344.102 US gallons. Google also knows that this is equivalent to 706,293.746 cubic feet. And so it will be no surprise to learn that Google has no trouble calculating that 8 × 108 cubic feet divided by 706,293.746 cubic feet is 1,132.6732. Roughly speaking, all the human blood in the world would fit into about eleven hundred Olympic-sized swimming pools.

According to the National Blood Data Resource Center, about 15 million pints of blood are collected each year in the United States. That’s equivalent to just over three and a half Olympic pools. Blood is a renewable resource, of course, in that you make more of it when you lose some. Over the course of a year the U.S. blood system controls the allocation of roughly 0.31 percent of all the blood in the world. Unless the glass of wine I’m having has caused me to make a mistake somewhere.

January 22, 2005

English as she is spoke

Posted by Kieran

Josh Chafetz says:

NEW HAVEN IS FORECAST for 10-15 inches of snow tonight.

Is this a colloquial construction I’m unfamiliar with, or just backwards?

December 21, 2004

Hark the Herald Tribune Sings

Posted by Kieran

It’s Christmas here at Crooked Timber, though this does not mean we are Republicans. I can’t hope to match Maria’s instant-classic Christmas post from last year — for one thing, it’s harder to stir up the ole Christmas cheer in the Sonoran Desert than the Champs Elysees. But it’s not impossible. Last year we had a thread about the Most Annoying Christmas Songs, and my feeling is that being down on Christmas music is so over.1 Here instead are four Christmas songs I like. Besides being songs for the season, they are all songs for two voices in conversation — or argument.

Baby It’s Cold Outside.
An oldie and a goodie, despite the slight date-rape overtones of the whole thing. “The neighbors might think / … Say what’s in this drink.” Um, yes. I sometimes imagine the deleted verse that goes

Please let me out — But baby it’s cold out there
I’m going to shout — No help to be had out there
I’m using my Mace — I’m blinded! It hurts! My eyes!
Now open that door — I’ll crawl there right now, on the floor

And so on. Nevertheless, I’m still very partial to the Dinah Shore version. The Dean Martin one is pretty good, too, though appropriately enough he has a whole chorus in the bachelor pad with him.

Quoi, Ma Voisine, Es-Tu Fachée?
I know the English version of this song, called Neighbor, Neighbor. It appears on Jane Sibbery’s live album Child: Music for the Christmas Season, which incidentally is easily in the running for Best Christmas Album Ever. The song is about two people on the way to see the newborn Jesus, though one of them is considerably less impressed with the details of the birth than the other, and more alert to some of the oddities of its circumstances. The live version has the lines

#1: Hey — hey — you said she was a Virgin and then you said she had a husband …
#2: There are many unexplained miracles in this happening —
#1: But —
#2: You shouldn’t be focusing on the husband at this time

Watchman Tell Us of the Night.
This one is a bit more serious. It was written in 1825. It is best heard at Midnight Mass in a darkened church sung in call-and-response fashion by two male voices, one at the altar and the other entering from outside, ideally with a lantern or other light. And if that doesn’t send a shiver down your spine, well, bugger off.

Fairytale of New York.
All together now! In your best drunk-off-yer-arse voices! “So haaapy Christmus, Oy luv ya baaaby… I can see a batter time… when all our dreams come true… ” Fairytale of New York is, objectively speaking, simply the best Christmas song ever written. The fact that it is ideally suited to small groups of maudlin Irish guys thousands of miles from home is only one of its many, many virtues. It also, I believe, occupies a sociologically sigificant spot in Irish extended-family Christmas singalongs. When I was growing up (in the 1970s), these events were cherished by children as the time when you could hear elderly relatives wearing Pioneer pins cheerfully admit to using prostitutes (during mandatory renditions of The Boxer). These days relatives of all ages get to belt out “You’re an auld slut on junk” and “You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot,” etc, late in the evening.

1 Along with the expression “So over,” I imagine.

December 04, 2004

Draft Contribution to Tech Central Station

Posted by Kieran

So, there appear to be no explicit arguments in the peer-reviewed scientific literature against the consensus position that, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put it, “Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. … [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.” The Tech Central Station Op-Eds rebutting this finding must be in the hopper even now. To help them out, I have cobbled together one made up largely of statements in earlier columns by the likes of Joel Schwartz, James Glassman and Iain Murray.

The Main Source of Hot Air is Plain to See
Kieran Healy (assisted by Schwartz, Murray and Glassman.)

As Tech Central Station readers well know, there are reasons to be skeptical of claims of substantial human-caused warming. A recent article in the fringe leftist journal Science discovers a puzzle: none of these reasons is to be found in a survey of 928 peer-reviewed articles published in the past 10 years. Its author concludes that “Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.”

Remarkable, indeed. As you know, a superb analysis by Ross McKitrick and Steven McIntyre showed that the famous hockey stick finding — on which the consensus rests in part — was completely bogus, assuming you don’t know the difference between degrees and radians and think that temperature is not a physical quantity. (Setting missing temperature values to zero helps also, but is an advanced quantitative technique.) This is just the sort of nitpickery by which the notoriously left-wing scientific establishment keeps dissenting views out of the journals. The whole affair bears strong resemblance to the recent Bellesiles controversy. Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles won a Bancroft Prize for his argument that gun ownership in early America was not widespread. It took an amateur historian, Clayton Cramer, to point out that this claim could not be substantiated on the basis of actual gun-ownership records. In an exactly parallel way, it took an incompetent analysis by two non-experts to undermine the hockey-stick finding.

Had he worked for a hack website, Hayek would surely have been the first to note that the very idea of peer-review, and the free sharing of data and ideas, positively reeks of socialism. The market, and not Lysenkoist scientists, should be allowed to decide the truth about climate change. The present situation is a discouraging spectacle to anyone who expected rational, scientific discussions, but climate change has become an issue teeming with emotion, and uncertainty is not a word the participants in the so-called “scientific community” like to hear. Just like Dow 36,000 is not a word I like to hear. Stop it. I told you, that shit ain’t funny.

Kieran Healy is unqualified to comment on matters of climate change, and is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

(Hat tip: Chris Mooney.)

December 02, 2004

Brio

Posted by Kieran

Eugene Volokh complains that a recent draft of one his papers is missing something:

Verve. “Energy and enthusiasm in the expression of ideas . . . . Vitality; liveliness.” My writing was the usual lawyerese, flabby and clausy. The substance was getting there (though it still needs a lot of work), but it was missing vigor, concreteness, punch. So I’ve been doing Vervification Edits as part of my substantive editing passes.

“Verve” is a good word for the quality he’s after, but I think “brio” is better, if only because its roots are mostly Italian and those people know how to live it up. In Jonathan Coe’s terrific novel, What a Carve Up (published in the United States as The Winshaw Legacy) the narrator phones in a book review. Its chief complaint is that the book’s author “lacks the necessary brio” to carry off the story. Unfortunately something goes wrong in the transcription and the published version claims that the author “lacks the necessary biro,” instead. Just as debilitating to the writing process, to be sure, but as a critical observation of character perhaps not so incisive.

I’m recovering from a bad cold, so I’ve been feeling a little short of brio myself. I have three papers to draft, a review to write and a book manuscript to revise (I sign the contract this week). So if anyone has any strategies for revivifying oneself, let me know in the comments.

November 09, 2004

The Obvious Solution to Spam

Posted by Kieran

In the comments to John’s post about a jailed spammer, George Williams notes that “If we outlaw spam, only outlaws will send spam.” This is exactly right. The solution is to put industrial-strength spamming technology into the hands of ordinary citizens. The resulting deterrent effect would reduce the flood of spam to almost nothing, as no rational spammer would risk immediate retaliation in kind. Of course, no-one would be required to own huge email lists, spambot factories or relay-rape kits, but enough decent citizens would legally conceal them on their person and use them as needed that the problem would take care of itself very quickly. Moreover, actual use of spam technology would be very uncommon. A survey1 I did a few years ago while not quite on the faculty of the University of Chicago showed2 that simply brandishing a DVD of the software was enough to deter would-be spammers 98% of the time. In the American West of the early 19th century, where this approach prevailed, letter-writing was far more common than it is today, but spam was virtually unknown. Also indoor plumbing.

1 The data are unavailable for reasons too complex to go into here. You would be amazed how easy it is to lose every last shred of evidence showing you conducted a major piece of social research.

2 When appropriately, um, weighted.

November 04, 2004

No Child Left Behind ... Alive

Posted by Kieran

A National Guard F-16 strafed an elementary school in New Jersey last night with 25 rounds from its M61-A1 Vulcan Cannon:

 A National Guard F-16 fighter jet on a nighttime training mission strafed an elementary school with 25 rounds of ammunition, authorities said Thursday. No one was injured. The military is investigating the incident that damaged Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School shortly after 11 p.m. Police were called when a custodian who was the only person in the school at the time heard what sounded like someone running across the roof. Police Chief Mark Siino said officers noticed punctures in the roof. Ceiling tiles had fallen into classrooms, and there were scratch marks in the asphalt outside.

I take it this is an early warning of the attack on the Blue States that will be launched early in the new year, after Colin Powell makes a presentation to the U.N. demonstrating the existence in New Jersey of large research and production facilities most likely devoted to the manufacture of lethal chemical weapons.

November 01, 2004

Tomorrow's race

Posted by John Quiggin

As usual before the first Tuesday in November, Australians are closely studying the papers, trying to predict the winner in tomorrow’s race, and planning the well-lubricated parties that are essential as we wait for the results. A critical question here, and one that has been the subject of vigorous debate, is whether betting markets are efficient predictors. While some have argued strongly in favor of the markets recently, long-standing Australian tradition holds that they are utterly unreliable. There’s also a lot of debate about whether the whole turnout may be affected by the weather, and if so, in whose favour.

The level of interest is so high that the event is almost impossible to avoid. Even those who are completely apathetic have found it easier to pick an allegiance at random than to admit to not caring one way or the other.

Work will stop around the nation as we try to digest the results, and the champagne. Victorians, who take all matters of this kind more seriously than other Australians, will take the entire day off.

Update 2/11 A triumph for the betting markets, as the favorite Makybe Diva came home on the inside, the first mare to win two successive Cups. I managed a successful arbitrage on the office Calcutta buying the favorite for $25 in a pool of over $150, as opposed to market odds of 5/1 or less.

Trick or Treat

Posted by Kieran

Or, “Anything for Halloween?” as we used to chant at doorways when we went around in the Days Before Television. Other differences between Halloween in Ireland then and the U.S. now include the absence of pumpkins and the stricter dress code — we had to dress up as something frightening, whereas in the U.S. it’s more like a fancy dress party. A final difference: the apartment across the way from us has a pumpkin carved with “W ‘04”. I get the sense that there’s a bit of strife between the college girls who share the apartment, as one of them keeps turning the pumpkin around so that the uncarved side faces outward. If the carver comes trick-or-treating I’ll be sure to ask why she expects a handout from me. Let the market provide you with candy, I say.

October 29, 2004

Acknowledging Your Limitations

Posted by Kieran

While looking up something else, I came across one of the Top 10 Best Things in a Preface ever written by an academic. It’s from Garry Runicman’s A Treatise on Social Theory, Vol II:

I have also been faced with a dilemma about the use and transliteration of sociological terms from languages other than English … I have compromised as best I can, and where the language in question is Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian or Spanish I am reasonably confident of my judgement about the nuances carried by vernacular terms for institutions, practices and roles. But in all other languages, I have had to rely entirely on the authorities on whose writings I have drawn …

It’s tough having such a narrow range.

October 26, 2004

Becoming the Establishment

Posted by Kieran

In the continuing discussion around Jerry Fodor’s LRB piece about Analytic Philosophy, Jason Stanley makes the following observation in a discussion thread on Brian Leiter’s blog:

There is a certain kind of very influential academic who has a difficult time recognizing that they are no longer a rebellious figure courageously struggling against the tide of contemporary opinion, but rather have already successfully directed the tide along the path of their choice. Chomsky is one such academic, and Fodor is another.

This reminds me of a comment my advisor, Paul DiMaggio, made to me a few years ago. He’d just turned 50, and when asked how he felt about it, he said that, seeing as he couldn’t really be an enfant terrible any more, he would have to content himself with merely being terrible.

October 19, 2004

More on flying the friendly skies

Posted by Eszter

I couldn’t (but why oh why?) let Kieran be the only one with interesting flight experiences. The other day I was on a flight that taught me why you don’t want to take the last flight out.. and why giving flight attendants the power to throw people off planes may not be such a good idea.

We were sitting in the waiting area quietly waiting for the plane to board. Twenty minutes before boarding we were told that the flight crew’s plane was getting in late so we would be boarding late. The person telling us had a nice sense of humor and everyone seemed pretty low-key about the issue. Eventually the crew arrived and we boarded the plane. Some people didn’t seem so calm anymore. There was some bitterness going around about fitting luggage into various compartments. One of the flight attendants was among the most annoyed people. And sure, passengers can be very annoying, but her reactions seemed a bit excessive.

At this point we were only about fifteen minutes behind schedule. But nothing happened. And still nothing happened. Eventually we were told that we would not be taking off for another half an hour as we were the last flight out and so we had to wait for one more plane that had passengers connecting to our flight. Take note: go for earlier flight next time.

A man in the row in front of mine noticed that there was a cart of luggage still sitting next to our plane. He mentioned it to above referenced bitter flight attendant. She clearly had no idea what was going on and dismissed his comment as none of our business. So he asked again. Next, the following exchange took place:

Flight Attendant: You want to go to Chicago?
Passenger: I am going to Chicago.
Flight Attendant: I wouldn’t be so sure about that.

Ouch. At that point the passenger stopped pursuing the question. Twenty minutes later the remaining passengers arrived. Then nothing happened. And we waited. Finally we were told that 1. There was a crate of luggage next to our plane that still had to be loaded, but no appropriate personnel could be found; and 2. We needed to be pushed out, but no appropriate personnel could be found. Eventually, after a two-hour delay, we took off for our less than two-hour flight.

Added annoyance: the bitter flight attendant was not wearing an ID. The ID badges of the other two attendants were put on backwards.

October 15, 2004

The ultimate dotcom

Posted by John Quiggin

I’m five years too late, and McNeil PPC has beaten me to the name, but it struck me the other night1 that iModium.com would have been the ideal name for an Internet/telecom/dotcom IPO in the late 1990s.

1 There was no medical reason for this thought, just a random neural connection

October 14, 2004

Statistical Methods

Posted by Kieran

Maria’s post about required statistics courses reminds me of a possibly apocryphal story. I think it concerns one of the very early British social surveys of urban poverty by Charles Booth, or Mackintosh or one of those guys. The results were resisted by many for political reasons, and one strategy was to discredit the new-fangled methods they relied on. Thus, one critic in (I believe) the House of Commons asserted that he could not find the results credible because the report “only relied on a sample of the population — and a mere random sample, at that.”

If anyone knows the source of this (doubtless mangled) story, let me know in the comments.

October 13, 2004

Not impressed

Posted by Eszter

I just received an email from a journalism student from a school in Florida asking to interview me about the cultural implications of the Internet for an article in a campus publication. She sent the email to my Princeton email account and also mentioned that she’d left a voicemail message for me at my Princeton number. I have not received any correspondence from this person on my Northwestern email account or phone number. My pages are the first hit on Google for searches of either my first or last name (and the two together). My site gets similar rankings (except for some sponsored links) on other major search engines as well. My Web site clearly states my current affiliation right up front directly below my name. My site’s old location at Princeton redirects to the new location. My old blog on Princeton’s servers lists my Northwestern address. What, exactly, is being taught to journalism students nowadays if, given all that, this person still couldn’t figure out where I work??

I’ll let you guess whether I decided to grant the interview.

UPDATE: Since people seem to deduce from this message that I sent the person a rude reply I should clarify: I sent her a polite note saying that I was unavailable for the interview at this time and wished her luck.

October 11, 2004

Comic Disaster Relief

Posted by Kieran

Today my University is carrying out a Disaster Preparedness Exercise, simulating “campus and community crisis responses” in the face, I think, of a series of imaginary industrial explosions. The Physical and Atmospheric Sciences building was evacuated, but so, unfortunately, was Social Sciences. They didn’t do that one on purpose, though. Industrial accidents, even imaginary ones, seem much more likely to happen in PAS. The only chemical present in dangerously high quantities in Social Sciences is caffeine. Nevertheless the building has been shut down since 8am, the power is off, police tape is everywhere, guards are posted and fake victims with fake injuries seem to be wandering around. At least, I think the guy with the bandaged leg was faking. Maybe I should have given him a kick to make sure. From talking to the cops and listening to the radio chatter, my theory at the moment is that the power failed in Social Sciences, possibly as an accidental byproduct of the fake disaster, and now not only can they not figure out how to turn it back on again, everyone is so busy tending to fake victims and cleaning up non-existent industrial waste that there are no staff available to fix the problem. So, in effect, the hypothetical crisis has managed to generate a real one.

It’s just as well that it’s only an exercise. I was out in the parking lot with everyone else for an hour, waiting in vain to be allowed back in. It’s bad enough that we were all allowed to hang around by the doors, breathing in putative anthrax or notional dirty bomb fallout. But then a flatbed truck carrying large flammable and quite real gas cylinders came up the driveway and parked behind the fire engine to make a delivery to the chemistry department. About ten minutes after that, two forty-foot tractor trailers pulled in to deliver props and stage equipment to the Centennial Hall theater. They might have been full of anything. If the Trojan Horse itself arrived at the main entrance to the University today, I swear a fat guy in a day-glo vest would have waved it through saying, “Just hurry it up there, we’re trying to co-ordinate an imaginary emergency here.”

October 02, 2004

Around the Web in 80 minutes

Posted by Eszter

A few noteworthy items as I catch up with other blogs.

  • Fox News in Arizona suggested in a report (aired twice) that students are committing an “unintentional felony” by registering to vote where they attend school. Hat tip Ms. Musings who provides helpful additional materials on the subject.
  • Ross reminds us that this is Domestic Violence Awareness Month and he is featuring question boxes in the upper left corner of his blog all month with helpful information.
  • From The New York Daily News (hat tip: ionarts):
    Mayor Bloomberg had little sympathy yesterday for New Yorkers who find the new $20 admission to the Museum of Modern Art a bit steep.
    “Some things people can afford, some things people can’t,” said Bloomberg, whose estimated personal fortune is $4.9 billion.
  • Benigni is shooting a “comedy” about Iraq. (Hat tip: Nomad via Dove’s Eye View)
  • September 29, 2004

    I didn't go to evil medical school for seven years to be called Mr Evil!

    Posted by Daniel
    Over at Marginal Revolution, they’re quoting Jagdish Bhagwati:
    “Once, Mrs Joan Robinson, my radical teacher at Cambridge University, and Professor Gus Ranis of Yale University, a ‘neo-liberal’ economist, were observed agreeing with each other that Korea had been a great success. The paradox was resolved when it turned out that Mrs Robinson was talking about North Korea and Professor Ranis about South Korea!

    (emphasis added)

    Although “Mrs Joan Robinson” was indeed so called in 1956 (when she was teaching Bhagwati), by 1965, she was going by the name of “Professor Joan Robinson”. Gustav Ranis was made a full professor in 1964, according to his CV. So either this conversation took place in the second half of 1964 (or early in 1965), or Bhagwati is making a mistake that is, frankly, all too common when people discuss female academics. Val Dusek points out that Margaret Mead was a frequent victim of this accidental rudeness too.

    Update. A number of our commenters appear to be making variants of the same joke about Joan Robinson being stupid for calling North Korea a success. Ahem.

    “Like all the postwar Communist states, the DPRK undertook massive state investment in heavy industry, state infrastructure and military strength, neglecting the production of consumer goods. By paying the collectivized peasants low state-controlled prices for their product, and using the surplus thus extracted to pay for industrial development, the state carried out a series of three-year plans, which brought industry’s share of the economy from 47% in 1946 to 70% in 1959, depite the intervening devastation of the Korean War. There were huge increases in electricity production, steel production and machine building. The large output of tractors and other agricultural machinery achieved a great increase in agricultural productivity.

    As a result of these revolutionary changes, there is no doubt that the population was better fed and, at least in urban areas, better housed than they had been before the war, and also better than were most people in the South in this period. Even hostile observers agree that standards of living rose rapidly in the DPRK in the later 1950s and into the 1960s, certainly more rapidly than in the South, where there had been no land reform and little industrial development. There was, however, a chronic shortage of consumer goods, and the urban population lived under a system of extreme labor discipline and constant demands for greater productivity.

    In other words, between the Korean War and the oil crisis of the 1970s, the North Korean economy was not doing at all badly and it was entirely arguable that it was outperforming South Korea. (Professor) Joan Robinson retired in the early 1970s. Btw, Bhagwati explicitly did not make this mistake; his whole point in the original anecdote was to point out that subsequent events had shown that South Korean state-organised export promoting capitalism was a better system than North Korean state socialism.

    Update update It’s just struck me that since JR was the wife of Professor Sir Austin Robinson, there’s probably a case to be made that at the very least, Bhagwati ought to have called her “Lady Joan Robinson”.

    September 25, 2004

    Confusing U

    Posted by Kieran

    How many different (and distant) placenames can an institution fit into its name and address? Miami University, Oxford, Ohio is way out there in the lead, I think.

    September 23, 2004

    Business Opportunity

    Posted by Kieran

    For various reasons we needed to locate some Kosher dairy products today, which proved to be more difficult on short notice than I imagined. However, if anyone wants to set up a shop selling such things, it’s obvious that it should be called “Jews for Cheeses.”

    Vengeance is Mine, Sayeth the Lord

    Posted by Kieran

    Bob Morris points out that Florida counties which voted for Bush in 2000 seem to have been visited with calamities in the past few weeks. I think He is trying to send a message. (Hat tip: Erin Kelly.)

    September 13, 2004

    Synergistic Annoyance Convergence

    Posted by Kieran

    I recently got a new cell phone after being out of the U.S. for a year, and now I routinely have a problem with telemarketers. The odd part, though, is that the people who call me, whoever they are,1 seem to have fused the two most irritating aspects of dealing with companies on the phone. Telemarketers are annoying because they phone you up unannounced and try to sell you stuff. Customer service departments are annoying because when you phone them up you get put on hold right away. The guys bugging me at the moment call me up and, when I answer, immediately say “All of our agents are currently busy serving other customers” or “For quality purposes this call may be monitored.” I don’t know what they say next, because I hang up. Which marketing genius dreamed up this approach, I wonder? Is it a common phenomenon? Is it a ruse to get me to stay on the phone for some reason? And how can I make them stop?

    1 Nine times out of ten they have strong Indian accents.

    September 11, 2004

    Memories of my dissertation

    Posted by Eszter

    In the Fall of 2001 as I was coding and analyzing data for my dissertation on how people find content online, I realized that some Web sites had changed a few design elements after the events of 9/11. I put up a little Web page documenting some of these changes because I thought they were interesting and worth archiving. I wish I would have had time to find more.

    There were some more direct links between 9/11 and my dissertation. One was logistical while the other brought it all up close and personal. I think about these issues sometimes, especially the latter, and thought today would be an appropriate day to share them.

    I did the recruitment of participants for my project by sending letters and brochures to randomly selected residential addresses in Mercer County, New Jersey. It turned out that this was precisely the area where post offices were shut down due to anthrax concerns so letters that I thought had been sent out to residents were not leaving the post office and letters that may have gone out before the sending office closed down were not arriving at the other end. This led me to delay the study even further – having put it on hold right after 9/11 – in order to be able to pursue the original course of recruitment. I think a mention of anthrax thus made it into my dissertation in a footnote.

    The other link is certainly more touching. Respondents came to my university’s campus to participate in the study. First, I sat with them and orally administered a questionnaire about their general Web use patterns and some additional questions. One issue of particular interest to me is the role of social support networks in people’s Internet use. I had a question on the survey that asked about whether there were people the respondent knew to whom to turn with questions about Web use. One day a participant gave a curious response to this question: he said that there used to be someone. Since you know the context of my blog post, you may see where this is headed. But in the context of the interview this was a curious response and so I asked again to confirm that I had heard the response correctly. I looked up from the questionnaire and asked: “You used to have someone you could ask but that is no longer the case?” He looked at me and said: “It was my son. He used to work in the Twin Towers.”

    September 09, 2004

    Fafblog

    Posted by Henry

    Best. Blog. Ever.

    September 07, 2004

    Happy Arrival Day!

    Posted by Eszter
    Today we celebrate Arrival Day, the 350th anniversary of the first Jewish immigrants’ arrival in New Amsterdam (today’s New York City) on September 7, 1654. The Head Heeb has been preparing for this event for over a year. He explains:
    Arrival Day is a holiday of the American Jewish people rather than the Jewish religion - a celebration of the Jewish community and its contributions to the United States. As such, non-Jews as well as Jews are welcome to join in the celebration. In the wise words of Ikram Saeed, everyone is Jewish today, just as everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.

    A month ago I participated in a wonderful wedding that offers the perfect story for Arrival Day. I share with you the details of this wedding as a celebration of Jews from all over the world coming together in the United States.

    In early August I returned to Princeton for the wedding of two friends. I had met both the bride and the groom even before they met each other. There is something extra special about friends coming together in that way. The bride had been an undergraduate Sociology major at Princeton (the department in which I got my graduate degree) and once started talking to me in the department’s mailroom after having heard me speaking in Hungarian with someone. Although she grew up in Manhattan, her parents are Hungarian from Transylvania (now Romania) and she, too, speaks the language. The groom and I started our graduate training at Princeton the same year and hung out in the same social circles from close to the beginning of our years there. He is from Australia. The two of them met as a klezmer band was forming at Princeton. They are both music lovers and amazing musicians. Music and their Jewish cultural heritage seemed to bring them together. And now they are a wonderful Jewish couple from different ends of the globe living a life together in the United States. The wedding was marvelous with friends and family of both the groom and the bride putting on amazing musical performances the night before the ceremonies.

    There are several reasons why I live in the U.S. and although no one factor is fully responsible, one contributing reason is that no matter how people try to downplay it, anti-Semitism is alive and well in Europe. I prefer to live in a country where I do not have to be on my guard all the time about being Jewish. (I realize experiences must vary across the U.S., but this is my experience having lived in seven states in rural, suburban and urban areas and I appreciate it.) At my friends’ wedding, Jews and non-Jews of numerous backgrounds came together to celebrate in the joy of two wonderful people. In my mind, this story is the perfect tribute to Arrival Day.

    The Head Heeb will be linking to posts that celebrate Arrival Day through the day to be sure to hop on over to his blog for pointers.

    The Cane Mutiny

    Posted by Kieran

    Some contributors in the discussion thread on crutches (if you see what I mean) bring up other ambulatory aids by-the-by, and Bad Jim says:

    Can anyone who remembers the 19th century think of canes as anything but a weapon?

    The 19th century? What about the 1970s? I remember being caned at school. On the palm of the hand, though, rather than the backside. I think I was about six or seven. (This was in Ireland, by the way.) I also remember the news percolating down to us kids at some point1 that such things would no longer be allowed in schools, and some of us telling the teachers “You can’t smack us anymore because capital punishment is abolished!”

    1 Google informs me that corporal punishment was abolished Irish schools in 1982, when I was nine.

    September 05, 2004

    Crutches

    Posted by Kieran

    Seeing as Kevin is wondering whether M&Ms have gotten smaller since the last time he looked1, my imponderable for the day is this: Why is it that in Europe (at least in my experience) patients with a sprained ankle or whatever are typically issued with forearm crutches whereas in the U.S. you get underarm crutches. It seems clear to me that the underarm kind is inferior in every important respect. So why does it survive in the U.S.?

    Possible explanations:

    • Efficiency. Already ruled out. Underarm crutches are inferior.
    • Revealed Preferences. Underarm crutches must be more efficient because otherwise people wouldn’t be buying them.
    • Path Dependence. Some QWERTY-like event in the early 1900s locked American hospitals into the underarm regime.
    • Cultural. De Tocqueville notes somewhere that American individualism thrives in the presence of underarm supports for gammy legs, while the ancien regime’s tendency to lean at the elbow meant that its collapse was both inevitable and unforseen.
    • Marxist. The ruling crutches of any epoch are the crutches of the ruling class, etc.
    • Evolutionary Psychology. On the Pleistocene Savannah, Underarm crutches provided a selective advantage to their users due to their greater length, enabling Underarm-using groups to hold off predators at a slightly greater distance and obtain marginally higher-hanging fruit than their Forearm-using competitors.
    • Political Economy. A cartel of crutch producers in league with hospital crutch-wranglers and has cornered the market through aggressive undercutting of the competition and a complex system of kickbacks. Standard Crutch (New Jersey) pioneered this technique in the 19th century, bringing it to such a pitch of perfection that it was impossible to buy a forearm model without also getting three underarm models delivered to you.
    • Libertarian. Though technically inferior, underarm models are ultimately beneficial because they encourage a quicker return to standing on your own two feet.

    Alternative explanations (perhaps even informative ones) are invited.

    1 Perhaps they are simply further away than before?

    September 01, 2004

    Soft drinks and hard evidence

    Posted by Daniel

    This probably doesn’t mount to all that much, but it’s been irritating me slightly for the last couple of days …

    We all know that the second most dispiriting phrase in the English language is “Steve Milloy has a devastating critique …” (the first most dispiriting phrase is “My new column is up at Tech Central Station”.) The original reason why the Volokh post linked above irritated me was that it came the day after a post on Tim Lambert’s marvellous spot on the radians/degrees error in that global warming error. It rather irked me that Tim Lambert should get referenced with caveats (“Of course, that’s the claim; if there’s a rebuttal somewhere, please point me to it”) while Steven Milloy got three paragraphs of direct quotation with no caveats at all. Anyone wh knows even a little bit about the two chaps knows that Tim has always been tirelessly and scrupulously accurate, while Steven Milloy, proprietor of “junkscience.com”, is a bit of a hack, who got his start with a bit part towards the end of the single largest and most impressive work of intellectual dishonesty of the previous century1, the effort to discredit the scientific work on the link between tobacco and lung cancer.

    So I decided to take a look at the “devastating critique” to see whether it was really all that.

    Surprise surprise, it wasn’t. In the linked article, Milloy is commenting on an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It’s subscription only, but I managed to get a look at a copy and a few things stuck out at me.

    First, it’s a paper written using a very large sample; a panel study of about fifty thousand nurses. In particular, it’s looking at what happened to that portion of the sample of nurses who significantly increased their consumption of sugary (ie, non-diet) soft drinks. The finding is that, apparently, they tended to get diabetes at a significantly higher rate.

    Milloy doesn’t seem to understand this; possibly by choice. He keeps on talking about the differences (which the study also reports) between the populations of nurses who had consistently low consumption of sweet drinks over the period and the population who had consistently high consumption. He also attributes claims to the report (such as “the simple-minded notion” that the entire weight gain reported in the switching group was due to the sugar in their drinks) which purely and simply aren’t there. This is irritating, but I’m prepared to read through it as it is most likely the result of genuine confusion on either my part or Milloy’s.

    The point which really irked me, though, is the hallmark of a true Milloy hack-piece (as in, if it isn’t there, it’s not the real Milloy) - the discussion of things mentioned in the study phrased so as to suggest that only Milloy has noticed that they completely invalidate the study. In this piece, it’s a vintage example; Todd Zywicki at Volokh correctly excerpts it as the most important paragraph, and what a pity that he didn’t think about what he was pasting.
    When the researchers statistically adjusted their results for bodyweight (a risk factor for diabetes) and for caloric intake (a proxy measure for consumption of sweetened foods other than soda), the 83 percent increase dropped to an even more statistically dubious (and soft-pedaled) 32 percent increase. That result is of the same magnitude as the study’s reported 21 percent increase in diabetes among consumers of more than one diet soft drink per day

    Think about this for a second. According to Milloy, the correct (even the ethical) thing to have done in presenting the results of this study would have been to have headlined the “32 per cent increase” (1.32 relative risk) that one gets in a model which controls for body mass and caloric intake. This is equivalent to suggesting that the correct way to think about the health risks associated with soft drinks is to deal with a model under which somebody goes from drinking one can of Coke a week to more than one per day, but reduces their consumption of other foods so as to maintain a constant total caloric intake. Given that the entire reason why people worry about soft drink consumption is the sugar in the drinks, does this make any sense at all?

    And then, assuming that we were to accept this stupid model, is Milloy reporting the results correctly? Here’s a clue; the phrase “the same order as magnitude” is a phrase with a precise meaning which is not here being used precisely. Nine is “of the same order of magnitude” as one, but if my missus was to find out I’d had nine sexual partners last month rather than one, I’d imagine she’d call it significant.

    The phrase “order of magnitude” is presumably meant to convey that the sugary soft drink risk ratio is not significantly different from the diet soft drink ratio, which is a curious way to summarise the paper, because the paper explicitlysays that the sugary drinks risk ratio is significant while the diet drinks one isn’t2. Anyone who thinks that a paraphresis of this sort isn’t actually “fibbing” is welcome to their view; personally, I think it’s pretty bad.

    Now, I have no real brief for the medical profession on this one; it seems to me pretty intuitive that since a can of Pepsi has the equivalent of thirteen sugar lumps in it, then drinking a lot of the stuff might not be the best thing on earth for the old pancreas, but on the other hand, since everyone drinks soft drinks and there are a lot of people walking around, I’m guessing that soft drinks aren’t poisonous. But it can’t help the debate to have the likes of Milloy misrepresenting research like this, and the less it gets promoted by reputable sources like the Volokhs, the better. And when Milloy reports it as a “in my opinion … flagrant and inexcusable omission” that the researchers didn’t include a separate, tangentially related3 study that one of them carried out earlier, the correct response should not be endorsement, but rather a horse-laugh and a note that Milloy has a certain amount of previous form when it comes to inventing ethical codes from whole cloth.

    So anyway, I think my only conclusion for this is shape up, Volokhs; if you are suspicious of a piece of scientific research, it is always better to spend the extra few minutes and find a critique that isn’t by Milloy.

    Footnotes:
    1If one was of a mind to defend Milloy, then one might say that the main work of junkscience.com was in fighting the battle against the link between second-hand smoke and cancer rather than the Big Evil of smoking and cancer. But as the linked .pdf above shows, he’s not been above making flip remarks about the smoking-cancer link.
    2Two coefficients of this kind can be as close together as you like, but if they have different standard errors, then one might be very significant and the other not at all.
    3You’re going to have to trust me on this one unless you want to shell out the cash for a JAMA subscription, but Milloy’s case is very weak here. The previous study carried out by one of the junior coauthors dealt with steady consumption of relatively small amounts of sugar in the context of an overall diet. This one was about a sudden increase in one’s consumption of drinks containing lots of sugar. In any case, there is certainly no quasi-ethical presumption in the econometrics behaviour that any new piece of work needs to have a comprehensive literature review and I don’t believe that there is in the medical literature either. Milloy’s statement that “Her new study only presented data concerning a potential association between increasing soft drink consumption and weight gain. It presented no data on increasing soft drink consumption and diabetes” appears to me to be outright false as well.

    August 23, 2004

    Links 1 2 3

    Posted by Eszter

    A few sites of interest around the blogosphere (and beyond) in the upcoming weeks:

  • Judge Richard Posner is guest blogging this week over on Larry Lessig’s blog.

  • The Head Heeb has started the countdown to this year’s Arrival Day.

  • It’s not too late to get involved in The September Project, an opportunity to discuss democracy and citizenship with other concerned and interested folks in your local library or other public location. Over 150 300 libraries in over 30 45 states are already signed up to pariticipate. Is yours?

  • August 20, 2004

    Roll 10 or better on 2 D8s to make the Obvious Joke

    Posted by Kieran

    BoingBoing reports that Dungeons and Dragons is 30 years old. And it’s still a virgin.

    August 07, 2004

    Flying the Friendly Skies

    Posted by Kieran
    I’m nearly at the end of my few weeks of dashing around various countries by various means. Here’s an incident I witnessed this afternoon on a flight from Salt Lake City to Tucson, on a small commuter jet. I was sitting in the first row. The flight attendant was standing next to me, by the door. A tall, casually-dressed woman got on and presented a little yellow piece of paper to the flight attendant. He looked at it.
    Flight Attendant: This isn’t a boarding pass.
    Woman: Yes, I—
    FA (Polite but confused): I’m sorry. Are you sure —
    W: I’m armed.
    FA: What?
    W: I’m armed.
    FA (looks at yellow paper again): OK. I haven’t seen this before.
    W: Thanks.

    Then she went and sat down. Later the Flight Attendant went and showed the piece of paper to the pilots, and they had a chat about it.

    July 28, 2004

    Shattered

    Posted by Eszter

    Since things seem to be pretty low-key around here, you’ll excuse me if I vent a little. Last night I got a call from a kind neighbor letting me know that it seemed as though one of my windows had shattered. I was in the office finishing a paper to meet a deadline so the timing wasn’t perfect, but really, is there ever a good time for that kind of a call? I decided to head home and check things out. To my dismay I found this (or for a bit more artistic version, this). It is completely unclear what may have caused it. My best guess is a bird although there are no traces anywhere (the neighbors were on their balcony when all this happened and didn’t see anything except for the window starting to break up into pieces after a loud bang). This is definitely one downside of home ownership.. and a clear example of why one must always have some money on hand in a checking account. In addition to the lost $$ a really annoying part is the logistics of sitting around waiting for the glass company and the anxiety produced by not having any idea about the costs. Any upsides? I got to meet some nice neighbors and also learned that I have double-pane windows (a very good thing in such a situation, indeed).

    So now I’m left wondering whether I should cut back on some of the fun stuff I was going to do in Princeton and NYC in the next few weeks.. to balance out the costs.. or just accept the fact that trying to save on any of what I was going to do would make not a dent in this additional expense so I should just deal with it and move on. Uhm, yeah, probably the latter.

    July 25, 2004

    Weekend trivia

    Posted by Eszter

    I was playing Scattegories with some friends last night and ran into an interesting scenario. The game is about coming up with names of things/people/places/etc that begin with a particular letter. The goal is to get as many points as possible and you get a point if yours is a unique answer for the particular category. Apparently, one of the rules is that you cannot use the same response for more than one category. Initially this did not seem like a big deal. After all, what are the chances that a capital and a menu item or an insect name and a crime would be the same? But it turns out, it happens more often than one might think. I suspect this may be because you are so focused on the letter and the words you have already come up with that if one of them fits another category, you’ll make the connection relatively quickly. You have three minutes to find a dozen matches, that’s a lot of cognitive switching in a short span of time. I ended up with the same response to the following two categories: President and Product Name (which we interpreted as brand name). What was my answer? There are probably several matches depending on the letter, mine happened using the letter H. I got the product name first and then realized there had been a U.S. president by the same name. Knowing the outcome, it would make sense to figure out the match here the other way around, of course.;) Remember, no Web searches available during the game and you have about fifteen seconds to come up with a response. (Of course, from the point-of-view of the game this is a silly exercise since the goal is to avoid such overlaps, but we’re not playing that game.:)

    July 23, 2004

    On the Road Again

    Posted by Kieran

    After a year of leave in Australia (well, someone has to act as a counterweight to all those Aussie backpackers), I just arrived back in the U.S. Three observations:

    • It should not surprise you that making a c.1 year-old boy watch the in-flight TV system for six hours of a Sydney-to-Los Angeles flight would lead to emotional problems (viz, crying, screaming, kicking) for the following six hours. It seemed to surprise the parents of the c.1 year-old boy sitting next to us, however.
    • A clear-eyed assessment of Los Angeles International Airport (e.g., by Martians) would conclude that it is a machine designed to produce unhappy, stressed-out people by means of multiple queues, unnecessary bottlenecks, pointless dumping of international transfer passengers out onto the sidewalk, and other more sophisticated methods.
    • What the hell is Hooters doing with an airline? When I saw the jet trundle by on the runway I thought I was hallucinating.

    After spending the next few days recovering from jetlag, I’m going to drive from South Carolina to Arizona, probably along I-40. (I have to do this, for various reasons.) Any advice? Apart from “Book a flight instead”, I mean.

    July 19, 2004

    Faux Pas

    Posted by Kieran

    Guest-blogging over at Volokh, Cathy Seipp tells us why we should learn French rather than Spanish:

    Last year, when she took French at Pasadena Community College, we got the same reaction: “Why French? Why not Spanish? Isn’t that more useful around here?” Well, no. What’s useful in Los Angeles, just like everywhere else in the country, is English. I suppose if I were a contractor rounding up day laborers every morning, and wanted my daughter to learn the family business, Spanish would be invaluable. … I do speak enough Spanish to communicate with the cleaning lady … This is sort of useful, but not vital. Since 1066, educated English speakers have studied French. Even if we don’t speak it … it gives us a deeper understanding of our own language, and prevents embarrassing gaffes like “I just love that Why-vees Saint Laurent!” Which some trophy wife actually said to me at a fashion show once.

    An example of the kind of embarrassing gaffe that the study of French seems powerless to prevent is left as an exercise to the reader.

    July 07, 2004

    Worse than the disease ?

    Posted by John Quiggin

    My preferred cure for jetlag is to arrive in the morning and spend a fair part of the day outside, resetting my body clock, then have as normal an evening as possible, before going to bed about 10pm. In most respects, my schedule fitted this plan perfectly. Leaving Paris on Monday evening, I got into Brisbane this morning (Wednesday) and the day was suitably sunny. With the State of Origin1 starting soon, there’ll be no problem about staying up2 .

    The only unusual feature is that my normal Wednesday includes karate training. I can now report that this is a complete, if problematic, cure for jet lag. Whatever term might describe my post-training condition, it is not “jet-lagged.”

    1 The high point of the Australian rugby league calendar, this is a three-game series between Queensland and New South Wales in which, as the name implies, players line up for their state of origin, rather than of current residence. The deciding match is being played tonight.

    2 Wrong! The game was such a depressing walkover that I gave up and went to bed early.

    Paddling for bandwidth

    Posted by Eszter

    When I was in Paris I spotted a guy sitting on a corner on the ground just outside a bank with a laptop. It looked pretty random, but then it occured to me that perhaps this was the best location he could find for WiFi signals. Now I see that CTD over at ionarts blogged what he considers a possible “techno-geek historical first … ‘warboating’”. He and his brother went out on a fishing boat for signals. Not bad. I’m curious, what’s the craziest/weirdest thing people have done to find wireless connection?

    Vacation

    Posted by Kieran

    Just thought I’d let everyone know that the Great Barrier Reef really deserves its name.

    July 06, 2004

    The right to a soda.. at any price

    Posted by Eszter

    I was sitting in the St. Louis Amtrak station yesterday (huh, that would be a glorified name for a shack1) and observing with curiosity people’s reaction to a soda machine that was sold out. Given the hot day and my tourist explorations of the morning that left me tired and thirsty, the soda machine was the first thing I looked for upon entry into the waiting room. The two machines I noticed at first were selling snacks and coffee. I couldn’t believe that there was no soda machine – unfathomable for this type of an establishment in the U.S. – so I circled the room. And there it was, of course. The first thing I looked for was to see how much the soda cost. However, instead of a price, I found the words SOLD and OUT flashing. Bummer. But now came the fun part: observing how other people reacted to the sold-out soda machine. At one point I was almost convinced we had a candid camera scenario. It was quite amusing to watch how few people bother to check signs. (This was second in a series that day after having watched just a few minutes earlier a woman in front of me exit – or try to do so in any case – a building through a door clearly labeled and also taped shut by a sign stating that the door was out of order. After pushing it a few times she noticed the sign at her eye-level letting her know that this was not going to work.)

    Most people approached the soda machine with bills or coins in hand and started to feed (or attempted to do so) the money into the machine. The machine seemed to be configured so it would not take bills when empty (good call) and the coins fell through and came out in the coin-return section immediately. These signals did not prompt most people to look for clues about what may be going on. Rather, they continued to attempt feeding the machine with their money. The most interesting case was a young man who walked up to the machine with much confidence and tried to feed a dollar bill into it. Soon enough he noticed the SOLD OUT sign. This did not faze him, however. He decided to try again. You can guess the result: nothing. At that point he walked over to the other two machines with much confidence intent on satisfying his soda needs. His stride made it seem as though by marching with enough confidence those machines would transform themselves into selling sodas. Alas, that’s not how it works. Oh, the world is so unfair!

    What seems interesting in all this (in addition to the obvious) is that people were ready to buy the soda no matter the price. After all, the SOLD OUT sign was where the price would be displayed. But other than one woman (in addition to me), no one cared to check it before starting to feed their money into the machine. Sure, it may be that all these people go to the St. Louis Amtrak station all the time and are already familiar with the price of a soda, but I doubt that that is the case. People probably have an expectation for how much the soda might cost and are willing to pay in the vicinity of that sum regardless of the specifics. Next up in the candid camera saga is a soda machine that charges $7.50 per bottle. Stay tuned for reactions.

    1 The station is so remote (although downtown) that a woman on her way there stopped her car when seeing me walking toward it to offer to drop me off saying that it was all too dirty and messy for me to have to walk to. Some people are so nice. (No, I did not take her up on it, but did think it was a very kind gesture.)

    July 02, 2004

    The Republican case for inflation

    Posted by John Quiggin

    In keeping with the CT tradition of bringing you tomorrow’s talking points today, I thought I’d look a bit further than the current election campaign and consider the implications of a Bush victory. On past form, there’s no reason to suppose that a second term will lead Bush to abandon his tax cuts, or to propose any significant net reduction in expenditure. At least not when there’s an obvious alternative, that only a few shrill Democrat economists and some incredibly out-of-date Republicans would ever object to. The US government has at its disposal and endless source of costless wealth - the printing press that turns out US dollars. Hence there’s no need to do anything tough like raising taxes or cutting Socil Security benefits. The only problem is that, according to some economists, reliance on the printing press as a source of government finance is likely to cause inflation.

    As a first line of defence, the views of these economists can be criticised. There are plenty of Keynesian critics of monetarism who’ve pointed out that there’s no simple or automatic relationship between the money supply and the rate of inflation, and probably there are some who’ve been incautious enough to deny that there is any relationship at all. In any case, in the new era, the dynamism of the US economy is such that everyone wants to buy US dollars as fast as the Treasury can print them (ignore any recent observations on currency markets that might suggest otherwise).

    Still, these are only delaying tactics. What will really be needed is a set of talking points showing that inflation (properly referred to as price appreciation or something similarly positive) is actually a good thing. In the hope of bringing the debate forward a bit, I’ve advanced a few.

    • There’s a trade-off, in the short run, between unemployment and inflation. If you go back far enough, you can find plenty of Keynesian economists asserting that this trade-off also occurs in the long run.
    • Inflation turns ordinary working people into millionaires. Democrats are opposed to inflation. Indeed.1
    • Inflation hurts the poor. So its a way to make the lucky duckies who pay no income tax share the pain of those who do, and learn to vote against big government, or any government
    • Inflation is anti-Communist. For several years now, one of the biggest buyers of US government bonds has been the Chinese central bank. No doubt, they think they’re buying leverage, but all they’re really going to get is pictures of Ronald Reagan. Heh.
    • Inflation will destroy trust in government money and encourage the creation of private-sector alternatives.
    • Inflation is part of the American patriotic tradition. Like Bush, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln faced the threat that the nation would be destroyed by war, and responded by printing money. To complete the trifecta, ex-Democrat neocons may wish to add FDR or JFK, while Southern Republicans might manage a quiet allusion to that great patriot and exponent of inflationary finance, Jefferson Davis

    1 I’m not making this one up. As Brad de Long pointed out a while ago, Stephen Moore has actually defended the record of US capitalism on the basis of figures for the number of millionaires, unadjusted for inflation.

    June 28, 2004

    Maybe Our Fat Chum Chet Could Help!

    Posted by Belle Waring

    Courtesy of the now non-blogging (but suspiciously time-wasting-on-the-interweb) Chun the Unavoidable, I present you with the Mayday Mystery. These are a series of mysterious ads which have been running in an Arizona paper since May 1, 1985. It seems to be an erudite, mathematico-historical puzzle of some kind, containing specific Tuscon-area clues (?), but what is the point? Is there a prize? Some of the ads are rebus-like, while others tend to the Dr. Bronner’s label All-One-God-Faith style. Sample text from the May 1, 2004 edition:

    1) “Quaerendo invenietis” [1747]}}!!+}The 473rd Anniversary of the Confessio Augustana will again be celebrated in the Riemann Room of the 5)Hotel Californias (non uni fidit antro) where the Founders will be entertained by an in situ demonstration of 17) l’art d’accommoder les restes. The Pigs will be less entertained by le dénoument—and the Hirelings least of all. 29) Alberich has programmed The Symmetry Generator as per I Corinthians 1:28 to serve as the propaedeutic for Ireton’s penetration of [$\omega_{p,n}= i log ˜p^n$] on Trinity Sunday.

    Perhaps the brainy CT readership will figure everything out? If there’s lots of money involved, the solver of the puzzle is respectfully encouraged to pass some along to your humble author. Perhaps I will use it to take a vacation in Thailand. I hear Koh Phi Phi is very nice this time of year.

    UPDATE: Adam Kotsko has put out a call for posts for a Chun the Unavoidable Festschrift. Suggested topics include: Halitosis in Literature, Cunnilinguis and the Discursive Performance of Class, Richard Clarke, and The blogospheric reception of the verb “to chun.” You know what to do, people.

    June 24, 2004

    Down to Gehenna

    Posted by John Quiggin
    I can remember discovering, with something of a shock, that Armageddon was a real place (modern Megiddo). So, I shouldn't have been too surprised to find out today that Gehenna is the name of a valley near Jerusalem, bearing no obvious marks of being on the road to eternal damnation. I also got to see Golgotha and Mount Zion - I don't think my reading of Biblical allusions will be quite the same after this.

    June 14, 2004

    Fair Warning

    Posted by Kieran

    When I am President, those people who think they are so clever and such savvy travelers for using the parents’ room instead of the regular bathroom — because it’s quieter and cleaner and they read about this handy trick in a “Travel Tips” column once, even though they do not have, say, an unhappy five-month-old in their arms who needs a change and a feed — had better watch out. I will have the Justice Department and a team of Military Lawyers by my side, together with a bag of bamboo splinters, a Leatherman Crunch, a Camping Stove and a copy of the Constitution of the United States for kindling. And who would stop me? For one thing, a War on Irritating Frequent Flyers would command widespread popular support, and I would be willing to consider opening New Fronts in this war, e.g., on People Who Cut Me Off In Traffic, or Bloggers Who Do Not Link To My Posts. Besides, in the words of President George W. Bush, “I am the commander, see? I do not need to explain why I say things. — That’s the interesting thing about being the President. — Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”1

    1 Previously thought to be mere managerial bravado but subsequently discovered by Administration lawyers to be a valid constitutional argument licensing the use of torture against unspecified numbers of persons.

    June 11, 2004

    More CT travel

    Posted by Eszter

    Since hopping across continents seems to be the CT way of life these days, I thought I’d join in on the fun. Next week I will be in London giving a talk at a conference at LSE on how people search for jobs online (the daylong workshop is on online recruitment in general). A few days later I will move on to Paris to meet Maria in person, finally! We already have tickets to the P.J. Harvey concert thanks to a friend of mine who is much more on top of these things than I am. I will give a seminar talk in an R&D group at France Télécom, but otherwise this will be my summer vacation.

    Question: for someone who has pretty much seen all the touristy musts in London and Paris, what are less obvious things not to be missed? I realize entire book collections must exist on this, but I thought I’d throw it out there anyway.

    In Paris in particular, there is a museum I visited years ago that I am having a hard time locating again. It is not one of the really famous ones. It featured contemporary art at the time and I think that is its theme in general. I recall that it was on a corner and possibly close to the river, although I am not sure (this was waaay too many years ago). If any of this rings a bell to anyone, please advise, although I realize my description is too vague to be of much help.

    June 09, 2004

    You've got to hand it to the French

    Posted by Kieran

    They’ve got class. I particularly like the line about “the best red wine I’ve ever tasted.”

    June 08, 2004

    Well I can't think of one

    Posted by Kieran

    It strikes me that there is no antonym for “exceed.”

    June 07, 2004

    Celebrity sightings

    Posted by Eszter

    I spent the beginning of last week at my graduation at Princeton. (Although I defended almost exactly a year ago, I had missed the deadline for marching in the ceremonies last year.) I am really glad I went back. I had always envisioned graduation from grad school as a fairly anonymous event where I would be hooded amongst lots of people I did not know. This was not at all the case. It turns out that I knew many of the people finishing at the same time and that made the ceremonies all that much more special. (And as usual, I was hanging out mostly with economists.. go figure.)

    Princeton usually does not have a Commencement speaker although the President of the University does say a few words. However, the senior class has a Class Day the day before Commencement to which they do invite a speaker. Last year I got to see Seinfeld this way and this year Jon Stewart gave quite a funny speech kindly sprinkled with local references as he is from that area. The unexpected celebrity sighting had come during Reunions on the Friday before though. I was waiting for the green light to cross Washington Road just in front of the Woodrow Wilson School when I spotted a security guard right next to me. I knew it was Reunions weekend and there are enough big deal Princeton alums that there could be all sorts of reasons for this so I was not that surprised. Nonetheless, it is not too common to see such obvious out-of-a-movie security personnel. So I thought I would glance to his right to see if I could spot someone famous. I did. Donald Rumsfeld was waiting for the green light as well (not something he is necessarily known to do…), back for his 50th I guess. Although Jon Stewart did mention in his Class Day speech that no matter who wins the presidential elections this year we can blame Yale, I’m afraid that doesn’t leave all Princetonians exempt from related responsibilities…

    June 04, 2004

    Don't Upgrade

    Posted by Kieran

    As a devotee of structured procrastination I am constantly on the lookout for things to be doing instead of whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. As long as what you’re doing has some value (even if it has less value than what you’re supposed to be doing) then you can end up accomplishing a reasonable amount, except for that thing you avoided doing. But I’ve learned the hard way that installing and, especially, upgrading software does not fall into the category of Inadvertently Productive Activity. Upgrading is basically guaranteed to not work properly, break something or otherwise create some unexpected and unpleasant effect. Upgrading can be perversely satisfying because you then have to fix whatever it is that got broken, which can involve a considerable amount of clever diagnosis and problem-solving to bring you back to the point where you were a yesterday, before you upgraded. But this is not a healthy approach to life.

    This is all common knowledge amongst software developers so I’m surprised that no-one told The Royal Bank of Canada about it.

    They upgraded some software and now “today is the fifth day in which [it] cannot tell its 10 million Canadian customers with any certainty how much money is in their accounts.” The bank can’t process automatic payroll deposits. Sadly, though maybe not surprisingly, this isn’t a symmetric error: the bank still knows who owes it money.

    The stories are vague about what bit of software went wrong exactly. It would be nice to think that Microsoft is somehow to blame, but this is very unlikely. Although Microsoft’s products are up to trivial tasks like writing letters or making dogs fly or running the electronic voting systems of the United States, no-one would trust them with something like a transactional database, an air-traffic control system or an electricity grid. Applications for stuff like that are usually written in languages you have never heard of, like APL. I only know about APL because my colleague Ron Breiger uses it to write routines to do social network analysis. He gave me a tutorial in it once. Unlike most languages, APL has more than a hundred primitive operations, each with its own symbol. You need a special keyboard to work it. Ron insists that it’s really quite intuitive, but alas unlike most professors he is a genius. Because it has so many primitives, APL is a pithy language. Here is a sample APL program to find all the prime numbers less than or equal to a specified integer:

    PRIMES : (˜R ∈ R º.× R) / R ← 1 ↓ ιR

    That’s the whole thing. A full explanation is available, but not from me. I recommend this page which contains opinions about APL and better-known languages like C (“A language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly language”), C++ (“an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog”) and FORTRAN (“Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice”).

    There is a broader point here about the sociology of credit and confidence in highly-automated contexts that are subject to failure. But mainly I think the lesson is, Don’t Upgrade.

    June 02, 2004

    Geek Moment

    Posted by Kieran

    Cribbed from Dirk Eddelbuettel’s email signature on the R-help List

    FEATURE: VW Beetle license plate seen in California

    Well I thought it was funny.

    May 26, 2004

    Your Commencement Speaker Roster

    Posted by Kieran

    Successful commencement speakers are notoriously difficult to find. If you’re not boring people to death you are likely to be ticking someone off. With this in mind, the Crooked Timber Talent Agency is pleased to announce its list of 2004-2005 Commencement Speakers to the Administrations of all interested degree-granting institutions of higher learning, high schools, kindergartens, day-care centers and also right-wing think-tanks posing as any of the above. A brief selection of our speakers follows.

    Saddam Hussein. Bio: Former President of Iraq. Speech topics: The glorious history of Iraq; the importance of law and order; outdoor living and survival skills. General theme: The importance of following your dreams; bouncing back from unexpected adversity. Special Appeal: Like Ted Nugent, but with broader musical fan base.

    Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, Richard Foster and Larry Lindsey. Bio: Former administration officials now collectively known as “The Mayberry Quartet.” Group bookings only. Speech topics: The meaning of loyalty; public service as its own reward; starting a new career later in life. General theme: The importance of following your dreams; bouncing back from unexpected adversity. Special Appeal: Barbershop quartet numbers at post-commencement reception.

    John Lott. Bio: At various times very nearly on the faculty of several major universities, currently at the American Enterprise Institute. Speech Topics: Gun control in the United States and elsewhere; public policy; the dangers of the Internet. General theme: The importance of believing your dreams rather than the evidence, or presenting the former as the latter; bouncing back from unexpected adversity. Special Appeal: Much loved by graduands who faked all their physics problem sets in sophomore year.

    Ahmed Chalabi. Bio: Future President of Iraq. Speech Topics: The glorious history of Iraq; the importance of law and order; indoor living and survival skills. General theme: The importance of being able to get other people to follow your dreams; causing unexpected adversity. Special Appeal: None.

    Judith Miller. Bio: New York Times reporter who as recently as a month ago was personally storing Saddam Hussein’s WMD stocks in her basement at home, according to one Iraqi scientist. Speech Topics: The overwhelming danger posed by Iraq; compromised sources I have known but not suspected. General theme: The importance of believing other people’s dreams; bouncing back from unexpected adversity. Special Appeal: Sincerity above all.

    Many other speakers available for booking, most at short notice. Reasonable rates. Speeches guaranteed short. Email for details today.

    May 13, 2004

    Torture of a different kind

    Posted by Kieran

    Remember to watch the Eurovision Song Contest this weekend. If you have no idea what this is, you can read my primer on the subject from last year.

    Update: Never let it be said that the tools of empirical social science are not abused on this website. I decided to see whether my prejudices about the geopolitics of the Eurovision were empirically confirmable. To this end, I dug up data on voting patterns in the Eurovision from 1975 to 1999. (From a B and B in Stirling, too. If only all social science data were this easily available.) Confining ourselves to a group of countries who competed during (almost) all these years, we can aggregate their voting scores into a directed graph representing their preferences for one another’s songs over the years. Given that Eurovision songs are (to a first approximation) uniformly worthless, we can assume that votes express a simple preference for one nation over another, uncomplicated by any aesthetic considerations. We then abuse the tools of network analysis to see how the voting patterns cluster. And to think Drezner got published in Slate for calculating a correlation coefficient.

    cluster analysis

    As we can see, the main counterintuitive result is that Ireland and the UK form a distinctive group by themselves. It seems that their more-or-less shared language makes for a common cause against the rest of Europe, 600 years of colonial oppression notwithstanding. Though now that I think of it, the oppression is the reason the languages are shared in the first place. Elsewhere, as expected, Norway and Sweden sit snugly alongside one another, although surprisingly Finland is not included. Similarly, the BeNeLux nations cluster together. France and Spain show some similarities also. On the fringes, Israel, Germany and Switzerland are left out in the cold.

    It’s well known that unscrupulous researchers can manipulate data to their own ends. This is particularly true of graphical representations of network data, so we take full advantage of this here. The following figure shows the basic graph data, with the layout determined by the structural equivalence distances of the nodes, based on the Hamming metric.

    seham

    The main benefit of this approach here is that it allows the UK to be separated from Ireland and placed firmly on the periphery. The central European core remains evident, as does the Sweden/Norway love-fest and the relative isolation of Finland from its Scandinavian so-called neighbors. France and Germany emerge alongside Israel in this picture, which should make American hawks ask just who is calling the tune in the Middle East these days.

    May 10, 2004

    By Any Other Name

    Posted by Belle Waring

    The release of the movie Troy prompts me to wonder again about why certain things are named after the Trojans. Take sports teams, for example, like the USC Trojans. Now, there is just one story cycle involving the Trojans and conflict, and in it the Trojans decisively, utterly lose. I’m not saying they’re losers, per se; I’m always rooting for the Trojans because I love Hector. But imagine a coach giving an inspirational speech along these lines: “Guys, I want to you get out there and fight with all your hearts, only to see all you hold dear destroyed. At the end of this bowl game, I want you to feel like the original Trojans did when the saw their ancestral altar run red with the blood of aged Priam, beheld the pitiful spectacle of little Astyanax’ body broken on the walls of Troy, and heard the lamentations of their daughters, mothers and wives as they were reduced to slavery in a foreign land.” It’s not exactly “win one for the Gipper”, is it?

    And then, there are the condoms. What do you think of when you hear the word “Trojan”? Possibly, you think of the heartbreaking scene of farewell between Hector and Andromache, when little Astyanax is frightened by the nodding plumes of Hector’s helmet. But probably not. Probably, you think: Trojan horse. So consider the context. There’s this big…item outside your walled citadel, and you are unsure whether to let it inside. After hearing the pros and cons (and seeing some people eaten by snakes), you open the gates and drag the big old thing inside. Then, you get drunk. At the height of the party, hundreds of little guys come spilling out of the thing and sow destruction, breaking “Troy’s hallowed coronal”, as they say. Is this, all things considered, the ideal story for condom manufacturers to evoke? Just asking.

    May 01, 2004

    Read the Footnotes

    Posted by Micah

    Place your bets! In about two minutes, I hope this horse wins. What a triumph it would be for academics worldwide. Wondering where the name comes from? Here’s my conjecture: the owner is Seth Klarman, who is the brother of Michael Klarman, who is the author of this absolutlely terrific book, which has many, many footnotes. But that’s just a guess.

    UPDATE: Alas, defeat.

    April 29, 2004

    Oxonia

    Posted by Kieran

    I’m in Oxford for a few days, as Laurie is giving a talk to the Jowett Philosophical Society tomorrow.1 The last time I was in town, I was thirteen years of age and was hospitalized with gastroenteritis contracted from food cooked by scout masters who were supposedly proficient in wilderness survival skills. This visit is turning out much better than that, though it’s hard not to invent ways to annoy students who affect a patronizing attitude to tourists. Maybe I should ask the next one directions to the grave of Oxford’s most famous economist, John Milton Keynes.

    1 “Change is Mulitple Realization,” at 4:30pm in the Lecture Theatre in the Faculty of Philosophy, 10 Merton Street. Under the rules of a non-aggression pact governing attendance at talks given by one’s spouse, I won’t be there.

    April 28, 2004

    Treachery

    Posted by Harry

    Courtesy of zizka I notice that our honourable colleague Daniel has been profiteering while all the time opposing the US action. Just to declare that CT will make no money from the sale of these goods, unless we can figure out how to.

    April 12, 2004

    Random links

    Posted by Eszter

    Here are some random sites I thought people may find interesting. I maintain a mailing list (from my pre-blog days) and just sent these out in an issue.

  • Bush in 30 Seconds ads
  • Motorcycle ride through Chernobyl
  • Seeing Double - Cloning Humans with a Camera
  • Chocolate Wrappers Museum
  • Play 80s arcade games

  • April 03, 2004

    Get Along Kid Charlemagne

    Posted by Belle Waring

    There is an interesting article in Slate today about how no one is taking acid anymore. “In both the 2000 and 2001 surveys, 6.6 percent of high-school seniors reported that they’d used LSD in the previous year. In 2002, the figure dropped to 3.5 percent. And in the most recent survey, from 2003, only 1.9 percent of high-school seniors claim to have dropped acid.” The explanation seems to be a really big bust in Kansas, where the nation’s LSD was apparently being manufactured (um, Kansas?). The entrepreneurial Kansans were sitting on 400 million 100 mike hits when busted. Dude, they could, like, turn on everyone in America! Wouldn’t it be wild if they put it in the water supply of Washington, D.C., and all the warmongers were totally tripping? Also noted in Slate: the death of Jerry Garcia and subsequent halting of Grateful Dead tours knocked the market hard. Fair enough; if the chances that you’re going to hear “Dark Star” plummet to zero, what’s the point? That must have been a sad day for acid dealers everywhere. Given the logic of supply and demand, prices are up to $20 a hit. Not noted in the article: if you have to shell out $20 you might just as well take Ecstacy and not spend 13 out of 14 hours wishing you hadn’t taken that goddamn hit of acid.

    April 01, 2004

    US trip

    Posted by Chris

    I’m just back from a trip to the US, which I greatly enjoyed. The main reason for going was the annual conference of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Boston, where I’d organised a panel which included blogger Chris Brooke of the Virtual Stoa . I also caught an excellent seminar on Rousseau at Columbia given by Fred Neuhouser of Barnard and met up with the Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden for a rather good sushi lunch one day (thanks!). Patrick and Teresa encouraged me enormously when I first started blogging so it was good to meet them in the flesh. More reflections on matters arising as and when, but meanwhile, thanks to everyone who helped to make it a memorable visit.

    March 08, 2004

    Alistair Cooke

    Posted by Tom

    I’m saddened by the news that Alistair Cooke has decided that the ‘Letter from America’ he read on the 20th of February would be the last one. If Cooke had decided that, at ninety-five, he simply didn’t want the hassle of the damn thing anymore, that would be one thing, but it seems that the decision to stop was prompted by the outrageous medical advice that it’s usual and desirable for ninety-five year-olds to slow down a bit. Fair enough, but I was rooting for Cooke to be making me smile when he’d made his century.

    Nonetheless, I hope that AC enjoys the time left to him, and that his health leaves him able to share with his family and friends the humour, humanity and learning, always lightly-worn, he’s been sharing with the rest of us since 1946 when the ‘Letter’ was first broadcast.

    I’ve been fascinated by American politics since my teens, and if, hypothetically, one had such an interest and was for some reason unable to find something more conventionally adolescent to do on a Friday night, one might imagine that Cooke’s letters, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 8:45 PM, would be something to look forward to and to savour.

    Better yet: the fact that transcripts of certain of his greatest hits going back to the ‘forties are available from Penguin enables one to take a step back more than half a century to sample some superbly shrewd, stylish writing on the kind of stuff that one would have to read incredible amounts from all over the place to cover otherwise.

    For instance, consider Cooke’s piece about Colonel Robert McCormick, the publisher of the Chicago Tribune, on the event of the latter’s death in the 1955. AC gives a preliminary sketch of this ‘self-appointed defender of the Midwest against its perpetual legendary rival and persecutor, the financial East’, and indicates that McCormick’s public persona was that of the

    … rugged, downright rough diamond, unaffected, unlettered, but unbowed, the very archetype of the Irish and Germans and Poles and Swedes and Czechs who built the railroads and ran the factories and sowed the prarie soil and intermarried to produce a new man in the world whom we know as the Midwesterner.

    Cooke then turns on a sixpence to point out that McCormick was in fact just as effete, coddled and frankly Eastern in his personal life as his contemporary at Groton, Franklin D. Roosevelt:

    He took tea at precisely four thirty in the afternoon, a custom indulged in in this country only by the most rabid Anglophiles. His voice could hardly boast a single Midwestern vowel, uvula r, or cadence. In horrid fact, he had more than a trace of a British accent. So that if you went to Chicago looking for that archetypal Midwesterner you would never have found him. He looked indeed like a Tory clubman, a Bond Street polo player, of the vintage of 1912. Freud, thou shouldst be living at this hour!

    Before Cooke is done, we’ve had a thumbnail history of the Tribune, an explanation of its role in the inculcation of American customs and manners in the immigrants pouring into Chicago in the first half of the last century, and the nice dig that, to this day, ‘it is impossible not to notice the Midwestern chip on the shoulder, which Colonel McCormich elevated to the dignity of an epaulette’. All in fifteen minutes.

    Another favourite of mine is the talk Cooke did when John Nance Garner died in 1967. (Garner was FDR’s Vice-President in his first two terms for those who would otherwise need to google for him, as indeed would I if I hadn’t read Cooke). AC says that Garner ‘would not have claimed to understand or sympathize with the trouble in the cities, the missions to the moon, or the turn of American life much after 1934’, and traces this back to Garner’s origins in post-Civil War Texas, of which AC then gives this pungent description:

    [This was] a frontier which was riddled with army deserters, cattle thieves, claim jumpers, and strangers who came in and settled down to a farm on the general presumption of their neighbours that they had shot an uncle or sired an untimely baby someplace in Tennessee or the Carolinas. I well remember… sitting at the bedside of a very aged lady in Alpine, Texas. She would have been about ten or fifteen Garner’s senior, but she talked with that intense concreteness of the very old when they are recalling their childhood and youth. She talked about the feuding families and the silent types who settled in the Davis Mountains; and she spoke with contempt of an expansive jolly man who came through in the 1870s, was full of praise for the bare landscape, and said he meant to settle there for the reason that he liked the people and thought it great farming country. Evidently, he had not shot or ravished anybody. ‘From then on’, said the old crone, ‘he was a suspicious character.’

    Cooke is, unsurprisingly in a protege of H.L. Mencken’s, capable of some lovely wit when he feels like it. One of the talks is entitled ‘The Summer Bachelor’, and covers the mid-century tendency for wives and children to depart Manhatten during the hottest summer months, leaving the mouse to to play, so to speak. (Does this still happen? I’ve no idea.) AC offers us this droll little thing about the possible effects of the invention of air-conditioning on this custom:

    Two days ago, a Wednesday, I pressed the elevator button of my apartment house and as the door slid back it revealed the capacious frame of a neighbour of mine from the twelfth floor. He is a retired old gentleman, a notable fisherman and a solid but saucy character. I asked him what kept him in town in mid-week. ‘Are you kidding’, he said. ‘It’s like the basin of the Ganges out there. I retreated to this wonderful apartment. And you know what? My wife showed up this morning. God damn!’

    ‘If this goes on’, I said, ‘it’s going to play the devil with fishing.’

    ‘Fishing nothing’, he said. ‘It’s going to play hell with marriage.’

    Perhaps one of the most glorious things about Cooke is that, though he wrote superbly about politics, he was adamant that politics was not the amongst the most important things in life. (I suspect I may not be alone amongst Crooked Timber readers in needing to be reminded of this fact from time to time.)

    The preface to the first volume of talks has this passage:

    Politics will undoubtedly bedevil us till the day we die, but… even the prospect of early annihilation should not keep us from making the most of our days on this unhappy planet. In the best of times, our days are numbered, anyway. And it would be a crime against Nature to take the world crisis so solemnly that it put us off enjoying those things for which we were presumably designed in the first place, and which the gravest statesmen and the hoarsest polititicians hope to make available to all men in the end: I mean the opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to sit under trees, to read, to hit a ball and bounce the baby.

    In a later talk entitled ‘Politics and the Human Animal’, Cooke quotes Justice Holmes’ line that ‘the purpose of civilised argument between friends is to arrive at the point where you agree that some day it might be necessary to shoot each other’, and concludes:

    Let us take our stand on the Middle East, or Vietnam, or whatever, and in the process perhaps lose a friend or shoot a friend, or agree to differ and do neither. Then let us get down to life and living.

    Cooke’s work was a wonderful argument for doing exactly that, and I thank him for it.

    March 01, 2004

    Vexing Vexillology

    Posted by Kieran

    It seems to be trivia day here at CT, so I will chip in with a question that came to me when watching a report about the Australian Olympic trials. Australian athletes and sports teams compete in green and gold, even though neither of those colors is in their national flag.1 New Zealand does this as well — see, e.g., the All Blacks.

    Now, when I started this post I was developing a clever theory to explain this that relied heavily on the fact that Australia and New Zealand are both post-colonial nations located in the Southern Hemisphere. But two European examples just occurred to me: the Italians compete in blue and the Dutch in Orange. Maybe I should just stick to my original question of where Australia got the green and gold scheme from. Are there any other examples of countries whose home sports kit doesn’t share anything with their national flag?

    1 Here we pause to congratulate Australia on including two of the sillier animals known to man in their Coat of Arms. Having gone that far, couldn’t they have found room for a platypus in there somewhere? Down the bottom, maybe?

    February 28, 2004

    He wishes for the cloths of Heaven

    Posted by Kieran

    There wasn’t much light pollution when I was growing up in Ireland, but it was cloudy way too often. It wasn’t until I moved to Arizona and got out into the desert at night that I fully appreciated the Milky Way as a celestial object you could look up and see. I remain appallingly ignorant about the constellations, but via Escadabelle comes a superb photograph of the Arizona night sky (see also a larger version).1 If you’re ever in Tucson, make time to get out to the Kitt Peak National Observatory which runs a terrific Nightly Observing Program. Here in Australia the night sky is also very clear, outside the cities, but I am even more clueless about its composition.

    1 Incidentally, I know that this photo wasn’t taken just by strolling out into the desert and pointing a camera in the air. But it conveys the feeling of what it’s like to be out there.

    February 20, 2004

    Equal opportunity for what ?

    Posted by John Quiggin

    In the middle of yet another scandal about American college sports, the NYT chooses to run an editorial calling for cheerleading to be recognised as a competitive sport (It is implied, though not clearly stated, that this sport would be open only to women).

    I prefer watching cheerleading to watching American football and I have no problem with claims about its athleticism and so on. And I'll concede Allen's arguments that injuries might be reduced if the activity were run on a more professional basis (of course she doesn't use the dreaded word 'professional', anathema to the NCAA).

    Nevertheless, this seems to me to be a case where unsound premises have been pushed to their logical conclusions, with predictably bizarre results. The basic problem is the mixture of higher education and professional sport, which makes about us much sense as if high school cafeterias doubled as French restaurants.

    Isn't there even one university president prepared to take up the banner of Robert Maynard Hutchins and get universities out of the entertainment industry?

    February 13, 2004

    Veil of ignorance

    Posted by Henry

    Begging to differ (politely) from a comment that Scott Marten makes on the French headscarf ban:

    I just don’t understand how people who feel this law is justified because girls are being forced to wear headscarves can think that the solution is to force them to take it back off. If I hold a gun to your head and make you do something you don’t want to, is the correct police response to hold another gun to your head and tell you not to? What makes otherwise rational people think that the solution lies in that direction?

    Well, perhaps because there are situations in which holding a gun to someone’s head is the right thing to do, and is indeed in the interests of the person at gunpoint. I don’t think that the headscarf ban is one of those situations, but …

    Take two examples. Many countries impose jail sentences on people who pay kidnap ransoms. The reasoning is obvious - if nobody were willing to pay ransom (because they would face a hefty jail sentence) then nobody would have an incentive to kidnap; therefore everyone (except kidnappers) would be better off. Another example comes from legislation that imposes extraterritorial sanctions - country A seeks to impose penalties on executives from country B, who do business in country C (as when the US introduced legislation that would have sanctioned non-US nationals who did business with Cuba). Many countries have laws that forbid their citizens from complying with extraterritorial sanctions of this sort, thus protecting them to some extent from the application of the extraterritorial legislation (and perhaps encouraging the country that has tried to make a grab for extraterritorial power to rethink its demands). Again, these executives are better off because their government has effectively put a gun to their head, threatening to punish them if they comply with foreign laws that have extraterritorial reach.

    This logic may apply to informal institutions too - the state may be quite justified in banning some opprobrious social practices that appear to be the result of individual choice, but that are in fact the result of pervasive social norms which drastically constrain the freedom of choice of the individuals involved. These individuals may actively ‘prefer’ to be forced to do something which they would otherwise find greatly difficult to do (people who break with informal norms may face exclusion from their community, violence, or death). The question then is whether or not the foulard is the result of constraint or the result of choice. If young women (1) really were being forced en masse to wear the veil by their parents and community leaders, (2) would strongly prefer to do otherwise, and (3) had few available choices if they broke with their community, then the French state would probably be justified in banning it. As matters stand, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that this is the case. Many young women from Islamic backgrounds seem to be adopting headscarfs as a matter of free choice rather than external compulsion. They’re not adapting the veil because they’re being forced to, or even because they’re ignorant - they’re adopting it as a form of self-expression. This suggests that France’s approach is unjustified - but other state rules banning informal social practices might not be.

    February 10, 2004

    Transcripts

    Posted by Kieran

    Eugene Volokh notices an error in a transcript. My friend Bethany had a bunch of interviews transcribed professionally for her dissertation and now offers Transcription Bloopers: 29 Reasons Not to Waste Your Money. Choice examples include:

    As SpokenAs Transcribed
    20th centuryPlanting some tree
    Class oppressionFast depression
    Enrich each otherRate each other
    Serbian oral epicServient oral ethic

    Errors of this sort in transcripts are at the intersection of Mondegreens and the strange phenomenon of the media always happening to desperately misreport stories you know something about personally.

    February 08, 2004

    Ill Communication

    Posted by Henry

    A cautionary tale - over the last couple of years, my wife and I have been using cheap prefix companies in Canada and the US to make long distance and international phonecalls. In the US we’ve been using 101-6868, a fairly popular - and cheap - service, which bills indirectly (you see the charge on your monthly phone bill from your carrier). No more. My wife changed phone carrier a few months ago, which apparently meant that PT-1 Long Distance, the proprietor of 101-6868 wasn’t able to charge us properly (I presume they didn’t have a relationship with our new carrier). PT-1’s reaction wasn’t to phone us, or to send us a bill - it was to refer the matter (involving the princely sum of $8.93) directly to a debt collection agency, which then sent my wife a dunning letter threatening the usual kinds of nastiness. A couple of very irate phonecalls seem to have sorted the problem out - but other users of the service (or its competitors) may want to take this under advisement. All the more so, as we’re apparently not the only people who’ve had this experience with PT-1 Long Distance; indeed, it appears that we’ve gotten off quite lightly in comparison.

    January 29, 2004

    Where's Florence Nightingale when you need her?

    Posted by Daniel

    There’s a wide spread of political opinions at Crooked Timber; as you can tell, we run the gamut from social democrat to democratic socialist. All sorts, I tell you. But I think that there’s one issue which divides us neatly into two groups. Or rather, into one group consisting of me, and one group consisting of all the others. And that’s the fact that I’m a nationalist. Horrible to admit it but it’s true. I genuinely do believe that, according to my standards (and who else’s standards might I use?), Britain is the best place to live that there is, and the British are the finest people in the world. After that, Irish, Turks, Czechs, Danes and French in that order, and after that there’s quite a steep drop-off. Sorry, where was I? Anyway, yes, the British are best.

    If I were to criticise my fellow countrymen at all, however, it would be to say that we do have something of a tendency to panic when we see two flakes of frost sticking together. Look at this bloody circus. It snowed for precisely one hour yesterday evening round our way, a snowfall that had been forecast a week in advance, and left about half an inch of light white dust on the ground, which promptly started to melt. I was four hours late getting into work this morning because the trains couldn’t cope with it. The bloody Russians run trains across Siberia, for Christ’s sake. I actually watched an interview with some London Transport bod on the TV explaining that the Metropolitan line had to be shut down because of “severe weather”, in which it was possible to see over his shoulder a beautiful clear blue cloudless sky. As Peter Cook remarked, the arrival of winter, while usually quite generally expected, seems to always catch London Transport by surprise.

    A look back at the history of the Crimean campaign reveals that this has been a bit of a blind spot for the Sons of Albion for quite a while.

    UPDATE] I’ve just been told that we’re running “emergency trains” this evening, 24 hours after the event and with the snow entirely melted. Apparently the “severe icy weather conditions” have had serious effects on “both trains and infrastructure”. Apparently water freezes. Who’d a thunk it?

    Political correctness as civility

    Posted by John Quiggin

    In my experience there is a close to 100 per cent correlation between the stated belief that society is suffering from a decline in "civility" and a willingness to proclaim that we are all being oppressed by "political correctness". Australian PM John Howard neatly illustrates this. A week or two ago, he was denouncing public schools as hotbeds of political correctness, and the excessive concern with offending religious minorities that (allegedly) led to the curtailment of Christmas celebrations. Now he's calling for more civility.

    The common analysis underlying both demands for "political correctness" (this actual phrase was never used, except jocularly as far as I know, until critics seized on it, but terms such as "sensitivity" or "inclusive language" cover much the same ground) and for "civility", is that offensive words give rise to offensive acts. In both cases, there's some ambiguity over whether the problem is with the offence to the recipient or with the reinforcement of the hostile/prejudiced attitudes of the speaker, but the central claim is that modes of speech are an appropriate subject of concern and that some form of government action to encourage more socially appropriate modes of speech, ranging from subtle pressure to direct coercion, is desirable. The only difference between the two positions is that they have different lists of inappropriate words.

    I don't have a sharply defined position on any of this, except that I find people who think that being "politically incorrect" is exceptionally brave and witty to be among the most tiresome of bores. I doubt that changes in speech will, of themselves, produce changes in attitudes. The obvious evidence for this is the rate at which euphemisms wear out and become as offensive as the terms they replaced (for example, 'handicapped' for 'crippled'). On the other hand, I think there's a lot to be said for avoiding offensive words and forms of speech and can see a place for (tightly drafted and cautiously applied) laws prohibiting or penalising various forms of collective defamation.


    [Posted with ecto]

    January 15, 2004

    Movement

    Posted by Brian

    A while ago Slate had a long, and amusing, discussion of why people stand on escalators but walk up stairs. (I’m out of net range right now or I’d find a link.) Here’s a slightly tougher question. Why do people stand on escalators but walk on moving walkways?

    January 13, 2004

    Vocab Words

    Posted by Kieran

    Ted asks:

    O’Reilly has repeatedly lied about the interview in which he told Jeremy Glick to “shut up” and cut off his microphone. As it turns out, transcripts can be checked on this intergummy thing. Someone should make up a phrase about that.

    I propose that Bill is here speaking a dialect we shall call reverse transcriptese.

    January 08, 2004

    Quack

    Posted by Micah

    It appears that Vice President Cheney and Justice Scalia have been out shooting things. So much for being kind to your web-footed friends.

    Irregular Verb Watch

    Posted by Kieran

    This New York Times Report about a fight in a firehouse defines a new irregular verb in its first three sentences. The conjugation appears to be “I tease playfully; You make abusive taunts; He is asking for a broken nose.” (Via En Banc.)

    January 06, 2004

    Another Failure

    Posted by Kieran

    Martian probe breaks up in Earth’s atmosphere. British aerospace engineers express sympathy with counterparts on Red Planet.

    January 04, 2004

    Illocutionary Vegas Act

    Posted by Kieran

    If Britney Spears were gay, I suppose this would be an excellent example of the kind of thing that’s ruining the institution of marriage.

    December 29, 2003

    Feeling a bit dizzy now

    Posted by Kieran

    In future, when you come across some piece of irritating rhetoric or dishonest spinning, rather than attempt to rebut it simply link to this picture instead. It conveys very well what’s going on and will save a lot of trouble all round.

    December 24, 2003

    Christmas in Oz

    Posted by Kieran

    I’m having my least Christmas-like Christmas ever, mostly because I’m living in Canberra. I understand that it’s unreasonable to expect Christmas to proceed as normal amidst the gum trees and sunshine, and of course there’s a lot to be said for adapting traditions to fit the circumstances. At the same time, I can see why the first transplants from Europe held so grimly to traditions that were absurdly out of whack with their situation. I have a strong urge to light a candle and put it in the window, except Monday was the longest day of the year, so what’s the point?

    For someone brought up on a Northern-hemisphere Christmas, the uneasy Australian detente between the season and the Season (so to speak) is deeply unsatisfying. Even our two years in the high desert of southern Arizona were more genuinely festive — though warm it was still winter, and local adaptations like Chili Wreaths were much more creative than anything I’ve seen here. Australia might be better off if it just ditched the holiday altogether, perhaps replacing it with a full-on festival of the Summer Solstice. There must be something better than having the fake snow-covered pine trees, overheated Santas and In-the-bleak-Midwinters hanging on for dear life in the blazing sun.

    December 18, 2003

    Wright on Target

    Posted by Kieran

    The re-enactment of the Wright brothers’ first flight failed to get off the ground in South Carolina, but the hackers at MIT were much more successful. My favorite is still the police car that made it up there. (Via Kai von Fintel.)

    December 16, 2003

    Surnames

    Posted by John Quiggin

    Surnames were invented sometime in the Middle Ages in response to the crisis caused by the oversupply of men named John. Since the same problem has alreadycaused some interesting confusion, I’ve breached CT style by switching to my full name. I hope this isn’t a problem.

    December 15, 2003

    The War On (some kinds of) Theory

    Posted by Daniel

    The excerpt from Ophelia Benson’s article which Chris posted below got me thinking about a few particularly egregious examples of the phenomenon I’ve seen over the years. The one which sticks out in my mind was of a teacher proudly boasting that he’d spent half of a class ignoring the subject matter that was meant to be discussed and instead talking about technical arcana which added nothing to our understanding of the subject, made the discussion incomprehensible to the layman, but fitted the students to carry on a discussion among people working in the same field, according to the rules of a trivial formal game.

    Hang your head in shame, Brad DeLong, for the following piece of wilful obscurantism and “Bad Writing”

    “On February 12 I taught Andrei Shleifer’s “Implementation Cycles” (Journal of Political Economy, 1986) paper to my advanced macroeconomics Ph.D. students class.

    Once again, just has happened the week before, I didn’t get through the paper. I had thought it would be easy—that I would finish with plenty of time to sketch extensions and qualifications. After all, the class does run from 12 to 2. However, that was not enough time.

    My recurrent problem is that I spend so much time in asides on the modeling strategy—“this term is in this definition because twenty minutes from now it will cancel that when we take a derivative to establish the first-order condition”, “note that even though we have started with a rather general and flexible setup in which firms have a number of different decisions to make, the setup has been carefully designed so that when push comes to shove there is only one economically interesting and non-obvious decision a firm ever has to make”, “note that if this condition is not satisfied, then the consumer’s utility is infinite and it is not clear in what sense we can say that the model even has an equilibrium at all,” that kind of thing. These asides on modeling strategy take up a surprisingly large amount of time. Yet I don’t think I can cut them out or even cut them down. After all, if I don’t teach them this, when will they ever learn it?”

    Pretty egregious, huh? After all, the essential insights of this model are clear. Brad even summarises them himself in the same post:

    • A lot of firms implementing their new technologies at once creates a boom.
    • An aggregate demand externality makes it profitable to cluster the implementation of new technologies. A firm with a new technology wants to wait until a boom to implement it because its technology will be quickly copied—its edge is temporary—and it is more profitable to implement when the economy is booming and demand is high than when the economy is not booming and demand is low.
    • Partly offsetting this is the fact that the interest rate is high when a boom is expected, and thus the cost of waiting until a boom to implement your technological innovation can be substantial. (In fact with log utility or a utility function less risk-averse than log utility, the interest rate effect always outweighs the aggregate demand externality effect).
    • Thus the model can exhibit periodic “implementation cycles” in which technological advance is delayed until periodic booms.
    • However, in the basic model households always want new technology to be implemented as fast as possible: these implementation-cycle equilibria reduce welfare.
    • But this can be reversed: in a version of the model with fixed costs of implementation and with ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ effects in discovery, it is very possible that technological progress is only possible if there are periodic large booms. “

    So, if it is perfectly possible to summarise the conclusions of the Shleifer implementation-cycles model of the business cycle in a few digestible bullet-points, surely it is counterproductive and unforgivable to shroud the simple underlying points in all this “Theory”, isn’t it? After all, if something is intrinsically simple, it’s ludicrous to suggest that the conclusions have to be established through convoluted language, massive generalisations and strange constructs which make no sense on the face of them, isn’t it?

    Well of course, no. If the history of economic thought teaches us anything, it teaches us that people who don’t use the mathematics always, sooner or later, end up saying something badly wrong about economics. Paul Krugman has an essay on the subject with which I profoundly disagree on a number of points, but which contains one highly important truth; there are important ideas in economics which are crystal clear if you understand the mathematics and bloody hard to get your head round if you don’t.

    But, of course, I’m being silly here, or at least satirical. The use of mathematics in economics isn’t the sort of Theory we’re concerned with trying to stamp out; like the War on Drugs, the War on Theory isn’t meant to touch the recreational hobbies of nice people like us. Nobody would question the right of economists to use whatever mathematical toolkit they need in order to write economics, because unlike the Bad Writing crowd, they’re using mathematics precisely in order to ensure the rigour of their analysis, not to cover up a lack of such rigour.

    Well, not quite. The position that mathematics in economics is a) the best way to do economics and b) the only rigorous way to do economics can be attacked on two separate fronts. On the one hand, we have the view of Alfred Marshall and his famous rules for the use of mathematics in economic theory:

    ””(1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can’t succeed in (4), burn (3). This last I [Marshall] did often.”

    This is the view of the subject in which the use of the mathematical theoretical toolkit predisposes economists toward what Schumpter called the “Ricardian vice”, after David Ricardo’s habit of building policy advice on the basis of arguments which made extensive use of deductive reasoning:

    ““He then piled one simplifying assumption upon another until, having really settled everything by these assumptions, he was left with only a few aggregate variables between which, given these assumptions, he set up simpler one-way relations so that, in the end, the desired results emerged almost as tautologies.”

    This is exactly what Brad means when he euphemistically refers to “modelling strategy” above; the careful selection of the assumptions, not so that they are gerrymandered to give a particular result (although this too can be done, it is usually recognised by economists as the crime it is, whereas “modelling strategy” is a perfectly reputable thing to teach students), but so that they will deliver a deductive argument which has a conclusion at all. The problem being that there is one too few degrees of freedom here; you can either select assumptions so as to be realistic descriptions of behaviour, or you can select them so as to make a model soluble or tractable. Assumptions will only possess both desiderata by the purest of chance. Marshall’s approach, while honoured much more in the breach than the observance, could be seen as an attempt to avoid the Ricardian Vice. It’s the equivalent of (part of) the Bad Writing critique in the arts subjects; an exhortation to keep economic analysis to subjects that the common man can understand, in language that the common man can understand.

    It gets worse for the users of mathematical theory in economics. They’re also under attack from the other flank from Econophysics. The econophysics crowd tend toward the belief that the problem with the Ricardian Vice is not the use of mathematical and deductive reasoning from assumptions per se but rather the use of particular forms of mathematical argument and insufficiently complicated assumptions. It’s always possible to fend off criticism from the likes of Robert Kuttner when they trot out the Marshallian/ Schumpeterian critique that they’re only doing so because they’re too thick to hack the maths. It’s rather more difficult to pull off that act with someone likeDidier Sornette, who predicts earthquakes for fun, or Barkley Rosser Jr[1] who understands Goedel’s theorem and uses it, and who is one of the few people who I would trust to write a paragraph including the words “Chaos Theory”.

    Faced with the twin critiques, that they use a dumbed-down, linear mathematical toolkit which is woefully inadequate to the task of accurately modelling economies, and that they use this toolkit excessively in an obscurantist fashion (linear mathematics can get really quite complicated!), how is it the case that the particular form of mathematical economics practised by Andrei Shleifer and Brad DeLong has come to dominate the methodology of the field? Surely there is some terrible organisational pathology of the academy, that it lets such Bad Writing persist in economics? The Post-Autistic Economics Network, the Bad Writing equivalent for critics of mathematical economics, certainly seem to think so; do they have a point?

    Basically, no. The level of mathematics used in most printed academic journal articles is, I have come to conclude, about right. The point is this; economics is, as Deirdre McCloskey points out regularly, a form of rhetoric. At its heart, it is and has always been about the construction of a certain kind of argument, which is meant to be persuasive over human action. I state this without argument, in the knowledge that many people at work in the field believe that they are involved in a project of genuine scientific enquiry. I feel no argument of mine is ever going to carry the day on this issue, so if anyone wants to make the case for economics as a science, I’ll simply respond thus: “Sir, I gracefully concede that you yourself and your department are engaged in a value-neutral quest for scientific facts about the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. I apologise for having suggested otherwise. But would you at least grant me that the description ‘A form of rhetoric … the construction of arguments aimed to be persuasive over human action’ is a decent description of what all those other bastards are up to?”

    And the point I’m trying to make is this; in the construction of arguments of this kind, there are certain kinds of mistake which it is fearfully easy to make. It’s easy to spot particular benefits and miss the fact that their counterparts are costs elsewhere in the system. To come up with arguments which, if true, would imply that people systematically allowed others to impoverish them without changing their behaviour. To miss the fact that your model requires the build-up of debts forever that never get repaid. Etc, etc. The bestiary of really bad economic commentary is full of all sorts of logical howlers. And the good thing about building mathematical models is that, in general, it acts as a form of double-entry book-keeping, to make sure that, if you’ve followed the rules of the game, your economic argument will not have any of these most common and most egregious flaws. It doesn’t mean that it won’t be bad or misleading for other reasons, of course, but it does mean that you’ll at least be saying something that makes sense, if only to other experts.

    And I think that there is probably a generalisation here which can be extended to other fields; typically, the formal language of a discipline (its jargon) has, among its other functions, the function of making it more difficult to make the characteristic mistakes of that discipline. In economics, it’s politically convenient adding-up errors. In literary criticism …. well, I don’t know enough about criticism to be sure, but if I know properly the little bit I do know, one of the things that at least some of them are all about is careful analysis of the implicit assumptions of common language. And it strikes me as not on the face of it unreasonable to suggest that the most common mistake in this kind of analysis would be to make arguments which unconsciously rely on an unanalysed implicit assumption, and that one way to avoid this common mistake would be to adopt a formal use of language which made it more difficult to rely on the common meanings of words. So the defence of Bad Writing on the grounds that “some subjects can only be written about in unclear terms” actually encapsulates an important truth about the subject; it’s probably possible to write about the implicit assumptions of everyday terms without falling into exactly the same kind of mistake yourself, but it might take a hell of a guy to do it. Just as it is possible to write in a sensible and apolitical way about economic matters, but it takes a hell of a guy to do it. Furthermore, it’s much more difficult to write economics in a manner comprehensible to laymen (and check by hand that you’re not making the mistakes) than to write in the mathematical style (when the maths basically does half of your checking for you). So the progress of the subject at anything like its current rate depends on the ability of professionals to use the formal language when talking to each other, and to only use Good Writing when expressing ideas to a non-specialist audience which have already been judged as worthy of the extra effort.
    All of which suggests to me that, as a criticism of professionals writing for professionals, the Bad Writing crowd are protesting far too much; there is a genuine place for formal language in subjects which have characteristic mistakes. I think that the sensible position in both the maths-in-economics debate and the theory-in-criticism debate is somewhere in the middle of this exchange between Krugman and James Galbraith; obscurantist theory is over-used, it’s overused specifically as a means of trying to shut outsiders out of the debate, but for a’ that, it doesn’t mean that the theory is worthless and it particularly doesn’t mean that you can ignore the theory altogether and still assume that your contribution to the discussion will be valid except by purest luck. Bad writing is writing that’s inappropriate for its content, and to assume that the same pristine clarity should mark out a postcard from Ibiza, an actuarial report and a discussion of subtext and metonymy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is, well, bad.

    [1] Yes yes yes, Rosser is not really an econophysicist, but he certainly associates with people who are, and he shares the same status of being an outside critic of neoclassical economics on the grounds of insufficient mathematical sophistication.

    December 06, 2003

    Love is a many-legged thing

    Posted by Kieran

    Via my former RA Brayden King comes news that you can now Marry Your Pet if you feel that it’s, you know, the one. Matilda, who has been a “Pet and Partners Priest for longer than she’d care to remember” will marry you and your chosen pet in one of three sizes of wedding. Many happily married interspecies couples testify that it brought added depth and meaning to their lives. It was the disclaimer that convinced me the site was on the level. It helpfully points out that although you get a marriage certificate “You have no conjugal rights. You are not allowed to have sex with your pet.”

    If you don’t want that kind of relationship with your dog, then perhaps you should consider sending it to Dog Island, where they may roam freely on one of the three constituent islands (for big, medium and small dogs, as appropriate), and feed on rabbits raised on wild carrots.

    Incidentally, you may not wed if both you and your pet are gay, as this would desecrate the sanctity of marriage.

    November 19, 2003

    The Roaming Charges are Killing Me

    Posted by Kieran

    Can you hear me now?

    October 31, 2003

    Watch out for the cereal killer

    Posted by Eszter

    There are lots of serious issues to ponder these days, but we shouldn’t forget about Halloween, which comes with its own set of challenges. One such challenge is finding a fun yet easy costume.

    One year I cut up some cereal boxes, colored parts of them red with a marker, made some paper knives and plastered these all over the clothes I was wearing. I forget whom to credit with that but I thought it worked well. Nothing like a cereal killer on the loose.

    For the more academically minded, you may want to try dressing up as a social circle/ego network. You inflate a few balloons with helium, you draw faces on them and then tie them to your body. Valdis Krebs who suggested this to me has a helpful little guide to social network analysis on his Web site in case this costume doesn’t make too much sense.

    Another option is to wear white clothes and wrap a few yards of white fluffy fabric around you. Then attach some aluminum foil on the inside of the fabric. When people ask you what you are, you show the aluminum foil and say: “silver lining”. (Thanks to my friend Carolyn for that one.)

    Last year, my friend Tania suggested I wear regular clothes to which I attach a bunch of name tags all over. That was an easy costume.. perhaps not to guess, but to make. I was an identity crisis.

    I welcome additional suggestions as I haven’t yet decided what to wear tonight.

    October 26, 2003

    Geras on Copyeditors (revised)

    Posted by Kieran

    Norman Geras writes:

    I do not generally [consider deleting, or move to beginning of sentence] hold people in contempt because of for their profession, their job^, or their calling. But copy editors editing! That is something [Make consistent with either ‘editors’ or ‘editing’ in previous two sentences] different. Not as bad, I will grant, as war criminals or child molesters, they nevertheless belong in one of the very lowest categories of human intelligence^, and indeed morality. You will [consider ‘may’] object that copy editors perform a most useful and necessary function, turning what is often ill-formed and error-strewn text into something more presentable. This, too, I will grant. However, it there is no excuse for what copy editors they [referent is clear] also do - which is to [run-on; consider breaking into two sentences] interfere with people’s painfully-crafted stuff [lazy choice of word] when there is no reason whatever for doing so, other than some quirk in the ^mind of the particular copy-editor ing mind which is at work….

    October 23, 2003

    Preferably lost in translation

    Posted by Eszter

    I haven’t always understood why some products have different names depending on the country. Nonetheless, there are cases where it’s clear why a name couldn’t or shouldn’t just be transplanted from one context to another. It’s one reason for having at least some locals come on board when expanding a product to new markets.

    I am reminded of an Internet company a friend of mine started in Hungary a few years ago called World-Wide Link. That sounds innocent enough but the word “link” exists in Hungarian and means irresponsible or careless, which is probably not the image a company wants to convey or associate itself with in any way.

    Then there are the cases that are much harder to anticipate. Apparently sales of a detergent called Ariel plummeted in Eqypt when rumors spread of its possible connection to Israel’s Ariel Sharon.

    October 22, 2003

    Bumper Stickers

    Posted by Kieran

    David Bernstein at Volokh posts about his favorite bumper stickers. The central mystery about bumper stickers in the U.S., by the way, is why they are called “bumper stickers” in the first place seeing as Americans call bumpers “fenders.” But I digress.

    David’s favorite stickers are determined wholly by his politics. One of his “all-time favorites” is “If you can’t read this, thank the public schools,” which doesn’t seem that interesting to me. (Its counterpart, “If you can read this, thank a teacher,” isn’t much good, either.) His least favorite ones endorse lefty sentiments that he has no time for. Two of my favorite stickers comment on religious matters, though they endorse differing world views. The first is “In case of Rapture, this vehicle will be empty.” The second, which I’ve only seen once (on a car in New Jersey), is “Jesus loves you, but everyone else thinks you’re an asshole.”

    October 13, 2003

    What did she expect?

    Posted by Chris

    There’s quite an extraordinary column in today’s Telegraph in which the ghastly Barbara Amiel, who no doubt has no more access to the evidence than any other member of the public, declares the as yet untried footballer-rape case to be of dubious merit, and opines:

    In the past, any woman crying rape under such factual circumstances would have had to show feeble-mindedness to warrant society’s protection. Going voluntarily up to a stranger’s room for intercourse or its preliminaries, and expecting a man to behave as a light switch that can be turned off at will, may be technically her right, but it is both biologically and logically mad.

    Those following the case will know that it is suggested that the woman was attacked by a number of persons other than the one she had gone upstairs with. I’d be interested to know if Amiel’s piece amounts to contempt of court.

    October 04, 2003

    Infographics

    Posted by Eszter

    Those who like to learn about and ponder world affairs through the graphical representation of data will enjoy these posters presented by the International Networks Archive at Princeton.

    October 03, 2003

    Go West

    Posted by Brian

    Brad DeLong quotes Stephen Cohen on California’s Uttermost Westerness.

    Everybody knows that you can’t go west from California. There is no place wester. If we go from California to New York, we go Back East. If we go from California to Tokyo, we go to the Far East. We cannot go west. There is no way to do it.

    But Tokyo isn’t the only place you can fly from California. When I’m flying from LA or SF to Sydney I certainly feel like I’m going west, not to the East. I suppose if you really want to feel like you’re on the western edge of things, you’d not only fly to Sydney but keep on going to Perth. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone whose identity was as bound up with being Western as Western Australians.

    October 02, 2003

    Someone else's fantasy

    Posted by Maria

    Well, first off, I think I can always be relied on to lower the tone of CT. And since I’m in the middle of a nightmare flat-moving extravaganza this is probably all I’ll have to say for a while.

    I’ve started getting text messages from a french mobile number I don’t recognize. One from the other night started;

    “J’ss tte nue, tu vns ch moi ce soir?…”

    and continued in that vein. For those unfamiliar with french texting argot, that translates as ‘I’m completely naked. Are you coming over to mine tonight?”

    First off I thought, hmmm, it’s just a wrong number. Then; nope, it must be a scam of some sort. Or someone just having a laugh from mailing naughty messages to random thousands of mobiles (though that would be kind of a pricey joke). But in a city where crossed wires make for star-crossed lovers, you can’t be too sure.

    Then, yesterday morning I checked my messages on the way to work and received a real, live voicemail from ‘Celine’. She sounded pretty ticked off that I hadn’t made it the previous night.

    So here’s the question. Should I call or text Saucy Celine to tell her she’s got the wrong number? (bearing in mind my mortification threshold is not high). Or just let the poor, slightly innumerate, girl think her bf is neglecting her on purpose? She’s been naked since Tuesday so I’d say she’s getting chilly…

    September 29, 2003

    Even Further Down Under

    Posted by Kieran

    In case anyone’s wondering why I haven’t been posting, it’s because I’m off in the Southern Alps of New Zealand’s spectacular South Island. I feel the blogosphere will survive without me for a week.

    September 18, 2003

    There are no stupid questions

    Posted by Kieran

    Well, as a matter of fact, there are.

    September 16, 2003

    Word Salad

    Posted by Kieran

    Originating from who-knows-where (Uncle Jazzbeau is looking) but spreading fast comes the following:

    Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.

    Language Hat was my source. There’s also a Slashdot story.

    Now this is very neat. But the explanation — “we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe” — raises some questions. The original researchers may have answered them, of course, but a post’s reach should exceed its grasp or what’s a blog for? If the first and last letters must always be in the right place, then any word three letters long or less will always be spelled properly. Having those words around adds a lot of context to a sentence, helping the reader to process the other words. To really test the idea, we need samples of text where that kind of context is missing.

    Recrsheears souhld csrncotut secntnees unisg olny wodrs edxcieneg terhe lttrees. Tihs wlil psoe seevral polrbems beaucse wwreell-ittn Esglinh sluohd nlurtaaly cointan mnay sorht wrdos iunidnlcg pvrn-eborses, gtienvie csaes, cncoeinvets and (howpos) penrpsoitois, aongmst many ohtres. Lnoegr wrods soluhd povre useufl when tteinsg tihs ieda. Fatiensnredg wdors dviorecd form hplfeul cnotext mhgit aslo mkae fnie cidenadats for (siht) iiulsocnn. Eelhapnt. Preorpritay. Mainargl. Avtrinmdatiise. Boyend. Caainnbl. Wree tsohe tcekriir tahn tpyical sentecens? Ppostecirve linigusts wlil find csnuotntrcig w-llromefed, ativce senetcens fere form tohse mnay hfepull sroht wrods raehtr dcffiuilt. Tihs txet semes edecnive eonguh of (carp) taht ponit. Neevretslhes, linigstus slohud sitrve twoards tihs gaol. Cvioncning sitedus msut searapte ecah slaml wdor’s cepvidnino-troxtg rloe form the (admn) sipecfic ieda taht praticular otparhghiroc tosntrianipsos gaurantee taht sesne wlil reiman eevn toughh itrnael snbairmclg occrus. Fanlily dleabielrty minlaaitpnug sacmrbled lteter order sohlud mkae tihngs eevn mroe duffiilct. Raeeedrs wlil fnid wdros wtih vbres or (fcuk) cooatsnnns aaenrrgd ceiuoesctlnvy mkae uiansmnrbclg mroe dcffliiut.

    (Tankhs to Jmaie Zainkswi and Pehobus for saciftoiimrbclan asstasince.)

    September 06, 2003

    Euphony in Language

    Posted by Kieran

    Tim Dunlop and Jonathon Delacour wonder if some languages are more pleasant to listen to than others, whether you understand them or not. This is certainly true from person to person. When I moved to the U.S., I sometimes found that things I complacently thought were due to my natural wit and charm were in fact explained by my speaking in a pleasant Irish accent. Conversely, these days I am routinely berated by almost everyone for having lost that accent after a mere six or seven years in America.

    The more general proposition — that some languages are inherently better-sounding than others — is usually just a step back before taking a kick at the Germans. But Clive James, I think somewhere in his autobiography, makes an elegant case for Italian. As I remember, he quotes this bit from Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, III, 1-3):

    Per me si va ne la città dolente,
    per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
    per me si va tra la perduta gente.

    “Through me you pass to the city of woe / Through me you pass into eternal pain / Through me to amongst the lost people.”

    Bitter words, James says, but because it’s Italian you still get to say “tra la.”

    September 05, 2003

    San Juan Islands

    Posted by Brian

    I was happy to see the NY Times article on the ferries between the San Juan islands. I was over there this summer for a conference and a group from the conference took one of the ferries to Lopez island. It really was incredibly beautiful. The Times story online has one photo hinting at the kind of views you get, and there are a few more photos in the print version. If you’re anywhere near the San Juans, getting out to the islands is highly recommended.

    A word of warning though: if you’re kayaking on the waters between the islands, and it looks like a ferry might be bearing down on you, it probably is a ferry bearing down on you and it will probably get to you quicker than you think. I managed to stay well out of ferry routes the short time I was out there, but friends who were a little more adventurous had some impressive horror stories to tell.

    September 02, 2003

    It follows me wherever I go

    Posted by Kieran

    Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein has a problem. Recently he’s smelled stale urine in three different hotel rooms. “Has anyone else had the same experience,” he asks, “or know of some explanation for this phenomenon?” But the Volokh Conspiracy does not have comments enabled, so enterprising readers cannot make the appropriate rejoinder.

    August 31, 2003

    Funding Basic Research

    Posted by Kieran

    My gradual progress through the multi-volume Latham and Matthews transcription of The Diary of Samuel Pepys continues. Here we are on February 1st 1664:

    Thence to White-Hall, where in the Dukes chamber the King came and stayed an hour or two, laughing at Sir W. Petty, who was there about his boat, and at Gresham College in general … Gresham College he mightily laughed at for spending its time only in weighing of ayre, and doing nothing else since they sat.

    William Petty was a fascinating character who is remembered variously as a pioneer in demography and political economy, the man responsible for the first really good map of Ireland and, as we see him here, the designer of a novel “double-bottomed boat” (i.e., a catamaran). Pepys’ editors — who have a great line in dry commentary — chime in with a footnote:

    The gibe was of course untrue, and in any case this laughable weighing of air did in fact lead (by way of Newcomen’s steam-engine in Anne’s reign) to the development of steam power. Cf. the similar complaint of a pamphleteer in 1680: “We prize our selves in fruitless Curiosities; we turn our lice and Fleas into Bulls and Pigs by our Magnifying-glasses; we are searching for the World in the Moon with our Telescopes; we send to weigh the Air on the top of Teneriffe … which are voted ingenuities, whilst the Notions of Trade are turned into Ridicule or much out of fashion”.

    We also learn that the French Ambassador, “in a despatch to Louis XIV of 25 January/4 February, referred to Petty’s double-bottomed ship as ‘la plus ridicule et inutile machine que l’esprit de l’homme puisse concevoir.’”

    August 27, 2003

    Stats, stats, stats...

    Posted by Chris

    I’ve just wasted spent an entertaining half-hour or so at www.nationmaster.com, a stats site that allows you to compare nations on just about every dimension, generate graphs etc. I started looking for comparative stats on the UK and Ireland (interesting, Ireland has a higher GDP per capita but scores lower on the Human Development Index). Anyway, there’s lots to play with, though I’m not sure how reliable it all is. Spain seems to be - by a mile - the robbery capital of Europe and North Korea has the world’s highest military expenditure as a percentage of GDP. The “Probability of not reaching [the age of] 40” list makes interesting and sobering reading: you have to get as far as the 35th country in the list (Haiti) to find anywhere outside Africa.

    August 26, 2003

    Pick Me! Pick Me!

    Posted by Kieran

    Ever wish you could easily see every post a particular CT author has contributed? Me neither. But capitalism is all about the creation of new needs in the mind of the consumer so that afterwards market researchers can give PowerPoint presentations saying this new feature “satisfied a clear demand amongst CT customers.” So now, over there in the left sidebar, you can just click the ∞ symbol next to each contributor’s name to see a list of the titles of all their posts from newest to oldest.

    In phase two of the rollout of this technology, we will charge a $10/month subscription fee to users. We are convinced this is an exciting and viable business model and that the world is ready for pay-to-list services of this sort, particularly given that CT is the dominant player in the burgeoning market for eclectic left-leaning quasi-academic online commentary. Prospective investors should see Confidential IPO Memos #7 (“Yglesias Graduates, Sells Out”), #15 (“Semi-Daily Journal Accounting Scandal Ready To Break”) and #27 (“Marshall’s Head Falls Off When Hand Is Removed”).

    August 25, 2003

    Trivia

    Posted by Kieran

    At the risk of sounding like Eugene Volokh, and inspired by a post from John Quiggin, I can think of three bands who take their names from William Burroughs’ writings. Name them and be entered in a prize drawing for the paperback edition of The Best of Crooked Timber, vol 2.

    August 14, 2003

    Power Outages

    Posted by Kieran

    Just catching the news about the power outage in New York and — reportedly — also in a number of major cities along the east coast, up into Canada and even into the midwest. I wonder why this is happening, especially if the early reports of outages in other major cities are accurate. Apart from the obvious (but I imagine unlikely) explanation that we all don’t want to jump to because we’re responsible people, the other thing that springs to mind is the network structure of the national grid. This is a topic of which I of course know nothing. But in his book Small Worlds I seem to remember (it’s a pain not having access to my library) that Duncan Watts has a discussion of power grids and the potential for serious cascading failures under certain conditions. The idea is that small failures can spread rapidly through networks with the right properties. Here’s the Google cache of one of his working papers on this topic, that treats power grids as a sample case. I wonder if this is what’s happened.

    I guess I’ll just have to keep watching the news (like all the other bloggers who are reminded of their dependency on primary media sources).

    Update: CNN is now reporting that the Niagara/Mohawk power grid may have become overloaded and then failed. Score one for CT analysts over that jumpy guy on CNBC that I just saw. He was clearly hoping for terrorists. You could see the hungry gleam in his eye. So, although the Sociology Department isn’t at the top of your list of places to call for comment on events like this, someone should give Watts a ring. Except they can’t, because, um, he teaches at Columbia and there’s a blackout.

    August 12, 2003

    Comings and Goings

    Posted by Kieran

    So I’m working away this afternoon (not blogging, no sir), getting ready to make a quick trip to Atlanta for the American Sociological Association’s annual meetings and this guy comes in the door…

    I know this sounds like the start of a bad joke, but in fact it was Tim Dunlop, who happens to be in Canberra at the moment. This was a pleasant surprise, not least because he managed to find my office, thereby proving himself to be a very clever man indeed. I only know Tim through his blog, so it was nice to put a face to the name.

    As I say, I’m off to Atlanta tomorrow (weather permitting) for the ASA meetings this weekend. Depending on what the hotel is like and how jetlagged I am, I may post some DeLong-style amateur conference ethnography. Unlike the AEA meetings, the ASA will have a number of professional ethnographers on the scene, though they may not be observing in their spare time. Possibly there’ll also some reporters looking for a cheap August story built around papers with silly titles. We’ll see.

    Bad Movie

    Posted by Kieran

    Amitai Etzioni has an odd post about the supposedly pernicious effects of The Matrix on impressionable young minds. It of four fans of the movie (and presumably its atrocious sequel) who committed violent crimes and talked afterwards about their obsession with the film. One guy shot his parents to death with a 12-gauge shotgun. “[Josh] Cooke’s lawyer characterized his client as “obsessed” with the Matrix, and supported the appointment of a psychiatrist to determine whether Cooke was sane when he committed the murders.”

    The post doesn’t have anything in the way of analysis, it just invites you to blame the film for the crimes. Important bits of information (e.g. “whether Cooke was sane”) don’t seem to me to get the kind of weight they deserve. It wasn’t as if the guy beat his victims to death with the the DVD case, either — there’s that shotgun he had.

    I’m not sure what Etzioni’s point is. Does he think we ought to ban the film? (It’s a bit late.) Maybe sue the filmmakers? (I’m not sure that litigation is very communitarian. If it happens, count me in: the Wachowski brothers definitely owe me at least $4.50, because Reloaded was basically half a crap movie.) And more importantly, didn’t we have this whole debate in the 1970s already? It shouldn’t need pointing out that any cultural phenomenon as big as The Matrix is going to have enormously variegated effects. Some of the people who get involved are going to be the odd pork pie short of a picnic. But what are you going to do? When it comes to assessing the effects of blockbuster movies with cult followings, The Matrix is actually a pretty interesting case. It’s probably done more to get people reading analytic philosophy than any other film I can call to mind. (It’s spurred more paid-up philosophers to write papers about it, too.) This seems like a good thing, on the whole. The more teenagers who are routed towards papers by Colin McGinn or Dave Chalmers or Julia Driver and away from The Fountainhead or Ender’s Game the better, if you ask me.

    So I really can’t find anything more in this post than a bit of tut-tutting. I suppose it’s that schoolmarmish streak, combined with having actually been raised in one o’ them real live vibrant communities — where everyone knows your business and has you pegged as soon as they hear your surname — that’s always made me a bit wary of the communitarians.

    August 09, 2003

    Scenes from Canberra Traffic

    Posted by Kieran

    We pull up behind a 1970s-vintage Holden something or other. A youngish guy is driving. There is a sticker on the back window:

    If its’ got tits or tyres your going to have trouble.

    There is a pause. “You know, that’s very satisfying,” says Laurie.

    August 07, 2003

    Great Headlines of the World

    Posted by Kieran

    It’s not quite “McArthur Flies Back to Front,” but it shares something with “Headless Body in Topless Bar” and I just read it in the current issue of the ANU’s “On Campus” newsletter [pdf]:

    Former Head of John XXIII Remembered

    The headline writer had room to clarify the meaning by inserting the word “College” between “XXIII” and “Remembered” but clearly did not want to spoil her chance to enliven one of the world’s duller publications.

    This reminds me of the time on Ireland’s Nine O’Clock News when newsreader Ann Doyle asked someone whether they would best remember the late Cardinal Tomas O’Fiach as a man or a primate.