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?

My contribution to Henwood week will be up tomorrow … meanwhile, London-based CT readers can see the man himself give a talk on the general subject of the New Economy, tonight for one night only. The venue is 72 Great Eastern Street, kicking off at 7pm. I won’t be there myself because I’ve developed a really shocking head cold, but it ought to be fun. The nearest tube is Old Street or Liverpool Street, and here’s a map.

Non-UK readers might not be aware of this, but there is the most almightly kerfuffle going on in the UK at the moment on a subject which I strongly suspect Americans would regard it as bizarre to be having a debate about. We’re all throwing beer bottles and calling each other fascists over the question of … whether different universities should charge different fees. Why? Well, for one thing, Blair and his government promised us in their last manifesto that they weren’t going to do this, and apparently some of us still care about the government’s habit of allowing us to go into the ballot chamber believing things that aren’t true (by the way, where the hell are our oversized pint glasses and longer opening hours?). But there is another, more fundamental reason; a lot of people believe that this is a fundamentally inegalitarian measure. And on my analysis (though not that of most other economists) they are right. Read on …

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From Thomas “Even More Airmiles” Friedman’s column today:

“Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo remarked to me: “I don’t think I would have been successful in political reform without the decent economic growth we had [spurred by Nafta] from 1996 to 2000. Those five years, we had average growth of 5 percent.”

Who can tell me what might be considered by harsh judges to be perhaps a leetle bit misleading about this quotation?

Answer below the fold.

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Via Normblog, a piece in the nation on “The New Anti-Semitism, that being the kind practised by people like Paul Krugman when they criticise the Likud party, as opposed to the old kind of anti-Semitism – things like saying Mussolini wasn’t all that bad, which used to be unacceptable but apparently isn’t anymore.

The Nation piece argues that this new knd of Anti-Semitism doesn’t exist and isn’t anti-Semitism. Norm doesn’t like the article and he’s right; it’s a pretty weird and unsatisfying piece. But it contains one really odd standout line:

But the evidence suggests that the perpetrators of the anti-Jewish attacks in France were animated by political outrage, not bigotry.

Surely if this were true, it would mean that there was a new kind of anti-Semitism around, wouldn’t it? I know I’d certainly be a lot less vocal in criticising the Israeli government if I thought I was encouraging the “political outrage” of the kind of person who sets fire to synagogues. Wouldn’t you?

(and btw, this is the answer to Norm’s final question of “who cares?”. Liberal gentiles who oppose the actions of the current government of Israel care, because if there is a new kind of anti-Semitism, we’re potentially allying ourselves to a social trend which leads to racist attacks, and if there isn’t, we’re not. Personally I think there isn’t, but I begin to think I ought to make sure).

(by the way, I’ve not enabled comments because past experience suggests that links to Normblog have an almost pheromonal quality when it comes to bringing out the nasty side of otherwise lovely CT commenters. C’mon guys, you should be grateful. I’ve saved you from wasting Friday night on a pointless bulletin board flamewar).

I stole this idea from Cosma Shalizi, who got it from something else. Anyway, it’s basically an irregular sampling of economics things that interested me. Mainly post-Keynesian, econophysics or sociology of economics stuff, but if I see a good Austrian piece I’ll use it. Also a few things that aren’t really all that heterodox but struck me as good. I’m trying to put in a few bits that will interest fellow nerds and obsessives, and a bit of didactic stuff for the layman, so if any of it strikes you as incomprehensible and/or patronising, then I’ll hide behind the excuse that it probably wasn’t meant for you. Email suggestions very welcome.

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Not often I admit this, but this Spectator article makes a lot of the points I’ve been trying to make myself on this issue rather better than I did. I’m not sure myself about whether or not the military-industrial complex is a red herring (I think that the defence procurement industry is too small to be as important as most conspiracy researchers think it is), but the rest is dead on. Thanks to the chaps at Slugger O’Toole for the link.

By the way, while we’re on the subject of defence procurement, why is it that every Army surplus shop in the world appears to have rack after rack of German army surplus shirts? Is this the result of a monumental purchasing error by the German Army or something?

The discussion on the Caroline Payne story below reminds me of a fine old piece of doggerel attributed to James Tobin:

The poor complain
They always do
But that’s just idle chatter
Our system brings rewards to all
At least, all those who matter

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Can we no longer hear about the “predictive power” of the Iowa Electronic Markets, please? They were bamboozled to exactly the same degree as the rest of us.

[UPDATE]: A couple of people in comments have pointed out that this market is for the nomination, not the Iowa Caucus itself. Fair point, but sadly, no. Either the Iowa Caucus is an important determinant of who gets the nomination, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, there shouldn’t have been anything like this sharp movement on the 19th. If it is important, then trading in these contracts ought to have reflected relative chances of winning in Iowa. Either way, big spikes like this on news days are not consistent with semistrong market efficiency. I’d also note that the Iowa Electronic Markets are strongly linked with Iowa University’s business school, so the Iowa caucus is their best chance of having local tacit knowledge. While we’re noting things, I’d make a few points on the alternative prediction methods. The Irish Independent’s online poll seems to have done at least as well as IEM if not a little better (fair enough, I don’t have a time series for this one), and BBC Newsnight ran a big feature on Kerry last week; they’d clearly picked up the buzz.

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Over the last year, those of us who were against starting the particular conflict in Iraq which took place in the second quarter of 2003, have taken an awful lot of criticism from those of our fellow left-wingers who supported it. Which is fair enough; robust debate is important. But it is a bit much to be accused of supporting the murder of innocents, by people who know perfectly well that you don’t, because you refuse to lend your voice to an already deafening clamor of approbation for a policy which you didn’t support, still regard as misguided, but which happened to have some favourable consequences. For example.

I personally have a very great antipathy to loyalty oaths, but am never happier than when discarding principles in order to fight dirty. So, it’s sauce for the gander time.

I hereby question the “left” credentials, and indeed the commitment to democracy, of anyone who takes the government side against Katharine Gun. Saddam’s gone and nothing can bring him back. Whatever happens in Iraq, happens. The war was fought and cannot be unfought. All that turns on this case, is whether someone who is aware that the government is trying to do something in private which they would not dare to do in public, has the right to blow the whistle. If you think that Ms Gun deserves to go to jail, then all I can say, mes amis is examine your conscience.

[EDIT] Just to emphasise that this is my own personal view, rather than the “party line” of CT. I’ve not discussed it with any other contributor and suspect that a number of them won’t agree.

In an interview with Norman Geras, J Bradford DeLong makes the following odd statement:

If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to?

> Brad :)

So in an ideal world, he’d be called Bradford Bradford DeLong? Without wanting to cast aspersions, I have to say that if Prof DeLong had ever been to Bradford, he might not be so keen on having it in his name, twice.

Thanks very much to Michael Pollak, whose comments on the last Globollocks piece spurred me to make a few changes to this rather tiresome feature. Below, I score this piece by Nicholas “Airmiles” Kristof in the New York Times. The new scoring system is fairly self-explanatory; it’s based on the original Globollocks list, but it’s a bit more subjective rather than box-ticking, and you can now win points back for writing things that aren’t Globollocks.

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A wonderful example of framing effects in action. I hear that the USA is going spend $1.5bn on promotion of marriage.

First thought: A billion and a half! That’s a HUGE amount of money! How the hell are you gonna spend that kind of money on marriage counselling?

Second thought: Fifteen bucks per household isn’t going to buy you a lot of marriage counselling.

It’s a common enough saying (and at least one of the CT collective, whose blushes I’ll spare, has endorsed it):

“If you have to choose between explaining something as a cock-up or a consipracy, choose cock-up every time”.

I’ve searched high and low for empirical evidence supporting this, but found rigorous studies to be surprisingly thin on the ground. Some people even go a bit further, suggesting that cock-up explanations rather than conspiracy explanations are correct 99 per cent of the time; I’ve found nothing to support this point estimate, still less any idea of what the confidence bounds on it are. What if the cock-up explanation was only right 75% of the time?

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